woman when he was getting on in years, and they had Jace.
But that never affected the way Roy felt about Jace. They were as close as any full-blood brothers you ever saw.
Aaron Gault was from California—Bakersfield, I think. He'd drifted east after some trouble out there, just like I'd drifted west from Texas, and we both wound up in Nevada and fell in with Roy. Aaron was a good-looking fella with blond hair, and the gals all loved him as soon as they saw him. That never gave him a big head, though. He was down-to-earth, and a good man to ride with.
Big Boy was with us too, of course. Wherever Roy was, Big Boy wasn't far off. His real name was Alfred Guinness, but he never cared for it—the Alfred part, I mean. And Big Boy suited him just fine, since he was so tall and wide we used to rib him by saying it'd take a man on horseback a day just to ride around him. He'd been riding with Roy the longest, even longer than Jace.
The last two who went into the bank were the Gunderson brothers, a couple of Swedes who had just joined up with us. This was their first job. Outside, seeing to the horses, was Murph Skinner. Roy never gave that chore to a new man. It was too important. Being able to keep a cool head while you were inside a bank robbing it was pretty important too, but you sure as hell wanted your horses to be there waiting for you when you came out. And Murph was cool-headed, right enough. A treacherous son of a buck, but not prone to panic.
So we all had our guns out, but there were more of us than there were other people in the bank. A manager, a couple of tellers, and an old man standing at one of the tellers' windows were the only folks there, and they were all gawping at us like they'd never seen a gang of outlaws in dusters and Stetsons, with bandannas tied over their faces, before.
And maybe they hadn't, since it was 1917, after all, and most people thought the Wild West was dead and buried. Some of the streets were paved now, even in a little burg like Flat Rock, and there were gaslights on every block. Flivvers were parked along the boardwalks, instead of buckboards.
But there were still hitching posts along the street too, because this was ranching country and a lot of cowboys still rode their horses into town on payday—which was, of course, the very next day, and that was why the bank was full of money today.
'Nobody gets hurt,' Roy said again. 'All we want is the cash.'
The bank manager was a dried-up little prune of a man, and he puffed up like a toad and said, 'Well, you can't have it, you hooligan.'
Roy pointed his gun at the man's face and said, 'You best think about that for a minute, mister, but no longer, 'cause we ain't got the time.'
The bank manager swallowed hard as he stared down the barrel of that Colt. Then he looked over at the tellers. 'Give 'em what they want.'
'Figured you'd see the light of reason,' Roy said.
Big Boy and the Gunderson brothers holstered their guns and took canvas bags from under their dusters. They went behind the counter and started emptying the cash drawers in the tellers' cages. While they were doing that, Roy said to the manager, 'You'd best open the vault now.'
'I . . . I can't. The key's not here—'
'Sure it is. I never saw a banker yet who couldn't get into the vault whenever he wanted. I'll bet you like to go in there and just look at all those greenbacks. Makes you feel all nice and tingly inside, don't it?'
The bank manager heaved a disgusted sigh. Roy had him pegged, all right. 'The key's in my pocket,' he said. 'I'll get it out.'
'You do that.'
The fella reached into his coat and brought out a gun instead of the key to the vault. I don't know what he thought he was going to do with one piddling little pocket pistol against four Colts, but he never got a chance to do much of anything. As always, Roy had told us that there wouldn't be any shooting unless it was to save our lives, so he jumped at that bank manager and cracked the barrel of his gun across the gent's scrawny little wrist. The manager yelped and dropped his pistol before he could even come close to getting a shot off. Roy whacked the little gun with the side of his boot and sent it sliding across the floor, well out of reach.
'That was a damned stupid thing to do,' he told the bank manager, who was bent over holding his broken wrist and whimpering. Roy reached into the man's coat, found the vault key, tossed it to Jace. Jace opened the vault door, and Big Boy went in there with his sack, leaving the Gundersons to finish cleaning out the tellers' cash.
Big Boy came out a few minutes later and held the sack up to let us know he was finished. Nobody ever talked while we were pulling a job except Roy. That was the rule, and we followed it as closely as possible.
That day, though, Aaron had to break it, because he had backed off to keep an eye out through the bank's front window, and he said sharp-like, 'Men coming.'
Roy stepped back so he could look out the window too. 'They're still a block away. Let's go.'
Those of us still holding guns holstered them, and Aaron opened the door. Roy looked at the bank manager and the other three men in the room and said, 'Just remember, we could have killed all of you.' Then he turned and went out onto the boardwalk, not hurrying. The rest of us followed him.
There was a time, I suppose, when the sight of a bunch of masked men in dusters coming out of a bank would have instantly alerted the folks in a town to what was going on. But like I said, nobody expected such a thing to happen in this modern day and age, so the men down the street just stopped and stared at us in confusion for a few seconds as we mounted up. Then one of them yelled, 'Hey! What the hell!'
The bank manager popped his head out the door and squalled, 'Stop them! They robbed the bank!'
Roy palmed his Colt out slick as you please and put a bullet in the doorjamb about a foot above the manager's head. The fella screamed like he'd been shot and vanished back inside the building. More yelling came from down the street, but we didn't pay any attention to it. We just put the spurs to our horses and rode like blazes out of there.
Most of the side streets weren't paved. Roy swung into the first one he came to, and almost before you knew it, we were out of town. The street we were on petered out into a broad, open fiat covered with short-grown sage. On the far side of the flat was a line of green trees that marked the course of a creek, and beyond the creek the terrain started to slope up toward the Prophet Mountains, which rose gray and purple against a blue sky. As I rode along with the others, I pulled down my bandanna so that the wind could blow in my face.
God, what a beautiful day!
Where we went, there weren't any roads. Sooner or later the people back in Flat Rock probably came up with the idea of getting together a posse on horseback, but by then it was too late, of course. They were used to turning to the law for help whenever there was trouble, instead of handling things themselves. Flat Rock had a deputy sheriff stationed there, but he was the sort who didn't like to go anywhere that he couldn't get to by automobile. Roy had checked into that before we decided to hit the bank. The deputy likely ran around for a while like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to figure out how he could use his car to chase us into the mountains, and by the time he realized he couldn't, we were long gone. We never saw any sign of pursuit at all.
We took a little over sixteen thousand dollars out of that bank. Two thousand a man, share and share alike. Everybody was happy.
Well, nearly everybody.
We made camp that night way up in the high lonesome of the Prophets, not lighting a fire just in case somebody was looking for us, and as we sat around gnawing on jerky and biscuits and washing it down with whiskey, Roy said to Big Boy, 'How much did you leave in the vault this time?'
'Don't know for sure,' Big Boy said. 'Four or five thousand, I reckon.'
Roy nodded. 'Good. That ought to be enough to tide folks over.'
Murph spoke up, saying, 'I still don't see why the hell we have to leave
'If we had, then every cowhand around Flat Rock would've had to do without a whole month's pay,' Roy said. 'How much credit you think the bartenders and the whores would extend to them under those circumstances? This way, when we leave a little cash behind, at least they still get a couple of bucks to jingle in their pockets. It ain't much, but it's better'n nothin'.'
Murph shook his head. 'Still seems mighty wasteful to me. What do I care whether or not some cow nurse can buy a drink or a whore?'
