After Bryant’s death, Bob and Eugenia both left the Hennessey house to travel east, Miss Moore attending the funeral at Mulhall for the gang, then proceeding to the Oklahoma town of Wagoner thirty-five miles southeast of Tulsa. There she posed as a female reporter for Harper’s Weekly, sent there to gather articles about the territory and the end of the frontier and the last of the Old West gangs. She’d step timidly into a bank and sit on the edge of the chair in the bank president’s office, taking notes like a college girl. She had lunch with a railroad official who got tomato soup in his beard, and a senior man with the express company escorted her to a Sunday Chautauqua lecture on the lessons of ancient Greece. She sat in the shade with a parasol and he bought her lemonade. “I find you beautiful,” he said.

She hired a one-horse cab to drive her four miles north to a railroad depot at Leliaetta where she sat at the one bench with a heavily mustached telegraph operator who kept brushing flies from his face. His eyebrows were black as electrician’s tape.

He showed her the water tower and track switch and coal yard and the telegraph lines with the porcelain insulators. He leaned against a tall semaphore blackened with coal dust. “Leliaetta’s just a flag stop. If there’s danger of any kind or mail to be picked up or passengers, well this here blade with the red glass lens is swung in front of the hanging lantern and the train stops.”

She wrote that down like her brain was a little lame. “So red means stop,” she said.

“That’s right.” He tapped the blade with the green lens. “Otherwise I throw the green and the train just has to hesitate some till it clears the city limits.”

“Green means go.”

He sighed. “But this is where it gets complicated. Since the Dalton gang’s been boarding trains and causing such a ruckus we switched everything around.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed down the rails. “The engineer blows a whistle before he rounds that bend. I take a look around the place and if I put up the green blade, then the red, that means I haven’t seen any outlaws and he can brake for the mail.” He stared at her. “This must be confusing as heck to a woman.”

“But you explain it very well.”