the bandits. He is now in the hospital here in Blanding but the doctor has little hope for him. He told Sheriff Lester Ludlow that his name is Davis and that Butch Cassidy was leading the group.
Sheriff Ludlow said most of the loot taken in the robbery was recovered in the bags Davis had been carrying?which was the payroll money for the Parker Mine. He said the bandits probably got away with no more than three or four hundred dollars?mostly in bank notes, stamps and other supplies being delivered to post offices along the route south from Salt Lake City.
The rest of the story was mostly information about the dead and wounded mail clerks and about the posse formed to pursue the bandits. Chee skipped through it hurriedly and went on to the next item. It was dated a week later. Davis had died. The posse had tracked the two survivors southward. They had been seen by a Mormon rancher near Montezuma Creek?two men with four horses. Sheriff Ludlow expressed optimism. “The Sheriff said in his telegram to this newspaper: They will be caught.’”
A week later, Ludlow was not making such optimistic statements. “They have slipped away onto the Navajo Reservation. We have wired authorities throughout Arizona and New Mexico to look for them.”
The only mention of the robbery the following week concerned the wounded mail clerk. He was released from the hospital.
“Finding anything?” Jacobs asked. “Reading these old papers is like eating peanuts. You can’t stop. Here’s a piece about a stagecoach robbery. Imagine!”
“Wonder why he saved that?” Chee was thinking of motivations.
“One of the passengers said it was Butch Cassidy.”
Chee was still thinking of motivations, remembering the bandits had gotten away with very little money. That led to a thought of the coin-collector books at Redd’s place, the pennies on his table. If coins were involved, they’d be antiques now. And valuable.
“Redd had about a million pennies when we were there,” he said. “Do you know what that’s all about?”
“It’s all about how a graduate student stays alive,” Jacobs said. “Pays the rent. When Odell gets his paycheck, he cashes it at the bank and buys all the pennies he can afford. And then he sorts through them looking for keepers. Some of them are worth something to the collectors. Certain dates, certain mints. Maybe, for example, you find a 1947 penny minted in Baltimore might be worth a dime, or a ‘54 minted in Denver maybe would be worth twenty cents. He keeps those out and sells them to the coin stores, and takes the others back and buys more pennies.”
“Hey,” Chee said. “That’s smart. How much does he make?”
She laughed. “You don’t get rich. One week he found an Indian head worth almost four dollars. That week he made about five dollars an hour for his time.”
“What if you found coins taken in that train robbery? Would it be like a gold mine?”
“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Odell talked about that?how great it would be to find all those old coins. But he looked it up and it was a bad time for coins. They made tons of silver dollars and five-dollar gold pieces during those years. Scarcity is what makes coins expensive.”
“Like how much would a nineteen-hundred silver dollar be worth?”
“Maybe twenty dollars to a coin dealer, if it was in perfect condition,” she said. “And the newspaper said most of the money was bank notes.”
So much for that idea. And while he was thinking that, he found what he’d been looking for without knowing he’d been looking for it.
The manila folder was labeled PINTO/CASSIDY. In it was a thick sheaf of paper, typed double-spaced.
“They say it was the summer my brother was born. That’s when they say this thing happened.” Penciled in the margin was the notation “1909/10?”
They say the Utes had been bad about coming down that year. They would come down that trail past Thieving Rock and Blue Hill and at night they would steal horses and sheep from the people around Teec Nos Pos in the flats around the San Juan River, and even as far over as Cineza Mesa. They say this happened several times, and one time the Utes shot at a Navajo man over there. He was out there with his sheep and those Utes shot at him and he ran away. They say it was a Piaute Clan man named Left-handed.
Now Left-handed had a son named Delbito Willie and he had married a woman of the Yucca Fruit Clan and he was living with her over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. But he had come over there around Teec Nos Pos to see about his brothers and sisters and everybody told him about the Utes shooting at his father.
They say this Delbito Willie talked to two of his wife’s brothers, and some young men in his own Piaute Clan, and he told them they should go up north, go up there around Sleeping Ute Mountain, and they should steal some Ute horses and get all their sheep and goats back.
The Piaute Clan headman over there in those days was an old fellow they called Kicks His Horse and they talked about this idea with him, and he said they should wait. They say he said that because it was in Yaiisjaastsoh season, which in the biligaana language is Season to Plant Late Crops. They call it July. At that time there is lightning and the snakes are out feeding and then you can have the kind of curing ceremonial they would need before they went on that kind of a raid. And when they got back they would need to have an Enemy Way sing to cure them, and that could not be held either because you can’t hold those ceremonials until the Season When the Thunder Sleeps. You can’t hold them until the ground is frozen and the snakes are in the ground.
But they say Delbito Willie he was angry about the Utes shooting at his father and he wanted to go anyway. He didn’t care what anybody said. They say the Piaute Clan men listened to their headman and wouldn’t go, so Delbito Willie went back to his wife’s Yucca Fruit people and talked to them about it. He got seven of them to listen to him, mostly young men, they say, but one of them was Old Man Joseph. And so they got their best horses and they went off to the north toward Sleeping Ute Mountain. They say they forded the San Juan there at?
“Find something interesting?” Jean Jacobs was leaning over his shoulder.
“I think this is what Redd was telling us about,” Chee said. “Pinto’s story that puts Cassidy on the Navajo Reservation. Anyway it’s about a raid to steal Ute horses. And the dates would be about right.”
Chee flipped through the pages, read about Old Man Joseph being thrown from his horse. Flipped again, read about Delbito Willie deciding that they should take only horses arid mules from the pastures west of Sleeping Ute
