Before we forget Marshal Fletcher of Tannery, wise beyond his weight, let us move in tight on the bulletin board in his office and linger for a moment upon one of the prognathous, razor-challenged faces posted there. It’s a peculiarly savage likeness of a type once epidemic on the covers of Action Western and Flaming Lariat: jaw sheared off square at the base, boot-scraper beard, eyes like dynamiter’s drill holes in granite. The name beneath the pen-and-ink sketch is Black Jack Brixton, and it should come as no surprise that he’s wanted dead or alive. His activities include assault, armed robbery, murder, and burning entire towns to the ground.
Dissolve to a real face, strikingly identical, in glorious Technicolor on a screen thirty meters wide: Brixton in the flesh, under a gray Stetson stained black with sweat, a blue bandanna creating a hammock for his aggressive Adam’s apple. His expression is intense. He is watching something we are not privileged to see until we cut directly to the explosion.
In the enormous ball of smoke and fire and dirt, we pick out flying sections of steel rail and shattered oak ties, uprooted trees, and what may be a human body, flung high and flailing its limbs like a piece of shredded licorice before it disappears under a heap of earth and sawdust and pieces of sets left over from previous productions.
As things clear, we see a locomotive hurtling toward the destruction. The engineer’s face, leaning out of the cab, pulls tense with shock. A sooty fist hauls back on the brake lever. The steel wheels shriek, spraying sparks. The cowcatcher grinds to a halt inches short of the bent and twisted ends of the rails. Steam whooshes out in a sigh of relief.
“Yahoo!” cries Brixton, smacking his horse on the rump with the ends of his reins and firing his six-gun into the air for added incentive. The animal bolts, leading the charge down the hill.
“Yahoo!” cry his subordinates, galloping out of the dense stand of trees on the other side of the tracks. More bullets fly.
As several men board the train to pacify the paying customers, the rest take charge of the engineer, his fireman, and the fat conductor. They are herded out onto trackside and Brixton threatens at the top of his voice to blow their heads off if the guards in the mail car fail to open the door by the count of five. On “four,” hammers click. The door slides open then and the guards emerge with hands high. Foolishly, one lunges for the revolver in his holster. Brixton shoots from the hip. The guard snatches at his abdomen, drops his weapon, and tumbles to the cinderbed.
A bundle of dynamite makes its appearance. A match flares; the fuse is ignited. The spark travels ten feet and the door flies off a black iron safe embossed with a gold eagle. Sacks of coins, bars of bullion, and bales of banknotes—big, square, elaborately engraved certificates, much more impressive-looking than our modern bills—vanish into canvas bags and saddle pouches. More cheers and shooting as the horsemen clatter away.
These are a few minutes in a day in the life of the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang, infamous in newspapers in both the East and West and in a flood of cheap novels printed in Chicago and New York City. Somewhere in a cattle camp or saloon or velvet parlor with a piano, an uncertain baritone is singing its ballad to a melody plagiarized from “Blood on the Saddle.”
Like so many others of his day, Jack Brixton’s story began in Missouri, where he rode with the Bushwhackers, holding up Union trains, blowing windows out of banks filled with Yankee gold, taking target practice on Jayhawkers, and generally giving civil war a bad name. Witnesses say he left that crew because he considered Bloody Bill Anderson too lenient.
Accounts of how he spent the years between the end of the conflict and the spring of 1874, when his trail crossed with Johnny Vermillion’s, are mostly hearsay. He’s said to have rustled cattle in Texas, hunted Apache scalps in Arizona, shot a couple of dozen Mexicans south of the Rio Grande, and introduced the sport of lynching to Wyoming Territory. It was about the time the Wyoming story got around that people started calling him Black Jack.
It was a name no one called him to his face. Transients and newcomers to the gang found that out right away, at the butt of his Smith & Wesson .44 American, a weapon endorsed also by Jesse James and Wyatt Earp for use as both a firearm and a bludgeon. Brixton had a superstitious horror of nicknames. Frank “Hole Card” Handy, the gang’s original leader and also the inspiration for its name, had been so called because of the Butterfield derringer he carried for emergency use in a special holster sewn inside the crotch of his trousers. Drawing it one night during a dispute over a hand of poker, he shot off the end of his penis and bled to death before he could be brought to a doctor. His successor, Apache Jim Weathersill, who was no part Indian but had been rechristened to avoid confusion with the better-known Jim Weathersill of the Turkey Creek Outfit, took a double load of buckshot in the belly from a pimp who’d mistaken him for the original Jim, and Redleg Johnson, the most athletic of the Ace-in-the-Hole boys, miscounted his coaches while loping along the top of the Katy Flyer looking for the mail car and ran off the end of the caboose to a broken neck. Brixton had come to the conclusion that living up to one’s professional name involved ceasing to live at all. He considered it bad luck to pass one of his wanted posters without slowing down to obliterate the “Black” with a fusillade of lead.
In addition to his daring, ruthlessness, and bad temper, Black Jack Brixton was notorious for his escapes from the law. He’d been captured in Missouri by McCulloch’s cavalry, by the sheriffs of several counties in Kansas and Colorado, by a succession of town marshals (which he didn’t count), and by a deputy United States marshal in the Indian Nations, and had wriggled free every time, a phenomenon he credited to his talent for dislocating both wrists. No matter how tight the manacles, he had only to slip his bones out of joint to slide them over his hands and off. He’d employed this trick so many times his wrists had a habit of slipping out on their own, often at inopportune moments, as when his gun arm gave out under the weight of his big American in a bank in Grand Junction and he shot Mysterious Bob Craidlaw, his best man, in the foot. After that, he’d acquired a pair of Mexican leather cuffs with brass studs and buckled them on tight before going to work; Mysterious Bob acquired a permanent limp.
Bob kept his own counsel to the extent that no one in the bank apart from Brixton and himself knew he’d been shot until the gang reunited in a line shack twenty miles from the scene of the robbery, when he pulled off his boot and poured out a pint of blood. The suddenness of the report, in fact, had startled Tom Riddle into shooting a cashier, which raised the reward for his capture to fifteen hundred dollars.
There was nothing secretive in Mysterious Bob’s past. Much of it was public record, and his list of criminal accomplishments filled a paragraph in his circular going back to age twelve. He just never talked about himself. Although he’d spent three years with Brixton in the service of Missouri guerrillas—an opinionated group, who punctuated their arguments with gunfire—none of the men who slept and ate and rode with him had ever been able to determine just where he stood regarding slavery and states’ rights. Arch Clements, his immediate superior, thought he was a mute. When Brixton, who knew otherwise, asked Bob point blank why he never set Clements straight, the quiet man let a full minute pass, then said, “I reckon he didn’t ask.” He made his best remarks with his Winchester, and like his tongue he never used it until he was certain of the effect. He never missed.
Tom Riddle did enough talking for them both, and for that matter all the rest of the crew. Short and compact where Bob was tall and lanky, he’d once spent most of a week stuck in a badger tunnel in California, where he’d been sent by his prospecting partners, larger men all, to look for color. He’d survived on roots and earthworms, talked to himself the whole time to keep from going loco, and acquired a taste for his own conversation, if not for earthworms and roots, which he frequently and at length compared to the meals they were forced to eat on the trail. He also avoided going into vaults and other tight places. Tom was a good man with dynamite, and a little deaf from the explosions; his speech was loud as well as incessant. “Shut up, Tom,” was a phrase repeated wherever the group bedded down, usually in chorus.
In enterprises of this nature, there is in all likelihood a man called Breed, who demonstrates the less fortunate traits of his white and Indian ancestors. They wear their hair unfettered to their shoulders, resist hats, and clothe themselves in fringed leather vests and striped cavalry trousers stripped from the carcass of some unlucky trooper like the skin of a slain animal. Ace-in-the-Hole’s Breed spent his leisure hours curing the ears he’d sliced off bartenders who refused to serve him whiskey and stringing them on the buckskin thong he wore around his neck during robberies, which had a dampening effect upon individual heroism. He had Mother tattooed in a heart on his right bicep and Father encircled by serpents on his left, and prized his big Bowie knife above all other weapons. Brixton, who had balked at Bloody Bill’s “spare the women and children” policy, found Breed’s company distinctly unpleasant.
The Kettleman brothers, Ed and Charlie, had fled Texas one step ahead of the Rangers, who sought them for running guns to the Comanches, and of the Comanches themselves, who were eager to talk to them about the quality of their merchandise. They’d commandeered a wagonload of Springfield rifles with rusted actions and broken firing pins on its way from Fort Richardson to the Fort Worth scrap yards and traded them for a total of four thousand dollars in buffalo robes. They were businessmen who always got the best price for bonds, bullion, and other items that could not immediately be converted into cash, much of which they won back off their companions at poker. In action, they worked in perfect union, as if they shared one brain, and also at the table, where each had a sixth sense for what cards his brother held in his hand. They were the least popular members of the gang and the most indispensable. Identical twins, slack-jawed and skinny as rails, they looked in life very much as they did in a picture the Pinkertons took of them in 1875, propped on a barn door with seventeen mortal wounds between them.
These five formed the unchanging center of Black Jack Brixton’s band of desperadoes; ten thousand dollars on the hoof to the bounty hunter foolhardy enough to dream of capturing them. The authorities and outraged commercial interests responsible for this reward were parsimonious, as always. Acting separately and in concert, the wanted men had looted a quarter of a million from legitimate concerns and circulated it back into the economy by way of saloons, women of casual character, and the army of camp followers who supplied them with arms, ammunition, horses, and shelter. Counting temporary help and onetime alliances with other gangs, a million dollars had passed through the hands of between twenty and thirty individuals associated with Ace-in-the-Hole. It was never at a loss for recruits, because in the bleak aftermath of the Panic of 1873, banditry was the fastest-growing cottage industry in America. Bicycle sales placed a distant second.
The bold daylight robbery of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad near Council Bluffs, Iowa, which we have witnessed, removed sixteen thousand dollars from the hands of its rightful owners, the robber barons of New York City and San Francisco. When word reached civilization, the sheriff of Pottawattamie County—rock-ribbed and sunburned, dumb as salt pork—assembled a posse of the usual hotheads who convened in the Boar’s Neck Saloon to burp up pickled eggs and damn the Republican administration. They mounted up, milled around the town square making speeches and terrifying the horses, and rode out, whooping and waving torches and shooting up private property.
By the time they reached the stranded train, Black Jack Brixton and his companions had been gone for hours. The sheriff’s men followed their tracks half the night, stopping briefly to set fire to barns and smokehouses along the way, and wound up back at the train; whereupon they straggled back to town and wired the Pinkerton office in St. Louis.
Ace-in-the-Hole, meanwhile, had scattered like so many cards.
Anticipating a hot reception to so successful a raid, they sought bolt-holes as far south as Louisiana and as far west as California. The Pinkertons, who lost no time in identifying the train robbers, were just as quick to declare the trail cold, and counseled waiting until Brixton’s men struck again. The board of directors of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific howled at the delay, and bumped the reward up a hundred dollars per man.
Money won in the course of a few minutes’ work, however intense and fraught with peril, spends quickly in sinful Barbary and the deadfalls of New Orleans. Fifteen men had taken part in the raid, and sixteen thousand divided so many ways melts like grease in a skillet. As winter broke up beneath the heavy rains of early spring, six men in shining slickers waded their horses through the muddy streets of Denver and tied them to the rail in front of Nell Dugan’s Wood Palace. Inside, Brixton, Mysterious Bob, Tom Riddle, Breed, and the Kettlemans took their pleasure out of what funds they had left and blocked out a plan to rob the Overland office in Salt Lake City.
That same day, the Prairie Rose Repertory Company commenced rehearsals of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the Salt Lake Theater, directly across the street from the Overland.