Soon after Frank’s funeral my older brother Grattan was named to replace the bereaved hero. Grat was glorified in legend for a while because a rustler named Felix Griffin shot him in the stomach as Grat attempted an arrest, but my brother kept walking at him unvexed and used his hat to slap the man down to his knees. The bullet had split a wooden button on his shirt and Grat squeezed the slug out of his belly like a cinder. Some people claimed Grat had it in him to become as great a lawman as Heck Thomas and the talk about him became so exaggerated that when the Osage Indians created a tribal police force, they selected the great man’s younger brother, Robert Renick Dalton, then eighteen, to be the new police chief, the youngest in the history of the West.

That year I was a cowpuncher at the Bar X Bar ranch near Pawnee where I mixed with bad company in the bunkhouse—Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, Bill Doolin—and my brother Bob soon got the inspiration to save my soul by hiring me as his posseman.

I was the ninth son in the brood of fifteen kids who were Lewis and Adeline Dalton’s, and when I left that measly, cramped, hardscrabble farm for sixteen-hour days on a horse, kicking cattle into pens, I was as happy as I’ll ever be, like I’d been released from sufferance and began my life all over again.

But there was a pull to be with my brothers again that lured me away from that ranch. And I can recall the grin on the face of the sixteen-year-old Emmett Dalton who stood on the steps of the Methodist church for his official swearing-in. I was six-feet-two inches tall and long for my clothes and twenty pounds to the better of Bob, wearing a cardboard collar and a paisley tie and big-roweled spurs on my boots. My hair was slicked back with rose oil and cut close about my ears with a bowl so that the white of my scalp showed through. And my father, who was then seventy-three, sat on a split-bottom chair in a knee-long velvet-trimmed coat he wore over the scrubbed gray top of his long underwear, staring at me and smoking a corncob pipe, trying to place me among his children while the wind blew his white hair around.