Even so, he woke up Monday morning looking forward to seeing the hard-earned publicity that his advisers had guaranteed him on the front pages of the papers, only to discover that John Herbert Montgomery had stolen his thunder. Yesterday evening, the tycoon had suddenly broken his silence about his son’s killers, informing a group of newsmen gathered outside his Long Island estate that he was willing to pay three times what Tennessee was offering to whoever brought him their heads. Except for brief notices in a couple of the local rags, Bill’s funeral wasn’t even mentioned. Photographs showed Montgomery barely able to control his grief, and the attorney general vaguely wondered whether he could ever summon such emotion—if, for example, his old mother passed away, or his wife ran off with a better man. He doubted it. As blind as he was to most of his defects, even Powys knew that the first thing a man lost when he entered politics was his humanity.
Of course, the story Montgomery fed the journalists was not the real story at all, which was something the attorney general, as many times as he had manipulated the press himself, should have realized. As for the tears in the photographs, all the eighty-year-old tycoon had to do was recall the afternoon long, long ago when he’d told a young, impoverished Tom Edison to go fly a kite, and they fell like rain. And as far as Reese went, the outlaws had actually done him a favor by blowing his spoiled, rotten son out of the air—by his accountant’s calculations, the lazy little whoremonger had cost him close to a million dollars in the past year alone—but still, as several of his cronies had reminded him repeatedly in the days since the boy’s death, you couldn’t let the hoi polloi think they could murder the privileged class without repercussions, or you’d end up with another Russia on your hands. The sooner this Jewett trash was tracked down and dealt with, the sooner he could forget about the entire mess and get back to the business of the day, which was making as much money as possible off the cluster-fuck in Europe before somebody threw in the towel.
On the heels of Montgomery’s pronouncement, reporters from all the big news organizations on the East Coast were quickly dispatched south to get in on the story before it was too late. Every newspaper in America featured tales written about the outlaws and their crimes. From time to time, the brothers managed to get hold of one lying around somewhere, and the black-and-white drawings of their faces nearly drove Chimney crazy the first few times he saw them, since he was made to look like a sneaky, bucktoothed rodent, and Cob a fat, goofy baby, while Cane was always portrayed as some sort of devilish ladies’ man. Disregarding the facts, several of the more liberal publications began to twist the crime spree into a romantic saga, due in part to a hysterical widow’s claim that the oldest had handed her a bouquet of sweet williams and a fifty-dollar gold piece after they watered their horses at her well in Chapel Hill. More conservative journalists, however, chose to ignore the heartthrobs and moonbeams, and put a different spin on the tale. Thus, on the same day that a Socialist weekly in Boston ran an editorial stating that the brothers were just humble, illiterate sharecroppers who had killed their tyrannical overseer after he refused to allow them time off to bury their dead father, a staunchly right-wing daily out of New York City compared the outlaws to a band of ungodly savages who were possibly even worse than the Huns, going so far as to claim that they had robbed and left for dead a half-dozen good Christians along a highway in Arkansas who were on their way to a revival. And things were just getting warmed up. Crimes as far away as Idaho and Arizona were soon attributed to the trio. A fruit farmer in Vermont, sensing that his nosy wife was beginning to suspect his own sick behavior, and viewing the brothers as the perfect fall guys, walked into the Montpelier police station and swore that he had come upon them burying a woman’s nude body in his orchard. Fortunately, the detective on duty, a man by the name of Abe Abramson, was blessed with an uncanny ability to detect when someone was lying, mostly by observing the manner in which they held the cup of coffee or tea he thrust upon them while they were being interrogated; and within hours the farmer was arrested for the slayings of nine females who had disappeared from the Green Mountains over the past decade. Still, even though that grisly incident received much attention nationwide and should have served as a wake-up call that perhaps the outlaws were being blamed for crimes they hadn’t committed, the reporting became more and more tawdry and unbalanced, and the telegraph and phone wires fairly sang with contradicting lies and outlandish bullshit. But there was one thing that everyone seemed to be in agreement on, and it was this: with deputized posses in six states now searching for them, along with a great number of independent bounty hunters, it was only a matter of days or even hours before the brothers now known as the Jewett Gang would be no more.
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