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

accommodate him, to be a good wife to him, and nothing else really mattered to her. And that seemed to be true, for thenceforth Zee avoided all rumors and newspaper stories about the James-Younger gang, she shied from conversations about criminal acts and politics, she refused invitations into society, she never inquired again about the robberies or murders attributed to Jesse; instead, she’d accepted a simple, stay-at-home life for herself and was no more conscious of the James brothers’ crimes than she was of the Suez Canal or the mole on her back or the dust kittens under the sofa.
    And yet Jesse made some efforts at conventional work: he was a millwright, a machinist, a coal salesman; he plowed in the sun with three pistols hooked onto his belt; he swapped cattle at the livestock shows. He would start a job with good will and industry, but then he would walk away from it because he was belittled or maltreated or weary and bored. Each occupation became a day-or week-long deception, for he was twenty-one years old and had already settled into the one career that suited him.
    During the five years between 1869 and 1874, the James-Younger gang robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin; stole six thousand dollars from the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank in Corydon, Iowa; six hundred dollars from the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky; four thousand dollars from a bank in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; two thousand dollars from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway near Council Bluffs, Iowa; twenty-two thousand dollars from the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, Missouri; three thousand dollars from the Hot Springs stagecoach near Malvern, Arkansas. And so on. Jesse shot John Sheets in the head and heart and the banker drained off the chair; his clerk scurried into the street and the bandits fired twice, catching him fat in the arm. A cashier named R. A. C. Martin was told to open a safe and answered, “Never. I’ll die first.” “Then die it is,” said Cole and raised his dragoon revolver to Martin’s ear and fired. An iron rail was winched off its tie as a passenger train slowed on a blind curve and the locomotive tilted into the roadbed and then crashed to its side in weeds, crushing John Rafferty, the engineer, and scalding Dennis Foley, the stoker, so badly that he died within weeks. The six thieves were dressed in the white hoods and raiment of the Ku Klux Klan—for what reason, no one knows—and collected three thousand dollars in compensation for putting an end to two lives.
    Stopping the increasingly common robberies became so paramount that the United States Secret Service and private detectives from Chicago and St. Louis joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in stalking the James-Younger gang. Allan Pinkerton’s son William established headquarters in Kansas City and split his operatives between pursuit of the Youngers and the Jameses in the counties of Jackson and Clay; and yet, though many could recognize the gunslingers and their regular sanctuaries were known, investigators only came to misfortune when they got close to the gang.
    John W. Whicher was assigned Dr. Samuels’s farm and, upon receiving a spy’s report that the James boys were present, walked there with a carpet bag and in poor man’s clothes on a cold night in March. He’d just crossed the wooden bridge over Clear Creek when he caught a slight noise, and then Jesse jerked the man’s chin back with his wrist and asked, “You looking for something?”
    Arthur McCoy and Jim Anderson (Bloody Bill’s brother) scrabbled up from under the bridge with guns out and Whicher said, “I’m only looking for work. I was hoping to find a place on a farm. You happen to know of any?”
    “Yep,” said Jesse. “I know just the right place for you. And Satan’s got it all prepared.”
    Whicher was seen again at 3 a.m. near Owen’s Ferry, his mouth gagged and his legs tied astride a gray horse; and on March 11th his body was discovered in