Free The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel by Ron Hansen Page A

it with her crying eyes in her palms.
    THE JAMES AND YOUNGER BROTHERS larked into Kentucky in March 1868, and at the same time a man calling himself a cattle dealer visited the Nimrod Long and Company Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, chatted about escrow accounts, and departed. Soon thereafter the cattle dealer returned with four other men who drew revolvers from under their coats and received over twelve thousand dollars, which was thrown into the same wheat sack that had been noted in the Missouri robberies. Shopkeepers located revolvers and fired on the robbers in their ride out but ten sentries who were stationed on the avenue covered their getaway.
    A Louisville detective named Yankee Bligh took on the Russellville case for a consortium of financiers and he identified Cole Younger and his confederates as the probable bank robbers. He was also concerned that two men named Frank and Jesse James had bloodied the bedsheets of a hotel in Chaplin, more than a hundred miles from the incident. A sallow man under a greatcoat had clutched his side as he slunk away from the open hotel room door and his grave older brother had informed the maid that the man’s Civil War injuries were still uncured. His wince when he moved, however, persuaded her that the wound was reopened in a scrap. And Jesse sealed the detective’s suspicions about the James brothers’ involvement when he mailed his fiancée a card that said a physician had instructed him to go to California or else lose his vitality.
    He went to the Paso Robles Hot Sulphur Springs resort owned by his uncle, Drury Woodson James. There he mended his lung and recovered from an ear infection by consuming lemons and oranges and castoreum in addition to a pound of fish every day. A photograph of him at the time showed a cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and eyes darkened with hollow, his left hand clutching a cane; he would never again be as sick as he was then: Jesse would later say it was a condition that was brought on by being away from Missouri and Zee. It took him four months to convalesce and then he vacationed in San Francisco on stolen cash that he doubled with casino roulette and monte. He lounged in steam baths, he stood at the prow of a ferry, he ate six-course meals in French restaurants, he sinned in fandango saloons where the “pretty waiter girls” wore ostrich-feather bonnets and red silk jackets but nothing whatever below that except shoes, and for a dollar would let Jesse contemplate what he had never spied outside of art museums. It all made him feel guilty and unmoored, and it wasn’t long before he was climbing aboard a train that would carry him back to Missouri and make him himself again.
    Zee was visiting her Aunt Zerelda at the Kearney farmhouse when Jesse arrived. His mother made an opera of his coming home and cooked a supper of pork and pies, complaining all the while of the illnesses and sleepless nights her boy’s going had brought her, and reporting on the many deputies and Pinkerton detectives who were skulking around the place. “Seems like I’m spending every minute making up alibis for you.” She proclaimed, as they were eating, that she’d attempted to get cash for some negotiable papers “the boys” had swiped from the Clay County Savings Bank but that a manager had snootily refused her. She asked if Jesse knew that it was Mr. Nimrod Long of Russellville who paid half the tuition for Jesse’s father to go to Georgetown College. She asked if Jesse wasn’t ashamed of himself. Through it all, Jesse miserably eyed Zee but saw that she was simpering at Zerelda as if she were speaking the lightest of gossip. And as the couple strolled down to Clear Creek to flip pebbles into the water and chat, Jesse saw that the woman he was pledged to had changed. Zee called herself a milkweed, a nuisance, a scold; she regretted her prying into his affairs, regretted giving him arguments when she knew that he needed allegiance and love. She wanted to