Sixteen year old Jesse James rode through the picket lines of the Quantrill camp on a bay gelding with a bullet weal on its flank that was barely healed. The sun wasn’t yet up properly as he made his way to seek out his brother Frank.
He found him in a group of men talking around the glowing ashes of a fire, waiting for their breakfast. There was Cole Younger that Jesse had met once before, and a short man who’d he also met, called Gottlieb, who came from up north in Chicago. His first name was foreign and he was always called Dutchman.
There were two others with them that Jesse didn’t recognize at all. Even though he recognized the style of them. Noticing the way they both wore their pistols low down on the right hip, as he did, with a leather tie around the thigh. As he walked towards them, Jesse unconsciously loosened the retaining thong over the top of his own thirty-six caliber Navy Colt, his favorite weapon.
Wondering who the two strangers were. They didn’t look more than three or four years older than him, though one of them looked like he was trying hard to grow himself a moustache and not having much joy of it.
They were both tall. The one on the right with curling hair and broad shoulders. The other with hair that looked in the dawn light to be very pale pink, cascading clean over his shoulders. Jesse couldn’t make him out at all. He seemed to be wearing part of an old tent draped over his skinny shoulders.
‘Hi, Jesse,’ shouted Frank, waving a hand to greet him and beckon him to join them.
‘Frank.’ He nodded to his brother, grinning shyly for the pleasure of seeing him again.
‘You know Cole Younger and the Dutchman?’
‘Surely do. Pleased to see you both.’
His brother turned to Jed and Whitey. ‘And there are another couple of boys joining up with the colonel. This here is Jedediah Herne. Jed, this is my little brother Jesse James.’
‘Good to know you, Jesse,’ said Jed, shaking the boy’s hand, surprised at the strength of the grip. Noticing the way Jesse’s bright blue eyes blinked nervously at him. Also seeing the worn butt of the Navy Colt and the way it was carried.
‘Likewise, Mr. Herne.’
‘Hell, Jesse,’ said his brother. ‘Mr. Herne! His name’s Jed. We don’t go for all that mister shit here.’
‘Ma wouldn’t take kindly to hear that sort of language from your lips, Frank,’ said Jesse solemnly. ‘Swearin’ and cussin’ like that.’
‘Yeah, well—’ said his brother, shuffling his feet and looking uncomfortable at the reproach. ‘This here’s Isaiah Coburn and his friends call him Whitey.’
The tall albino turned from the fire to face Jesse, the light of the rising sun reflected from his deep-set eyes turning them into smoldering pits of blood.
‘By Dingus!’ exclaimed Jesse, startled at the sight. ‘I never seen nothin’ like —’
‘Hold on, little brother,’ said Frank, hurriedly. ‘Whitey here’s on our side and he don’t take kindly to folks sayin’ nothin’ about the way that the good Lord’s afflicted him. It wouldn’t be mannerly to say more.’
Jesse nodded, blinking more rapidly than ever. ‘I see that, Frank. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Whitey. I surely am.’
The introductions over, the six of them went to get something to eat from the main cooking fire. Frank was eagerly listening to news from home and Cole Younger was discussing the problems of which horses to take with them to Strafford Springs with the squat figure of the Dutchman. Herne and Coburn were left more or less on their own.
‘We got what we wanted, Jed,’ said the albino.
‘Guess. We do our part and we’ll be members of the Quantrill Raiders and just watch my butt for smoke when we get near some of that Yankee gold.’
‘You reckon they’re as bad as some folks make out?’ asked Whitey.
‘Couldn’t be,’ replied Herne. ‘Have to be a mix of Satan and an Apache shaman for Quantrill to have done half the wicked things they say. And we met him and he don’t look much like that.’ A pause, and somewhat doubtfully: ‘Not much like that.’
After the meal they sat around drinking coffee, while Cole and Frank went off to discuss the final plans for their patrol with Quantrill. The Dutchman lay on the dusty grass with his back against a tree and fell asleep, egg stains all down the front of his grey jacket.
It had been the first good meal in a while for Jed and Whitey and they’d eaten their fill of the thick-sliced Virginia ham. With com dodgers and a skillet of fried eggs. Badly cooked, with some of the whites runny and some black and burned with bits of shell dotting the mess. But it was still fresh food, with a great iron pot of grits to dig into and line their bellies.
Cole Younger had told them what to wear. The unit had a wagon filled with extra weapons and ammunition as well as plenty of spare clothing. And a string of horses all of which had brands notable by their absence. Each man had picked out a mount for himself, as well as discarding any items of uniform. Whitey had thrown away his long Union soldier’s coat with a sigh of relief.
They all wore nondescript shirts and breeches, and carried Navy Colts. Quantrill had decided that they were the best pistols for his sort of hit and run raiding, but he had allowed Herne to retain the Tranter when he told him he was hoping it might prove a lucky gun for him.
Jesse was interested in the unusual hand-gun, never having seen one before.
‘I’d be obliged to you, Jedediah, ifn I’d be allowed to examine that there pistol of yourn?’
‘You’re welcome, Jesse. Here. Take care of the action, if you aren’t used to it.’
The boy took the hand-gun, feeling the balance, and swiveling his wrist, testing the weight.
‘It loaded?’
‘Yeah. It’s the third model Tranter. Fires six rounds of forty caliber ammunition. Rammer plunger’s on a joint with the lever there.’
‘Yeah. I see it. But how’s this double trigger thing work?’
‘Careful, boy. You’ll blow your damned head off if’n you wave it around like that!’
Whitey’s admonition didn’t go down well with Jesse James, who turned his pale blinking eyes on the albino. ‘Don’t call me “boy”. I don’t like it. And I know how to use a gun as well as you. Maybe better.’
Herne saw tension appearing like sparks between the young lad and his friend and acted quickly to defuse the situation.
‘Trigger’s on a hinge inside this cocking lever,’ pointing to where it hung beneath the trigger guard. ‘Cylinder belt’s there, with the hand, sear and lifter. Pull back on it with your middle finger. That’s it.’
Jesse held the pistol in his lap, steadying the barrel with his left hand while he used the right to make the action work.
‘Right back and it cocks the pistol and swings the chambers round and locks them in place.’
‘By Dingus!’ exclaimed Jesse. ‘Who in thunder thought this up?’
‘William Tranter in Birmingham, England,’ said the Dutchman, who’d been watching with interest. ‘Kind of thing that I make it my business to learn about. Good gun I hear, though I ain’t never fired one. That spur acts to kind of steady it don’t it?’
‘Yeah, Dutchman, it does,’ replied Herne. ‘When you pull on the firing trigger like an ordinary hand-gun the blade of it presses there against the tail of the lifter and it acts as the safety and off goes the old hammer.’
‘What happens if’n you pull both of them triggers at the same time?’ asked Cole Younger who’d joined the group of men around them.
‘You want to aim properly then you do it as a double action. But if you want rapid shooting then you use them together.’
‘Bit like fannin’ a pistol for quids shootin’.’ said Frank James, looking at the unusual gun in the hands of his young brother.
‘I’ve given some thought to it,’ said Herne, ‘and I don’t rightly see how it can be very accurate. The action’s too tight for that’
‘Too tight?’ asked Jesse, experimentally tugging at the double trigger.
The boom of the pistol made everyone jump with shock. Cole Younger grabbed at the arm of Frank James, spilling him into the Dutchman, sending all three of them tumbling to the dirt. Herne was kneeling at Jesse’s side and tried to move backwards, only succeeding in knocking over a couple of other men behind him. Whitey was the quickest to react, leaping sideways with the grace and ease of a cougar, his own Colt flashing into his hand.
Young Jesse James vanished in a cloud of powder smoke, giving a cry of pain.
‘What in Hell’s happened?’ yelled Cole.
‘Jesse! You all right?’
The smoke cleared away, revealing Herne’s Tranter lying on the ground with a curl of grey creeping from the end of the octagonal barrel. And Jesse was huddled up, holding his hands together, with blood trickling from in-between his fingers, splashing on his trousers. His face was pale with shock and his eyes blinked away nineteen to the dozen.
‘Jesse! What happened?’
The boy turned to his brother and attempted a smile that never even got halfway there.
‘By Dingus, Frank! I guess I just shot myself.’
It wasn’t serious. The forty caliber bullet had taken off the tip of a finger and ploughed harmlessly into the earth. There was a deal of blood but the man who doubled as surgeon tied on a tight bandage over the wound and said that he thought the boy ought to go on home for a few days and get himself over it.
‘I ain’t goin’ nowhere!’ said Jesse, stubbornly, as the others tried to persuade him to leave.
Whitey had been greatly amused by the God-fearing reaction of Jesse James to shooting himself.
‘By Dingus, I guess I just shot myself,’ he laughed to Herne. ‘By Dingus! Ain’t that somethin’? Me, I’d have been cursing up a blue streak if’n I’d done that.’
‘Colonel Quantrill says you won’t ride with us until you get well and learn about takin’ orders,’ said Frank, patting his younger brother on the shoulder.
‘It ain’t fair, Frank,’ said Jesse, fighting back on the tears. ‘I come to kill Yankees. Not to go home again like a whipped child. By Dingus! I ain’t!’
‘Come on, Dingus,’ said Whitey. ‘You do like your big brother says.’
‘Don’t call me Dingus,’ shouted the boy.
‘You said you didn’t want to be called boy so I figured it was time you got yourself a nickname. Dingus suits you real well.’
Jesse leaped to his feet at the albino’s teasing, his hand dropping to his own Navy Colt. But Frank was quicker, swinging a round-arm punch to his brother’s jaw, setting him back on the dirt. Standing over him and threatening him with another blow.
‘Draw and I’ll kick your teeth out, Jesse.’
‘He shouldn’t have called me that.’
‘What? Dingus? Ain’t a bad name at that. And you better learn here and now, Jesse, not to catch fire that way. Short life’s no good to any of us. Now get up and go on home like I tell you.’
Reluctantly Jesse James did as he was told, rubbing at his nose where Frank had bloodied it for him.
‘See you in a week or so, Dingus,’ said Cole Younger, grinning at Frank and at Jed and Whitey.
‘Off you go, Dingus, and give all our regards to your Ma,’ added Dutchman.
So Dingus he’d become.
Twenty years later Jesse James died, still called Dingus by some, with a bullet in the back.
‘Now what do we do?’ asked Frank James.
Cole Younger returned from a brief meeting with Quantrill, having explained the accident to him, and told him that they must now change their plans. The big man squatted down among them. ‘We do near the same. But the colonel wants a change. Frank stays here. I come with the three of you to Strafford Springs. Wait in the woods. You two boys go on in with Dutchman and find out what you can in the town. Come out again after a couple of hours.’
‘With the Dutchman?’ asked Frank James in surprise. ‘I thought that Quantrill didn’t want anyone who’d been seen as one of us goin’ in. In case he was recognized.’
‘He didn’t. But Dingus blowing his hand up like that changed things. colonel says it’s not much of a risk, and he doesn’t figure anything go wrong.’
Dutchman didn’t seem worried. But Jed and Whitey exchanged glances. Neither of them were very happy about folks who didn’t think things could go wrong.
But they went anyway.