SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES
JAMES A. TWEEDIE
A HOLDUP ON THE TOMBSTONE STAGE
T
A SHORT STORY
here’s more stories about stagecoach robberies than you can shake a stick at, and some of them might even be true, but though I don’t want to bore you with another one, I’m going to tell it to you anyway only because of Frederick Mead who got a bad reputation for doing what, at the time, seemed to be the right thing. It was early June 1883—mebbe it was the third or mebbe it was the fourth, I can’t recall, but it was a Tuesday—and I’d been driving a stagecoach with passengers and the Wells Fargo money box between Tucson and Tombstone for near two years, getting the job when Joe Harper up and quit after getting shot in the arm during a holdup that went wrong when the six-horse team bolted at the shot and pulled the coach straight over the bandit who was supposed to be holding the reins. The bandit what shot Joe took off, and by the time Joe and his shotgun messenger got the horses and passengers settled down, he’d lost so much blood the doc up in Tucson near had to take off the whole arm to save the rest of him. In the end he got to keep the arm, but he quit driving the stage, and that’s how I come to get the job. But I wasn’t meaning to bore you about old Joe Harper ’cause you can find him in Tucson, and he’ll be happy to tell you a whole heap of stories straight out, so I don’t need to tell those stories anyways. And that’s why I was going to tell you about Frederick Mead because it’s Fred’s story, but he won’t tell it even if you ask him, but since it’s also my story, here’s how it played out.
Now, Robert Burt had been my shotgun messenger for two years, and he was good at it. During those two years he’d been shot at six times, fought off four holdups, killed two robbers, and wounded at least three others and only lost the money box once when one of the passengers riding on the roof turned out to be one of the gang and thumped poor Bob on the back of his head before he knew it was coming. Anyways, when he comes to, he says he feels dizzy, and he’s stayed dizzy ever since. He’s so dizzy he can’t ride on the top-side of a coach or shoot a gun straight anymore, so Wells Fargo fires him, and he moves to Colorado, and as far as I know, he’s still dizzy all the time. And that’s how Fred gets hired as my new shotgun messenger and that seventeen-hour Tuesday ride from Tucson to Tombstone back in June of ’83 is his first day on the job. Now Fred’s a good man, and I take a liking to him right off, but he’s making me nervous because he keeps talking about what if “this” happens or what if “that” happens, and I want the man with the shotgun to be sure of himself and not hem and haw when things happen because they happen all the time, and when they do, they happen right quick, and that’s not the time for the man sitting next to me with the gun to start asking questions. But that’s how it is with Fred, and since he and me are now a team, I’ve got to trust that he’ll come through when the highwaymen show up—which they do three or four times a year or close to it.
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