Butch Cassidy the Lost Years Read online

  Luckily, that wasn’t the case. Banded bundles of cash fell onto the table as I turned the pouch upside down. The other pouch held more of the same. The men standing around the table stared avidly for a moment at the scattered loot. I knew that for some of them, at least, it was more money than they had ever seen in one place in their whole lives.

  Then Bert reached out and started stacking the bundles in neat piles. He liked things orderly and organized.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said a while back, Bert,” I told him. “About how this robbery was like something Jesse James or Butch Cassidy would pull.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, looking up at me in surprise. “I didn’t mean any offense by that.”

  “None taken, son,” I assured him. “In fact, I’m sort of honored by the comparison to Jesse James.”

  “But not by the one to Butch Cassidy?” he asked with a puzzled frown.

  “Well, I can’t rightly be honored to be compared to Butch Cassidy,” I said.

  Grins began to spread over the faces of Enoch and Gabe.

  “You see,” I went on, “I can’t be compared to him because I am him.”

  Bert looked more confused than ever. He shook his head and said, “Who?”

  “Butch,” I said as I let my gaze sweep around the table at all of them. “You see, boys, I am Butch Cassidy.”

  CHAPTER 30

  See, I told you I’m fond of dramatic moments. That bold declaration sure as hell was one of those moments. It caused the three youngsters to stare at me in shock, and even the normally stolid vaqueros seemed surprised. Javier and Fernando’s bushy eyebrows went up at exactly the same time like they’d practiced it. Only Enoch and Gabe didn’t look at me like I’d totally lost my mind.

  Nobody said anything for a long moment before Randy finally spoke up.

  “That’s not possible,” he said. “Butch Cassidy must be dead by now. He dropped out of sight a long time ago.”

  “Yeah,” Bert chimed in. “I read about him in a magazine I found in the train station. I think it said he was hanged somewhere.”

  I asked, “Would that have been an issue of the Police Gazette, Bert?” I chuckled. “Hate to tell you this, son, but everything they print in that rag ain’t always the truth. Sometimes it’s nowhere close.”

  “I don’t believe it, either,” Vince said. “No offense, Mr. Strickland, but I’m not sure Butch Cassidy was even real.”

  I tried not to look forlorn as I said, “Now, you ought to know better than that, Vince. I’m as real as can be. I’m standin’ right in front of you, ain’t I?”

  The three of them all started talking at once. Enoch listened to it for a few seconds, then raised his voice and said, “Hush!”

  They all stared at him, sort of like they had stared at me a couple of minutes earlier when I told them the truth.

  Enoch went on, “You sound like a bunch of chickens squabblin’ in a farmyard. Of course Butch Cassidy’s real. I seen him with my own eyes, years ago.”

  “Is that true?” I asked him. “We’ve met?”

  “Not exactly. But we were in the same livery stable one afternoon in Winnemucca, almost fifteen years ago. You rode in on a big white horse with a couple of other fellas.”

  “I remember that horse,” I said. “Fast as greased lightning he was.”

  Enoch nodded and went on, “Nobody around there knew who you were then. But when the bank was robbed a couple of days later, they all figured it out, sure enough. You were havin’ a look around the town before you and the rest of the Wild Bunch hit the bank, weren’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I always liked to know what we’d be gettin’ into,” I said. “So you saw me one time in a livery stable and never forgot it?”

  “I’d already done considerable hell-raisin’ myself by that time. Fact of the matter is, I wouldn’t have minded ridin’ with you boys back then. But no, I didn’t recognize you right away when you came up to us in the saloon in Largo. I just knew you looked a mite familiar. Didn’t think nothin’ of that, since I’ve been a heap of places and seen a heap of people. But when you started talkin’ about robbin’ a train, that day in Winnemucca came back to me.”

  Gabe added, “And I knew you’d been an owlhoot, even if you were tryin’ to go straight now. You’d get that faraway look in your eyes, like you could feel the wild, lonesome trails callin’ to you.”

  “Why, Gabe,” I said with a grin, “that was almost poetical.”

  Randy said, “So the two of you believe him? You think he’s really Butch Cassidy?”

  “Why shouldn’t we believe him?” Enoch said.

  “Because Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are dead!”

  I sighed.

  “Bring back bad memories, Jim?” Gabe asked. “Sorry, that’s what I’m used to callin’ you.”

  “Jim’s fine,” I assured him. “I’ve been usin’ it for a while. Ever since last December, when I came on a poor fella who’d been gut-shot—.” I stopped and shook my head. “I’ll tell you boys the whole story, but Gabe, you’ve got stew simmerin’ and need to tend to it. How about we wait until after supper for me to explain everything?”

  “That’s not fair!” Bert said. “You can’t just tell us that you’re Butch Cassidy, then expect us to sit around and wait for the story!”

  “I’ll talk better on a full stomach.”

  “We can wait,” Enoch said. “Butch Cassidy’s been dead for a long time. He can stay dead for a little while longer.”

  The three youngsters didn’t like it, but they didn’t argue. Gabe went to check on the stew, saying, “You can count the money while I’m gone. I trust you to divvy it up right.”

  So that’s what we did. Those pouches had $8,260 in them. That was $920 apiece, minus a couple of dollars on each share. For simplicity’s sake the eight of us, not counting Vince, each kicked in $450, making a kitty of $3,600. With Vince’s share put in, that made a little more than $4,500 to give to his ma.

  He warned us, “She’s liable to guess where it came from and refuse to take it. She’s always prided herself on being an honest woman.”

  “After what the railroad did to your pa and then to her, she’s liable to decide she’s got it coming, even if she does figure out where you got it,” I said. “It’s only fair.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “She won’t turn us in, will she?” Randy asked worriedly.

  Vince glared and said, “Damn it, Randy, if we weren’t friends, I might have to take a poke at you for that. My ma would never do such a thing.”

  I hoped he was right about that. But it was a chance we had to take.

  After supper, the nine of us found places to sit. I was in one of the armchairs, with Scar curled up on the floor next to my feet. I reached down from time to time and scratched one of his ragged ears as I commenced telling them what they wanted to know.

  “I’ll start off by sayin’ that I’m not gonna give you a lot of details about some parts of this. They’re still too painful for me to dwell on, even after all this time. But I’ll tell you that there came a time when Harry and me—that’s Harry Longabaugh, my best friend, him who folks called the Sundance Kid—there came a time when the two of us went to South America along with a female acquaintance of ours who was Harry’s particular ladyfriend.”

  Back in those days, when I was telling the story to the boys on the Fishhook, the general public didn’t know about the whole South America business, about how Harry and Etta and I went to Argentina and tried to make a go of it as honest ranchers. It was a number of years later, when somebody wrote a story about it in another magazine, not the Police Gazette, that that part of our lives came to light for most folks, although friends and family knew where we’d gone at the time, of course. I had written letters to some of them to tell them about it.

  Sitting there in the ranch house, I told my new friends about how the ranching hadn’t worked out and how Harry and I had fallen bac
k into our old, larcenous habits, especially after Etta fell ill and had to return to the States. With just the two of us knocking around down there on the loose, the temptation was too much to resist.

  So we drifted over into Bolivia, robbed a few banks, and stuck up a mine payroll. When I got to that part I looked at the neat stacks of bills still sitting on the table and thought about how there are cycles in all our lives, patterns that repeat themselves again and again, sometimes right out in the open and sometimes so subtle you can’t even see them unless you know to look for them.

  “Hitting that payroll turned out to be a mistake,” I said. “The army was lookin’ for us, and when we stopped in a little village called San Vicente to rest our horses and fix something to eat, the soldiers caught up to us. Somebody in the village pointed to the abandoned hut where we were stayin’ and told the capitan we were in there. He and his sergeant marched up and tried to arrest us, and Harry and me . . . well, we didn’t want to be arrested.”

  Even though it was nighttime and we were indoors as I was telling the story, I seemed to feel the hot sun on my face again. I heard the shots booming, smelled the sharp tang of powdersmoke in my nose, relived the shock of a bullet hitting me.

  I could see as well the bright splash of blood on Harry’s shirt. He was wounded a lot worse than I was, even before he made an unsuccessful dash for the rifles we’d left outside and was hit several more times.

  The afternoon we spent holed up in that hut had seemed like a year instead. It’s a hard thing to watch your best friend dying by inches. For years afterward, I sometimes woke up at night in a cold sweat, having dreamed that I was back there sitting on that dirt floor with my back propped against an adobe wall, while across from me the light slowly dimmed in his eyes.

  I didn’t say much about that to Enoch and the others, just told them that we traded shots with some soldiers and then took cover inside the hut.

  “That evening Harry died,” I said simply. “If he had been able to hang on until they charged us, I would have stayed there with him and died beside him. That was the kind of pards we were. But with him gone there was no point in it. I managed to slip out in the dark, which is what I knew he would’ve wanted me to do.” I sighed. “I heard talk later, while I was still in South America, about how they found us both dead in there and buried us in a cemetery close by. My hunch is that they didn’t want to admit I’d gotten away, so they buried one of the soldiers who’d been killed in my place. But I don’t know if that’s right, and I don’t reckon anybody ever will know for sure. The only thing that’s certain is that Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, died there, and I didn’t.”

  I paused for a long moment, overcome by the memories. When I didn’t go on, Bert leaned forward on the sofa, where he was sitting with Vince and Randy, and asked eagerly, “What happened then? How did you get from there to here?”

  “Oh, a lot of things went on that weren’t very interestin’,” I said. “I was hurt and laid up for a while. Some of the Indians who lived down there took me in and cared for me until I got well enough to travel. There was nothin’ left for me in South America, so I went to Europe. Knocked around there for a while. I finally came back to the States because I wanted to see some of my kinfolks again, and because I knew I needed to talk to Harry’s ladyfriend and let her know the truth about how things ended up down there. I didn’t want her hearin’ any rumors and not knowin’ the straight of things.

  “I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about that part of it, either. Etta and I had been good friends—might have been more than that if she hadn’t been with Harry—but she was hurt by the news I brought her and told me she didn’t ever want to see me again. I had honored that request, even though it pained me at times.

  “Since then I’ve just traveled around the country, visited family now and then, done a little gambling, worked at jobs when I had to. Honest jobs, mind you. I thought my outlaw days were over. I even got a laugh now and then when I heard that some fella somewhere was claiming to be me. That happened several times. I always thought, well, if that so-and-so is really Butch Cassidy, then the law should arrest him and send him to prison for all the things Butch did.”

  “Bet he would’ve changed his story in a pretty big hurry if that happened,” Enoch drawled.

  That made me laugh. I nodded and said, “I expect you’re right.”

  “So if all this is true,” Randy said, “how did you wind up here on the Fishhook?”

  “That’s a whole other story,” I said, and I gave it to them, starting with finding Abner Tillotson in that gully and then settling his score with the Daughtry brothers for him.

  When I was finished, Randy frowned and said, “I suppose it could have happened that way. The part about Butch Cassidy, I mean.”

  Vince said, “I believe you about the Daughtrys. They were a bad bunch. Probably everybody in this part of the country had heard of them. And most were glad when it looked like they pulled up stakes and moved on.”

  “Then this ranch is legally yours?” Bert asked.

  “I’ve got the deed and a bill of sale signed by Abner,” I assured him. “It’s legally mine, all right.”

  “And yet you risked it to help me and my mother,” Vince said.

  “Ride for the brand,” I said. “That goes both ways.”

  They let that sit there for a few seconds, then Bert turned to Enoch and asked, “Do you believe Mr. Strickland is really Butch Cassidy?”

  Without hesitation, Enoch nodded.

  “I do,” he said. “I’d bet this old hat of mine on it.”

  “So do I,” Gabe added. “His story rings true as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Sí,” Santiago said. His cousins nodded in solemn agreement.

  “Well, I’m not convinced,” Randy said, “but it doesn’t really matter, does it? The train robbery is over and done with. Nobody got hurt, and Vince’s mother ought to be all right now. It’s over. Finished.”

  “Well . . . ,” I said. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  They all looked at me, and Enoch asked slowly, “Just what did you have in mind, Jim?”

  “That money’s gonna come in mighty handy for Vince’s ma, no doubt about that. But that wasn’t the only reason we decided to do this. What those fellas Kennedy and Milton did, cheating Mrs. Porter and havin’ Rutledge spread those ugly rumors about Vince’s pa bein’ drunk, those things are just flat-out wrong, and they deserve to pay for ’em.”

  “The holdup’s got to be embarrassing for them,” Vince said.

  “One holdup’s not all that embarrassing.”

  That was true enough, but there was more to it than that. Today I had felt more alive than I had in years. It hadn’t been a bad life since coming back to the States, I suppose, but all of it sort of blended together. Today—that moment when I’d leaped from the bank onto the boxcar, the feeling of a gun in my hand, even the whine of a bullet past my ear—those things would never be a blur. They would always stand out sharp and clear in my mind.

  “What are you saying, Mr. Strickland?” Randy asked.

  I gave him a straight answer. I said, “I think this new Wild Bunch of ours ought to ride again.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Nothing much was said after that. Enoch and Gabe weren’t shocked, of course, and I couldn’t tell about Santiago and his cousins. Bert, Vince, and Randy seemed to have a lot of trouble believing I had actually suggested such a thing. It had been a long day, and I could tell they were going to have to mull it over, so I suggested that we all turn in. That would give them a chance to sleep on it.

  Since it was late, Santiago, Javier, and Fernando spent the night rather than returning to their spread, bedding down in the barn. The next morning nobody seemed to want to bring up the subject, and I thought it might be wise not to push the issue. I was confident that once they had a chance to get used to the idea, they’d all come around to my way of thinking.

  Vince needed to take that money to his mother,
but I didn’t want him riding all the way to the county seat by himself while he was carrying that much loot. So after we’d eaten breakfast and the vaqueros had headed for home, taking their shares with them, I said, “Vince, why don’t you and Enoch and I ride to town today? Gabe and Bert and Randy can hold down the fort here.”

  Vince gave me a suspicious look and asked, “Why do you and Enoch need to go?”

  “Nobody knows that we had anything to do with that train robbery,” I said, hoping that was true. “But even so, you might run into trouble carryin’ that much money. There are road agents who are always on the lookout for a fella travelin’ by himself.”

  “Maybe there used to be,” he said. “I’m not sure there are anymore.”

  “Well, you don’t ever know. I’d just feel better about it if you weren’t ridin’ by yourself.”

  Vince thought about it for a second and then shrugged.

  “All right,” he agreed. “I’d like to get that money to my ma and have a talk with her about it, and I probably would get a little nervous about riding that far with it by myself. What you’re saying makes sense, Mr. Strickland.”

  “All right, then. We’ll saddle up and ride.”

  We started out early enough to make it to the county seat by early afternoon. The idea of riding right into Sheriff Lester’s bailiwick like that might’ve given pause to some folks, but it didn’t really bother me. I didn’t see how Lester could have recognized any of us the day before.

  The sheriff could count, though, or at least I assumed he was smart enough to since he’d managed to get elected, and if he had noticed that there were nine of us, that might put some thoughts in his head. He knew that the Fishhook crew had totaled nine during roundup.

  Having thoughts in your head was a far cry from proving anything, though. I was willing to run that risk. The truth is, knowing that Lester might suspect us just sweetened the pot that much more and made me look forward to that visit to the county seat.