The Polite Bandit

If you've got to be robbed, and I hope you don't, you could do a whole lot worse than the fellow waiting up this road. Ten o'clock in the morning, the twenty ninth of July, nineteen fourteen. The stagecoaches pull out of Old Faithful fifteen or twenty minutes apart, and they have a habit. They all stop at Shoshone Point, so the folks can have a look at the lake. A man with a Winchester rifle has noticed that habit. He's got a black handkerchief over his face, thick gray socks, and a hole in his felt hat. He steps out in front of the first coach. Passengers down. Driver, pull ahead. Valuables on the coat there, and have a seat on the ground. Then he waits for the next one. And the next. He isn't holding up a stagecoach so much as running a toll gate, fifteen coaches by the superintendent's count, twenty six by the highest, while the folks he's already cleaned out sit in the dirt and watch. His name was Ed Trafton, and he had his standards. The drivers kept their money. He told them he wouldn't take it, because they worked as hard as he did. A Missouri mother refused to climb down and leave her children, so he told her he loved children and would never hurt them, and then he took her money. A woman who called herself a suffragist sat down by the road and lit into him. This, she hollered, is what women get for letting a little man like you take away our rights and our money. He told her she was butting into his game and sent her back to the coach for whatever she'd held out. It cost her seventy five dollars. When the investigators put out his description, it said he spoke good English and was fairly polite. I've had worse from bankers. A tourist got his picture while he was sorting the take, and he couldn't have cared less. One coach finally turned around on the sly and ran for help, and he strolled off into the timber with close to a thousand dollars off a hundred and sixty five people. He'd thought of everything but the horse. He had stolen a pair of them on his way up from Jackson Lake, and one of those horses had thrown a shoe. It left a track that was just a little bit wrong, and a Justice Department man named James Melrose had the patience to follow a little bit wrong. He followed it back to Trafton. He found the jewelry. Then he found Minnie. Ed's wife. She swore out a paper saying her husband had told her he did it, and that she'd come across the jewelry in his things. A hundred and sixty five people had looked down that rifle, and the one who finished him had never been near it. They tried him at Cheyenne in December of nineteen fifteen, sixty three years old, and gave him five years at Leavenworth. While he sat, Minnie divorced him, married a policeman, and took their fourteen year old boy out of Idaho. His four daughters married and went their ways. They let him out early, for good behavior. And in October of nineteen nineteen Ed Trafton wrote a letter. It wasn't to Minnie. It was to James Melrose, the agent who caught him. He wanted the man to know he was getting out ahead of time, and that he'd spent his years inside making plans for his future. The lonesomest man I ever heard tell of was a bandit who wrote home to his detective.