I personally find talk like that tiresome, but the Tulare menfolk laughed and laughed and Bill would grin along with them. He’d have the porch chairs filled and men sitting on the hitches, and then he’d spice his ramble with sermons about politics and the railroad and at sundown stand up and stretch. “Oh me, but I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.” Like as not a man would then buy him supper and whatever liquor he wanted in a saloon. And down the block there’d be a man in a gray vested suit and brown shoes with a pistol in a sweat-black shoulder holster and a Southern Pacific badge in his pocket, watching for clues and information that might lead them to the apprehension of Grattan Dalton.

My brother Bill was aware of that and of the detectives on horses in the Russian olive tree shade back on his Paso Robles farm. Yet there he kept, in plain view, until the winter rains came and he saw an oily, wild-looking man with a beard and a skunk smell to him clomp along the board sidewalk on the other side of the street. Then Bill sent a boy with a note and he paid out a hundred dollars and tied an Indian pony up behind the hotel and sat at the screened window that night, watching as brother Grat, in all his coats, rode off for Oklahoma.

Bill packed a suitcase and carried his best serge suit down the street on a hanger and left it with an actor friend named Lonnie, I believe, who thereupon shaved his jaw beard until it duplicated Bill’s chin brush. He proved a good impostor.

The railroad detectives lost Bill in Tulare but the men staked out at my brother’s farm said they’d picked him up there. And for two weeks they sent reports to San Francisco saying Bill was puttering in his toolshed or picnicking at Pismo Beach on Sunday or driving his wife to town in a buggy, wearing his blue serge suit.

It was only then, two weeks after Bill took a night train to the Oklahoma Territory, that the detectives learned they’d been duped.

And it was about that time that Chief Marshal William Grimes and authorities of the Southern Pacific decided to combine their manpower and intelligence to bring in the infamous Daltons; and dispatched to San Francisco was a new U.S. deputy marshal from El Reno named Christian Madsen.

Chris Madsen was our undoing.