Grat stayed on in the Cherokee legislative territory with an office in Tahlequah, and Bob worked the northern Osage nations out of an office in Pawhuska, the capital, with his warrants originating from the federal court in Wichita, Kansas. He hired twenty Osage men as peace enforcers; murderous, brown-looking men with black-looking hands, who wore greasy buckskins and feathered black hats and smelled worse than city sewers. I had rank over them and a desk job for a couple of weeks, but I got tired of that and soon I was riding with Bob, taking schooner wagons of criminals up to the federal court.

Bob and I walked down the mud alleys of boom towns with serious faces and hands on our pistol butts and older men sat on onion crates smoking pipes outside of their tents, snickering at us like we were children, like we ought to be wearing short pants. Bob stopped a lumber truck on a main street to check the driver’s bill-of-sale and the carpenters hammering up the storefronts quit work to nudge each other or straddle a roof peak and shout jokes down at the brand-new marshal. But there was never a nineteen-year-old as sure of himself as Bob was. He seemed to think he already had Wyatt Earp’s mean reputation. He pushed giant men out of his way on the streets; he shut down a saloon on a Saturday night because there was gambling going on; he was a stickler for licenses and paid-up fees. He arrested every drunk he saw; he’d handcuff a woman for stealing potatoes; he’d walk against a man’s drawn gun and twist it out of his fist like nothing bad could happen to him. He was as unscared as a lawman can be.

He was dedicated then. I’d wake in the morning before sunup and see Bob crouched by the fire drawing up law enforcement inventions in his diary: gloves with hinged metal fingers, a contraption that locked a man’s legs to his saddle, a mace; a vest of a hundred pockets that would hold a hundred iron plates so a lawman couldn’t be gutshot. In his right boot he carried a .32 caliber pistol on a heavy .45 caliber frame so he could quick-draw on a miscreant simply by lifting his knee. Sometimes he’d lag behind me and I’d turn to see him muttering arguments with someone imaginary. Then he’d slap his pistol up.

“Keeping amused, are ya, Bob?”

“Heck, they don’t have a chance against me. We’re almost out of work.”