When old-timers make a big haul they generally go far away to one of the big cities to spend their money. Green hands, however successful a hold-up they make, nearly always give themselves away by showing too much money near the place where they got it. I was in a job in '94 where we got twenty thousand dollars. We followed our favorite plan for a get-away-that is, doubled on our trail-and laid low for a time near the scene of the train's bad luck. One morning I picked up a newspaper and read an article with big headlines stating that the marshal, with eight deputies and a posse of thirty armed citizens, had the train robbers surrounded in a mesquite thicket on the Cimarron, and that it was a question of only a few hours when they would be dead men or prisoners. While I was reading that article I was sitting at breakfast in one of the most elegant private residences in Washington City, with a flunky in knee pants standing behind my chair. Jim was sitting across the table talking to his half-uncle, a retired naval officer, whose name you have often seen in the accounts of doings in the capital. We had gone there and bought rattling outfits of good clothes, and were resting from our labors among the nabobs. We must have been killed in that mesquite thicket, for I can make an affidavit that we didn't surrender. Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then, why no one should ever do it. In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That is, of course, supposing that they are old-times with the necessary experience and courage. They have the outside and are protected by the darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small space, and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door, to the aim of a man who is a dead shot and who won't hesitate to shoot. But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the passengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you will understand what I mean when I say that the passengers 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 passenger. 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 passenger 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 beforehand 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 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-shooters 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 out-numbered 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 blankets 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 tired 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. 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 constitutionals, 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 assiduously 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 behavior. They tug at the leash fractious, 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; ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN 655 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 scrapers, dachshund dandlers, terrier trailers, and Pomeranian pushers of the cliff-dwelling Circes follow their charges meekly. From cosy corner The doggies neither fear nor respect them. Masters of the house these men whoin they hold in leash may be, but they are not masters of them. to fire escape, from divan to dumbwaiter, doggy's snarl easily drives this twolegged 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 His expression was melancholic, his manner solid virtues for this airy vocation. depressed. He was leashed to a vile white dog, loathsomely fat, fiendishly illnatured, 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 labor 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 willy walloo, give us your hoof!" Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is death to the handshake microbe. "You old fat rascal!" continued Wide-Brim, with a wrinkled brown smile; "it's I been in this town a week, but you can't find been five years since I seen you. you dinged old married man, how are they nobody in such a place. coming?" Well, 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 Are you the pound-master of this burg? Do you've throwed your lasso over. 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 café. '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 café cat. "Whiskey," said Jim to the waiter. "Make it two," said the dogman. "You're fatter," said Jim, "and you loo subjugated. I don't know about the All the boys asked me to hunt you up when I started. East agreeing with you. Sandy King, he went to the Klondike. Watson Burrel, he married the oldest Bill Rawlins, he's gone to 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. 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 How is Missis Telfair?" View. But you was the lucky man. "S-h-h-h!" said the dogman, signalling the waiter; "give it a name." "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. Every evening at six I take that dog out for a walk. It's Marcella's pet. There never were two animals on earth, Jim, that hated one another like me and that dog does. His name's Lovekins. Marcella dresses for dinner while we're out. We eat tabble dote. Ever try one of them, Jim?" "No, I never," said Jim. "I seen the signs, but I thought the said 'table de hole.' I thought it was French for pool tables. How does it taste?" "If you're going to be in the city for awhile we will 99 "No, sir-ee. I'm starting for home this evening on the 7: 25. Like to stay longer, but I can't." "I'll walk down to the ferry with you," said the dogman. The dog had bound a leg each of Jim and the chair together, and had sunk into a comatose slumber. Jim stumbled, and the leash was slightly wrenched. The shrieks of the awakened beast rang for a block around. "If that's your dog," said Jim, when they were on the street again, "what's to hinder you from running that habeas corpus you've got around his neck over a limb and walking off and forgetting him?" "I'd never dare to," said the dogman, awed at the bold proposition. "He sleeps in the bed. I sleep on a lounge. He runs howling to Marcella if I look at him. Some night, Jim, I'm going to get even with that dog. I've made up my mind to do it. I'm going to creep over with a knife and cut a hole in his mosquito bar so they can get in to him. See if I don't do it!" "You ain't yourself, Sam Telfair. You ain't what you was once. I don't know about these cities and flats over here. With my own eyes I seen you stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass faucet out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the wildest steer on Little Powder in 39 1-2." "I did, didn't I?" said the other, with a temporary gleam in his eye. "But that was before I was dogmatized." "Does Missis Telfair- began Jim. "Here's another café." The dog fell asleep at their feet. "Make it two," said the dogman. "I thought about you," said Jim, "when I bought that wild land. I wished you was out there to help me with the stock." "Last Tuesday," said the dogman, "he bit me on the ankle because I asked for cream in my coffee. He always gets the cream." "You'd like Prairie View now," said Jim. "The boys from the round-ups for fifty miles around ride in there. One corner of my pasture is in sixteen miles of the town. There's a straight forty miles of wire on one side of it." "You pass through the kitchen to get to the bedroom," said the dogman, "and you pass through the parlor to get to the bathroom, and you back out through the dining room to get into the bedroom so you can turn around and leave by the kitchen. And he snores and barks in his sleep, and I have to smoke in the park on account of his asthma." "Don't Missis Telfair" began Jim. "Oh, shut up!" said the dogman. "What is it this time?" "Whiskey," said Jim. "Make it two," said the dogman. "Well, I'll be racking along down toward the ferry," said the other. "Come on, there, you mangy, turtle-backed, snake-headed, bench-legged ton-anda-half of soap-grease!" shouted the dogman, with a new note in his voice and a new hand on the leash. The dog scrambled after them, with an angry whine at such unusual language from his guardian. At the foot of Twenty-third Street the dogman led the way through swinging doors. |