But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the pa.s.sengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you will understand what I mean when I say that the pa.s.sengers get locoed.
That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world. You can"t coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wide. It looks as big to him as the Mississippi River. That"s just the way with the pa.s.senger. He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting outside, when maybe there are only two or three. And the muzzle of a forty-five looks like the entrance to a tunnel. The pa.s.senger is all right, although he may do mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of money in his shoe and forgetting to dig-up until you jostle his ribs some with the end of your six-shooter; but there"s no harm in him.
As to the train crew, we never had any more trouble with them than if they had been so many sheep. I don"t mean that they are cowards; I mean that they have got sense. They know they"re not up against a bluff. It"s the same way with the officers. I"ve seen secret service men, marshals, and railroad detectives fork over their change as meek as Moses. I saw one of the bravest marshals I ever knew hide his gun under his seat and dig up along with the rest while I was taking toll.
He wasn"t afraid; he simply knew that we had the drop on the whole outfit. Besides, many of those officers have families and they feel that they oughtn"t to take chances; whereas death has no terrors for the man who holds up a train. He expects to get killed some day, and he generally does. My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold-up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you. Another reason why officers are backward about mixing things with a train robber is a financial one. Every time there is a scrimmage and somebody gets killed, the officers lose money. If the train robber gets away they swear out a warrant against John Doe et al. and travel hundreds of miles and sign vouchers for thousands on the trail of the fugitives, and the Government foots the bills. So, with them, it is a question of mileage rather than courage.
I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is the best card in playing for a hold-up.
Along in "92 the Daltons were cutting out a hot trail for the officers down in the Cherokee Nation, Those were their lucky days, and they got so reckless and sandy, that they used to announce before hand what job they were going to undertake. Once they gave it out that they were going to hold up the M. K. & T. flyer on a certain night at the station of Pryor Creek, in Indian Territory.
That night the railroad company got fifteen deputy marshals in Muscogee and put them on the train. Beside them they had fifty armed men hid in the depot at Pryor Creek.
When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up. The next station was Adair, six miles away. When the train reached there, and the deputies were having a good time explaining what they would have done to the Dalton gang if they had turned up, all at once it sounded like an army firing outside. The conductor and brakeman came running into the car yelling, "Train robbers!"
Some of those deputies lit out of the door, hit the ground, and kept on running. Some of them hid their Winchesters under the seats. Two of them made a fight and were both killed.
It took the Daltons just ten minutes to capture the train and whip the escort. In twenty minutes more they robbed the express car of twenty-seven thousand dollars and made a clean get-away.
My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at Pryor Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by surprise and "locoed" at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their business, expected they would.
I don"t think I ought to close without giving some deductions from my experience of eight years "on the dodge." It doesn"t pay to rob trains. Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don"t think I ought to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of an outlaw. After a while money ceases to have any value in his eyes.
He gets to looking upon the railroads and express companies as his bankers, and his six-shooter as a cheque book good for any amount. He throws away money right and left. Most of the time he is on the jump, riding day and night, and he lives so hard between times that he doesn"t enjoy the taste of high life when he gets it. He knows that his time is bound to come to lose his life or liberty, and that the accuracy of his aim, the speed of his horse, and the fidelity of his "sider," are all that postpone the inevitable.
It isn"t that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.
But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind--and that is what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else--he knows where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they gained their positions and immunity by turning state"s evidence, by turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He knows that some day--unless he is shot first--his Judas will set to work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a surpriser at a stick-up.
That is why the man who holds up trains picks his company with a thousand times the care with which a careful girl chooses a sweetheart. That is why he raises himself from his blanket of nights and listens to the tread of every horse"s hoofs on the distant road.
That is why he broods suspiciously for days upon a jesting remark or an unusual movement of a tried comrade, or the broken mutterings of his closest friend, sleeping by his side.
And it is one of the reasons why the train-robbing profession is not so pleasant a one as either of its collateral branches--politics or cornering the market.
VI
ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN
Do you know the time of the dogmen?
When the forefinger of twilight begins to smudge the clear-drawn lines of the Big City there is inaugurated an hour devoted to one of the most melancholy sights of urban life.
Out from the towering flat crags and apartment peaks of the cliff dwellers of New York steals an army of beings that were once men. Even yet they go upright upon two limbs and retain human form and speech; but you will observe that they are behind animals in progress. Each of these beings follows a dog, to which he is fastened by an artificial ligament.
These men are all victims to Circe. Not willingly do they become flunkeys to Fido, bell boys to bull terriers, and toddlers after Towzer. Modern Circe, instead of turning them into animals, has kindly left the difference of a six-foot leash between them. Every one of those dogmen has been either cajoled, bribed, or commanded by his own particular Circe to take the dear household pet out for an airing.
By their faces and manner you can tell that the dogmen are bound in a hopeless enchantment. Never will there come even a dog-catcher Ulysses to remove the spell.
The faces of some are stonily set. They are past the commiseration, the curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of continuous compulsory canine const.i.tutionals, have made them callous. They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of profane pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the strings of their kites.
Others, more recently reduced to the ranks of Rover"s retinue, take their medicine sulkily and fiercely. They play the dog on the end of their line with the pleasure felt by the girl out fishing when she catches a sea-robin on her hook. They glare at you threateningly if you look at them, as if it would be their delight to let slip the dogs of war. These are half-mutinous dogmen, not quite Circe-ized, and you will do well not to kick their charges, should they sniff around your ankles.
Others of the tribe do not seem to feel so keenly. They are mostly unfresh youths, with gold caps and drooping cigarettes, who do not harmonize with their dogs. The animals they attend wear satin bows in their collars; and the young men steer them so a.s.siduously that you are tempted to the theory that some personal advantage, contingent upon satisfactory service, waits upon the execution of their duties.
The dogs thus personally conducted are of many varieties; but they are one in fatness, in pampered, diseased vileness of temper, in insolent, snarling capriciousness of behaviour. They tug at the leash fractiously, they make leisurely nasal inventory of every door step, railing, and post. They sit down to rest when they choose; they wheeze like the winner of a Third Avenue beefsteak-eating contest; they blunder clumsily into open cellars and coal holes; they lead the dogmen a merry dance.
These unfortunate dry nurses of dogdom, the cur cuddlers, mongrel managers, Spitz stalkers, poodle pullers, Skye sc.r.a.pers, dachshund dandlers, terrier trailers and Pomeranian pushers of the cliff-dwelling Circes follow their charges meekly. The doggies neither fear nor respect them. Masters of the house these men whom they hold in leash may be, but they are not masters of them. From cosey corner to fire escape, from divan to dumbwaiter, doggy"s snarl easily drives this two-legged being who is commissioned to walk at the other end of his string during his outing.
One twilight the dogmen came forth as usual at their Circes" pleading, guerdon, or crack of the whip. One among them was a strong man, apparently of too solid virtues for this airy vocation. His expression was melancholic, his manner depressed. He was leashed to a vile white dog, loathsomely fat, fiendishly ill-natured, gloatingly intractable toward his despised conductor.
At a corner nearest to his apartment house the dogman turned down a side street, hoping for fewer witnesses to his ignominy. The surfeited beast waddled before him, panting with spleen and the labour of motion.
Suddenly the dog stopped. A tall, brown, long-coated, wide-brimmed man stood like a Colossus blocking the sidewalk and declaring:
"Well, I"m a son of a gun!"
"Jim Berry!" breathed the dogman, with exclamation points in his voice.
"Sam Telfair," cried Wide-Brim again, "you ding-basted old w.i.l.l.y-walloo, give us your hoof!"
Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is death to the hand-shake microbe.
"You old fat rascal!" continued Wide-Brim, with a wrinkled brown smile; "it"s been five years since I seen you. I been in this town a week, but you can"t find n.o.body in such a place. Well, you dinged old married man, how are they coming?"
Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough leaned against Jim"s leg and chewed his trousers with a yeasty growl.
"Get to work," said Jim, "and explain this yard-wide hydrophobia yearling you"ve throwed your la.s.so over. Are you the pound-master of this burg? Do you call that a dog or what?"
"I need a drink," said the dogman, dejected at the reminder of his old dog of the sea. "Come on."
Hard by was a cafe. "Tis ever so in the big city.
They sat at a table, and the bloated monster yelped and scrambled at the end of his leash to get at the cafe cat.
"Whiskey," said Jim to the waiter.
"Make it two," said the dogman.
"You"re fatter," said Jim, "and you look subjugated. I don"t know about the East agreeing with you. All the boys asked me to hunt you up when I started. Sandy King, he went to the Klondike. Watson Burrel, he married the oldest Peters girl. I made some money buying beeves, and I bought a lot of wild land up on the Little Powder. Going to fence next fall. Bill Rawlins, he"s gone to farming. You remember Bill, of course--he was courting Marcella--excuse me, Sam--I mean the lady you married, while she was teaching school at Prairie View. But you was the lucky man. How is Missis Telfair?"
"S-h-h-h!" said the dogman, signalling the waiter; "give it a name."
"Whiskey," said Jim.
"Make it two," said the dogman.
"She"s well," he continued, after his chaser. "She refused to live anywhere but in New York, where she came from. We live in a flat.