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Page 20
That was my first train robbery, and it was about as easily done as any of
the ones that followed. But that was the last and only time I ever went
through the passengers. I don't like that part of the business.
Afterward I stuck strictly to the express car. During the next eight
years I handled a good deal of money.
The best haul I made was just seven years after the first one. We found
out about a train that was going to bring out a lot of money to pay off
the soldiers at a Government post. We stuck that train up in broad
daylight. Five of us lay in the sand hills near a little station. Ten
soldiers were guarding the money on the train, but they might just as well
have been at home on a furlough. We didn't even allow them to stick their
heads out the windows to see the fun. We had no trouble at all in getting
the money, which was all in gold. Of course, a big howl was raised at the
time about the robbery. It was Government stuff, and the Government got
sarcastic and wanted to know what the convoy of soldiers went along for.
The only excuse given was that nobody was expecting an attack among those
bare sand hills in daytime. I don't know what the Government thought
about the excuse, but I know that it was a good one. The surprise -- that
is the keynote of the train-robbing business. The papers published all k
inds of stories about the loss, finally agreeing that it was between nine
thousand and ten thousand dollars. The Government sawed wood. Here are
the correct figures, printed for the first time -- forty-eight thousand
dollars. If anybody will take the trouble to look over Uncle Sam's
private accounts for that little debit to profit and loss, he will find
that I am right to a cent.
By that time we were expert enough to know what to do. We rode due west
twenty miles, making a trail that a Broadway policeman could have
followed, and then we doubled back, hiding our tracks. On the second
night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in every
direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a friend's
house in the town where the alarm started from. Our friend pointed out to
us, in an office across the street, a printing press at work striking off
handbills offering a reward for our capture.
I have been asked what we do with the money we get. Well, I never could
account for a tenth part of it after it was spent. It goes fast and
freely. An outlaw has to have a good many friends. A highly respected
citizen may, and often does, get along with very few, but a man on the
dodge has got to have "sidekickers." With angry posses and reward-hungry
officers cutting out a hot trail for him, he must have a few places
scattered about the country where he can stop and feed himself and his
horse and get a few hours' sleep without having to keep both eyes open.
When he makes a haul he feels like dropping some of the coin with these
friends, and he does it liberally. Sometimes I have, at the end of a
hasty visit at one of these havens of refuge, flung a handful of gold and
bills into the laps of the kids playing on the floor, without knowing
whether my contribution was a hundred dollars or a thousand.
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 favourite 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 labours 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-timers 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.
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