The Cow Jerry/Chapter 11
THE McPacken Daily Gazette, a little five-column curio such as could not be found throughout the length of newspaper-plastered Kansas today, had much to tell about the raid on the bank that evening. Windy Moore was quoted at length, with embellishments of vocabulary and refinements of diction as surprising to himself as to everybody who knew him; Maud Kelly was quoted, but not to such great length, her plain statement lacking in the picturesque touches which Windy Moore knew how to lay on with artistic hand.
Cashier Crowley was given a chance to explain why he had not grabbed a gun and defended the public's money instead of playing the undignified part of a dead man in this, McPacken's greatest drama. The president of the bank made a statement bearing on the amount carried off by the robbers, which was the vital and important part of the whole story to McPacken.
The banker said the loss would run between forty and fifty thousand dollars; the exact amount would not be known for a day or two, when everything had been checked. A large part of the loss was county funds. There was no insurance. Although the president did not say so, the paper made it plain that things looked father cloudy for the bank.
Forty men were out, raking the country for trace of the robbers, of whom there were believed to be five, including the one who joined them at McPacken. These searchers were spreading the news at every ranch and cow camp, their numbers increasing as they rode. The gang had an hour, or more, start of the posse at the beginning, their audacious blow had so completely stunned and disorganized the town.
While the Gazette was loud in praise of the sheriff's valor and competency, it was low in its hope of results. The robbers had headed south, making for No Man's Land, as the panhandle of what was then the Indian Territory was called. For many years neither territorial nor federal jurisdiction had been exercised over that narrow neck of country. An outlaw who could gain the cover of No Man's Land was safe from the reach of those on the outside, no matter what his perils from more desperate refugees within.
The editor of the paper was a careful man, yet he wanted to give all the news and put it as plainly as he could within the limits of libel in case circumstances might clear up and show public report to be wrong. He did not mention Tom Laylander by name, there fore, but referred to him as "a young Texas cowman who has been around here the past four or five weeks, lately employed on the section as a common laborer."
This young man was defendant in an action to recover on a debt, brought by one of the county's most prominent citizens. It was the general public belief that this young man from Texas, resentful of this lawful reckoning demanded of him, had summoned his outlawed comrades from his notoriously vicious country, and carried out the robbery as a vindictive stroke of retaliation.
It was certain that the outlaw who had fallen by the city marshal's hand was a Texan. Letters and other evidence in his possession established that. It was also established beyond question that the young cowman before alluded to was the man who took the money from the bank's safe and threw it into a grain sack, which grain sack he carried out and flung across the saddle of one of the waiting horses, and rode away with it before him toward the fastness of No Man's Land.
All this, and much more, Louise Gardner read after she had borne her part in serving supper as usual, sitting in her little corner room with one window opening to the west, another to the south. Out of this south window she looked as night fell over the prairie, the confusion of this tragic event upon her. A soft little wind was coming up from No Man's Land, a lonesome, home-yearning touch in it, like a plea from Tom Laylander for an abeyance of judgment.
No Man's Land was not more than sixty miles away, in a southwesterly direction, lying west of the Cherokee Strip. Range horses could cover that distance in a few hours, Louise knew. She felt a little lifting of gladness with the thought that Tom Laylander would have reached and crossed the border of that dark, wild country by now, only to repudiate the feeling the next moment as a traitorous acceptation of his guilt. For she said, and repeated it with obstinate disregard of all argument, proof, circumstance and reason, Tom Laylander was not a guilty man.
Perhaps he had put the money in the robbers' sack; it seemed to be unquestionable that he had gone away with them, as the paper charged. Why he had done this, what circumstance had conspired to force him to do what he had done, she could not understand. It was a shocking tangle which her frantic seeking to penetrate only confused the more. There seemed to be no beginning of reason or motive; there was no end of any sort at all.
She thought the robbers must have taken him as a hostage, unreasonable, unheard of as such hypothesis was. Windy Moore's testimony she wiped out with indignant scorn. The whole experience was like the suffocating black struggle of a dream in which a climax never is reached.
Tom had gone away with the robbers, but Tom was not one of them. How she was to establish his innocence in her own reason, how he was to make it clear against public challenge in his own time, she did not know. Only that Tom had gone toward No Man's Land with the robbers, and that he was an innocent man.
She sat looking out of the south window, the south wind in her face, turning it over and over with distracting, heart-wearying, fevered persistence. He was not guilty. And her faith was the only faith that supported Tom Laylander in all McPacken that night.
The posse comitatus came straggling back next day, to be followed along toward evening by the sheriff, who looked as downcast as if he had come from a funeral. It amounted to about that, indeed, for the sheriff's hopes of re-election. It was disappointing business, being a sheriff in those times, so close to the border of No Man's Land.
Still, the sheriff had not returned without news, although it was not news of his own making. Some cowboys in his posse had found the body of a man a few miles north of the sanctuary of outlawed men. He was a stranger, unknown and unidentified by the cattlemen and herders who used in that part of the country. There was a crumpled letter from a woman in a small town of the Brazos country of Texas, entreating him to return home, or send her money. This seemed, to the sheriff, to supply about all that was wanting in his history. Some said he was one of the cowboys who had come to Kansas with Tom Laylander.
The sheriff brought the letter to McPacken; the man they buried where he lay. He had died of a bullet wound, given him by the marshal of McPacken in the battle before the bank door, it was believed.
The other members of the robber gang had not been sighted by the sheriff, who had turned back at the border. He did not believe in pushing his jurisdiction into the rough hills and scrubby forests of No Man's Land. Any man was as good as a sheriff there, where all men stood together to turn back the arm of the law. Other sheriffs of border counties had not been so wise as this man of McPacken. They had followed trails over the border, and they never had returned.
Two days later a cattleman rode into McPacken with the report of a dead man found a few miles over the line by some of his herders. The fellow had nothing in his possession but a dollar watch, some matches, tobacco and cigarette papers, with the exception of a rough map of McPacken and the roads leading into it. The situation of the bank on the public square was accurately marked. There were two bullet wounds in the man's breast.
The people of McPacken glowed with admiration for their city marshal, who had fallen in vain defense of their money. With the same breath they marvelled over the tenacity of life shown by these Texas men. This second bandit was found fully seventy miles from McPacken. The annals of that country did not record an instance where a man had lived to travel that far with two big bullets through his gizzards and his lights. They lived hard in Texas, and they died hard. And that was a cinch. So everybody said.
The sheriff alone expressed doubt, disbelief. He had been willing to yield the first man to the glory of the dead officer, but he would not go so far with the second one, found away across the line of No Man's Land. He pulled his long mustache, gloom in his eye over the prospect of re-election, speaking his mind freely on this sowing of dead men along the raiders' trail.
In his opinion it was due to a quarrel among the thieves. That cow jerry's hand was the one scattering this woeful sowing of death, the sheriff said. He had been told, by those who had seen him in action, that he was quicker than any man's eye when it came to slinging out his gun. He had been weeding out the undesirables from his gang, likely with the ultimate purpose of killing them all, leaving no division of the stolen money necessary. It had been done before in the sheriff's time; it was a well-known Texas trick.
Louise Gardner heard all these reports and theories, for the daily paper was supporting the sheriff and picked up every word that he broadcast in the square. Her own conviction of Laylander's innocence had become settled and serene. She had arrived at a theory in the case, which she kept to herself. She did not even repose her confidence in Maud Kelly, with whom she was serving her few days of apprenticeship in the county treasurer's office.
Louise knew that the sheriff's uncharitable hypothesis was true in part. Tom Laylander's hand was the one, indeed, that was dotting the fleeing bandits' trail with dead men.