6

APRIL 1882–APRIL 1884

Outside my window about a quarter mile to the west stands a little yellow house and a crowd of people are pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic hunters. They sold his dust-bin and foot scraper yesterday by public auction, his doorknocker is to be offered for sale this afternoon, the reserve price being about the income of an English bishop….The Americans are certainly great hero worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.

OSCAR WILDE

in a letter mailed from St. Joseph and dated April 19th, 1882

THEN THE FORD BROTHERS ran over to City Marshal Enos Craig’s office in order to surrender, but a man there told them Craig was at coffee and that a deputy marshal had just left for Confusion Hill, that a woman had called on the telephone to report a gunfight on Lafayette Street. The man was going to begin interrogating them about their intentions with Craig but the two were already running east, and they caught up with Deputy Marshal James Finley as he commenced his search for the slain man’s two cousins.

Charley was coughing from his exertions, so it was Bob who gathered his wind and made introductions, saying next, “I’m the man who killed the person in that house. He’s the notorious outlaw Jesse James, or I am mistaken.”

The confession was so cold and conceited, with nothing in it extenuated or softened by excuse, that Finley suspected it as a stupid prank or as a calculated interruption of his pursuit. And yet Bob persisted with his claims, specifying the articles in the cottage that would signify the owner’s name or initials, depicting physical scars and appearances that Bob incorrectly thought most people would recognize as characteristics of Jesse James.

Just then Marshal Enos Craig was climbing Lafayette Street with Dr. James W. Heddens, the Buchanan County coroner, and with John H. Leonard, a police reporter for the St. Joseph Gazette, so Bob Ford forsook the deputy marshal, running down to meet Craig. Bob asked him if they could talk privately and the city marshal lingered on the sidewalk as the coroner and reporter walked on to the cottage.

Rubberneckers, neighbors, and children were collected in twos and threes in the yard or were peering through the sitting room windows when Heddens and Leonard arrived. The two men went inside the cottage and saw the body on a green carpet, the left eyelid closed, the right blue eye asleep, the mouth slightly ajar. A coat and vest and two revolvers were on an oak bed; the room smelled of gunpowder. Dr. Heddens knelt to listen to the man’s chest and lifted his wrist to check for a pulse. He examined some mean lacerations on the man’s left brow and then removed the soaked swaddling and examined a nickel-sized hole in the skull. He asked, “Do you know who it is, John?”

The reporter was making notes about the contents of the sitting room. He said, “Haven’t the slightest idea,” and then saw a pretty girl of sixteen come out of a sideroom.

The girl said, “His wife’s in here.”

Zee was sitting on the wide bed and crying in her hands. Her calico dress was streaked with blood and was redly saturated in the middle and hem. A fat woman sat with a sweatered arm over the widow’s shoulders, and a girl of twelve was crouched with the children. Zee looked to John Leonard and realized he was recording whatever he saw. She pleaded, “Oh, please don’t put this in the paper,” and Leonard said, “I’m afraid that’s my job.”

The coroner came to the door and asked, “What’s your name, madame?”

“Mrs. Howard,” she said.

“Is the body that of your husband?”

She nodded.

The Gazette reporter turned to the sitting room to see Enos Craig and the two Fords come inside. The coroner asked Zee, “Do you know who killed him?” and Leonard could hear the widow answer, “Our two cousins, the Johnsons.”

City Marshal Craig stared at the strong, spiffily outfitted body on the floor and sidled over to Leonard. “Do you know who they say that man is?”

“Someone named Howard.”

Craig shook his head. “The boys claim it’s Jesse James.”

“Goon!”

The city marshal spied the widow in the sideroom and slipped off his broad white hat as he approached her. Enos Craig was a skinny and very stern man of fifty-three, with a crossed left eye and a vast gray mustache that he continually petted with a red handkerchief. He was not at all related to Henry Craig but was the younger brother of Brigadier General James Craig, a United States congressman, and he could exert in special circumstances the mellifluence that his brother made customary. He glared at the fat woman and the girl until they left the room, and then sat on the mattress with Zee. He remarked in an amenable, soothing voice, “Mrs. Howard? It is said that your name is not Howard but James and that you are the wife of the notorious Jesse James.”

Zee frowned at him. “I certainly can’t help what they say.”

“The boys who have killed your husband are here. It’s they who tell me your husband is Jesse James.”

She looked at him with consternation. “You don’t mean they’ve come back?”

Craig let the widow slump against his shoulder and weep rackingly as he stroked her fine blond hair. He crooned some comforting words and then said, “You know, it would be a lot more restful for your soul if you’d speak the truth. The public would think mighty highly of you; your children wouldn’t ever again want for anything.”

She nibbed her eyes with her sleeve, like a child. “I want to go see him.”

“How’s that?”

“I want to see my husband.”

“Just lean your weight on me,” Craig said, and the two walked into the sitting room.

Bob shrank back when he saw Zee and Charley moved to the screen door. She screamed, “You cowards! You snakes!” She surged at them but was restrained by the city marshal and, struggling, she cried, “How could you kill your friend?”

Charley slouched outside and Bob followed him, slapping the screen door shut. John Leonard scurried after them and went over to the sickly brother with the smudge of a mustache who was then squatting against the white picket fence, making a cigarette. Leonard asked, “You mean that really is Jesse James?”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been saying since we come?”

The crowd ogled them and a small boy ran down the street, shouting what he’d overheard about Jesse James to whomever he encountered. Bob strolled over, slapping his palm with a stick. He said, “Have someone twist off that gold ring on his finger. You’ll find a script with the name Jesse James inside.”

Leonard jotted that down and then asked Charley, “Why’d you kill him?”

Bob intervened, “Say: we wanted to rid the country of a vicious and bloodthirsty outlaw.”

Charley smiled in agreement and craned his neck to see the flight of the reporter’s scribbled shorthand. He said to Leonard, “You should mention the reward too.”

“You shot him for money?”

“Only ten thousand dollars!”

Leonard looked at Bob and saw that the young man was scowling. He said, “I’ll mention that you are young but gritty.”

Charley grinned. “We are all grit.” He licked a cigarette paper and said, “You never expected to see Jesse’s carcass in Saint Joe, did you? We always thought we’d create a sensation by putting him out of the way.”

Zee gave in to Craig’s gentle interrogation and admitted the truth. She wished she were in Death’s cold embrace; she wondered what would become of the children; she talked about Jesse’s love and kindliness and promised to speak further if the city marshal would guarantee no entrepreneur could get at the body and drag it all over the country.

Shortly after ten o’clock the body was carried to the Seidenfaden Undertaking Morgue in a black, glass-sided carriage that was followed by a procession of mourners, including Mrs. James. Snoops and onlookers swarmed around the cottage, viewing what they could through the windows, appraising the horses in the stables, swapping stories about the James gang, stealing whatever would slide up their sleeves, so that the cottage was soon closed, the sashes nailed shut, and a policeman stationed on the sidewalk to scare off looters.

Removed as evidence by Enos Craig were a gold ring with the name of the gunman inside, a one-dollar gold coin made into a scarf pin and cut with the initials J.W.J., a set of pink coral cufflinks, a Winchester rifle that Jesse called Old Faithful, a shotgun that was nicknamed Big Thunder, four revolvers (Pet, Baby, Daisy, and Beauty), an eighteen-karat-gold stem-winder watch stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stage robbery in Arkansas, and a Waltham watch in a gold hunting case stolen from Judge R. H. Rountree when the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stagecoach was robbed in 1880. Mrs. James was not relieved of a resized diamond ring that was owned by Rountree’s daughter, Lizzie.

An onlooker came over to the boy Tim and smiled as if they knew each other. “So you’re Jesse Edwards James.”

The boy frowned at the man.

“Do you know who Jesse James is?”

The boy shook his head.

“Do you know what your father’s name was?”

Young Jesse was mystified. “Daddy.”

The man laughed as hugely as he would have if Jesse James had joked with him and tried to get the gathering reporters to jot down the story along with his name, spelled out.

Jesse Edwards James and Mary were sent to stay with a woman named Mrs. Lurnal, and the manager of the World Hotel gave Mrs. James accommodations there. She displaced her grief by fretting a great deal about finances, so an auction of unnecessary household items was suggested. Zee’s uncle, Thomas Mimms, sent telegrams to Mrs. Samuels and the family; the girl she was to shop with for Easter clothes packed a suitcase. Alex Green informed Zee that she was an accessory-after-the-fact in the multiple crimes that her husband committed but consented to represent the widow for a retainer of five hundred dollars; then R. J. Haire ruined Green’s scheme by volunteering his services as an attorney in loving remembrance of a much-maligned and magnificent man.

POLICE COMMISSIONER Henry Craig received Bob Ford’s telegram at his law office in the Kansas City Times building, but made no effort to inform the newspaper staff of the assassination; he merely sent a return message to Bob that read: “Will come on the first train. Hurrah for you,” and then notified William H. Wallace, the Jackson County prosecuting attorney, of the extraordinary news. And since the wait for a regular run would have been many hours, Craig rushed north in the readied Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive and coaches, stopping once, in Liberty, to collect Sheriff Timberlake and a stunned and saddened Dick Liddil.

Thomas Crittenden’s secretary saw Bob Ford’s communiqué only after perusing the morning’s correspondence, but he immediately telegraphed the St. Joseph authorities for particulars and made arrangements for the governor to go there as soon as Crittenden returned from a meeting in St. Louis. The governor groaned when he was greeted with the news, and according to Finis C. Fair, the secretary, Crittenden said over and over again on their walk to the executive mansion that he regretted the Fords did not apprehend Jesse James alive.

At noon in St. Joseph, O. M. Spencer, the prosecuting attorney for Buchanan County, scheduled a coroner’s inquest for three o’clock that afternoon and visited the Fords in Enos Craig’s office in order to inform them that he didn’t actually believe their stories about acting in concert with the government and that he intended to prefer charges of murder against them. He said, “I don’t care if Mr. James was the most desperate culprit in the entire world; that fact wouldn’t justify you in killing the man except in self-defense or after demanding his surrender, and the law is very explicit on that point.”

Bob looked at the floor but Charley smirked at O. M. Spencer and asked Enos Craig when lunch would be served.

At Seidenfaden’s funeral parlor on Fourth and Messanie streets, the cadaver was made void and then swollen by a cavity injection that was the substitute, then, for embalmment. A starched white shirt was exchanged for the stained one, but the cravat and remaining clothes were the same that Jesse James wore when he walked to the cigar store that morning.

On his second day of work with the Alex Lozo studio, a man named James W. Graham got the chance to become renowned at twenty-six by gaining the city marshal’s permission to be the only photographer of Jesse Woodson James. He set a single-plate, eight-by-ten-inch studio camera on a box and, with William Seidenfaden and two men, carried the cadaver from the laboratory into the cooling room where those who’d expired were exhibited in a case of ice.

Correspondents from Kansas City, Independence, Richmond, and Kearney were already in the city and clustered behind the crimson cord and stanchions in the cooling room, writing their impressions and comparing the physical features on the remains with the two available photographs of Jesse at seventeen and twenty-seven.

Graham and the undertaker’s assistants strapped the body to a wide board with a rope that crossed under his right shoulder and again over his groin, then they tilted the man until he was nearly vertical and let the camera lens accept the scene for a minute. The man’s eyes were shut, the skin around them was slightly green, and the sockets themselves seemed so cavernous that photographic copies were later repainted with two blue eyes looking serenely at some vista in the middle distance. Likewise missing in the keepsake photographs was the mean contusion over his left eyebrow that would convince some reporters that it was the gunshot’s exit wound and others that it showed the incidence of Bob Ford’s smashing the stricken man with a timber. The body’s cheeks and chest and belly were somewhat inflated with preservatives, necessitating the removal of the man’s thirty-two-inch brown leather belt, and making his weight seem closer to one hundred eighty-five pounds than the one hundred sixty it was. His height was misjudged by four inches, being recorded as six feet or more by those who wrote about him.

Graham carried the photographic dry plate back to the Lozo studio for development and many in addition to the newspaper reporters followed him, awaiting prints that sold for two dollars apiece and were the models for the lithographed covers on a number of magazines.

The body of Jesse James was lowered onto a slab that was surrounded with crushed ice and Mrs. Zee James was escorted into the cooling room by Enos Craig. She was so overcome with anguish and sorrow that she swooned in the city marshal’s arms and then catatonically sat in a chair, disinclined either to cry or talk, unmindful of other visitors, merely staring at the slain thirty-four-year-old man until two in the afternoon.

Bob and Charley were in the midst of perfunctory interviews with reporters by then. Many noted that the Fords appeared to be proud of their accomplishment and contemptuous of the men who’d sought the James gang of late. Their comments were sneering, snide, argumentative, cocky, misleading. Charley preempted most of the conversations, exaggerating his role and responsibilities in order to insure the governor’s indulgence. Bob lied about being an employee of the Kansas City Detective Agency, about being twenty-one, about Jesse’s wearing four revolvers instead of two .45s, about never having joined the James gang, about shooting Jesse through the left temple, when the man turned around, rather than to the rear of his right ear. When they were asked whether they feared retribution from Frank James, Bob answered in a sentence that seemed rehearsed: “If Frank James seeks revenge, he must be quick of trigger with these two young men; and if we three meet anywhere, it will be Bob Ford who will kill Frank James if there’s anything in coolness and alertness.”

A policeman returned from the cottage with clean clothes for Charley, a gray tweed suit for Bob, and after they’d washed and changed, the Fords were issued shotguns for a short walk under rain-lashed umbrellas to the Buchanan County Courthouse.

The circuit courtroom was on the second floor and was already more jam-packed than an immigrant ship, with pallid women in the pews and children squeezed between the balusters of the bar and boys piggy-backed on their fathers’ shoulders. Sitting in the aisles and pushing down the alleys and shoving into every cranny were correspondents from all the closer towns, shopkeepers with aprons on under their sweaters, intimidatingly mustached businessmen in nearly synonymous suits and slickers, farmers with droopy hats and fierce-looking beards, everyone staring as six policemen and the Ford brothers strode to the reserved seats on the defendant’s side, their bootheels clobbering the oak wood flooring, their suit coats stuffed behind their pistol grips.

Mrs. Zee James was sitting with Marshal Enos Craig on the plaintiff’s side, wearing a black silk dress and dark brown veil; in the second row was Henry Craig with a yellow legal pad on his knee, his round spectacles far down his nose. He gave Bob just a glimmer of a smile and then found justification to make some sort of notation. Bob crouched forward and saw that Zee was crying, he saw the prosecuting attorney instructing Coroner Heddens at the clerk’s table, he looked around the room. People began making comments on his attractiveness, expressing surprise at his slightness and age, gossiping about his peccancy, sending him looks of scorn; but Bob governed his own emotions, reading his fingers as Coroner Heddens and a jury of six men came in from the judge’s antechambers and a bailiff announced the inquisition was in session.

Charles Wilson Ford was the first witness called to the stand. He testified that he was twenty-four years old and in residence on the Ray County farm of Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton when he first made the acquaintance of Jesse James in 1879. He said, “He was a sporting man and so was I. He gambled and drank a little, and so did I.” Charley claimed he’d never stolen anything with the James gang, but most of his further statements were true. His lisp was not much noticed. Rain fell straight as fishing line outside and gradually cooled the courtroom. Heddens asked if Bob came to St. Joseph to assist in robbing a bank and Charley apprised the coroner of their plans for a Platte City attempt. “Jesse said they were going to have a murder trial there this week, and while everybody would be at the courthouse, he would slip in and rob the bank, and if not he would come back to Forrest City and get that.”

The coroner stood near the plaintiff’s table with his hands in his pockets. He was unpracticed at cross-examination and all too aware of the many attorneys observing his performance. He lamely asked, “What was your idea in that?”

Charley continued as if the man’s inquiry were logical and incisive. “It was simply to get Bob here where one of us could kill Jesse if once he took his pistols off. To try and do this with his pistols on would be useless, as I knew that Jesse had often said he would not surrender to a hundred men, and if three men should step out in front of him and shoot him, he could kill them before he fell.”

O. M. Spencer was aghast when Dr. Heddens then released Charley without a more exacting interrogation but chose to let the matter rest until he could manage the questioning at the Ford brothers’ trial. Charley swaggered back to the wooden chair and slouched down in it so that all the eyes would be off him. Bob said, “You did fine,” and Coroner Heddens called Robert Newton Ford to the stand.

People strained their necks and rose from their seats and jumped to see the shootist. He strode with confidence to the bailiff, calmly swore not to perjure, and then complacently revealed himself to the courtroom audience, smiling with arrogance and gladness. He was twenty years old but looked sixteen. His gray suit was new, he seemed exceptionally well groomed, his short brown hair was soft as a child’s. He was very slim but sinewy, with stark bones that seemed as slender and hard as the spindle struts on a chair. His facial features were refined, his complexion was flawless and without color (sunburn was then tantamount to dirt), and except for something cruel about his mouth Bob Ford might have been thought rather pretty.

The coroner commenced his easy catechism and Bob answered with a voice that was authoritarian and certain, even haranguing in its tone. He presented a comparatively accurate narrative of the preceding four months, misspeaking some dates and making the ten-thousand-dollar reward seem his only motive for the murder.

Heddens asked, “What have you been doing since you came here?”

“My brother and I go downtown sometimes at night and get the papers.”

“What did you tell Jesse you were with him for?”

“I told him I was going in with him.”

“Had you any plans to rob any bank?”

“He had spoken of several but made no particular selection.”

The coroner was a little confused about the variation from Charley’s statement about the Platte City Bank but went on. “Well, now will you give us the particulars of the killing and what time it occurred?”

“After breakfast, between eight and nine o’clock this morning, he, my brother, and myself were in the room. He pulled off his pistols and got up on a chair to dust off some picture frames and I drew my pistol and shot him.”

“How close were you to him?”

“About six feet away.”

“How close to him was the hand that held the pistol?”

Bob sent the coroner a reproachful look for the pointlessness of the question and said, “About four feet I should think.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He started to turn his head but didn’t say a word.”

“Was Jesse James unarmed when you killed him?”

“Yes, sir.”

The coroner gave Bob permission to step down and the court was adjourned until 10 a.m. on Tuesday. O. M. Spencer moaned.

Henry Craig said, “You’ll get your chance, Spencer,” and the two attorneys strolled to a restaurant in order to argue their strategies.

In the meantime, the Fords tardily returned to jail in a cold rain. A cluster of black umbrellas were raised over them by policemen and a crowd followed them with admiration, congratulations, catcalls, jeers, and surly looks. Sheriff James R. Timberlake rose from a chair when the two scurried inside. Door locks were thrown and the window shades were drawn as Timberlake walked the Fords back to their cell. He told them to make no agreements without consulting Henry Craig or William H. Wallace, to make no arrangement about an attorney since a good one was already considering the case, and to get their accounts of the assassination straightened out—according to the reporters he’d chatted with, there were too many inconsistencies; in some versions Charley was not even in the room when the shot was fired.

Bob Ford explained, “I was just having a little fun.”

“Fun,” said the sheriff.

Dick Liddil was resting on a cot next to theirs. He stood when the Fords came in and exchanged greetings with Charley, but it was clear that Dick was aggrieved and he could only stare with anguish at Bob. Timberlake suggested that it might be safer for Dick if he remained in jail overnight and Dick said, “It’s all right, Jim. I’ve gotten used to it.”

Sheriff Timberlake was intercepted outside by a correspondent with the St. Louis Democrat and used the occasion of an interview to correct some misconceptions, saying Jesse knew that Bob Ford was there on a mission and was only waiting for the right time to kill the boy. “For ten days I suffered mortal agony, expecting any hour to hear that Bob was dead, and when at last I did hear of the killing, and how it was done, I knew in a minute that Jesse had only taken off his revolvers in the presence of Bob to make him believe that he stood solid. He never dreamed that the drop would be taken upon him then. That very night, on the ride toward Platte City, which had been seemingly agreed upon, Jesse would have shot Bob Ford through the head sure.”

Railway companies had by then rather gleefully scheduled special coaches that would carry the inquisitive to the city at greatly reduced rates; thus a thousand strangers were making spellbound pilgrimages to the cottage or were venerating the iced remains in Seidenfaden’s cooling room. Reporters roamed the city, gathering anecdotes and apocrypha, garnering interviews with the principals, relentlessly repeating themselves, inaccurately recording information, even inventing some stories in order to please a publisher.

The man who offered thirty thousand dollars for the body of Charles Guiteau sent a telegram to City Marshal Enos Craig offering fifty thousand for the body of Jesse Woodson James so that he could go around the country with it, or at least sell it to P. T. Barnum for his “Greatest Show on Earth.” Notwithstanding his guarantee to Mrs. James, Craig appears to have given the proposal some strong consideration, and appears also to have craved the criminal’s guns, for on Wednesday Governor Crittenden angrily interceded in the matter with a wire to O. M. Spencer that said: “Just informed your officers will not turn over the body of Jesse James to his wife nor deliver his arms to me. I hope you will have done both. Humanity suggests the one, and a preservation of such relics for the state the other. His jewelry should be held for the present.” The governor also sent the state militia to St. Joseph on the 3rd in order to preserve the peace and to protect his increasingly threatened clients.

However, the militia had not yet arrived when six horsemen in raincoats and slouch hats rode inside the fence at 1318 Lafayette Street. They had short rifles or shotguns in saddle scabbards, revolvers made their coats wide at the waist, and they were laughing at some sally or jest when a policeman in navy blue walked out of the cottage to meet them. They were unnerved when they saw him, some were affrighted, but one man merely scowled and asked the policeman what happened to the owner. When they received word that the man they sought was shot, one of the six groaned, “Oh, God, no!” and because they steered away and left the city at once, it was thereafter conjectured that they were recruits to the James gang that not even the Fords knew about; which of course lent credence to Bob’s claim that Jesse meant to kill them. Little was made of the six men’s unanticipated appearance and precipitate departure—there was simply too much frenzy and ferment in the city for the episode to make an impression on the authorities.

Mr. Seidenfaden concluded his day by noting in a black ledger: “Apr. 3. Mr. Jesse James killed. Number 11 S. casket with shroud, $250. Shroud $10. Paid.” That was an extravagance: the casket was an imitation rosewood that was made with galvanized iron; the lifts and lugs were silver; the mattress and pillow were cream-colored satin. Two hundred sixty dollars was more than ten times the price of a standard funeral, but the costs were entirely covered by “gentlemen who wished to remain anonymous.” It was only much later that the gentlemen were revealed to have been James R. Timberlake and Henry H. Craig.

Jacob Spencer, the man who owned the St. Joseph News, went into his library late that afternoon and began seven nights’ work on what would become The Life and Career of Frank and Jesse James, a two-hundred-page book that sold out as soon as it reached the stores on April 12th. (Spencer claimed later that five hundred thousand copies would have been needed in order to meet the demand.)

A man crept into the cottage that night and cut out a swatch of the blood-stained carpet; the next afternoon he was in Chicago selling square inches of the material for five dollars.

The governor wanted to be certain that the man on ice was Jesse James, so a party of acquaintances and Clay County neighbors (including two cousins) were sent to St. Joseph via a Missouri Pacific train and at midnight viewed the remains. Mattie Collins was the most greatly affected by the sight: she called Bob Ford a cur and a scoundrel, rashly cursed William Wallace and Henry Craig in their presence, maintained that it was that slut Martha Bolton who’d orchestrated everything, and carried on like an overexercised actress until Wallace commanded, “My dear lady: cease!”

One by one the identifiers were asked by Craig if they recognized the man, and all corroborated that it was indeed the man they’d schooled or soldiered or been on the scout with. Dick Liddil said, “That’s Jess all right. I’d know his hide in a tanyard.” Four of them then signed a statement certifying “that we were well-acquainted with Jesse James during his lifetime, that we have just viewed his remains now in the custody of the coroner at this place and have no hesitation in saying that they are unquestionably his.”

Soon after they left, at about 1 a.m., Coroner Heddens and three other doctors, among them George C. Catlett, the superintendent of the insane asylum, stole into the cooling room in order to perform an autopsy. They noted the cadaver was “a man of fine physique and was evidently possessed of unlimited powers of endurance.” They sawed open the skull and followed the .44 caliber bullet’s route from its entrance at “the lower part of the occipital bone on the right of the median line” to “the junction of the suture which divides the occipital, parietal, and temporal bones of the left side.” According to Catlett, “The brain was a most remarkable one, and showed the great will power, earnestness, and determination of the man. It also showed thought and courage and in most men would have accomplished wonderful things.”

They saw two round scars within three inches of the man’s right nipple and after surgery realized, with some astonishment, that the man had managed a vigorous life without the service of his right lung. They also recorded a bullet wound in a leg, the scar of a lanced abscess in the right groin, a fractured interior anklebone of the left foot, a missing inch of the left middle finger, a brown birthmark above the right elbow. The doctors then restitched the sectioned skin and cleaned and dressed the cadaver with such care that their post-mortem was secret for more than a week.

The remaining night was calm.

ON TUESDAY MORNING, Police Commissioner Henry Craig, Sheriff James R. Timberlake, James Andrew “Dick” Liddil, and Deputy Marshal James Finley were tactfully examined by a tired Coroner Heddens. Little that was unanticipated was said. Timberlake stated he’d known Jesse James since 1864 and recognized the cadaver as being that of the criminal. (His words at Seidenfaden’s were “Jesse, I’ve looked for you for a long time.”) Timberlake volunteered the theory that Jesse would have killed the Fords if Bob hadn’t shot him first, that Jesse only removed his revolvers in the Ford brothers’ presence in order to pacify them. He reminded the court that Jesse James had announced his intention of killing Governor Crittenden, Dick Liddil, and one or two others in the gang “as they were surrendering too fast, and he would be in danger if they were permitted to live.”

Henry Craig admitted that Bob “was not regularly employed by us, but acted in good faith, and according to our instructions, and assisted in every way he could to aid us,” an acknowledgment that caused a stir of rebuke in the courtroom but meant so much to the careers of the Fords that Bob smiled with gratitude and relief when he heard it said.

In the course of the Tuesday proceedings, Mrs. Zerelda Samuels arrived at the railroad station and was greeted by a great throng awaiting her on the platform. She moved in their midst like an Amazon queen—six feet tall, two hundred twenty-eight pounds in weight, the largest form in the crowd, but with a sovereignty that made her seem even grander. She accepted solace and sympathy from a great many there, gathered sprays and nosegays of wildflowers, and then rode in a carriage with grave indignation to Seidenfaden’s parlor.

She tottered as she walked to the stone slab on which her third-born son slept. She was too mentally and spiritually limited to contemplate the sorrow that the man she mourned over had caused the wives and mothers of his many victims; she only contemplated her own grief and wept as she stroked his white sleeve. A man asked if the remains were really Jesse James and she said, “Yes, it’s my son; would to God it were not.” She then caressed his cold cheek and cried with great lamentation, “O, Jesse! Jesse! Why have they taken you from me? O, the miserable traitors!”

Mr. Bowling Browder, a Kentucky hotel owner who’d married the sister of Zerelda Mimms, then steered Mrs. Samuels out to the carriage that carried her to the courthouse. Some correspondents accompanied them. She said, “You know, he must’ve had a foreshadowing that this was about to happen. One of the last things he said to me was ‘Mother, if I never see you on earth again, we’re sure to meet in Heaven.’ ” She was practiced enough with reporters to pause while they wrote down that statement, and then she continued with vituperations against the government and angry professions of her son’s charity and goodness.

They reached the circuit courtroom just as Deputy Marshal Finley was concluding his brief testimony and as Coroner Heddens was preparing to call for a recess. The Ford brothers were removed from the courtroom through the judge’s antechambers in order to avoid the press, so they missed the attention-getting entrance of the magisterial Mrs. Samuels in a long black gown and veiled sunhat. She was seated with Mrs. James and the two children but then saw Dick Liddil slumped on a side bench. She rose at once and, with the vast courtroom audience attending her, shook her mangled right arm damningly at Dick and railed, “O, you coward! You did all this; you brought all this about! Look at me, you traitor! Look upon me, the broken-down mother, and on this poor wife and these children! How much better it would be if you were in the cooler where my boy is now than here looking at me! Coward that you are, God will swear vengeance upon you!”

The courtroom assembly strained to see Dick’s reaction, some further off even climbing onto the seats; Dick looked around with annoyance and bewilderment and then meekly said, “I wasn’t the one who killed him. I thought you already knew who did it.”

Henry Craig peered across the room at Dick and shushed him with a parental finger to his lips. Coroner Heddens wisely interrupted the scene by calling first the mother and then the pregnant wife of the deceased to the stand, asking them merely to give their names and current residences and to verify the identity of the remains. Then, lacking any reason to continue the inquest, he requested that the coroner’s jury of six men, “all good and lawful householders in the township of Washington,” be impaneled until they could render a judgment as to how and in what manner and by whom the said Jesse W. James came to his death. Their verdict was returned before noon and the Fords were summarily indicted for first-degree murder.

The St. Joseph Gazette was sold out by then and its seven-column account of the assassination was being reprinted verbatim in many newspapers throughout the country. Scare headlines were not yet in use, so that JESSE, BY JEHOVAH was wedged into a single column and was followed by five three-line decks that read: “Jesse James, the Notorious Outlaw, Instantly Killed by Robert Ford—His Adventurous Career Brought to an Abrupt Close on the Eve of Another Crime—Ford Gets into His Confidence and Shoots Him from Behind While His Back Is Turned—Jesse a Resident of St. Joseph Since the Eighth of November Last—An Interview with Mrs. James and the Testimony Developed Before a Jury.”

The account began: “Between eight and nine o’clock yesterday morning Jesse James, the Missouri outlaw, before whom the deeds of Fra Diavolo, Dick Turpin and Schinderhannes dwindled into insignificance, was instantly killed by a boy twenty years old, named Robert Ford, at his temporary residence on the corner of Thirteenth and Lafayette, this city.

“In the light of all moral reasoning the shooting was unjustifiable; but the law is vindicated, and the $10,000 reward offered by the state for the body of the brigand will doubtless go to the man who had the courage to draw a revolver on the notorious outlaw even when his back was turned, as in this case.”

And there followed a narrative of the assassination as set forth by the Fords. John Leonard wrote that the news of the shooting “spread like wildfire” but that few people gave it credence. Inevitably, the excitement in St. Joseph and Kansas City was compared to that created nine months earlier when President James A. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau.

On the afternoon of the 4th, Zee consented to an interview, in which she said she was thirty-five rather man thirty-seven and went on to prevaricate about her late spouse. She said Jesse was not a good scholar and that his spelling was rudimentary, but that he read incessantly and could compose letters like he was pouring water, and never striking a word. She said he was quiet and mild and affectionate, never smoked tobacco nor consumed alcoholic beverages, was always playing with the children. She talked about his practicality and acumen at finance and then made the familiar claim that the circumstances of geography and history compelled him to commit the very few crimes for which the James gang was actually accountable. She stated, without close questioning or contradiction, that the couple had worked in contentment on three farms at various times but authorities had always conspired to drive them off and confiscate their property. The correspondent mentioned that it was estimated the James gang had collected over a quarter of a million dollars in fifteen years, and Zee replied by saying she hadn’t an inkling where the money could’ve gone, she only knew they’d always been poor.

Cole Younger was interviewed in the Stillwater penitentiary but magnanimously tempered his antipathy for Jesse by limiting his comments to tales of the Civil War and a physical description of the outlaw. And a girl who’d once thrown snowballs with the man she knew as Thomas Howard said she’d “never met a more perfect gentleman. Whenever I came to his house he bowed very politely, and in a dignified manner offered me a chair and conversed in the most accomplished manner. Much has been alleged against him but I don’t believe half of it.”

Many newspaper editorial pages on Tuesday carried columns applauding the assassination because it was cheap, expeditious, and successful, but the newspapers’ correspondents were at odds with that judgment, seeming only to record conversations with people who were sympathetic to the victim or skeptical that he’d really perpetrated all that the government said he did. In consequence, antagonism to the Fords was increasing. It was rumored that some Crackernecks intended to steal and enshrine the remains, that Bob would be lynched on the day that the body was interred, that Frank James was in the city with vengeance on his mind—this “mysterious stranger” was eventually revealed to be a German barkeeper who was known as Dutch Charlie. By afternoon the Fords had received at least two menacing letters, one of them crudely printed under the official seal of the Tennessee House of Representatives. It read: “To the Ford Brothers you have Killed Jessie James but you did not get his Pal so Jessie James shal be Avenged i will kill you both if i have to follow you to the end of the earth you cant escape my Vengeance.”

A reporter asked the Fords if they were at all cowed by the threat and Charley was again the one who answered, “No, sir, we fear no one. You tell this fellow from Tennessee to give us his name and we’ll meet him on even ground.”

Bob added, “Give me my guns and let me know who he is and I will meet him anywhere he will name in the United States.”

The writer was clearly impressed by the boys’ courage and resolution and said in summary, “If the worst comes, they will sell their lives as dearly as possible.”

Governor Crittenden came up from Jefferson City on the 4th and graciously shook hands at the polling places, urging people to vote the Democratic ticket. The Republicans swept the city elections except for a Democrat who was preferred as city marshal over Enos Craig.

Crittenden granted a good number of interviews, denying in each that he’d meant that Jesse James be killed. He was sure though that his actions would meet with the sanction of law-abiding citizens of Missouri and throughout the United States. “If not killed when he was,” the governor said, “he would have attacked the bank at Platte City, and in perpetrating the robbery would have killed in all probability some one or more of the officials in the ill-fated bank; then he would have gone to Kansas, returned and attacked the bank at Forrest City and killed one or more of its officials. Should not these things be considered? Must we overlook not only his past but anticipated robberies and murders in the future and grieve over his deprivation? I say no, a thousand times no. I have no excuses to make, no apologies to render to any living man for the part I played in this bloody drama; nor has Craig nor has Timberlake. The life of one honest law-abiding man however humble is worth more to society than a legion of Jesse Jameses. One is a blessing, the other a living, breathing, putrid curse.”

Crittenden’s secretary, Finis Farr, then substantiated the governor’s claim that no murder was intended by indicating the July proclamation that promised a reward only for the arrest and conviction of the man. Off the record, however, the secretary confided that studies showed real estate values in Missouri would increase by thirty-three percent once the desperado was gone, and noted that one man who was selling his farm had already raised the price by five hundred dollars.

Meanwhile the crowds at Seidenfaden’s grew and now were gaining admission to the cooling room only after contributing fifty cents. Another photograph was taken of the renowned American bandit constricted in a small walnut coffin, with his head canted to the left and with three sullen, scraggly men around him, and it was that shot that was most available in sundries stores and apothecaries, to be viewed in a stereoscope along with the Sphinx, the Taj Mahal, the Catacombs of Rome.

JAMES WILLIAM BUEL ARRIVED on Wednesday to cull information about the shooting for a reissue of his two books about the James brothers, The Border Outlaws and The Border Bandits; and Frank Triplett was in the city to sign a contract with Mrs. James and Mrs. Samuels and a St. Louis publisher, giving them fifty dollars as an advance against royalties. (The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James was written at the rate of sixty pages a day, and while not actually dictated by the two women, as was alleged, it was as congenial to the Jameses and as contemptuous and critical of Governor Crittenden and the Fords as any chronicle could be; yet it claimed that Frank and Jesse were criminals, and for that reason Zee repudiated the book in May, and Governor Crittenden unintentionally cooperated with the widow by suppressing it.)

Ex-Governor Brockmeyer visited both the cooling room and the jail cells and then communicated to a correspondent his glancing impressions of the slain man and his remover, saying Mr. James could have been distinguished in whichever course he undertook, that he was obviously a man born to control subordinates, and his general appearance showed a sagacity and power that but few men can ever possess. Of the Ford boy, there was a youth who could look green and uncouth except when cornered. That he was courageous, self-reliant, and prepared for any emergency, those, who looked into the depths of his cool blue eyes could not doubt for an instant. He could cope with anything, although his manner was quiet, self-centered, and of a retiring character; and it was possibly the corresponding singularities in the fugitive’s make-up that conceivably caused him to take young Ford into his confidence.

Mrs. Moses Miller, the mother of Clell and Ed Miller, also looked in on the cooling room, moving inchingly on two canes and shivering with palsy as she stood over the remains. Many reporters insisted on her opinion of the man more or less responsible for the deaths of her two sons, but she refused to speak a syllable and simply pressed a laced linen hankie to her eyes.

Meanwhile, an eight-year-old boy named Tom Jacobs was gallivanting through greening woods in countryside east of Richmond, calling for his mongrel dog. He followed its barking around scrub oak, box elder, and crab apple trees and saw it gambling miseries with a skunk, wagering to the right and left as the skunk showed its sharp white teeth and maneuvered in the scraggle and muck of a rain-changed creek. The boy saw that the skunk had been eating. He recognized a muddy wool blanket, menacing teeth, and a withered left hand with three missing fingers, and then ran with fright to his father.

Perry Jacobs was so convinced by the child’s horror that he rode straight to Richmond and collected Constable John C. Morris and Coroner Richard Bohanon, and they followed Tom Jacobs onto the Harbison acreage that was rented by the widow Bolton, finding the rotting cadaver of Robert Woodson Hite in a shawl of clay and apple tree leaves that slid from his chest in the rain. His eyes were plucked out, his mouth seemed to scream, and a bullet hole in the man’s right temple had been exaggerated by birds. The men wincingly carried Hite’s weight to a wagon and wound him in a rubber sheet, and then arrested Martha Bolton and Elias Capline Ford on the suspicion of murder.

Elias acknowledged that the cadaver was Wood Hite, but Martha claimed she’d only known the man as Grandfather Grimes; otherwise their statements about the December gunfight matched in attesting that it was Dick Liddil who’d committed the killing. They were released on their own recognizance since two brothers already in jail seemed a satisfactory guarantee that they wouldn’t “high-tail” it (the constable’s words). Wood Hite was deposited on the plaintiff’s table in a Richmond courtroom, pending a coroner’s inquest, and then Constable Morris, with unseemly haste, sent a message to Governor Crittenden that read: “I have the body of Wood Hite and am ready with evidence for identification. What shall I do with it? I claim the reward.”

The governor was so incensed by the constable’s greed that he considered charges against him, but guiltily decided that Morris’s reaction was partly of the governor’s own making, so that he merely sent the reply: “On account of the weather, rebury it. No reward offered for his dead body.”

The Ford brothers were remarkably unbothered by the revelation in Richmond. Perhaps their distractions and perturbations were already too plentiful for them to register the significance of the discovery, or perhaps they’d made a blithe assumption that the governor would pardon all previous crimes. At any rate they continued to comport themselves as if they’d done nothing terribly wrong, and Charley even acted hurt when he was informed that they would not be allowed to attend Jesse’s last rites on Thursday.

THE RAINS CONTINUED into the afternoon of April 5th, and surreys and rigs were mired in the slime of the streets, and yet more than four hundred mourners slogged after an express company wagon that carried a boxed iron casket to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad depot. A covered hackney summoned Mrs. James and the two children at six, then Mrs. Samuels, a cousin named Luther James, and Sheriff Timberlake. Thomas Mimms, Henry Craig, and deputies, correspondents, and the city marshal came after them in carriages that were somberly festooned with black crepe ribbons and bows. Crowds lined the sidewalks and watched the cavalcade from beneath wet umbrellas and men stood lugubriously in the rain with their hats off, their hair washed slick against their skulls. A crackpot no one knew raised a purse pistol and shot at Mrs. Samuels, and Luther James and Henry Craig leaped out, tackling the manifestly intoxicated man in an alley. Craig punched him once in the stomach and once in the cheek and the man staggered away until he sprawled sloppily into a gutter. Craig regained the carriage and shook out his fingers and smiled when he was clapped on the back. “I needed the exercise,” he said. No charges were made against the crank.

Sheriff Timberlake and the deputies slid the boxed casket into a railway express car, then shut and locked the sliding door behind them, mindful of the irony in the situation. The remaining parties climbed onto a coach that included regular passengers who stared so rudely and pryingly at the veiled and weeping women that City Marshal Craig issued some minatory instructions and then sat with Mrs. Samuels’s left hand engaged in his right. They were old acquaintances from the Civil War when Enos Craig was the Buchanan County sheriff and oversaw Zerelda Samuels and her daughters in the county jail. They chatted about their gardens.

A special Hannibal train was scheduled to meet them at Cameron Junction but the crowds made them tarry so long in St. Joseph that they missed their connection and were forced to stay over in the town until a Rock Island train could be sent. Sheriff Timberlake and Marshal Craig vied over who would nightwatch the remains, for each mistrusted the other as a man capable of selling the corpse. An argument followed and Enos Craig reached for his gun, but realized the childishness of the fight when a station agent yelled from across the room, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! Don’t pull your pops in here!” Craig returned his revolver to its holster and then sourly walked the railroad tracks, snuffing Maccaboy tobacco.

Dick Liddil, Marshal Bill Wymer, Mrs. Katie Timberlake, and two other ladies had arrived in Kearney around noon on Wednesday and word went out that the funeral cortege would be coming soon, so that the railroad line between Cameron and the Samuels farm was fenced by the afflicted and curious even when the Rock Island freight train and single coach actually coasted by after midnight. Mary and Jesse Edwards James slept on the seats inside and Mrs. Samuels continued her inexhaustible commentaries on the caitiffs who’d slaughtered her son. Sheriff Timberlake lashed the container to the coach’s rear platform and sat on the box during the journey, sucking on a cold Calabash pipe, letting the wind comb his hair.

Once Kearney was attained, the casket was removed from the box and rested in the candle-lit lobby of the McCarthy House so that residents could look through the coffin glass at a man that many there had known only as a storybook legend. His skin was yellowing a little and the contusion over his left eye was orange but otherwise the man seemed more attractive than the Jesse they’d seen as a child. Mrs. Samuels came in from the sitting room at 3 a.m. accompanied by her mincing husband, and she again gave in to wild lamentations, screaming, “How can I stand it? How can I stand it? How can I stand it?” Zee James stood quietly at the foot of the casket, gently caressing the metallic rosewood with her light, gloved fingers. A silver name plate was affixed to the casket and German Gothic lettering had been used to inscribe the words “Jesse James.” Dr. Samuels recounted an uninteresting story about seeing his wife for the first time in that very hotel, and the New York Herald correspondent muttered a wisecrack to one of his colleagues. It was almost five in the morning when the writers at last went to sleep.

Sheriff Timberlake had arranged for the president of William Jewell College to officiate at the services on Holy Thursday, but after agreeing to that the Right Reverend W. R. Rothwell was reminded that a sophomore, George Wymore, had been slain by the James-Younger gang in the robbery of the Clay County Savings Bank, and Rothwell claimed an incipient malady, recommending in his stead Reverend J. M. P. Martin, pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church.

Kearney was a main street town with only six hundred residents then, and yet five hundred people moved through the McCarthy House between sunrise and noon. Freight and passenger trains made unscheduled stops at the Kearney depot so that travelers and railroad crews could see the desperado, and sharecroppers were walking into town from shacks that were sometimes as far as sixteen miles away. Then it was two in the afternoon and the casket was screwed shut and carried out to the flatbed of a spring wagon. A procession of twenty teams and carriages followed the remains to a one-storey red-brick church that was already so filled that two hundred spectators were laughing and smoking on the lawn. The sky was cerulean blue, the temperature was sixty degrees, and a slight wind mowed over the grass.

Sheriff Timberlake was the supernumerary among the pallbearers and was mistaken for Frank James by many in attendance. The five others were Deputy Sheriff J. T. Reed, a boyhood friend of the outlaw’s, and J. D, Ford, the mayor of Liberty; then Charles Scott, James Henderson, and James Vaughn (who much later became mentally ill and claimed he was Jesse’s brother). The casket was situated on a short table in front of the plain altar and relatives and close acquaintances were seated beside it as the congregation sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Reverend R. H. Jones read from the Book of Job: “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.”

Mrs. Samuels moaned, “O merciful Jesus!” at strategic intervals then and throughout the reading from Psalm 39: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold thou hast made my days as an hand-breadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Jones then offered a prayer for the bereft mother, wife, and children, asking the Lord to make their anguish a blessing to them by bringing them to wonderful knowledge of Himself.

The Mount Olivet congregation rose for the hymn, “Oh, Where Shall Rest Be Found?” and Reverend Jones retreated next to Timberlake as a stooped and sullen Reverend J. M. P. Martin sorely climbed to a raised wood pulpit that was slashed across with sunlight. He looked grimly at the casket through his spectacles and glanced apologetically at the family and assembly before dividing his Bible with his finger. He said, “We all understand that we cannot change the state of the dead. Again, it would be useless for me to bring any new information before the congregation respecting the life and character of the deceased.”

Some reporters were annoyed by the prim and politic tack the minister had taken, recognizing that there’d be no story in it, and they audibly sighed and sank deeper in the pews as Martin peered into his Good Book. “The text which I have chosen today is the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, forty-fourth verse: “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.’ ”

It was a sleepy, unimaginative, uninspired sermon that concentrated on the certainty of the grave, the need for repentance, the salvation of the righteous. Zee James no more than sniffed as Martin spoke, but Mrs. Samuels sobbed and swayed and rolled her eyes to the roof-beams, swoonily repining, then made the smaller Dr. Samuels crutch her flamboyant, chest-striking exit from the church at the conclusion of the service.

Only those closest to the James-Samuels clan were invited to the hundred-fifty-acre farm three miles northeast of Kearney, for Mrs. Samuels was afraid that the commotion would be a vexation to her boy Johnny. In spite of the minister’s instructions to the contrary, however, more than eighty followed the casket on the Greenville road and another vast number from the countryside was encountered in the yard.

Confederate Army soldiers had cut a grave into seven feet of loam and roots beneath the giant coffee bean tree in which Yankee soldiers had hanged Dr. Reuben Samuels by the neck. It was close enough to the kitchen window that the apprehensive mother could easily look out for body snatchers. The cadaver was shown one last time to Johnny and then was carried out into the shade where it was rested on chairs so that the company could see Jesse Woodson James in the sleep of peace.

Mother and wife were then overmastered by grief and hysteria and they cast themselves upon the casket, screaming for God to avenge the man slain by a coward for money. The two women were gently encouraged from the ground but Zerelda Samuels wrenched away from constraining hands and, having become convinced of some skullduggery, insisted that the casket be reopened in order to make certain that her son’s arms and legs had not been sawed off and replaced with limbs made of wax. Sheriff Timberlake went dutifully for a screwdriver but was called back after Reverend Martin soothed the woman with practiced words about a calculus in Heaven that adjusts for our privations and compensates for our losses. And as those gathered sang “We Will Wait Till Jesus Comes,” the casket was jarringly lowered on ropes and gradually covered with earth.

MEANWHILE LIFE WAS BEGINNING to be glorious for Charley and Bob. The manager of the Theatre Comique in Kansas City proffered one hundred dollars per night to them for presenting their interpretations of the assassination. Sojourners in the city, who might only have visited the Pony Express station previously, now patiently lingered outside the jail for Sheriff Thomas to show them to “the man who shot Jesse James.” They peered at Bob as if he were an anomaly from P. T. Barnum’s Grand Hippodrome, and they were inordinately pleased if the young man raised his eyes from his reading or spoke unimportantly to them.

It was even considered good advertising to capitalize on Bob’s patronage, as in this newspaper item from that week: “It may not be developed in the evidence, but it is no less a fact that Ford, the slayer of Jesse James, while under the assumed name of Johnson, only a few days ago purchased a genteel suit at the Famous Boston One-Price Clothing House, 510 Main Street. This is not mentioned to indicate that this has anything to do with the capture, but merely to suggest that when anyone wishes to personate a gentleman or wear good clothes of any kind, they are sure to buy them at the Boston.”

The Fords stayed in their jail cell until Easter, accepting no gawkers at all on the day that Jesse was interred in the grave. They spent their time chatting with Sheriff Thomas and Corydon Craig, the city marshal’s son, or they played cards or tiddlywinks and read the many newspaper recapitulations of past meetings with them. Charley’s lung congestion and stomach complaints seemed to have been aggravated by the week’s excitement, for he coughed persistently in the night, recurrently vomited his suppers into a bedpan, and pitifully informed the reporters that he hadn’t enjoyed a single day of good health in all the preceding five years.

Whereas Bob was learning to thrive on the attention, even to be thrilled by it. He began smoking cigarettes in order to appear more experienced and dangerous and cosmopolitan. He weighed the advantages of growing a mustache. He smelled gunpowder on his fingers. He could still feel the jolt of the gun going off, could still hear the groan as Jesse sagged from the chair, but that was all, he’d seen no phantoms, listened to no incorporeal voices, was not subjected to nightmares. He would ask on second thought, as a passing fancy, if anyone had yet sighted Frank James, but revenge was not a worry really, it was as if no person could physically harm him once Jesse was underground.

In order to satisfy the many requests for his picture, Bob agreed to sit for a studio photograph in the second week of April. He wore green wool trousers and a gray tweed coat that was buttoned just once at the short lapels and then curtained away from a green vest. He resisted sitting on a chair and suggested instead a gracefully scrolled and sculpted staircase, seating himself on the fifth step, his right hand dangling slackly off his right knee as his left grasped a gleaming Peacemaker, a photographer’s prop, that was artificially rested on his left thigh and calling attention to itself. He looked like a grocery clerk accidentally caught with a long gun in his hand. A correspondent asked why, if Bob was right-handed, he’d gripped the gun with his left, and Bob answered, as if nothing further needed saying, “Jesse was left-handed.”

And it was also in early April that the Fords rode to Kansas City with two deputies as chaperones, and they stood in the wing of the Theatre Comique, next to the fly lines and counterweight pulleys, rephrasing the tragedy in their minds and watching a Russian in opera clothes fling daggers at playing cards poised by a pretty woman. Charley was agitated and sick and smoked cigarettes so continuously that he used one to light another; but Bob was beguiled and delighted—the atmosphere was exciting, sympathetic, eccentric, provocative; it seemed precisely the sort of place that would bring him happiness. He chatted with the stage manager, regarded a man juggling white supper plates inside his dressing room, got a crick in his neck from looking into the loft at the curtains and teasers and scenery suspended from the overhead gridiron. An elderly woman highlighted his eyelashes with the licked point of a charcoal pencil and then smeared red coloring onto his lips with her little finger. Charley endured the same cosmetics and said, “I don’t know what we’re doing here.” Bob combed his ginger brown hair in a mirror and said, “Educating.”

The deputies let the Fords strap on their holsters and emptied pistols and then took seats in the orchestra pit with shotguns cradled across their chests. And a comedian with a spiraled mustache and waxed goatee rounded out his waggish stories about a baffled and bamboozled visitor from Boston by grandly indicating, “It is now a singular privilege to welcome to this performance hall the two courageous young men who brought to justice that wild beast to society, the notorious Jesse James.” He checked the wing and saw Charley woozily clutching the curtain but saw too that Bob was readied and impatient to go on. He swept off his top hat and swung it stage right, saying, “I therefore urge you to give your undivided attention to the report of their daring exploit, and I present to you in their premier public appearance, Charles and Robert Ford!”

Bob strode onto the gray stage apron and Charley sluggishly followed as a man at the piano accompanied them with processional music that wasn’t meant as sarcasm. The balcony and mezzanine were vacant and the main floor was only spottily filled with an audience that was principally couples in evening clothes and smoking them in the lobby. Some peered at their playbills to read if the act was explained (it was not even mentioned), but most gaped at the Ford brothers, getting their measure, gossiping, audibly recalling what they’d read.

Charley’s eyes slid shyly to Bob and then to the deputies in the orchestra pit who progressively slumped down in chagrin at the Fords’ prolonged aphasia. Stagefright stripped Charley’s language away and he wondered rather hopelessly if it would be enough to just stand there and be seen. Then he was caught by surprise upon hearing words easily come from Bob, astonished at seeing his younger brother enjoying the presentation, pronouncing a speech for which there was no script, gesturing gently in the air, portraying himself with apologies and subtle immodesty, and then inviting questions.

A man stood and asked, “Why did you decide on April third instead of any other time?”

Bob said, “Ever since Charley and I were with Jesse, we’d been watching for an opportunity to shoot him, but Jesse was always heavily armed, guns everywhere on his person, and it was getting to be impossible to even look to our weapons without him noticing. Then the chance we had long wished for came that Monday morning.”

Another man stood and Bob shaded his eyes from the stage lights to see him. The man asked, “What were Jesse’s last words?”

Bob glanced at Charley and signified it was Charley’s turn at answering, but Charley stammered inconsequentially and glowered at the footlights as he pursued words and impressions that kept disappearing. Bob spared him further hardship by surging on with the story he’d already related to many correspondents, except that this time he spoke Jesse’s comments with compelling accentuation, physically representing the great man’s stroll into the sitting room, his painstaking removal of coat and vest, the imprudent removal of his pistols on the mattress, the featherdusting of the picture of Skyrocket. “Getting back to the subject,” Bob said, “I guess his last words were ‘That picture’s awful dusty.’ ”

Some of the audience laughed.

A woman asked where Mrs. James was at the time; another asked the children’s ages; a gunsmith wanted to know the makes of all the guns in the cottage and Bob’s opinion of their accuracy and ease of operation, only to argue with him about his prejudices; the master of ceremonies came on stage and suggested that it would be fitting to conclude with Bob’s interpretation of the fatal shot.

Bob transfigured his expression into something hard and sepulchral and slapped the deputy’s gun from his hip, slowly crossing the audience from left to right with it, closing his left eye as he sighted the muzzle on the most appalled and upset faces. Then the gun’s hammer snapped forward and pinged into a cleared chamber. Someone in the audience gasped and others edgily laughed, for Bob was grim-visaged and villainous, with scorn in the sour set of his mouth and mean spite in his eyes. He relaxed his right arm and the crowd’s anxiety left; he shoved the gun into its holster and lingered next to the footlights, looking stonily at as many in the audience as he could, and the comedian said, “How about a big round of applause for these two courageous young men?” And Bob and Charley walked off the stage to the gratifying sound of clapping hands.

Charley said, “You surprise me, Bob.”

Bob collapsed onto a chair and grinned with ecstasy. “I was really good, wasn’t I?”

Some professionals who saw Bob play the slayer thought the boy showed an aptitude for acting and encouraged him to study stagecraft. So he begged release from jail to attend matinee performances at Tootle’s Opera House, pantomiming the leading man’s style, incorporating his gesticulations even if not appropriate. It was generally acknowledged that he ought to have been preoccupied with the impending court trial in Buchanan County and the coroner’s inquest into the death of Wood Hite, but Bob was instead becoming starstruck by Miss Fanny Davenport in her role as Lady Teazle in a comedy of manners called The School for Scandal.

ON FRIDAY, APRIL 14TH, Henry Craig arrived from Kansas City with Colonel John Doniphan, a powerful attorney and orator who’d recently completed the Burgess trial in Platte City (getting the gunfighter off on a five-year sentence). Doniphan was an austere, misanthropic man with no generosity or high regard for the Ford brothers, whom he’d agreed to defend. He sat with Charley on a cot in the jail cell and listened intently as Craig conducted Bob through a recapitulation of his conversation with the governor during their meeting in the St. James Hotel, and then through the peregrinations that resulted in the killing of Jesse James and a charge of first-degree murder. Craig completed his orientation and sat back; Doniphan crossed his long legs and asked, “How do you two feel about your situation?”

Bob looked at Charley and then replied, “I sleep fine.”

Doniphan then indicated what their problems were: that they had no written agreement with the governor, that Crittenden himself was susceptible to charges of conspiracy to commit murder, that public sentiment could coerce the governor into changing his mind about his pledge to the Fords. Suppose Crittenden denied ever making a promise of pardon, as he repeatedly had to the press? Were they not public nuisances on whom no pity should be squandered? Will the claims of two gunslingers and petty thieves carry much weight in a jury trial? What could the disposition of even their supporters be once the corrupted body of Mr. Hite had been discovered on their property?

Charley glared at Doniphan through the cataloging, and when the attorney was finished, asked, “Do you want me to answer those questions?”

Doniphan said nothing.

Charley said, “I’ll wager the governor does what’s right.”

Colonel Doniphan put his pencil away. “You’d better hope he does not.”

On Monday, April 17th, O. M. Spencer took his case to trial. The second-floor courtroom was as crowded then as it was on April 3rd, but there was little grandeur in the Fords’ progress through the gathered spectators now. Charley was angry and banged out of his way anyone who pressed close to him; Bob was grinning but fidgety and though he worked at aplomb and courage, it was read as arrogance.

For reasons of politics and prestige, Colonel Doniphan was unwilling to be the sole counsel to the Ford brothers, so he invited William Warner and W. A. Reed to collaborate with him, and they congregated with four deputies around the Fords in order to prevent any violence against the two who were sitting at the defendants’ table.

Judge William H. Sherman took his seat at the bench after one o’clock and once the court clerk crossed to the recorder’s table, O. M. Spencer stood and requested that Robert Newton Ford be the first arraigned. Bob rose and swayed a little as the prosecuting attorney read a grand jury’s accusation that on the third day of April, Ford had willfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought, killed Jesse W. James and was now being summarily charged with murder in the first degree. Spencer turned to the prisoner and with great formality asked, “What plea do you make?”

Bob responded, “Guilty!” as if pestered by ceremonies, and then presumptuously sat down.

Spencer raised a second grand jury indictment and with some irritation and frustration read the name of Charles Wilson Ford, pronouncing a premeditated murder charge and receiving the same reply.

The courtroom was then filled with controversy and whisperings and Bob reveled in it. He swiveled in his chair and crouched around the deputies to wink at his brother Elias and at Henry Craig, wave to some reporters he’d met, and pugnaciously smile at those who clearly wished him ill. Doniphan nudged him around.

Judge Sherman ruminated for many minutes and inscribed some thoughts in his elegant longhand before sitting toward the bench and saying, “Under the circumstances, there is only one thing I can do and that is to pronounce sentence here and now. You have pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, and it only remains for me to carry out the provisions of the law. It remains for others to say whether the sentence is carried out.” Sherman glanced at his writing and commanded, “Robert Ford, stand up.”

Bob smirked but arose.

“Have you anything to say as to why sentence should not be pronounced upon you?”

“Nothing,” said Bob.

The judge looked at him sternly but without passion or righteousness. He said, “Robert Ford, you have pleaded guilty before the court to the crime of murder in the first degree, and it becomes my duty to pass the sentence of death upon you. It is therefore the sentence of this court that you be taken to the Buchanan County Jail and there safely kept until the nineteenth day of May 1882, and at that time to be taken to some convenient place and hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

Bob then lazily slumped down in his seat and Charley was ordered to stand and receive the same sentence. Charley listened with aggravation and outrage that he might be executed without having fired a shot, but Bob simply laughed at the judge in a haughty and mocking way that he thought would be interpreted by correspondents as audacity and pluck. It was not.

Then Sheriff Thomas and the deputies and attorneys walked the Fords back to jail and checked all newspaper reporters for firearms before they were admitted. Bob was asked how he felt and he answered, “Bully.” Charley was asked if he’d actually hang and he answered, “Why, I should smile. The governor will attend to that part of the business; that’s in the contract.”

City Marshal Craig couldn’t abide the Fords any longer, so he collected the revolvers and rifles and articles that had been stored as evidence and carried them to 1318 Lafayette Street. Zee James received him graciously and served him sponge cake and coffee.

Meanwhile the Fords were packing their clothes in luggage that Elias had brought and were predicting that the pardon would come by evening. Bob wrapped his .44 caliber Smith and Wesson in yesterday’s newspaper but then weighed the gun with repugnance and gave it to young Cory Craig in gratitude for the many errands that boy had gone on. His only instructions were that Cory should get a gunsmith to engrave on the nickel sideplate: Bob Ford Killed Jesse James With This Revolver At St. Joseph, Mo. 1882.

Charley sat up from a nap and patted his pockets for cigarette papers. He’d apparently overheard the impromptu presentation, for he commented to Bob, “Your shoes must be starting to pinch.”

“I don’t need any mementoes,” said Bob. “I’ve already got everything fast in my head.”

At 3:45 p.m., Colonel John Doniphan climbed onto a box in the city marshal’s office and soberly read aloud to the assembled press a telegram in which the governor granted an unconditional pardon to Charles and Robert Ford.

Henry Craig ran to the jail cell and greeted the Fords with the news but few others joined him in congratulating the two.

ON APRIL 19TH, 1882, two days after his unconditional pardon and release from jail, Bob Ford was arrested in Richmond, Missouri, on the charge that he’d murdered Robert Woodson Hite, and Bob was obliged to beg two thousand dollars in bail from J. T. Ford, the father he’d always made efforts at forgetting. “Isn’t this typical?” Mr. Ford said with spleen and all too apparent pleasure. “You come to me crying and pleading and whimpering like a little girl, please give me the money, daddy, and I’m the one to clean things up.”

Bob glared as the elderly man jerked his shoestrings tight with a grunt. He said, “Maybe you’re the one I should have killed.”

Mr. Ford glanced with anger and fright at his youngest child and saw that the boy was grinning. He considered the garden outside his window as he often would when he composed his sermons and then pulled himself up from the overstuffed armchair and prepared to make a trip to town, only adding nastily, “How perfectly our good Lord put it in the parable of the prodigal son.” By the time the cashier’s check was made out, many customers at the Hughes and Wasson Bank had come by to say Bob shouldn’t take to heart the words of John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was then living in Sedalia, about sixty miles west of Jefferson City, and was managing editor of the Daily Democrat, which was singular among Missouri newspapers in its attenuated suspicions that Jesse James couldn’t have been killed in such a manner. Soon the corroborating evidence was overwhelming, however, and Edwards considered making a pilgrimage to Kearney to attend the funeral, but instead purchased six bottles of whiskey and “went to the Indian Territories.” And it was not until one week after the interment that the Sedalia Daily Democrat published his scathing philippic on the subject of the murder.

It began: “Not one among all the hired cowards, hard on the hunt for blood money, dared face this wonderful outlaw, one even against twenty, until he had disarmed himself and turned his back to his assassins, the first and only time in a career which has passed from the realms of an almost fabulous romance into that of history.”

He continued with a mixture of apology, reprimand, and angry screed, saying Jesse’s transgressions were outgrowths of the Civil War. “Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from among his people, a price put on his head, what else could he do, with such a nature, except what he did do?…He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters. Would to God he were alive today to make a righteous butchery of a few more of them.”

Edwards called the murder “cowardly and unnecessary” and castigated the commonwealth of Missouri for having “leagued with a lot of self-confessed robbers, highwaymen, and prostitutes” in having a citizen assassinated without confirming “that he had ever committed a single crime worthy of death.” The government and the conspirators had succeeded, Edwards acknowledged, “but such a cry of horror and indignation at the infernal deed is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself. But so sure as God reigns, there never was a dollar of blood money yet obtained which did not bring with it perdition. Sooner or later there comes a day of vengeance. Some among the murderers were mere beasts of prey. These, of course, can only suffer through cold blood, hunger, or thirst; but whatever they dread most, that will happen.”

Bob Ford read that commentary, of course—he’d acquired from Jesse the daily routine of reading every newspaper available. He read without much resentment its implicit denunciation of Crittenden, Craig, Wallace, and Timberlake (“sanctimonious devils, who plead the honor of the State, the value of law and order, the splendid courage required to shoot an unarmed man in the back of the head”) and its imputation of his sister Martha (“into all the warp and woof of the devil’s work there were threads woven by the fingers of a harlot”) but nothing upset and preoccupied him like the phrase whatever they dread most, that will happen. It seemed more than a simple curse; there was the ring of something presaging and prophetic about it, it was the sort of thing Jesse would say.

On May 13th a justice of the peace in Ray County accepted the two thousand dollars in bail along with Bob’s promise that he would be present for the court trial. Bob reportedly told him, “I keep my appointments, Your Honor.” Then Bob and Charley went to Kansas City with Sheriff Timberlake in order to supply further information about the James gang to the government. The journey was announced in the press against all instructions and a pro-James newspaper invited the public to greet the Fords “in some appropriate way” at the railroad depot. However, the sheriff let Charley and Bob jump from the caboose upon arrival, and they nipped around the train to a waiting carriage as Timberlake escorted two cuffed and camouflaged policemen through the gathering. One policeman was struck in the cheek with a rock and needed eight stitches to close the cut, the second policeman got into a fistfight and only Timberlake’s strong intervention kept him from getting disfigured.

Then Finis C. Fair joined the Fords in Henry Craig’s law office in order to present them with their rewards, but first he spoke at dulling length, explaining and adapting with the intricacy, circumspection, and loftiness that was regarded as a signal of good breeding. He made a preamble about the governor’s July 1881 proclamation, saying the extra five thousand dollars that was promised for the arrest and conviction of one of the James boys couldn’t be justified in the circumstances of manslaughter and, second, funding depended upon the railroad companies and their complete cooperation in providing the money. Some of these companies had proven themselves to be irresponsible, Fair said, still others were parsimonious. And there was a third component to consider, that it was not only the Fords who’d made the capture possible, there were good men who’d struggled for many years at great risk, and these civil servants too, the governor felt, should take some part in the profits. (Henry Craig diplomatically slipped from the room.)

Charley was exasperated. He slumped deeply in a chair and stared gloomily at the ceiling, sighing as the governor’s secretary moved from point to point. Finally he asked, “Are we going to get a plug nickel?”

Bob sneered at Finis Farr. “It’s just that there’s these raspberry cough drops that Charley’s got his heart set on.”

They each were given a large brown envelope with two hundred fifty dollars inside. Farr anticipated them by saying, “You two can complain if you want but that’s the only cash available; anything else would come straight from the governor’s pocket.”

Charley said, “Well, let’s not be too hasty in turning that down neither. I mean, it spends just the same, don’t it?”

Farr reacted testily. “Many prisoners would be happy to pay five thousand dollars to get a governor’s pardon. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Charley put the envelope inside his shirt and responded, “Appears to me we already did.”

SO THEY WERE READY for a change of atmosphere and providence when George H. Bunnell arrived in Richmond squiring a poshly costumed actress who’d apparently patterned herself after the great Lillie Langtry and spoke with an emphatic and highly suspect English accent. Bunnell was a New York showman with a museum of curiosities and living wonders in Brooklyn and a repertory company that played one-night stands in cities and resorts throughout the East. He made a party of a cheap cafe supper that evening and as Bob and Charley gaped with aspiration at the actress, he persuaded them to sign a contract with his “players guild,” guaranteeing them costly publicity and promotion, repeated engagements before large audiences, payment of fifty dollars for each of six evening and two matinee performances per week, plus an aggrandizing script “crafted by one of America’s most accomplished playwrights” and the professional improvements of a Broadway director. He’d misinterpreted the newspaper stories about the Fords: he presumed they were explosive and stormy men of great prominence who’d already rejected multiple opportunities while the actual case, of course, was that nothing had yet happened to make them feel either prosperous or respected and by May even the town of Richmond was inhospitable to the Fords. People crossed the street to avoid passing them, shop clerks refused to acknowledge them, every mailing included letters of asperity, reproof, and warnings that they too would be shot when next their backs were turned. By the time George H. Bunnell came around they were living in protective custody inside the Ray County courthouse and splitting a nightwatch at the single high window, often scaring children away by clapping saucepans together.

William H. Wallace procured the necessary permissions for the Ford brothers to quit Missouri and they proceeded, incognito, to New York City in June, gaping at the strange new geography outside the passenger coaches, their noses against the windowglass like snails whenever the train precariously crossed a gorge or hairpinned up a steep mountain. George Bunnell generally stayed close to Bob during the journey, as if the young man were an invaluable object to which he’d just gained possession. They would sit in the dining car with a silver service between them and with men of color refilling their coffee cups at brief intervals, and Bunnell would ask Bob yet again to give an account of how he killed Jesse James, designing a stage presentation from those story ingredients that Bob rarely forgot.

The Ford brothers’ try-outs quickly verified Bunnell’s prior conviction that Bob possessed some acting talent and Charley not a jot, and the unaccredited playwright made allowances for that incongruity by casting the script as Bob Ford’s proud and complacent reminiscence, calling it How I Killed Jesse James. Bob was taught not to saw the air with his hand nor to split the ears of the groundlings but to give temperance to his passion, to keep within the modesty of nature, and to imitate humanity; Charley was only expected not to slouch or mutter and to transport his sicknesses to the alley before letting them go.

They practiced the skit for two weeks and then previewed it with music hall and carnival acts at seaside resorts such as Atlantic City, Jersey City, and Ocean Beach before they opened in a splendid theater at Nindi and Broadway in Manhattan. Bob was as groomed as a European prince; his ginger brown hair was recut and marceled with irons, he’d glued on a dignitary’s clipped mustache, his gentleman’s suits were tailored in England throughout the range of grays and greens, he gained nearly four inches in height from exaggerated Wellington boot-heels and lifts. Charley was simply given a Prince Albert suit and striped cravat and a glued chestnut brown beard and mustache that matched Jesse’s, along with rigorous promptings throughout the performance due to his inadequate memory.

Saucy girls danced in the French style, cowboys sang anthems and gunslinger ballads around a gaudy cardboard fire, an Appaloosa mare displayed feats of arithmetic by stamping on the floor, a railway coach was robbed by a snarling gang to gasconades of opera music, and then the Fords walked onto a set that resembled the sitting room of the cottage atop Confusion Hill. Stage right contained an oak bed and an easy chair with a crimson shawl on it; to the center was a round dining room table and chairs and canvas wall with two artworked windows and a wide door; stage left showed a wicker chair and two picture frames, one of which enclosed a spurious reward poster that announced Jesse was wanted dead or alive and included an etched portrait of the outlaw, and next to that a shabby, made-to-order painting showed Julius Caesar being stabbed by conspirators in the Senate.

How I Killed Jesse James began with Charley clomping across the stage in the apparel of Jesse James and pumping Bob’s hand imperatively as his mouth seemed to make imploring words. Bob looked out to the audience and said: “When Jesse James came to me at the grocery store, he told me that my brother Charley was with him and that they had planned to rob a bank in Platte City. It would take three men to do the job and he needed my help.”

Charley sat down at the dining room table like a gruff town burgess and rattled out a newspaper; Bob sat informally on a wicker chair beneath the pictures and polished a silver pistol. Charley scowled across the stage at Bob and Bob again confided to the audience: “After we got to his house in the suburbs of St. Joseph he seemed suspicious of me for some reason and never allowed me out of his sight for even a moment. He had me sleep in the same room with him and he even followed me when I would go out to the stable.”

Bob laid down the pistol and collected some newspapers placed under the chair rungs, then moseyed over to the dining room table. “Each morning before breakfast he would take me downtown with him to get the morning papers which he read every day. He would buy the Saint Joseph and Saint Louis papers and I wanted to get the Kansas City papers to keep track of things, and after we had read them we would exchange.”

Bob straddled a chair across from his brother and the two traded what they’d been reading. Bob perused a page and flipped to another and, without raising his eyes, said: “I had been told that I must keep the papers from Jesse if I could, as the reporters were on to the fact that something was in the wind and it might leak out and be published that Dick Liddil had surrendered, which fact, up to that time, had been kept secret.”

Charley slammed his fists on the dining room table, astounding some in the audience, and jolted up as Bob registered amazement. Charley then careered around, wildly jawing, wagging a finger at his brother, overplaying wrath, as Bob shrugged and professed his guiltlessness according to the accepted conventions of stage acting. By way of explaining the foregoing, Bob stated: “Soon after my arrival in Saint Joseph, Jesse questioned me closely about Dick Liddil and I told him I had not heard anything about him for a long time.”

Charley resettled on the dining room chair and suspiciously eyed Bob as the young man walked to the footlights and invited everyone he could see to participate in his intrigue. “The days kept slipping by and it was getting hotter for me every hour. I knew anything might happen at any time to tip my hand to Jess, and I scanned the papers each morning eagerly.” He moved a little to the right in accordance with the director’s suggestion that Bob indicate a transition from summary to scene. “On the morning of April third, Jess and I went downtown as usual before breakfast for the papers. We were to go that night to Platte City to rob the bank, and I was afraid that I might need to go through with the prospect and that innocent people might be killed.”

Bob had by then circumnavigated to the oak bed; Charley squared on the audience and crossed his legs and looked at everything with belligerence. Bob raised the newspaper from the mattress and slowly rotated downstage. “We came back to the house at about eight o’clock and sat down in the front room. Jesse was sitting with his back to me, reading the Saint Louis Republican. I looked over the Kansas City Journal first, and seeing nothing of interest, I threw it on the bed and picked up the Kansas City Times.” Bob then glanced at the newspaper front page and his eyes signified aghast surprise. “The first thing I saw in big headlines, almost a foot long on the first page, was the story about Dick Liddil’s surrender. My only thought was to hide the paper from Jesse.” Bob perceptibly noticed the crimson shawl on the easy chair and pushed the newspaper under it with some expense of motion.

A pretty girl made to appear twice her age glided across to the dining room table with a porcelain coffee service on a tray. “Please sit down, Bob,” the actress said. “Breakfast is ready.”

Charley hackled a tooth as Bob sat and, seeming to prefer alternative company, Charley moved over to the easy chair where he conspicuously accomplished each action as Bob explained it: “Jess couldn’t have seen me conceal the Times but he sure enough picked up the shawl and threw it on the bed, and snapping open the newspaper, returned to his seat. I felt that the jig was up and I moved my belt around so that it was close to my right hand. I proposed to the game if Jesse began to shoot.”

The girl playing Zee poured cold coffee into painted cups and settled into her skirts at the table, sweetly facing the audience. Charley spread the newspaper over his plate and propped his chin on interlaced fingers as he joylessly read. Bob illustrated each of his director’s interpretations of panic, consternation, fright, and hopelessness. “My heart went up in my throat,” he said, without straying his eyes from the reading man. “I couldn’t have eaten a bite to save my life. All at once Jesse said—”

Charley surged in on signal: “Hello, here! The surrender of Dick Liddil!”

“And he looked across at me with the pitiless glare in his eyes that I had seen there so often before.”

“Young man,” Charley said, resticking a sinking wing of mustache, “I thought you told me you didn’t know that Dick had surrendered.”

“You mean he did?” Bob asked. “I didn’t know!”

“Well, it’s very strange. He surrendered three weeks ago and you was right there in the neighborhood. It looks fishy.”

The actress carried the coffee service off-stage, Bob removed to the easy chair as Charley continued to scowl at him and stood from the dining room table, his Prince Albert coat slung to the rear of his large revolvers.

Bob abstractly buffed his boots with a red bandana and slyly looked to the audience as Jesse loitered in the room. “I expected the shooting to begin right there, and if it had Jesse would have got me, for I was nervous. But then he was smiling and said pleasantly—”

“Well, Bob, it’s all right, anyway.”

Bob submerged a little in the chair in an attitude of judgment. “Instantly his purpose flashed upon my mind. I knew I had not fooled him. He was too sharp for that. He knew at that moment as well as I did that I was there to betray him. But he was not going to kill me in the presence of his wife and children, and so he was smiling and pleasant to throw me off-guard, intending when we were on the road that night to finish me.”

Charley strode to the oak bed with a general’s carriage and after some overacted deliberations in which his eyes squinched and his mouth screwed to the left and right, Charley painstakingly uncinched the cartridge belt and in a challenging way flung the two revolvers on the mattress. Charley had been coached to remember the balcony seats and his voice was consequently a little too like a yell: “In case you’re wondering why I took my guns off, it’s because I might want to walk into the yard!”

Bob revealed: “It was the first time in my life I had seen him without that belt on, and I knew in an instant that he threw it off to further quiet any suspicions I might have that he had tumbled onto my scheme.”

Charley’s brown eyes cast about the stage with what seemed mania and Bob helpfully clarified: “He seemed to want to busy himself with something to make an impression on my mind that he had forgotten the incident of a moment before at the breakfast table.”

Charley fetched a feather duster from a wicker stand and then flagged it toward the implausible painting of a dying Caesar and, with some tardiness in matching gesture to utterance, said: “That picture’s awful dusty.”

Bob surreptitiously got up from the easy chair and sneaked downstage as he softly divulged: “There wasn’t a speck of dust that I could see on that picture.” He swiveled to watch Charley flick the feather duster over the frame as one might watch a man at a petty crime and Bob let the audience espy his five-fingered right hand as he gradually rested it on his gun. His back was turned three-quarters to them, so he amplified his speech as he confessed: “Up to that moment the thought of killing him had never entered my mind, but as he stood there, unarmed, with his back to me, it came to me suddenly, ‘Now or never is your chance. If you don’t get him now he’ll get you tonight.’ ” Bob moved within six feet of a man who was then muffling a cough and straggling the duster onto the canvas wall, making the gray illusion undulate like a slowly luffing sail. Some people in the audience stirred with anticipation.

Bob said: “Without further thought or a moment’s delay, I pulled my revolver and leveled it.” Bob did so. “He heard the hammer click as I cocked it with my thumb in throwing it down on line with his head. He recognized the sound and started to turn to the right as I pulled the trigger.”

Bob let the hammer snap and a light charge of gunpowder ignited and the great noise on the stage made some of the audience gasp and later complain of the percussion still in their ears. Charley reeled on the chair, clapped his palms to his chest, shut his eyes, and then crashed unauthentically to the floor, stopping his collapse with his left foot, then his left elbow, but smacking flatly on his back and issuing one word: “Done!”

Bob stepped back and with a perfect imitation of marvel, puzzlement, and regret, confronted the witnesses to the assassination. “The ball struck him just behind the ear and he fell like a log, dead. I didn’t go near his body. I knew when I saw that forty-four caliber bullet strike that it was all up with Jesse.”

The girl playing Mrs. James ran onto the stage from the right, paused to see a man who was suppressing his breathing on the stage apron, and then permitted herself that which the script described as “a blood-curdling scream.” Then nothing happened; they froze. The houselights dimmed almost to darkness for many seconds and brightened once again on a stage that contained only Robert Ford. He slung his gun and glared at the susceptible and with gravity proclaimed to the crowd: “That is how I killed Jesse James.”

The curtain rang down to magnanimous applause, rose to show Bob and the actress and Charley accepting their compliments, then sprang noisily down again as boys in knickers scurried onto the stage in order to change the scene.

HOW I KILLED JESSE JAMES was mentioned in only one newspaper and then as a skit of mild curiosity value in an evening of middling entertainments—by Thursday so many seats in the Manhattan theater were empty that George Bunnell couldn’t meet his expenses and he moved the show, on the 25th, to his Brooklyn museum on Court and Remsen streets, where the competition for theatergoers was not nearly so dismaying and public captivation with the Ford brothers was emphatic.

The crowds there were without Southern loyalties or strong emotions about the Yankee railroads and banks, and if they thought about the West it was with contempt, as a region of Baptists, Indians, immigrants, cutthroats, and highwaymen that only the savage and stupid could take much delight in; or they thought of it with a dreamy worship inspired by nickel books, thought of it as a place of dangers, deprivations, escapades, knightly contests, and courtly love. And in that prejudiced and uncomprehending atmosphere, the Fords attained the peculiar type of respect and approval they’d sought when they started out rustling horses as teenagers.

It was an age in which common wages were twelve cents an hour, so at fifty dollars a performance they could easily think themselves rich; they were from a territory that was so critically short of women that marriages were still arranged by correspondence, and yet the Fords were everywhere accompanied by pretty, teenaged dancing girls and singers who did not vigorously protect their chastity or reputation, and who thought that Charley and especially Bob were menacing, moody, ungovernable, and wickedly appealing. They were recognized on the seashore, in grand hotel lobbies, in Brooklyn, and were warily accommodated, wisely adjudged, gossiped about as if they were Vanderbilts; they could walk into shops and see the aproned sales clerks cringe, they could jeer at waiters and maids and hackney drivers who would make the ridicule seem jolly, they ate in elegant restaurants with giggling girls who were painted and powdered in the superior fashion of the arrogant rich but who made no efforts at genteel politeness or responsibility. A significant amount of their days was without requirements or planned activities, and yet the temptations were now greater and interestingly multiplied: Turkish tobaccos, Scotch whiskies, English gins, nights spent gambling on cards or fighting dogs, Sundays spent with expert prostitutes. On the afternoon that Bob read about the flamboyant surrender of Frank James to Governor Crittenden, he was sitting in an apothecary awaiting a prescription for a stomach complaint, and when he received the telegram that ordered him back to Missouri, he’d already missed a Thursday matinee on account of intoxication. So that when Bob and Charley arrived for the court trial in Plattsburg—a change of venue caused by extreme anti-Ford sentiments—they were written about rather chidingly, as corrupted representations of the evils of city living. They were dissipated, intemperate, petulant, and overindulged. Charley’s consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles.

He was beleaguered in Plattsburg, cornered in strange rooms, gracelessly stalked and surrounded on sidewalks, greedily nagged for opinions and hypotheses about Frank and Jesse, the James gang, Governor Crittenden, Wood Hite. Everything was exaggerated and magnified—if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course a consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and the stinging judgment of history—even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning.

By October of 1883, Bob Ford could be identified correctly by more citizens than could the accidental president of the United States (Chester Alan Arthur); he was reported to be as renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of grand larceny, and though it was by then a presumption on his part, it was unanticipated by others that a poised but unscrupulous young man could be thought dapper and tempting to women: the courtroom was as packed during his second-degree murder trial in Plattsburg as was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church when the corpse of Jesse Woodson James was prayed over and dispatched to his Maker, and as the correspondents noted the crowds inside and on the courthouse steps, they were surprised by the presence of otherwise sophisticated ladies, reading in this a proof of the young man’s beguiling powers.

Bob was represented by Colonel C. F. Garner and the case against him was put by the prosecuting attorney for Ray County. An agreement was reached with the James-Samuels clan that if they neglected to respond to subpoenas requiring them to testify, Bob would repay the indulgence when and if Frank James came to trial, so the cross-examinations at Plattsburg were far less spectacular than many who visited the town might have hoped. Colonel Gamer opened the case for the defense by introducing an affidavit sworn to by James Andrew Liddil (who was then in an Alabama jail and in no jeopardy) stating, according to Garner, that Dick and Wood “suddenly became involved in a personal difficulty but that few words passed between them until both drew revolvers and commenced firing at each other…the firing being rapid and continuous, occupying a few seconds of time; that Liddil received a flesh wound in the leg, and Wood Hite was fatally shot, dying instantly; that Hite brought on the fight, was the aggressor, made the attack, and was firing at Liddil when he was shot and killed by a bullet from a pistol fired by Liddil, and that Robert Ford, my client, knew nothing of the difficulty until the firing commenced.”

The expected group of deponents were called to the stand: Constable Morris, who recovered Wood’s body, Dr. Mosby, who examined it, Henry H. Craig, residents of Richmond who could remember nothing derogatory ever having been said about Robert Ford’s character, and especially Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton, whose aplomb and placid deposition of even recklessly obvious lies very nearly stupefied the appalled prosecution.

It was a raucous and unruly trial interrupted by snipes from the spectators, by laughter at provocative or funny comments from the witnesses, and by applause at particularly rousing passages in the attorneys’ summary arguments. Bob ignored the exchanges to a great extent, seeming to be engrossed only in the cartoons he scribbled on a yellow pad or in smuggling silly notes to girls who flagrantly admired him. He even appropriated a piece of Henry Craig’s office stationery and scrawled out a misspelled and mispunctuated letter.

President Dear sir as have forgoton your name & addess as President of the Wabash St. Louis + Pacific R.R. will you please grant Myself and Family a monthly pass over your Road from KC to Richmond the distance of 45 miles

I Remain yours truly

Bob. Ford

Slayer of Jesse James

ON OCTOBER 26TH, after forty hours of deliberation, the jury arrived at a verdict and deputies spent the morning combing the county in order to bring back the defendant. Sheriff Algiers found him on the railroad tracks, walking a rail like a tightrope, his arms kiting out and his body hooking left or right for his precarious balance. Bob glanced at the road and grasped why the sheriff was there. He jumped to the cinders and as he swaggered to the sheriff’s buggy said, “The judge can hang me if he wants. I’m not scared of dying.” And when Bob walked into the courtroom it was with carelessness and insouciance; sitting next to Colonel Garner he seemed a worker called in from the cornfields for coffee and apple pie.

The jury foreman gave a folded note to the court clerk and Judge Dunn acknowledged that the court clerk could read it. “ ‘We, the jury,’ ” the clerk announced, “ ‘find the defendant, Robert Ford, not guilty of charges as indicated in the indictment.’ ”

Colonel Garner gleefully shook Bob’s hand and then the hands of the Ford family, and the large crowd exited as if from a play that was not entirely satisfying. Bob crossed over to the jury box, grinning a little crazily and saying, “You did the courageous thing.” One man wiped his palm on his pants leg after Bob Ford clasped it.

Practically as soon as the Plattsburg trial was over, the Ford brothers traveled east again in order to bring back to the stage How I Killed Jesse James. The repertory company went south to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, and the Ford origins in Virginia, then was rerouted north again with a Christmas in New England.

Charley was increasingly superstitious, increasingly subject to the advice of gypsies and tarot card readers and poor women who lived in the slums and who promised to cure his miseries with green teas, pipe smoke, poultices, hypnosis, even jolts of electricity cranked into his jittering wrists with a magnet generator. And yet his coughing continued, his fatigue grew greater, his stomach fought all his body’s cravings, he was convinced that tapeworms were eating his organs and once hung upside down over a goblet of syrup and milk, his mouth gapingly open, tears sliding into his dangling hair as he prayed the parasites would grope out of his esophagus into more acceptable food.

Charley was initially delighted with the East and with the progress he’d made from his poor beginnings. He would slog through an ankle-deep ocean at Atlantic City with his suit coat gathered over his right arm, his shoes clamped together in that hand as the other shaded his eyes from sunlight so that he could see more unmistakably the pretty women in their thigh-length bathing dresses and knee-length bloomers, their sturdy white calves exposed. They would step into the sheeting water higher up on the sand and a larger wave would curdle foam over their feet and they’d squeal, and Charley would grin magnificently, looking around for Bob so he could share his enjoyment. A young girl might venture out and dip into the ocean, bravely swimming toward Europe as Charley’s aghast eyes followed her every stroke. And when she came out, the frills of her bathing dress would be sagging low and the black cloth would be clinging to her body, making everything significant and generating such excitement in Charley that he’d run to get Bob and show him the sight.

“She was a beauty, was she?” Bob said once.

“She didn’t have one more bump than necessary. And you could tell she liked you noticing too.” Charley sniggered a little and added, “I would’ve stayed put till the tide came in but I was afraid I was starting to bulge.”

By the time they were living in Brooklyn, though, Charley was getting no great pleasure in hungering for women and was going out of his way to avoid meeting them. If Bob brought along one of his dancing girls on their evenings out in Manhattan, Charley managed to speak only when protocol demanded it or when he had something ugly to say, smiled without good humor when Bob nudgingly joked, and glimpsed the girl leeringly on the sly. He whispered to one girl, “I know exactly who you’re working for. You won’t get your hooks in me.”

Charley was becoming an onlooker, a playgoer, judging but not joining, given to long days alone in his room, where he read strange pamphlets and testimonies and circled his bed with garlic and black candles. He called Bob’s girlfriends Jezebels and temptresses, begetters of greed and jealousy, and warned Bob that his “wrong-living life will carry you into the perpetual burning.” He compared all females unfavorably to Mrs. Zee James, whom he spoke of as certain priests might the Madonna, and composed long, soul-describing letters to her, begging her forgiveness, none of which he mailed. He said once, “I’m going to look for somebody like Zee. All my spots will disappear.” And on another occasion Charley disapproved of something by pointing out that a soothsayer named Perfecta had put him onto just such a scheme.

Bob said, “You’re spending too much time with gypsies.”

“You mark my words, Bob. They’ll pluck out your eyes. They’ve got your name written in goat’s blood.”

Hence Bob grew more estranged from his brother. He was appalled by Charley’s peculiarities, his progressively worsening illnesses, his mixture of puritanism, piety, black magic, and gullibility. He squandered no money but possessed no savings and it seemed probable to Bob that Charley was giving his earnings away, having been counseled by some crystal-ball gazer—who was no doubt the beneficiary—that this was the only means of assuaging his guilt. And guilt was pumping like poisoned blood through the chambers of Charley’s heart; he’d confessed that many times he’d lain on a mattress, calling for sleep, but was instead visited by gruesome imaginings of a coffin and of the subjugation of earth on his chest, and more than once he’d bolted upright at night to see a grisly form fly out through the window. Perhaps in consequence, there was something changed in Charley’s stage portrayal of Jesse: his limp now seemed practiced, his high voice was spookily similar to the man’s, his newly suggested dialogue was analogous to a script that Jesse might have originated, he said he was “getting to know him” with the unopposable conviction of a man who’d just been in colloquy with a spirit made flesh. It was a gradual transmogrification, but it was no less frightening to Bob. Too many gunshots on the stage and too many resignations to Bob’s betrayal were separating the Ford brothers as Charley accepted the obligation of personifying Jesse James. He was given to private yearnings, wistfulness about the past, all of the commonplaces of death like weeping and glamorized memory, and he began to look at his younger brother with spite and antagonism, as if he suspected that in some future performance he might present himself to a live cartridge in Robert Ford’s gun.

So Bob avoided Charley insofar as that was possible, and sought only to repair his evil reputation. Ironically, it was in New York that Bob first heard the song written by a Missouri sharecropper whose name was Billy Gashade. Bob was sitting in a Bowery saloon, a green bottle of whiskey on the crate to his right, a shot glass in his fingers, when a man with a banjo announced he was going to sing “The Ballad of Jesse James.”

He began: “Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man. He robbed the Glendale train. He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor, he’d a hand and a heart and a brain.” The man strolled the room, coming so near Bob that Bob pulled back his crossed legs as the man sang the chorus in a higher pitch. “Oh, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life, three children, they were brave; but that dirty little coward that shot Mister Howard has laid Jesse James in his grave.”

A stevedore put a nickel in the singer’s palm; he tipped his head in appreciation and continued: “It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward. I wonder how he does feel? For he ate of Jesse’s bread and he slept in Jesse’s bed, then he laid Jesse James in his grave.”

The man with the banjo, whose name seemed to be Elijah, sang the chorus again and Bob worked at registering no change in attitude or expression. He was so drunk by then that his head jerked when he shifted it and one arm hung slack by his side, but his mind was stubbornly unasleep and could make out that there was an incorrect stanza about robbing a Chicago bank and another about the shot coming on a Saturday night and one about Jesse being born in the county of Shea. The singer concluded: “This song it was made by Billy Gashade as soon as the news did arrive. He said there wasn’t a man with the law in his hand could take Jesse James when alive.”

Bob capped the green bottle with his shot glass and stood, gripping the bottle neck. His chair tipped over and he staggered a little with intoxication, gaining balance as he moved by sliding a hand against the saloon wall. “Two chilrun,” he said. “Munnay mornin, na Sa-urday nigh. Cowny of Clay. You said Shea.” He gave the bottle and shot glass to the saloonkeep and tilted slightly to the right as he took a boxer’s stance versus the singer. “You gonna fight me, see who the coward is?”

Elijah glared at him with repugnance but said without anguish, “I ain’t gonna fight you, boy. You get on outta here.”

“Huh?”

A man at the rail yelled, “Sleep it off!” and slapped Bob forcefully on the back, sending him walking a step or two before he regained himself. “Any you wanna fight me? Huh? Who’s gonna be?” He fell off his legs somehow and sat down on peanut shells, looking flabbergasted. He crawled up to his feet and swayed without words for a moment, his fists raised only gingerly at his sides, and his eyes glinting with tears.

The saloonkeeper said, “Get on home now, son. Go on! Get yourself outta my place!”

Bob guided himself through the door and got lost in the night and awoke at sunrise on Houston Street, a dog licking his mouth.

SOON EVERY SALOON’S piano man could sing the song and stock companies were incorporating it into their romances, and because the simple chorus came up no less than eight times in the course of the ballad, even the stupid or dipsomaniacal could recall that it was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, who laid poor Jesse James in his grave.

Charley seemed to agree with the allegations of cowardice but Bob always challenged them, punching more than two street buskers, insisting on gunfights or meetings in alleys, stopping the stageshow at any gibe and asking the man if he wanted to investigate Robert Ford’s courage in some mutually agreed upon way.

On New Year’s Eve in the Horticultural Building in Boston, a rough who’d argued with Charley that afternoon (calling him a barbarian), came to the Fords’ evening show and guyed them throughout the act, yelling so many insults that Bob eventually sprang from the stage, jolting the wind from the man, swinging punches at his skull, maybe socking him a dozen times before others yanked him off. And then Bob smashed into them as well, his fists striking blood from the lips and noses of gentlemen who tried to discourage his rage, as Charley pitched into a second group, misapplying his pistols until a policeman finally appeared, fetching a lump from Charley’s head with a single swipe of his billyclub.

Only sixteen from an original audience of over three hundred had stayed in the Horticultural Building; the rest had stampeded outside, some even crashing through windowglass as if the place were on fire. Five men were lying on the floor, cupping their mouths or noses, their starched shirt fronts crinkled and spotted red. The policeman said as he shackled Bob, “You may be the Ford brothers or the James brothers, but you cahn’t drink blood in Boston.”

Articles about the fight appeared in many newspapers. Over the next week, inspiring the St. Joseph Gazette to comment: “Since one of them acquired notoriety by shooting another assassin in the back, the pestiferous pair has traveled the country under the apparent assumption that they were protégés of the state of Missouri. These fellows ought to be locked up in the interest of public morals or put under bonds to keep the peace by holding their tongues.”

George Bunnell coincidentally came to a like opinion that the slayers of Jesse James had lost their stage appeal and he called in their repertory company, claiming the competition for shows like theirs was already too plentiful. J. J. McCloskey’s Jesse James, the Bandit King was still in New York; Charles W. Chase brought his Mammoth James Boys’ Combination to the West, playing Mosby’s Grand Opera House in Richmond in May 1883; another company stayed for a two-night engagement at Tootle’s Opera House in St. Joseph; and a show called The Missouri Outlaws was being reviewed by P. T. Barnum. And yet the Fords continued on the road with their own company, The Great Western Novelty Troupe, presenting seven thespians and a composition called Jesse James throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey.

The playwright was a glamorous actor from Buffalo who gave himself the title role and rearranged American history to gain an enlarged arena for his gifts. The makeshift story commenced with an archetypal robbery with many killings, jumped rapidly to the cottage in St. Joseph where the swag was apportioned to the gang, the greatest amount going to Jesse. Angered by that, Bob shot the outlaw after supper on a Saturday night, but only now, on this stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Newark, New Jersey, did gallant and gritty Robert Ford see that he’d slain an impostor, for striding from the wings was the genuine Jesse James, and following a vainglorious dialogue, the two desperadoes met in a gunfight and Bob again vanquished the lion. Bob was then congratulated on his courage and accuracy with a gun and the tragedy was strangely forgotten as Bob began a shooting exhibition, firing many blank cartridges at apples that were jerked from Charley’s mouth with strings.

Charley called the road shows “a regular picnic” and claimed weekly receipts of nine hundred dollars, but they actually made only a fraction of that, and as they journeyed west they played to apathetic or antagonistic crowds. On September 26th, 1883, Jesse James played Louisville, Kentucky, and the management of The Great Western Novelty Troupe was agreeably surprised upon learning the Buckingham Theatre was completely sold out and that sitting rights to the aisles and galleries cost as much as regular box seats might. Only when the curtain was raised did Bob recognize that the great crowd was there to hiss and jeer at his every sentence and fling garbage onto the stage, and when he uneasily raised his gun at Jesse the audience rioted, according to Bob’s recollection, surging to the footlights, calling him a cur and a murderer, children scrabbling onto the stage to destroy the set and sneer at Bob in the sing-song of playgrounds.

And when Bob returned to his hotel that night he was given an unsigned letter that conveyed an account of Judas that was never accepted into the gospels. It said the disciple lived on after his attempt to hang himself, providing an example of impiety in this world. He grew huge and grotesque, his face became like a goatskin swollen with wine, his eyes could not be perceived even by an examining physician, to such a depth had they retreated from the sunlight, and his penis grew large, gruesome, a cause for loathing, yellow pus and worms coming out of it along with such a stink that he could stay in no village for long before he was chased away. After much pain and many punishments, Judas died in the place he belonged and, according to the account, the region still permitted no approach, so great was the stench that progressed from the apostate’s body to the ground.

EXCEPT FOR A MONTH as sideshow attractions with P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, the Ford brothers stopped performing in 1883 and their company dispersed into other productions as Bob and Charley sought more private lives, though that was problematical, even impossible, for many of those who’d once been in the presence of Jesse James.

Bob was going on twenty-two when he went back to Kansas City to gamble for a living. He was dapper, glamorous, physically strong, comparatively rich, and psychologically injured. By his own approximation, Bob had by then assassinated Jesse over eight hundred times, and each repetition was much like the principal occasion: he suspected no one in history had ever so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal, and he imagined that no degree of grief or penitence could change the country’s ill-regard for him.

He thought he might have committed suicide in the cottage on April 3rd, gripped the smoking gun barrel in his teeth and triggered his skull into fragments, painting his red regrets on spattered wallpaper he gruesomely staggered against, but even that might have been judged just one more act of cowardice. He thought he might have begged no clemency from the governor and been hanged on May 19th, but even with his own strangling descent to the grave, Bob guessed he would not be any more forgiven than Judas was long ago. So Bob played the renegade and rogue, stooping to no repentance, struggling with no phantoms, expecting no compassion, accepting no responsibilities, no pressures, no contempt. He was smug and disagreeable, arrogant and dangerous, as aggressive as a gun.

He thought, at his angriest, about visiting Mrs. William Westfall in Plattsburg, the McMillans in Wilton, Iowa, the Wymore family in Clay County, Mrs. Berry Griffin in Richmond, Mrs. John Sheets in Gallatin, perhaps even Mrs. Joseph Heywood in Northfield, Minnesota. He would go to their homes and give his name as Robert Ford, “the man who killed Jesse James.” He imagined they would be grateful to him. They would graciously invite him in and urge him to accept extravagant gifts in exchange for his having made their grief a little lighter. But in actuality Bob made only one irregular journey and that one was to Kearney, Missouri, under the cover of night when even dogs were asleep. He crept up to a nine-foot-high marble grave monument beneath a huge coffee bean tree and glided his fingers over an inscription reading:

In Loving Remembrance

JESSE W. JAMES

Died April 3, 1882

Aged 34 Years, 6 Months, 28 Days

Murdered By a Traitor and Coward

Whose Name Is Not Worthy to

Appear Here.

BOB JOURNEYED into Kansas and the Indian Territories in 1885, gambling with cowboys in saloons, sleeping on ground that still remembered the sun, riding west without maps. A rattlesnake once snapped at his spur and then slithered gracefully away. Bob crept after it with a machete, chopping off the snake’s head and giving the body to a gunnysack until he could cook the meat that night. Hours later when Bob stripped off the gunnysack, the snake slashed out and socked Bob’s neck, striking hard as a strong man’s fist, only then spilling onto the sand, its spirit spent and at peace.