Bussy was a large man with a handlebar mustache. He shook his head, watching the house. “Way Thomas talked, we ought to kill him and have done with it. Tilghman tended to favor taking him alive. Funny the way men think different.”
“Not so different,” White remarked. “I recollect Tilghman’s killed his share. Doolin’s the only one he ever brought in alive.”
“Wonder what the hell’s the score with Doolin. They didn’t say nothin’ about him.”
“Doolin’s like their own private grudge match. You can tell, they want him real bad.”
“I’ll bet you one thing,” Bussy said. “Next time, they’ll stop Doolin’s clock.”
“Yeah, he’s already dead and just don’t know it.”
The conversation dwindled off and the lawmen waited as the sun rose steadily higher. Toward midmorning Bussy nudged White with his elbow, nodding in the direction of the farmhouse. Clifton, mounted on a horse, had taken a shortcut through a cornfield to the north. He was broadside to them, already halfway across the clearing.
“Clifton!” Bussy yelled, shouldering his Winchester. “Hold it right there!”
Clifton reined his horse about, drawing his pistol. He winged a shot at the trees as he booted his horse into a gallop. The lawmen fired an instant apart, the reports of their carbines blending into one. White’s shot struck the horse, and it plowed nose first into the ground. The slug from Bussy’s carbine broke Clifton’s left arm as he was thrown from the saddle. He hit the dirt with a hard thud.
Bussy and White stepped from the trees, levering fresh rounds into their Winchesters. Clifton scrambled awkwardly to his feet, his left arm dangling at a grotesque angle. He hobbled toward the cornfield, triggering two wayward snap-shots as he moved. The lawmen fired simultaneously, one slug drilling Clifton through the chest and the other shattering his shoulder. He dropped three steps short of the cornfield.
White spun around, leveling his carbine as Wallis Brooks ran out of the house. He kept the farmer covered while Bussy walked forward to inspect the body. After a moment, Bussy waved his Winchester overhead.
“Dynamite Dick won’t dynamite no more!”
* * *
Shortly before noon Bud Ledbetter and his squad of five marshals were in position. Throughout the morning, he had waited in the woods while the lawmen, one by one, took their assigned posts around the clearing. They now had the farmhouse surrounded.
The farm belonged to Sam Baker, brother-in-law by marriage to Wallis Brooks. Located some five miles farther along the Canadian, the house overlooked the river. George Bussy’s informant had reported that the house was occupied by Al and Frank Jennings and the O’Malley brothers. So many outlaws were difficult to conceal, particularly when they made nightly trips into Eufaula. Their presence was apparently known to everyone in town.
Bud Ledbetter had saved the most critical task for himself. The gang had posted a lookout, armed with a rifle, seated in a wagon near the barn. Ledbetter surmised that the outlaws’ horses were stalled in the barn, for there was no outside corral. He stepped out of the woods, on line with the back of the barn, which screened his movements from anyone in the house, or from the lookout. A few moments later he paused at the corner of the barn, less than five yards from the wagon. He shouldered a 10-gauge double-barrel shotgun.
“Hey, mister,” he called out in a low voice. “Over here.”
Morris O’Malley looked around. He found himself staring into the twin bores of a scattergun. The man behind the gun stared back with a grim expression. “Climb down off that wagon,” Ledbetter ordered. “Walk over here slow and easy. You open your mouth and I’ll kill you.”
O’Malley gingerly moved off the wagon. For a moment, staring into the shotgun, he thought he would wet his pants. But he made it to the corner of the barn, where he was yanked out of sight, quickly disarmed, and his hands manacled behind his back. Ledbetter motioned with his hat toward the woods west of the clearing. In turn the marshal posted there signaled a marshal covering the front of the house.
“Al Jennings!” the marshal out front shouted. “This is a federal marshal speaking. I order you and your men to surrender!”
The back door burst open. The Jennings brothers and Pat O’Malley boiled out of the house in a headlong rush for the barn. Their pistols were drawn, and in their panic to escape, they failed to notice that their lookout had disappeared. Ledbetter moved around the corner of the barn, his shotgun leveled.
“Halt or be killed!”
Al Jennings and his brother fired in what sounded like a single report. Ledbetter triggered both barrels of his shotgun in a thunderous roar. From either side of the house, marshals cut loose with a rolling volley from their carbines. Jennings went down with a slug in his shoulder, and O’Malley collapsed, his legs shredded by buckshot. Frank Jennings froze, dropping his pistol, somehow unscathed in the hail of lead. He raised his hands.
The marshals converged on the house. Ledbetter shifted the shotgun to his left hand and drew his pistol as he moved forward. Al Jennings clutched at his shoulder, his eyes watering with pain. O’Malley writhed about on the ground, his trousers soaked with blood. Frank Jennings stood as though struck by sudden paralysis.
“Helluva note,” Ledbetter grunted, inspecting them with a bemused look. “I think you boys are gonna live.”
* * *
The grass was crisp underfoot. A glazy afternoon sun shed splinters of light over the swift-running stream. Tilghman and Thomas ghosted through the woods, halting deep within the treeline. To their front was a dugout at the bottom of
