Well, Hank, I must say I got your letter, for which I am ashamed of
myself for reading same. I looked all through it, and it wouldn’t be a
sensible letter for even my son and heir to write. You act like a little
kid which has had their candy stole.
Just to show your ignorance, you say you wouldn’t even ask me the time
of day and expect to get an intelligent answer. I’ve got one of the best
watches ever made, and you know it. Have I ever lied to you when you
asked me what time it was? Answer—No; and you know it, too, Hank.
Of course you know your own business better than I do, which I doubt,
but I’ll concede that much to you, but you’re crazy when you say you
wouldn’t pay five dollars for my brains if they’d hand them to you on a
gold platter, and throw the platter in. Hank, did you ever price a gold
platter? You never did or you wouldn’t talk that way, which shows
ignorance.
I often wonder if you ain’t a little bit loco from listening to the cows
bawling all the time. Try stuffing a little cotton in your ears, which
advice I give you for nothing such as it is.
You don’t know what a detective has to do, because you say that if
anybody misses any cows out here you’ll know who stole them. I get you,
Hank. You think you’re a mind-reader, eh? You’ll find that you can’t do
much like that, because outlaws are smart, you bet.
Well, Hank, the court set yesterday, which means that the judge was
there to listen to you lie about everything, but I didn’t have to lie,
because I hadn’t done nothing in the first place. I took the sheriff
with me to the court-house.
The judge asked me if I was represented by counsel, which means the same
as asking if I’ve got a lawyer, and I told him I didn’t because my
arrest is a farce, and I ain’t paying no law-shark to get me loose from
something I ain’t been tangled in, and he don’t say nothing, because he
knows I’m right.
Then he says, “Call the case of the State _versus_ Dobie Dalton, _alias_
Howling Wolf,” and I says, “For gosh sake, judge, is the whole State
against me in this?”
The judge makes the sheriff go to the back of the room and throw three
fellows outside, and I said, “Why didn’t you send me?”
The lawyer says, “You’ve got troubles enough, ain’t you?” I reckon he
felt sorry for me, Hank, but I don’t need no legal sorrow.
Well, Hank, old Abner Blalock, who owns the bank, gets up on the stand
and talks like this:
“Last Tuesday night I had been to the medicine show and was going home.
I heard a lot of shooting and yelling going on down the street; so I
started to go down there. I’m almost in front of the bank, when there
came a big explosion and the whole front of the bank fell out.
“I ran back and found three men, two colored men and the other was the
medicine professor. I heard him yell, ‘You danged fool, you used too
much juice!’ Just about that time one of the colored men hit me, and
that’s all I know, except that they didn’t get any money.”
Hank, that was a awful blow to me and I reeled in my chair. Then the
marshal gets up in the chair and tells the judge that I hit him over the
head after trying to entice him down the street. That’s about all he had
to say, and then the judge asks me to tell what I know. I says:
“What the marshal just told you is a lie on the face of it. He says he
seen who I was, and that’s a lie, because I wasn’t in the light where he
could see my face. I don’t know anything about the robbery. I found the
marshal crawling around the street. I started shooting and yelling, and
then I happens to think that if the crowd comes milling down there they
might step on him; so I shoved him under the sidewalk. I asks damages
from them what walked over me, and I wish now that I had left that lying
officer to his fate and took care of my own. Amen.”
One feller choked over his chew, and they had to take him outside. The
judge gets sort of overcome, too. The prosecuting attorney walks up and
down the floor, and then he looks at the judge, who shakes his head.
Hank, I sure had ’em all guessing.
Then the judge calls, “Gabriel Galesburg,” and my uncle by marriage
comes up and holds up his right hand. Hank, there’s more liars in the
court-house than there is in your cow-outfit, which is quite a few.
The judge says, “In your opinion, has Dobie Dalton brains enough to be
accessory to a bank-robbery?”
My uncle by marriage says, “Judge, he ain’t got brains enough to be an
accessory to anything.”
“Do you recognize the defendant?” asks the judge, and my uncle by
marriage says: “His face had been altered quite a lot, but his actions
prove he’s nobody on earth but Dobie Dalton. He’s likely been made the
goat in this proceedings.”
The judge and his friends all seem to get their heads together, and then
he asks me to take the stand.
“Dobie Dalton,” says he, “the court has decided to be lenient. I am
going to give you five years in the penitentiary at Deer Lodge, and make
it a suspender sentence.”
Hank, when the enormity of the offense strikes me, I stands up and says:
“Why, you danged old billy-goat-faced alleged lawyer, I’ll show you
where to head in at. Any old time I make suspenders in Deer Lodge for
five years, it will be a cold day. You can’t hand Dobie Dalton anything
like that.”
Hank, I moved quick. The sheriff reached for me, but I kicked his feet
out from under him, and then I picked up a ink-bottle and whaled away at
the judge. If the judge had held still it would all been right, but he
had to duck his head, and the bottle hit my uncle by marriage between
the eyes. Hank, I went through that crowd like a stampeding cow and
raged down the steps and away I went.
Nothing can stop me when I make up my mind to go ahead, because I’ve got
will-power wrote all over my face. I know there ain’t no use trying to
get away on foot; so I lopes down to a hitch-rack, where there’s a lot
of broncs tied. I says to myself, “You’ll likely get caught and have to
make a few extra suspenders, but after five years it won’t make much
difference.” I grabs a pinto and hops into the saddle.
Hank, I’m a fine judge of human nature, and I can look a man in the face
and tell what he is, but I guess I’m out of practise with broncs. This
one looks meek and mild, but he lied in the face. That don’t make much
difference if you know a horse has the bucking idea, but when you don’t
it’s like misplaced confidence. I don’t mind a bronc pitching a little,
if I’m looking for it, but I was thinking more about speed than height,
and I missed the right stirrup and while I’m trying to find it I loses
the other one.
Hank, as good a detective as I am, I can’t find either of them stirrups,
and after while I thinks, “What’s the use of hunting?” and I seems to
leave everything behind.
Hank, do you believe in hunches? I have a lot of them, some of which I
don’t use, but this time I got a good usable one. When I got the wind
back into my diafram, which is my lungs, I looks around. Know where I
am, Hank? I’m in Gabe Galesburg’s front yard, with the dog barking in my
face.
I look at the house and says, “Dobie, it appears that you must go into
the house and see your loving wife and son and heir.”
Hank, you know that nothing stops me when I get a idea, so I walks right
up to that house without knocking, and goes inside. There’s a strange
woman in there, and I says to her, “Where is my loving wife?”
She says, “I don’t know,” and just then I hears my son and heir bawling,
and I says to her: “Woman, you are keeping something away from me.
Emmeline is under a bad influence, and she can do as she likes, but
nobody is ever going to keep me away from my kid. You folks think you
are smart, but I’m here to tell you that a man has as much right to have
a kid as any woman, and I shudder to even think that my son and heir is
to be raised up in a home like this.”
Hank, I know how to talk to them, eh? That woman just stands there and
stares at me, and I says, “You just watch me get him,” and I went right
in and got my kid and walked out to the front room.
I says, “This kid belongs to me, woman, and wo unto the human being
mortal who gets into my path.”
“Papa?” asks the kid, and I says, “You’re —— right it is, old-timer.”
Pretty good for a two-months-old kid, eh, Hank? Blood will tell every
old time, and the Daltons are early talkers.
I starts out of the door, and something seems to burst in my head. At
first I think it’s a blood-vessel, but when I comes to a little I finds
a piece of it in my lap and I know it was that marble statue that
Emmeline liked so well. The woman is standing on the steps holding the
kid by the hand, and that kid is bawling to beat ——, and it ain’t my kid
at all, Hank, because it’s got red hair and freckles, and she calls it
Sam.
She says to me, “You ought to be ashamed,” and I says, “You’re the first
woman who ever hit me with a nude statue, and you ought to be ashamed
with me.”
I got up and felt of my head, and then I says to her, “You don’t need to
be scared, ma’am, because I ain’t going to swipe that homely little
bunch of frec’les and red hair,” and then I started for the gate.
Hank, I’ll never soothe a woman’s fears again. They ain’t got no sense
of right or wrong. I ain’t took twelve steps when she hits me in the
back of the head with half of that statue, and I drove my nose in a
geranium-bed.
I got up after while and starts for the gate, when I meets a stranger.
He says to me, “Holy smoke, what happened to you?”
I says, “Let me give you some advice. Don’t go near that house. There’s
a woman up there who owns a red-headed kid, and she’s a cross between a
bobcat and a buzz-saw. She ain’t got principle nor nothing.”
Well, Hank, I’m all through giving advice, if you know what that means.
If you wrote to me and enclosed a million silver dollars and offered it
to me if I would tell you the time, I’d tell you to take your money and
go where it is hot.
Well, Hank, I don’t know when you will hear from me again. I’m getting
tired of the long Winter and long for a sunny clime. I feel that you are
still my friend, Hank, and I subscribe myself the same as I mostly
always do, as yours sincerely and truly,
DOBIE DALTON,
Mesquite, Aug. 30.
P. S. Unless something happens I am going away from here, Hank. After I
left Gabe Galesburg’s home, I wanders downtown. I don’t care if they
send me up for life, but I figure nobody will know me now.
Then I meets my uncle by marriage. He’s got a lump where that ink-bottle
hit him, but he don’t mention it, which is a mark of respect to him.
He looks at me, and then he says, “My ——, Dobie, you’re a puzzle.”
I says, “I can sure keep them guessing,” and he says, “Why Emmeline
wants to hang on to you is a puzzle to me, but nobody understands
women.”