“Or part of their gang,” Cobb said. “Your husband couldn’t confirm it.”
“I don’t know that they have a gang. In the beginning, there were only the three of us. We were brothers, not much of anything else, not then. That’s how I remember it…”
“It’s not like Ham’s safe,” Morgan said, joining Gideon and Jack outside on the boardwalk. They stood there for a time, silent and reflective, in front of the Cumberland Bank in Rock Springs until Gideon thought they should move on.
“No point in attracting attention,” he said. He pointed to the saloon across the way. “Let’s go to Angel’s. Think this through.”
They chose a table out of the way even though it was the middle of the afternoon and the saloon offered a lot of empty tables. Gideon and Jack had a pint of whiskey to share. Morgan had a beer.
“Tell us about it,” said Gideon. “Zetta Lee said it was like Daddy’s.”
“Last time she was here, it might have been. Or it could be they just look alike to her.” Morgan gave his brothers a frank look. “Or, and here’s what I’m really thinking is the truth, she just said that to get us here.”
“What are you saying? We should go back with nothing to show for it?”
“I didn’t say it, but yes, that’s what we should do.”
“I don’t like it,” said Jack. “And Zetta Lee sure isn’t going to like it.”
Morgan lifted his beer and drank. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Jesus,” said Gideon, rolling his dark eyes. “You look like you’re about twelve when you do that. If you’d grow some hair on your lip and chin it would take care of that foam for you. I should have bought you a sarsaparilla.”
“Would have rather had a sarsaparilla. This beer’s sour.”
Jack said, “Forget about that. Can you do it, Ginger Pie?” He held up his hands, palms out, when Morgan scowled at him. “Sorry, but Gideon’s right. You look about twelve. So, can you?”
“I don’t know. It’s a Newell and Chester. I don’t have a feel for what it might be like. It could take longer than usual.”
“What’s that?” asked Gideon. “It takes forty minutes instead of fifteen? We go in at night, like we always do. Bankers don’t expect that. It ain’t been done until we done it, and no one knows it’s us. There is no one looking out for the place come nightfall. We saw that plain enough for ourselves last night.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s no risk,” said Morgan. “There are still people around. Most of them in and out of this saloon.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Cumberland Bank. “You haven’t forgotten the proximity, have you?”
Jack snorted softly. “We ain’t virgins staring at a twelve-inch pecker. We’ve done this before. Three times.”
“Not with a Newell and Chester. I’m not going in there.”
Gideon and Jack did not miss a beat. They spoke as one. “The hell you’re not.”
That night they left Rock Springs with a little more than fourteen hundred dollars from the Cumberland Bank in their saddlebags. No one saw or heard them. Mr. Horatio Cumberland discovered the theft the following morning when he opened the safe to put cash in the tellers’ drawers. He remarked that it was unnaturally thoughtful of the thief to shut the safe after relieving it of its cash contents. No documents were stolen, no jewelry. The office was left tidy, too. He mused aloud that if he had to be robbed, it was better done by a man with a light touch than one with four sticks of dynamite. Mr. Cumberland hired someone that afternoon to stay in the bank at night until the new safe was delivered.
It had taken Morgan twenty-seven minutes to open the safe once he was kneeling in front of it. He might have done it in less time, but the gun Gideon held to his head while Jack stood guard made his feel for the tumblers a slippery thing.
The Cumberland Bank robbery was the last time they worked alone. Gideon and Jack decided that they needed help in the event that Morgan could not be counted on to do his part. Gideon did not relish the idea of turning his gun on Morgan again; for that matter, neither did Jack. They agreed it was best done by a third party who had never heard Morgan answer to Ginger Pie.
Morgan opened two more safes for them, one in Leadville, Colorado, the other in Logan, Utah, and still it wasn’t enough. Their number grew to six, and Gideon and Jack had to hold the reins tight on their little group as dissension grew. Zetta Lee, too, thought they could take more risks and make Morgan’s role less important. They set a bonfire in the middle of the night on the Union Pacific tracks west of Rock Springs and allowed Morgan ten minutes to open the safe in the mail car. At eight minutes Gideon started setting the charges. At nine, Jack lit the fuses. Morgan felt his bones rattle when the safe blew. He was standing forty feet away by then, in the flickering light of the distant bonfire, apologizing to the mail clerks for destroying their car. His brothers dragged him off as soon as the payroll money was packed away.
The postal clerks would tell the Uinta County sheriff and the detectives who rode with the Union Pacific, that they felt a little sorry for the redheaded fellow who did his best to crack the safe. Hard to work, they said, under the kind of pressure he faced, what with the six-and-one-half inch barrel of a Remington pointed at the base of his brain. The clerks said they never feared for their lives; no one ever asked them to open the safe. It seemed the only person that might meet his maker that night was the young’un.
Morgan’s red hair and youthful features were the two clues that circulated throughout the territories and Colorado. Posses were formed. The Union Pacific sent a special investigator to assist in gathering information. They were still compiling a list of robberies where safes had been cracked when word reached them that the Jones Prescott Bank in Cheyenne had been broken into two nights earlier. It was the freshest trail; they decided to follow.
The raid on the bank had been made while it was still dark, but dawn was breaking as the robbers were leaving town. There were witnesses, not to the robbery, but to the departure. Two whores sharing a cigarillo on the second floor balcony of the Flower Garden saw six men riding out. Five of them wore a hat. The one who didn’t, the redheaded boy, looked up as they were passing, and smiled at them. They told Benton Sterling, the marshal from Bitter Springs who was part of the posse by then, that looking on that boy’s smile was the purest pleasure they had known, excepting the time they entertained Duke Forte when he came through town with his trinkets and toys.
It seemed to them, they added, that the boy wanted to be noticed. Why else would he be holding his hat instead of wearing it? Why else would he look up and give them a smile so full of glory it made them blink?
It was an observation worth considering, Benton Sterling thought.
There were two more robberies before the law narrowed the search in and around Lander. As best the detective for the Union Pacific could tell, the first robbery for this gang had likely been the Walker Trust. No one had reported a safecracking, not one that was done without explosives, before that. Once they arrived in Lander, it was inevitable that they would finally find Morgan Longstreet.
