An eerie stillness settled over the street. The marshals waited, staring over their sights at the stable. But the outlaws, unaccountably and all too abruptly, had ceased fire. Then, as Thomas cautiously motioned the officers forward, the screech of rusty door hinges broke the stillness. Doolin and his men, mounted on their horses, suddenly burst through a rear door of the stable and pounded across the countryside. They disappeared into a stark timberline at the north edge of town.
“Goddammit!” Thomas roared, hurling his shotgun to the ground. “The bastards already had their horses saddled. We let ’em get away.”
Tilghman crossed the street. “Why should that surprise you, Heck? Doolin’s smart and he always thinks ahead. He was fixed to run if anything happened.”
“Would you look at this?” Thomas stormed, gesturing wildly around the street. “Holy Jesus Christ!”
The man and the small boy lay dead outside the cafe. Nearby, one of the marshals in Tilghman’s group stared sightlessly at the overcast sky. Opposite them, in front of the blacksmith’s shop, two other lawmen were sprawled on the ground. The smell of blood was ripe in the cool, still air.
Along the street, townspeople slowly emerged from the shops and stores. The blacksmith walked forward, knelt beside the fallen marshals, and shook his head. A woman outside the cafe gently cradled the dead boy in her arms.
“A goddamn bloodbath!” Thomas raged, shaking his fist at the hotel. “All for that.”
Arkansas Tom Daugherty, arms dangling, hung from the hotel window.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 14
“Never saw a horse so proud of himself.”
Neal Brown laughed. “Figures he’s cock-o’-the-walk around here.”
“Guess that’s not far from the truth.”
Tilghman led the sorrel stallion from the stable to the corral. The weather was brisk even though a bright noonday sun stood at its zenith in a cloudless sky. The stud was frisky, impatient to be turned loose. He snorted, frosty puffs of air steaming from his nostrils.
Brown swung open the corral gate. Tilghman led Steeldust into the enclosure and unsnapped the lead rope. The stallion raced away, crossing the corral in a few strides, then swerved away an instant before colliding with the fence. Snorting frost, heels kicked high in the air, he circled the corral. His eyes were fierce with freedom.
Tilghman stepped outside as Brown latched the gate. They stood, shaking their heads with amusement, watching the sorrel stud cavort around the corral. Brown took out the makings, spilling tobacco into a paper, and rolled himself a cigarette. He struck a match on his thumbnail.
“Tell you what’s a fact,” he said, puffing smoke. “That critter almost makes me wish I was a horse.”
Tilghman smiled. “Yeah, he leads a pretty cushy life.”
“Cushy!” Brown hooted. “All he can eat, not a lick of work, and all the mares he can service. I’d trade places with him any day of the week.”
“I suspect lots of folks would, Neal.”
Tilghman was in a rare good mood. A month had passed since the murderous shootout at Ingalls. At first, the press had lambasted U.S. Marshal Evett Nix and the deputies involved for the debacle. Innocent citizens gunned down, one of them a nine-year-old boy, and three lawmen killed. On the other side of the ledger, only one outlaw had been slain and the Wild Bunch had escaped. Headlines denounced it as a tragic disaster.
Republicans, widely quoted in the newspapers, demanded Nix’s resignation. Neither Heck Thomas nor Tilghman offered any comment. In private, they reminded Nix that they had been opposed to such a large raid from the outset. In public, they quietly accepted the brunt of the blame, refusing to make Nix the scapegoat. Thomas, as leader of the raid, was vilified in the press.
Tilghman, the memory raw in his mind, had relived the bloody fight again and again. Fragmented in time, those moments were so brutalizing that the smallest detail would remain vivid all the rest of his days. Awake and in his dreams, he saw again the man and the boy step from the cafe only to be chopped down in a hail of gunfire. He wondered what would have happened if they had taken longer with their meal, remained in the cafe. At the very least, he ruminated, they would still be alive.
For the other part, though, nothing would have changed. He often reflected that fate, or perhaps simple bad luck, had brought Bitter Creek Newcomb through the door of the saloon at that particular moment in time. Given another minute, the marshals would have gained the element of surprise, trapping the gang in the saloon. But they’d lost the edge, and with it their composure, their ability to shoot straight in a moment of stress. Over and over in his mind he saw the outlaws retreating along the boardwalk toward the stable. He was still astounded that the other marshals, their guns blazing, had hit nothing.
In times past, from talking with Civil War veterans, he’d heard that most of the shots fired in battle never hit the mark. Still, looking back on Ingalls, there was no accounting for the marshals’ inaccuracy at such short range. After all, the Wild Bunch had killed three lawmen, and probably fired fewer shots. The whole affair reminded him of the cardinal rule for survival in a gunfight: Speed’s fine but accuracy is final. He took small consolation in the fact that he had killed Arkansas Tom Daugherty. The score was still three to one.
To make matters worse, Doolin and the Wild Bunch had again pulled their vanishing act. Following Ingalls, every lawman in Oklahoma Territory and the surrounding states had been put on alert. The rewards had been increased to five thousand dollars on Doolin and two thousand on every member of the gang. But there had been no sightings, no reports, absolutely nothing on where the gang had gone to ground. There was a rumor that they
