Grat hammered thick plate shoes on his horse at Bakersfield, the cowboy capital, and he took the Tehachapi trail for Barstow and the Mojave desert, thence to Needles and across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, sleeping afternoons in caves or in the tangled shade of mesquite or Joshua trees, feeding on fence lizards, salamanders, greasy peccary and drinking sulphur water. The land was bare as worn carpet except for the balls of tumbleweed and the animal carcasses and the purple mountains in the distance. He’d see strands of smoke from Hopi and Navaho fires fifteen miles away, but by the time he got there the cooking stones would be cool, the wickiups would be empty, and vicious travois dogs would bark and lunge at his horse. Sheep would stare as he slumped by at night; rattlesnakes would stab at his stirrups and flop down to squirm under sagebrush; small tarantulas crawled over his face to drink water from his eyes as he slept.

He lost thirty-two pounds, pried out an aching tooth with his dinner fork, blistered both heels so far down to the bone that he could pour blood when he took off his boots. I suppose Grat’s brain cracked just a bit with aloneness because he invented a cowboy named Dangerous Dan who supposedly rode an albino mule and caught turtledoves in his hands and talked to Grat about railroads and how they were going to get even. “Old Dan, he was good company,” said Grat. His journey from California to Oklahoma took one hundred and seven days.

12

MY BROTHER BILL WAS in the Oklahoma Territory by then. Soon after Grat escaped, the railroad detectives uncovered evidence that seemed to put the blame for the Ceres train robbery on the Sontag-Evans gang and might even have implicated them in the three previous holdups. Given those circumstances, the Tulare County district attorney thought a second conviction of a Dalton might be difficult and he ordered my brother Bill, twenty-eight years old, released on his own recognizance.

Bill returned to his farm near Paso Robles for the harvest, then took a hotel room in Tulare and sat on its blue porch in a spindle-back chair, whittling dolls’ heads and gaining an audience with talk: “Making these for my girls,” he said. “Not like when I was a boy. When I grew up we were so poor we couldn’t pay attention.” Nervous laughter. “I said, ‘Momma, I don’t have nothin’ to play with,’ so she chopped the bottoms off my pockets.” They chuckled. “Told my dad I wanted a watch for Christmas—so he let me.” Somebody giggled; other men hooted. “Not that I learned anything. I was so dumb back then I thought girls were just bumpy boys.” And so on.