Charley Floyd proceeded, with the quickness of a hungry prairie wolf, toward the broad harvest lands that stretched across Oklahoma and Kansas. He wanted to explore and discover. Choc was willing to live by his wits and brawn. There was just the suggestion of a swagger in his walk and not an ounce of fear in his heart. This youngster of nerve and resolve, with dark chestnut hair and blue-gray eyes, was as brave as a bigamist.
During his westward journey, Choc watched farmers as they marched down the furrows of red earth, sowing handfuls of clover seed that would grow into valuable forage. He passed Hereford cattle feeding in the shelter of cottonwood breaks and he counted the red-tailed hawks, gorged on mice and snakes, that preened from atop telegraph poles flanking both sides of the dirt highways. He slept in haylofts and on cool sandbars, bathed in creeks, and washed at strangers’ water pumps, using his shirttail for a towel. He hitched rides with silent men in their flivvers and hay wagons. They took him through prairie groves to one-horse towns where there were only a few shops, a post office, a pool hall, and maybe a bank. He used some of the money hidden inside his boot to buy dinner from the shelves at country stores where folks swapped eggs, butter, and cream for canned goods and staples. Sometimes he chopped kindling or husked corn in exchange for a hot meal or a sandwich and a glass of buttermilk from a farmer’s wife.
Just a glance at the stocky boy told any crew boss or ramrod worth a damn that this was someone who would pull his own weight and then some. They saw in a snap that he was useful with a pitchfork and they thought he would not be one to walk off the job after just a day or two of strenuous labor. They would get their money’s worth from Floyd. His thick arms and well-muscled shoulders were suited for baling hay, threshing wheat, or shucking corn. Years of labor in his father’s fields and experience gained working on a farm south of Muskogee were enough to recommend Choc to be anyone’s hired hand. The young man’s humor and quick banter were icing on the cake.
Wheat and corn prices that spiraled downward, just like the other cash crops, plunged to even lower depths in the 1920s. Still, there were fields to tend. It meant more toil but at least, Choc figured, he was out on his own and could control his destiny. That counted for a lot. Harvest work would be a means toward a better end.
Choc worked the fields of hay, corn, and wheat. None of the jobs were easy. Haying was the earliest of the harvests. Mowed hay was hand-raked into piles, forked onto wagons, and lifted into barns or else baled by machines that compressed the hay into box shapes. The bales were wrapped with wire or twine and brought in from the fields. Hay baling could be painful. The straw gouged and cut into flesh and made bare hands and arms look like ground meat. Even green city boys needed only a few hours wrestling with hay bales to learn about wearing long-sleeve shirts and gloves.
Then there was the corn. During the growing season, the corn crop was cultivated several times to kill the weeds. Corn likes hot weather and rain. Farmers joked that after a summer thunderstorm, they could hear the corn making noises. That is how fast it grew. When the autumn frosts came, it was time to bring in the ear corn for feed. Corn picking was one of the toughest jobs any farmhand faced. Ears of field corn were pulled from the stalks and heaved into the back of a wagon. When the wagon bed was mounded with corn, it would creak off and an empty wagon would appear. The procession of wagons seemed never to end. Many a day, Choc strapped on his hand a mitten with a sharp metal barb, called a shucking or husking peg, to strip husks from the cobs. It was a difficult and tedious chore.
Feed corn went to storage bins and was eventually devoured by the carloads of cattle and hogs that were shipped by rail to Kansas City and St. Joseph. The stock was driven from holding pens to the railroad loading chutes early in the morning or in the evening when it was cool. Sometimes live coals sparked from the passing train engines that pulled the cattle cars. The embers flew into the skies and could set a dry field ablaze. Harvest crews were rousted in the middle of the night. They left their bunks to battle the grass fires alongside the railroad section hands.
No matter what the task, Choc liked seeing the unfamiliar territory. He ventured farther and he joined up with a wheat-cutting crew in the outback of western Oklahoma. He stayed with them as the men and machines moved through rippling fields of uncut wheat that reached toward Oklahoma’s panhandle—called no-man’s-land—and spread up into Kansas and beyond. He gave them a day’s work for a day’s wages and even managed to send some money home to his mama at Akins. Mamie tucked it away in a can hidden in the cupboard near her secret cookies that everyone always found. She was pleased that her boy was helping supply the country with its daily bread. She figured he would come back home as soon as he scratched his wayfaring itch.
The wheat harvest was as demanding as the gathering of corn and hay. Depending on the variety, wheat was planted in the spring or the fall after the earth had been prepared. Teams of draft horses, sometimes four or six abreast, in their heavy leather harnesses and neck yokes, lumbered up and down the fields pulling plows that sliced open the ancient soil. The wheat grew and the grain turned golden. Not much more work was necessary until harvest time. The crop was in God’s hands. Farmers went about their business and other chores. They read seed catalogs and almanacs. They offered prayers at mealtime and on Sunday mornings for divine protection from every form of pestilence and blight. They patiently waited for the itinerant workers to appear and bring the harvest home.
Seasoned farmhands, like ancient food-gatherers of old, spent their whole lives as nomads following the harvests. They would curse the threat of hail or the bane of too much rain that could destroy an entire crop in minutes. These men could tell when the grain was aged by wading into a field. They would break off some wheat spikes and crunch into the kernels. Brittleness meant the grain could be reaped, and the boss leading the harvest caravan then barked his orders to the crew. Choc learned from these men. They also taught him that the sound of the prairie wind hissing through the ripe wheat meant it was time for harvest.
Whether it was wheat to be threshed, corn to be shucked, or hay to be cut and baled, there was never any question that the harvest was going to take long hours. Even on cold days, crews were drenched in sweat. For many years, the field-workers relied on a tool known as the cradle, an improvement of the scythe, to harvest the wheat. During that time, even a strong man could cut only four acres or less in a day. When Choc found his temporary niche in the wheat fields, however, there were machines called binders that were pulled by horses or gasoline-powered tractors. They permitted one man in a single day to cut easily thirty acres of matured wheat. Binders moved over the fields like great insects chewing wide paths. They tied the cut grain into bundles and laborers followed behind and placed these sheaves into shocks, or piles, of bound grain set up in a field with the butt ends down. During a wheat harvest, the shocks were arranged so the warm air would dry the grain heads. Sheaves were then forked from the shocks onto wagons and taken to threshing machines. The mechanized beasts banged and roared. They belched out thick smoke and spit steam all the while men tossed wheat down the machines’ throats. Inside, the grain was separated from the chaff and straw. A wire-gauze cap over the smokestack prevented sparks from flying.
At noon, women and girls brought baskets of dinner and lard buckets filled with biscuit sandwiches and doughnuts to the fields so the hands would not have to come in and lose time. Basins of water, soap, and towels were set out and the workers hunkered in the shadows of the wagons and ate in shifts. Throughout the afternoon, boys lugged pails brimming with well water to the parched crews. Sweating field-workers spit cuds of tobacco into their hands while they drank their fill. Choc would drink from a dipper and splash some of the water on his face and throat to cool off and wash away the sweat and dust. In the evening, it was time to rest. The threshers lined up at the wash pans under the trees, put on dry shirts, and waited for the dinner bell to clang. As many as two dozen men and boys sat elbow-to-elbow around tables covered with oilcloth. From out of the kitchen came bowls of cooked spuds and gravy, pickles, green beans flavored with chunks of bacon, platters of spareribs, and hot bread that was sweet as pound cake. There would be several kinds of pie and bowls of fresh berries. The big enamel coffeepots were never empty.
After they ate, the older men would go off to smoke and sneak in a few shots of bootleg liquor that might have served as coffin varnish. The younger bucks, like Choc, were full of piss and vinegar. They shot craps, played cards, and sometimes squared off for friendly boxing matches in the evening shade. They were footloose and felt as free as the crows scolding from the tops of scraggly Chinese elms.
The harvest crew moved across state borders during the dark of night, and, without even knowing, were in Kansas. Farmers there liked to brag that “Kansas grows the best wheat in the world.” Other states challenged that boast, but no one could dispute the fact that the rich Kansas soil yielded bumper crops of hard red winter wheat. In the western part of the state, they planted wheat in the autumn and harvested it in late spring and early summer. Eastern Kansas was corn country and farther north were more fields of wheat planted in spring that were reaped in the fall.
When Choc and his fellow harvesters came to Kansas, they saw more of the grain elevators and silos the color of pearls that towered like monuments over the wheat fields. Some farmers called the enormous cylinders “prairie cathedrals.” They were America’s most original architecture and held enough stores of grain to feed a town the size of Sallisaw. During midday, when heat waves were rising, the elevators appeared to be shimmering mirages. Nearby, small farm villages dotted the land. There was Nicodemus, Friend, Shallow, Water, Protection, Bloom, Paradise, and Pretty Prairie. People in these towns lived in tidy homes with hardwood floors and upright pianos. There were storm cellars in every yard. Kansans went to white-framed Methodist churches and attended band concerts and made their living from the fields of tamed yellow grass. They were constantly aware of their vulnerability when it came to weather and the vacillations of the marketplace.
There were also larger towns, such as Liberal, Meade, Great Bend, Dodge City, Medicine Lodge, El Dorado, Newton, Salina, and Hutchinson. Traces of the historic Santa Fe Trail and old cattle trails could still be made out in the rangelands. Wild phlox appeared each spring on the prairies and in the tall grass pastures. Rivers like the Arkansas, Republican, Solomon, Cimarron, and Pawnee snaked all through the plains and hills.
Kansas, like Oklahoma, Texas, and large parts of Colorado and Nebraska, was more than a decade away from the advent of the lean years when dust storms would come howling across the Great Plains to wither crops and snuff out lives. The storms were tempests out of Hades, ferocious enough so that many strong men and women lost faith in themselves and their land. However, for now the farmers—and also the harvest workers they hired to bring in the grain and corn—were more concerned with poor market prices, grasshoppers, Hessian flies, chinch bugs, and renegade tornadoes.
Choc savored his time in America’s heartland. He made new friends and saw places he had not seen before. Even after the harvest turned bitter for him, Choc was still glad he had come along for the ride up the dusty prairie roads. When the harvests were over and the shockers and binders returned to prepare for a new season and repeat the cycle all over again, Choc turned in another direction.
He had heard about Wichita, the old wide-open cattle town that had turned into a flour-milling and meat-packing center in the south-central part of the state. Some of the older fellows said there were opportunities there, including barber colleges where a young man could pick up an honest trade and make a clean living. That is all Choc needed to hear. When the crews finished their work, he took his leave. He drew his final paycheck, packed up his belongings, and was on his way.
When his family heard from him again sometime in early 1921, their Charley boy had taken up residency at a run-down boardinghouse with iron bedsteads and cracked mirrors in the largest city in Kansas. Choc had briefly visited Tulsa and Oklahoma City, but Wichita was the largest city in which he had ever spent any significant length of time.
The seat of Sedgwick County, Wichita was set in one of the greatest wheat-growing regions of the nation. About two hundred miles southwest of Kansas City at the junction of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, Wichita arose from lowly beginnings during the Civil War, when it was a trading post clinging to the riverbank. The city took its name from the Indians who had settled there after they fled the nations to avoid conflict with the pro-Southern tribes. It was incorporated shortly before the railroad arrived in 1872, an event that made Wichita a cattle-shipping center at the head of the Chisholm Trail and a frontier town that would attract many colorful figures, including Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman, Bat Masterson, and James Butler Hickok. Early law officers posted crudely painted signs on the outskirts of town that bluntly stated: ANYTHING GOES IN WICHITA. LEAVE YOUR REVOLVERS AT POLICE HEADQUARTERS AND GET A CHECK. CARRYING CONCEALED WEAP ONS IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. Some early citizens thought they would avoid getting in trouble by wearing their guns in plain view instead of hiding them. Many of those folks ended up in pine boxes beneath the prairie sod.
Before the final decade of the century, Wichita had already shed some of its cow-town image and had become a prominent agricultural trade and milling center. During the harvest rush, wagons, bearing mountains of wheat to be weighed and unloaded at the mills, lined up a dozen blocks long on Douglas Avenue. By 1915, major oil deposits were found in the region, and shortly after World War I, the lucrative petroleum and the fledgling aircraft industries brought newfound wealth to the city on the windy prairies.
By 1921, Wichita had grown into a Great Plains metropolis with a population of almost eighty thousand. Choc Floyd saw women with bobbed hair smoking cigarettes in public. He flirted with fresh-talking waitresses at the cafes where he ate blue plate specials and bowls of red-hot chili, and munched boiled eggs out of gallon jars stored on the back counters near the glass-enclosed pie safes. There were electric trolleys and jitney buses, municipal parks with picnic groves and archery grounds, stockyards teeming with cattle, cemeteries larger than some Oklahoma villages, manicured golf courses, and stylish theaters that hosted road shows and concerts. Residential areas with trim brick and stone bungalows were shaded by cottonwoods and elms, and there was a bustling business district. The city’s socially elite were still gossiping about the new residence of Wichita Beacon publisher Henry J. Allen, a house built at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Second Street. Allen, who had been elected governor of Kansas in 1918 while serving with the American Red Cross in France, was reelected in 1920, the same year construction on his house was completed. The two-story buff brick house with a low-pitched tile roof had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and was touted as a “radical departure” from residential architecture of the day.
Despite rumors bandied about by some family members, it is doubtful whether Choc Floyd even enrolled at one of the Wichita barber colleges, much less parted with some of his harvest earnings to purchase the necessary tonsorial tools. If he did start classes at one of the schools, such as the barber college on Douglas Avenue, he lasted but a short time and he never spoke about the experience. But, then, the Floyds were not privy to much information at all concerning Choc’s brief stay in Wichita. This was one of the most puzzling periods in a private life that was eventually to become very public.
What is known is that sometime in 1921, Choc Floyd became acquainted with one of Wichita’s most notorious characters—a throw-back figure from the city’s wild old days. He was a corpulent Irishman with white hair named John Callahan. He affected a brogue, smoked a stubby pipe, and could sling blarney as deep as the cow dung at the Wichita Union Stockyards. Born in 1866, Callahan was a familiar figure to many Wichita police officers, both those who were righteous and true and those who were tainted and corrupt. They knew Callahan as a man of cunning and deceit who managed to keep a low public profile, a person who managed to become one of the most successful fences in the Midwest as well as one of the largest bootleggers in Kansas. Every sneak thief, burglar, and bank robber in the region found his way to Callahan’s door to sell stolen goods and contraband or launder his loot. Callahan could dispose of anything including jewels, automobiles, bank securities, or whiskey.
The criminal mastermind used a junkyard on the railroad tracks near Wichita’s Union Station as a front for his nefarious business dealings. He lived nearby in a run-down two-story frame house. When Choc was summoned by Callahan to his place, he undoubtedly walked right passed the Carry A. Nation Memorial Fountain, on Douglas Avenue, just east of Santa Fe Street on Union Station Plaza. The granite slab with a drinking fountain was dedicated in 1918 by members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in memory of Carrie Nation (later in her life she changed the spelling of her first name to Carry), the eccentric reformer who was raised by an insane mother and was married to a hopeless alcoholic. Nation was best remembered for storming into saloons in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri to smash windows, mirrors, bottles, and kegs of beer. Just a block east of the Carry Nation Memorial was the Eaton Hotel, formerly named the Carey Hotel, the site of one of Nation’s barroom raids on December 27, 1900. Besides breaking up a sideboard with a cane, Nation pelted a large painting with rocks. All the while, she shattered mirrors and chandeliers and attacked the painting, yelling, “Peace on earth, good will to men!” The mutilated portrait by John Noble was titled Cleopatra at the Bath, a work described by the shocked Mrs. Nation as “the life-sized picture of a naked woman.” Carry Nation went to her reward in 1911, but had she lived, she and her temperance ladies would have had a field day with the likes of John Callahan and his pack of rascals.
In his earlier years, Callahan had robbed some rural banks and headed up a sizable burglary ring. In 1900, Callahan was charged with the robbery of the bank at Clearwater, Kansas, and served a term in the state penitentiary. He later was pardoned. In 1908, he was implicated in the robbery of a bank at Milan, Kansas. The first hearing resulted in a mistrial, but he was convicted at a second trial. Callahan later appealed and was cleared of the charge. In 1910, a reporter for the Kansas City Star attempted to get photographs of the notorious “dump” Callahan used for a front, but the newsman was attacked by a bulldog and received some severe wounds for his trouble. The reporter complained to Mayor Charles L. Davidson, who ordered an investigation. Officers who raided Callahan’s place found five and a half barrels of bottled whiskey.
About this same time, Callahan spent more time behind bars for his part in the theft and subsequent disposal of more than $6,200 worth of postage stamps from nineteen country stores that maintained post offices. Callahan sold the stamps to a corrupt police chief who then turned state’s evidence and resigned his post but did not do any jail time. A prominent Wichita banker who purchased the stamps from the police official for seventy-five to eighty cents on the dollar was convicted and handed a one-year prison term, but his influential friends convinced President William Howard Taft to issue a pardon. The banker returned to his position, made a small fortune, and ended up a highly respected member of the community. Callahan, however, went to prison and served a sentence. That experience convinced him to let others do the actual stealing. He would stick with the fencing and behind-the-scenes work.
By 1915, Callahan controlled most of the graft and rackets in Wichita. Big-name bank robbers and bandits from several midwestern states came to him with stolen bonds taken in train and bank robberies. They collected the usual going rate of twenty cents on the dollar. Some of Callahan’s clients included Al Spencer and Frank Nash, two of the most infamous from the legion of seasoned robbers operating out of Oklahoma. When a bandit wished to lay low and allow his trail dust to settle, he could go to Callahan for refuge. Sometimes the cagey old Irishman would hide desperadoes with sizable prices on their heads at the Wichita brothel operated by Clyde and Nellie Miles. When the heat was off and the refugees from justice were ready to be on their way, Callahan was there to collect his cut of the harboring fees.
Criminal historians credit Callahan with educating generations of thieves, bootleggers, and even murderers. They said he became a modern-day Fagin, an adult who instructs youth in the ways of crime and lawlessness. Smooth enough to finesse an old maid out of her knickers, Callahan conjured up visions of easy money that attracted any number of local boys who hung around the billiard parlors and dance halls. He also preyed on wayward kids like Choc Floyd who came through town fresh from the harvest fields. Callahan had developed such a convincing line of malarkey that he could have sold the Pope a double bed. Hayseeds and street punks held no challenge for him. Some of his more notorious recruits were the identical twins Major and Minor Poffenberger and Diamond Joe Sullivan. He also apprenticed Dudley, Roy, and Ray Majors—a trio of reckless brothers. But by far and away, Callahan’s star pupil was the deadly Eddie Adams.
Born W. J. Wallace on a farm near Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1887, Adams quit school in his teens and went to Wichita to attend barber college. He cut hair and wielded a straight razor for a short time at a shop on East Douglas Avenue before going back to Hutchinson to marry a local girl. When she jilted him for another man, the barber turned mean. Around 1915, he returned to Wichita with a chip on his shoulder and became involved in bootlegging and petty crime. He promptly hooked up with Callahan and then adopted the Eddie Adams alias. During the day, as W. J. Wallace, he trimmed hair. At night, as Eddie Adams, he ran the back roads for Callahan hauling illegal shipments of liquor from neighboring Missouri into Kansas. Bootlegging profits allowed Adams to take his pleasure at Nellie Mile’s bordello, not to mention his taste for narcotics.
Callahan gave Adams further clandestine assignments and introduced him to the Majors brothers. Together, this quartet formed a fearsome armed-robbery team that struck at small-town banks in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Back in Wichita, they lived like barons. Then in 1919, Adams and the Majors brothers made the mistake of trying to loot a gambling den in Kansas City, Missouri. This was foreign turf and was strictly off-limits to outsiders. In the resulting gun battle, two dice players were wounded and another gambler was shot dead. Roy and Ray Majors were also wounded and captured along with Adams. Only Dudley Majors managed to escape, although he was later arrested for another crime and sentenced to prison. Adams and the Majors boys were tried and convicted. Roy and Ray were handed five-year terms at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Roy never really recovered from his wounds and died in prison. Ray was later released but could not shake a life of crime and ended up spending his final years in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing.
Eddie Adams was convicted of being the actual triggerman who gunned down the gambler. He was given life in prison, but Adams never served one day of that sentence. On January 23, 1920, while en route to the penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri, Adams asked his guards on the train to unshackle him so he could use the toilet. Inside the washroom, Adams broke out a window and wiggled outside. He held on to the railing and waited until the train rounded a curve. When the train slowed down, he dropped to the ground and disappeared in the darkness. It was a spectacular and much-publicized escape and did not go unnoticed by Callahan’s other young protégés in Wichita. Adams was soon back in Kansas for fresh clothes, a gun, and an automobile. In a heartbeat, he resorted to his outlaw ways.
He robbed the bank in Cullison, Kansas, but in his haste to escape, Adams wrecked the getaway car. A posse of police officers found him hiding beneath a bridge. This time, after he was tried and found guilty, the authorities were able to deliver Adams to the Kansas state pen. In prison, the bandit took up with another trio of convicts—D. C. Brown, George Weisberger, and Frank Foster. Together, they masterminded an escape plan. On the evening of August 13, 1921, they sabotaged the power plant and threw the entire prison into darkness. The four men then escaped by scaling the walls with a sectional ladder they had secretly built in the penitentiary workshop. On the other side of the wall waited a driver in an automobile with its engine running. He was Billy Fintelman, a decorated doughboy who turned criminal. He had been sent from Wichita to Lansing by old man Callahan. Fintelman’s orders were to pick up the escapees and bring them home. Once again, Adams was back in business.
Upon his return to Wichita, Adams found that some changes had taken place. During his time spent in a cell at Lansing, the local police department had purged its ranks and cleaned out some of the internal vice that had been prevalent for so long. The new chief of police was S. W. Zickefoose. Word spread around Wichita that he was a tough copper who could not be bought. Zickefoose and his men swooped down on the criminal element like a duck on a June bug. Even Callahan began sweating bullets. Undaunted, Adams proceeded to go on a three-month crime tear. There were gun duels with police officers and savage killings. An eighty-two-year-old man died as a direct result of a pistol whipping during one bank stickup. Several lawmen were slain or wounded in a series of clashes with the bandit. Adams and his accomplices were also responsible for a multitude of auto thefts, a mail-train holdup, and more bank robberies in Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa. His crime spree reached a fever pitch when he was finally gunned down by detectives in a Wichita garage on South Lawrence Street in the wee hours of the morning of November 23, 1921.
Before Adams was buried, hundreds of curiosity seekers viewed his body at the morgue. Someone even swiped the bank robber’s overcoat when the rumor spread that some of his loot might have been sewn in the lining. At the funeral, the Salvation Army provided the pallbearers, and a Baptist preacher volunteered to give a short eulogy emphasizing how Adams had wasted his life. There were no mourners, only a few cops and newspaper reporters. John Callahan was there, however. “He was a nice kid before he went wrong,” Callahan told some detectives standing near the coffin with their hats in their hands.
It is uncertain whether Charley Floyd ever met Eddie Adams. They might have both been in Wichita at the same time in 1921, and both had connections to Callahan, but that was about all they had in common. The young harvest hand from Oklahoma was still learning the ropes. Still, there were those who believed that Choc was influenced by some of Adams’s escapades. Paul Wellman was working on the city desk of the Wichita Beacon during that period. He even helped get out the “extra” edition when Adams was shot and killed. Wellman later suggested in his book A Dynasty of Western Outlaws that perhaps Choc had become acquainted with Adams in Wichita. Bliss Isely, another newspaper reporter in Wichita during those years, also theorized that if Choc did not cross paths with Adams, at least he had been inspired by the older bandit’s tactics, notably his method of escape from law officers while on a speeding train. Less than ten years after Eddie Adams leaped from a train, Choc would have much the same experience in Ohio.
These two veteran police reporters knew for certain that Choc briefly fell under Callahan’s tutelage, however. Wellman contended that although “the raw youth was considered too young for important assignments,” Floyd ran errands and did odd jobs for the man who was forty years his senior. Callahan’s style was to gain the confidence of young men ages fifteen to twenty. He taught them how to drive the lonely dirt roads between Wichita and Joplin, where they would load up on cases of illegal spirits and bring them back for sale at secluded warehouses in Kansas. Choc may have graduated to a driver’s job because he could handle an automobile and had been exposed to the bootlegger’s life ever since childhood.
Even if he made some runs to Joplin and back, Choc did not remain in Kansas long enough to get into any serious trouble. There was never a police record to show that he had been arrested in Wichita. Old police officers in Wichita knew him only as a handyman to Callahan, not a real threat to society. Word among the beat cops and plainclothes detectives was to “keep a close watch on him.” Police Captain W. O. Lyle was one of those who recalled seeing Choc Floyd on the city streets. “We considered him a no-good kid,” said Lyle, “but hardly worth bothering about.”
At some point before his eighteenth birthday in 1922, Choc slipped across the state line back into Oklahoma. He headed due south to Sequoyah County and the Floyd farm near the town of Akins. His family was glad to see him again, even Walter, who was mostly stiff when it came to showing that he truly missed his son. Mamie and the girls laid out a nice feed, and a flock of Choc’s friends came by to see him. He told a few of them about his exploits and the characters he had met on the harvest trail and in Wichita.
On his trip, Choc had collided with men who knew Henry Starr and Al Spencer, two outlaws almost as famous in some parts as Jesse James. Starr had been shot and killed in a bank-robbery attempt in 1921, while Spencer was still on the rampage. It was as though the farm boy had touched living history. Callahan’s tales of old outlaws would not be forgotten. The time spent out on the road and in the cities had a profound impact on Charley Floyd. He had sampled the outside world and he liked what he had experienced. From the moment that long harvest journey ended until the time he left again a few years later, Choc thought of little else.