Having been tried and sentenced, Henry was placed in an individual cell to await his execution. Symbolically, the cell window offered a commanding view of the famous Fort Smith gallows, the gallows built to accommodate six condemned men at once, the gallows with the thirteen steps to climb, the gallows that had sent so many men to untimely deaths, some perhaps deserved, others perhaps not; the gallows by means of which, it was persistently rumored, Isaac C. Parker longed to send one hundred men to their individual eternities. In spite of his better judgment, Henry spent a good deal of his time looking out the window upon that notorious instrument of death. He was standing in this particular posture thinking the thoughts that the view naturally inspired when he heard footsteps in the hallway followed by a rattling of keys just at his back. He turned to face his cell door as it was opened by a guard.
“You have a visitor, Starr,” said the guard, stepping aside to allow the entrance into the cell of the portly Colonel Cravens, then shutting and locking the door again behind the lawyer.
“Hello, Henry,” said Cravens.
Henry noticed the long look on the face of the colonel.
“Hey, Colonel,” he said, “it’s okay. I know you did what you could. And I did kill the man.”
Cravens expelled a long and deep sigh, then helped himself to a seat on the wretched cot that served as Henry’s bed.
“You’re not going to hang, Henry,” he said. “At least, not for a while. I have taken out a writ appealing your case to the United States Supreme Court on the basis of nine procedural errors. So don’t give up hope yet. I haven’t.”
“You mean there’s a chance,” said Henry, “that I won’t help old Parker on the way to his goal of stretching one hundred necks on his gallows?”
“There’s a chance,” said the lawyer. “There’s a chance.”
Time passed slowly in the prison. The routine was always the same. Most of the time Henry, like the other prisoners, spent alone in his small cell, either lying in his cot or staring out the window. At regular, though not frequent, intervals, the convicts were let out of the cells and marched single file by prison guards outside to an exercise yard where they were allowed to mill around more or less freely, although under very close scrutiny, for a brief period of time, before being marched back into their cells the same way they had been brought out. On one such occasion Henry had just stepped back inside his cell and was waiting for the guard to latch the door behind him when a shot rang out somewhere out in the hallway. Henry turned on instinct, and the guard had vanished. The door remained unlocked. Chaos erupted in the corridor.
At the far end of the hallway eighteen-year-old Crawford Goldsby, known as Cherokee Bill, also awaiting execution, had stepped obediently into his cell and somehow produced a six-shooter from somewhere. Before the guard behind him had a chance to react, before any of the guards in the corridor had closed the doors behind any of the prisoners, Cherokee Bill had spun and fired, killing the guard, Larry Keating, instantly. Keating had dropped in his tracks. Guards and prisoners alike were looking, trying to see what had happened, as Cherokee Bill thrust his head and right arm out of the cell and fired a second shot down the crowded corridor. A few guards had figured out where the shot had come from and were running toward the far end of the hall, but when Cherokee Bill had fired the second shot, they scurried quickly around and retreated. The prisoners had all sought the safety of their cells.
Soon the guards had clustered up at the opposite end of the hallway from Cherokee Bill, and the remaining prisoners, including Henry Starr, were caught between the guns of the young condemned outlaw on one hand and the guards on the other. Guards fired a few random shots down the hallway. There was really nothing for them to fire at, as Bill had ducked back inside his cell. From inside his cell, which was practically at the end of the row near where the guards were huddled, Henry could make out the voices of the guards between gunshots.
“Who the hell is it, anyway?” he heard one guard ask.
“That’s Larry that’s down,” said another.
“Larry, is it?” answered the first voice. “Then I think …”
As he spoke, the guard slowly peeked around the corner to get a look down the hallway, and as he did, Cherokee Bill sent another pistol shot in that general direction. The guard didn’t finish his sentence, as he quickly jerked himself back behind cover.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s Cherokee Bill.”
“Where the hell did he get that gun?” said another guard.
“How do I know?” said the first. “We found one in his cell just the other day and took it away from him.” Then he turned to yet another guard, one who had thus far kept quiet. “Go get some shotguns,” he ordered.
The quiet guard, glad for the opportunity to leave the immediate vicinity, raced away in obedience. He was soon back, however, and each guard had a shotgun.
“Let him have it,” someone shouted, and shotgun blasts resounded down the corridor and into the cells. Henry thought that it sounded like a small war. Pellets ricocheted up and down the hall and into the cells, and the already stuffy atmosphere was filled with thick smoke and the smell of burnt powder. The shooting stopped when the guards had all fired their initial blasts, and there was a moment of silence while they were busy reloading. Cherokee Bill jumped out into the hall and fired three pistol shots into that silence, then jumped back into the safety of the cell. Then there was a second roar of shotguns. Henry huddled far into the corner of his cell until the calm of the next reloading period. Then he eased himself close to the cell door.
“Guards,” he called out. “Guards. It’s Henry Starr.”
“Keep back out of the way, Starr,” came the answer.
“Listen to me,” said Henry. “Hold your fire a minute. Let me go talk to him.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Didn’t you say that was Cherokee Bill?”
“Yeah, it’s him all right.”
“Well,” said Henry, “let me go talk to him before you all kill everyone in here.”
The guards were quiet for a moment. They looked at one another with questioning expressions on their tense faces. Finally one spoke.
“Hell,” he said in a low voice to his comrades, “it can’t hurt anything.” Then, in a louder voice, shouted out to Henry, he added, “All right, go ahead.”
Henry took a deep breath and scootched out into the hallway. He stood still for a moment, his heart pounding so that he imagined it could be heard by the guards and Bill and everyone in between. No shots were fired. He began to walk down the long corridor toward the cell that was the latest home of Cherokee Bill. Suddenly Bill leaned out into the hallway, gun in hand. Henry stopped still. His heart stopped pounding. It just stopped.
“Bill,” he said. “Don’t. It’s Henry Starr.”
“What are you doing here, Henry?” said Cherokee Bill.
Henry resumed his movement toward Cherokee Bill and quickened his pace.
“I came to talk you out of this,” he said.
“Shit,” said Cherokee Bill, as Henry stepped inside the cell to join him.
The two Cherokee outlaws sat down on the floor of the cell, Bill where he could look out into the corridor.
“What do you think you’re doing, anyway?” asked Henry. “You can’t get out of here.”
“Well,” said Bill in a sullen voice, “I can take a few of them with me.”
“How many? How many shells have you got for that thing?”
Bill didn’t answer. His eyes avoided those of Henry Starr.
“Bill,” said Henry, “your mother wouldn’t want you to do this.”
At the other end of the hallway, the guards nervously awaited some sign of what might be happening in the cell of Cherokee Bill. They held their shotguns ready in anticipation of whatever might befall them. They looked anxiously at one another and down the hallway.
“What the hell are they doing down there?” said one, not really expecting an answer.
“Let’s blast them both the hell out,” said another.
Just then they saw at the far end Henry Starr step out into the center of the corridor. He was holding both hands high above his head, and in his left he held by its barrel a pistol.
“I’m coming out,” he called.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said a guard.
From that day, Henry was not only popular with the other prisoners, he was almost a hero to the guards, and he was treated very well—as well as one locked in a small, filthy, bug-infested cell can be treated. But Henry had not taken the gun from Cherokee Bill in order to ingratiate himself to the guards. When he thought about it, he wondered, himself, why he had done it. To save lives? The lives of the guards or of the other prisoners? Perhaps, though he didn’t really think so. To save his own life? The chances of his being hit by a ricochet while he kept well back in his cell had been remote. Perhaps he held out some hope for Cherokee Bill as for himself that the sentence of hanging would not really take place—that there would be some kind of reprieve. If Bill had kept up his gunfight, he would surely have been killed, and then there would be no hope—not for Bill. So Henry had gone to the cell of Cherokee Bill to save Bill’s life? No. That was not likely either. Since having been sentenced to hang, Bill had killed Larry Keating with no warning and for no apparent reason. And unlike Henry, Bill had killed often and unnecessarily in the course of his robberies. No. Henry Starr could not for the life of him figure out why he had done what he had done to become a hero to the guards at the Fort Smith jail.