By late afternoon it was very cold for September. The sky was cobbled and the river was purple and red leaves floated on it. The wind ruffed the weather hair of cattle bunched at a fence. Mud hoofprints froze hard by nightfall and the knuckles turned red on my hands. I buttoned up a sheepskin and rode ten yards behind my brother until he stopped at Canton Lake.

“Look yonder,” he said.

I saw a four-horse team and a wagon far across the water. The white canvas had U.S. GOVT, painted on it and I could see lawmen leaning on rifles and jolting in the box.

“The manhunt,” he said. “Remember you and I doing that? Seems like a long time ago.”

The wagon was gone in the trees.

“You know what I wish, Bob? I wish I could get a wet rag and scrub the year 1891 clean off the slate. It’s been nothing but trouble and misery for nine months now.”

“That’ll stop,” he said. My brother borrowed my tobacco pouch and papers and constructed a cigarette. “Did you get taken in by all I said back there?”

“I’m not exactly sure.”

He smiled. “There’s three thousand five hundred dollars in each of my saddlebags. Seven thousand dollars, Emmett. How’s that for a yearly income?”

I suppose I should’ve said something about it not being right to short-pot and steal from your friends, of doing unto others, but the words failed me just then.

He said, “I can see you’re disappointed in your brother.”

I asked, “What’d you do it for, Bob?”

He smirked and nudged his horse ahead and without facing me he shouted, “Greed, Emmett darlin’! One of the seven deadly sins!”

11

GRAT WAS STILL IN jail in California. With my brother Bill’s considerable help, he’d written several narratives about the abuse and indignities he’d suffered during his incarceration which the San Francisco Examiner had published. And he was reading the back pages of that newspaper when he noticed two brief articles reporting the September 15th robbery of a train in Leliaetta in the Oklahoma Territory, and a September 16th robbery of another at Ceres, California, two hundred miles from Visalia.

The Ceres holdup, of course, wasn’t ours. A Southern Pacific employee named John Sontag had been hurt pretty badly at work but the railroad wouldn’t pay him compensation, so he joined with Chris Evans and pulled some smallish jobs all over the state. My hunch is the Alila train robbery which Grat and Bill were framed with was the Sontag-Evans gang’s too. I know that Ceres was. But the Dalton name was famous then and we somehow took the blame for most everything lawless in the forty-four United States.