I can recall very little about Bob from childhood when he and I slept in the same white iron bed. I’d see him call sooey at the pig trough with a basket of black apples and table garbage; see him combing his hair in the speckled mirror in the kitchen, experimenting with parts; see him in a wool shirt and knickers at the front of a one-room schoolhouse, parsing sentences on the blackboard. I remember him sitting on a milk pail stabbing a bowie knife at a plank between his boots. I remember him trying to stand on his hands and older brother Frank squinting from tobacco smoke and holding Bob’s feet, saying, “Up! Up!” I remember that he pissed against the barn in the cold and the gray steam floated up like seaweed. Those must not seem very special recollections of the Dalton who was to become the most famous, but Bob was the brother next to me, barely two years older than I was, and I envied him too much to pay close attention to his various attainments.

Bob was as handsome as Hamlet was when played by an actress (which was the fashion in those days), and he got tapped for Lady’s Choice every time it occurred at hoedowns. His brown hair was cut very short and his sideburns were shaved off at the top of his ear. He had blue eyes that slanted a bit and white teeth that he took good care of, brushing them with baking soda four or five times a day. He remembered whatever he read and he could multiply like a banker and spell any word backwards, and one of the schoolmarms had it in her head that he’d attend Cornell Medical School. He paid attention to what women said; he listened so hard he frowned; and if he couldn’t think of a proper answer he’d come up with something charming. He was six feet tall and maybe one hundred sixty pounds in his boots, all hard sinew and skeleton under his clothes, with skin as white as library paste. He was considered under the standards of that day to be friendly and suave and dashing. You cannot tell it from John Tackett’s authentic photograph of Bob Dalton bootless and dead.