On the second night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in every direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a friend's house in the town where the alarm started from.
Our friend pointed out to us, in an office across the street, a printing press at work striking off handbills offering a reward for our capture.
I have been asked what we do with the money we get.
Well, I never could account for a tenth part of it after it was spent. It goes fast and freely.
An outlaw has to have a good many friends.
A highly respected citizen may, and often does, get along with very few, but a man on the dodge has got to have "sidekickers."
With angry posses and reward-hungry officers cutting out a hot trail for him, he must have a few places scattered about the country where he can stop and feed himself and his horse and get a few hours' sleep without having to keep both eyes open.
When he makes a haul he feels like dropping some of the coin with these friends, and .he does it liberally.
Some times I have, at the end of a hasty visit at one of these havens of refuge, flung a handful of gold and bills into the laps of the kids playing-on the floor, without knowing whether my contribution was a hundred dollars or a thousand.
When old-timers make a big haul they generally go far away to one of the big cities to spend their money.
Green hands, however successful a hold-up they make, nearly always give themselves away by showing too much money near the place where they got it.
I was in a job in '94 where we got twenty thousand dollars.
We followed our favorite plan for a get-away—that is, doubled on our trail—and laid low for a time near the scene of the train's bad luck.
One morning I picked up a newspaper and read an article with big headlines stating that the marshal, with eight deputies and a posse of thirty armed citizens, had the train robbers surrounded in a mesquite thicket on the Cimarron, and that it was a question of only a few hours when they would be dead men or prisoners.
While I was reading that article I was sitting at breakfast in one of the most elegant private residences in Washington City, with a flunky in knee pants standing behind my chair.
Jim was sitting across the table talking to his half-uncle, a retired naval officer, whose name you have often seen in the accounts of doings in the capital.
We had gone there and bought rattling outfits of good clothes, and were resting from our labors among the nabobs.
We must have been killed in that mesquite thicket, for I can make an affidavit that we didn't surrender.
Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and then, why no one should ever do it.
In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That is, of course, supposing that they are old-timers with the necessary experience and courage.
They have the outside and are protected by the darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small space, and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door, to the aim of a man who is a dead-shot and who won't hesitate to shoot.
But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is the elemenit of surprise in connection with the imagination of the passengers.
If you have ever seen a horse that had eaten locoweed you will understand what I mean when I, say that the passengers get locoed.
That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world.
You can't coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wide.
It looks as big to him as the Mississippi River.
That's just the way with the passenger.
He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting outside, when maybe there are only two or three.
And the muzzle of a forty-five looks like the entrance to a tunnel.
The passenger is all right, although he may do mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of money in his shoe and forgetting to dig-up until you jostle his ribs some with the end of your six-shooter; but there's no harm in him.
As to the train crew, we never had any more trouble with them than if they had been so many sheep.
I don't mean that they are cowards; I mean that they have got sense. They know they're not up against a bluff.
It's the same way with the officers.
I've seen secret service men, marshals, and railroad detectives fork over their change as meek as Moses.
I saw one of the bravest marshals I ever knew hide his gun under his seat and dig-up along with the rest while I was taking toll.
He wasn't afraid; he simply knew that we had the drop on the whole outfit.
Besides, many of those officers have families and they feel that they oughtn't to take chances; whereas death has no terrors for the man who holds up a train.
He expects to get killed some day, and he generally does.
My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold-up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you.
Another reason why officers are backward about mixing things with a train robber is a financial one.
Every time there is a scrimmage and somebody gets killed, the officers lose money.
If the train robber gets away they swear out a warrant against John Doe et al. and travel hundreds of miles and sign vouchers for thousands on the trail of the fugitives, and the Government foots the bills.
So, with them, it is a question of mileage rather than courage.
I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is the best card in playing for a hold-up.
Along in '92 the Daltons were cutting out a hot trail for the officers down in the Cherokee Nation.
Those were their lucky days, and they got so reckless and sandy that they used to announce beforehand what jobs they were going. to undertake.
Once they gave it out that they were going to hold up the M. K. & T. flyer on a certain night at the station of Pryor Creek, in Indian Territory.
That night the railroad company got fifteen deputy marshals in Muscogee and put them on the train.
Besides them they had fifty armed men hid in the depot at Pryor Creek.
When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up.