After he was gone, Middleton rode down to Visalia to read the wanted posters, and collect a fifty-dollar check intended for Grat and mailed care of general delivery by Eugenia Moore. He spent it on a desk of twelve drawers and three secret compartments. Then he rapped on the glass of the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office and a deputy turned in his chair. Middleton opened the door. “I wonder if you and me could jaw for a bit.”

But Grattan was more canny than people gave him credit for. Horse and rider climbed a winding bridle path into thin air, Grat ducking under tall sequoia pine trees, hooking on a mackinaw, cradling a single-action rifle. Then he tore up the map and let it flutter away and swung right instead of left. He said, “What’s that fool done to your lungs, horse? You sound just like a freight train.”

Afternoons, Grat slept on black earth and blue pine needles, or he fished for trout in a tossed mountain stream that was so cold it made his sinuses ache when he drank it. He whittled forks and spoons out of green wood and hardened them in a fire. In a brand new baking soda can he kept rocks that seemed like animals to him: lion, magpie, buffalo head. At night he lay inside the tent with his hands behind his head, watching cigarette smoke ascend to the canvas and flatten out, or he’d open his trousers up and imagine pasty women and his semen spill would dry crusty on his stomach.

He fried squirrel for breakfast one morning and saw a greyhound that was just ribs and tail slink out from the trees. Grat threw a squirrel strip in the dirt and the dog snatched it down; she broke a hard biscuit in two and coughed on it and Grat poured water into his hat. Then the escapee named Riley Dean walked out of the trees in torn shirt and trousers, a big stick in his hand. “I see you’ve introduced yourselves,” he said. “Do you have food? I’ve been eating cave bats and that’s it. They sit in my stomach like glass paperweights.”

My brother hid with Riley Dean until the California winter rains came, which was snow at that altitude. A posse used information supplied by Middleton and risked the weather and crags and cliffs to climb Mill Creek Canyon in search of the two dangerous men. They caught Dean as he waded through drifts in his shirt and trousers.