The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

two railroadmen walked rather routinely off the cinder bed and sat down. Jesse heaved his chest onto the threshold of the express car and kneed himself into the room. Dick Liddil and the come-lately Charley Ford imitated Jesse and lighted a lantern as Jesse lifted packages and shook them and guessed at their contents. “That’s a woman’s satchel,” he said. “All fancy bead work and paper flowers.”
    “Could be,” said the baggageman. His smile didn’t know whether to hold on or vanish.
    Jesse smashed another box on a nail and snagged it open, finding inside a photograph of a child in an oval frame, the cheek torn by the nail. Jesse flung it against the ceiling, adjusted his blue bandana over his nose, and glared at the express manager. “I want you to open that safe.”
    Fox looked to the baggagemaster for counsel. The man’s head was down. Fox looked back at the robber with a nervous smile, his fright making him seem complaisant and insolent. Charley Ford stepped over and struck Henry Fox over the skull with his pistol, the concussion like gloved hands clapping loudly once, like a red apple pitched at a tree. The blow chopped the messenger down to his knees with blood shoelacing his face and the baggagemaster backed to the green wall with horror as Liddil said, “You didn’t have to bop him, Charley.”
    “Yes, he did,” said Jesse. “They need the convincing. They got their company rules and I got my mean streak and that’s how we get things done.” Charley grinned with accomplishment and Jesse cleared some registers off the only safe he could see, one no larger than the kneehole in a lady’s dresser. “Come over here and attend to this now.”
    Melloe was at the partition. He exclaimed, “You all right over there?”
    Dick Liddil heard a wild and scrambled fusillade and leaned outside to see the Crackers firing at a conductor and brakeman who were crouching with a red lantern. Frank James was hollering for them to cease, and after twenty rounds they did. Bob Ford was squatting in the weeds, his gun cocked up next to his cheek. “Scare ya?” Dick called, and Bob stood with no little chagrin. “I couldn’t tell what on earth was going on!”
    Fox gathered himself and dialed numbers on the U.S. Express Company vault and after two failures had the combination correct enough to jerk the door open. Then the baggagemaster helped him over the chicken coops, on which he sat down heavily, cracking two frames. The baggagemaster carefully backed onto the coop that covered the Adams Express Company safe, where the greater amount of money was.
    It was Charley Ford who emptied the U.S. Express Company safe, with such concentration and sedulousness that he stole receipts, waybills, non-negotiable notes, and a calendar schedule of express deliveries, in addition to more than six thousand dollars in mixed currencies. Jesse then tested the weight of the grain sack and slunk over to the lantern, puzzling over the contents. “Isn’t no hundred thousand dollars here, Dick.”
    Dick looked into the grain sack himself and said, “I’m real disappointed.”
    Bob Ford was standing over the engineer and stoker when Jesse jumped down to the cinder bed from the express car and encouraged the messenger and baggagemaster outside with his gun. Blood had trickled into Henry Fox’s right eye, so he looked at Bob with his left as he staggered over the weeds and crashed down.
    Bob gaped at the injury with some panic; Fox admitted to the railroad crewmen that he had a gruesome headache; Jesse was walking with Charley and Dick as he called that they were going to go through the cars. “If any of them so much as twitch, give their coconuts a sockdolager: that’s language they understand.”
    BY THAT TIME Frank James had ascended the stairs at the rear of the ladies’ coach, catching himself with the brass door pull as an ache branched over his chest. Ed Miller and Clarence Hite climbed after him and Ed Miller entered the coach