AFTER SHOOTING DOWN Reese Montgomery’s airplane, the Jewett brothers started traveling mostly at night. Since they had to stay off the roads most of the time, it was slow going in the dark. During the day they camped along brushy creeks and snaky swamps, hid in hollowed-out caves and deserted homesteads, with one always standing guard while the other two slept. They lived mostly on hardtack and candy and tins of stew and evaporated milk, but it was still the best fare they had eaten since before their mother died. Continuing their way northward, they robbed several general stores, collecting up various firearms and boxes of ammunition—along with a Webster’s International dictionary and a teakwood box of silver flatware—to the point where they finally had to steal an extra horse just to haul their arsenal. Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth. Crossing into Tennessee, they held up three more banks, finally hitting the jackpot in a little town called Wayward. That night, after Cane finished counting the $29,000 in hundred-dollar bills the trembling bank clerk had pulled out of the vault and tossed onto the coat Chimney had spread on the floor, he looked at his brothers and said, “That’s it, we’re done.”
“What do ye mean?” Chimney said.
“No more robbing. There’s enough cash here we don’t need to take any more chances.”
“You swear?” Cob said. By this point he was sick to death of running all night and hurting people and stealing their property. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from slipping off and giving himself up at the nearest post office or calaboose was Cane’s promise that they would buy a farm, a home, a place to call their own, as soon as they made it across the border into Canada.
Cane nodded. “All we got to do now is disappear.”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. The big haul in Wayward had come with a heavy price. While Cane was sitting on his horse acting as lookout during the holdup, a deputy in a motorcar had spun around the corner, ramming the steel bumper into the animal’s front legs and snapping them like twigs. Tumbling backward out of his saddle, Cane hit the ground hard, but managed to hold on to his Smith & Wesson. Just as the deputy raised his rifle, Cane fired two shots at him, the first one ripping his chin off and the second puncturing his right lung. Townspeople ran to their windows and watched as the tall man in the black coat put the screaming horse out of its misery before emptying another pistol into the still-sputtering engine of the automobile.
Though they managed to escape and steal another horse that night, the very next day they encountered still more trouble. While looking for a place to relieve himself, Bill Wilson, the leader of a posse from Wayward, accidentally wandered upon them hiding in a thick, tangled stand of pine trees. He was unbuttoning his trousers when he looked up and saw Cane pointing a gun at him. To the outlaw’s surprise, Wilson smiled with an air of complete confidence. He was the constable in Henderson County, and had been, over the course of a twenty-year career, in a number of fixes just as bad as this one. Most criminals, he had often told people, were essentially gutless cowards, and if you didn’t show any fear, they’d usually lose their nerve and slither away like snakes. He’d shot a number of them hightailing it for some hidey hole after he’d stared them down. But even men as dedicated and tough as Bill needed a break now and then, and he had been fishing the riffles on the Beech River when all hell broke loose in Wayward, or he would have probably already had these bastards either locked up or in their graves. “You better think twice about that, buster,” Wilson said coolly. “I got a whole pack of men right over the hill waitin’ on me.” From the witnesses he’d talked to, he was fairly certain this dirty thug was the one who had blasted half of Deputy Lamar’s face off.