put them on the train. Beside them they had fifty armed
men hid in the depot at Pryor Creek.

When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up. The next station
was Adair, six miles away. When the train reached there, and the
deputies were having a good time explaining what they would have done
to the Dalton gang if they had turned up, all at once it sounded like
an army firing outside. The conductor and brakeman came running into
the car yelling, "Train robbers!"

Some of those deputies lit out of the door, hit the ground, and kept
on running. Some of them hid their Winchesters under the seats. Two of
them made a fight and were both killed.

It took the Daltons just ten minutes to capture the train and whip
the escort. In twenty minutes more they robbed the express car of
twenty-seven thousand dollars and made a clean get-away.

My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at
Pryor Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by
surprise and "locoed" at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their
business, expected they would.

I don't think I ought to close without giving some deductions from
my experience of eight years "on the dodge." It doesn't pay to rob
trains. Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don't
think I ought to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of
an outlaw. After a while money ceases to have any value in his eyes.
He gets to looking upon the railroads and express companies as his
bankers, and his six-shooter as a cheque book good for any amount. He
throws away money right and left. Most of the time he is on the jump,
riding day and night, and he lives so hard between times that he
doesn't enjoy the taste of high life when he gets it. He knows that
his time is bound to come to lose his life or liberty, and that the
accuracy of his aim, the speed of his horse, and the fidelity of his
"sider," are all that postpone the inevitable.

It isn't that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the
law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of
outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.

But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind--and that is
what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else--he knows
where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the
majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse
thieves, rustlers, highway