He was a wide and blue-eyed and sober man, built from the belly up like he should’ve been six-foot-six, but he walked on runty legs that sawed him down to five-foot-five. His sideburns were cut off at the top of his ear; he had a brown mustache that was six inches across his face; he was losing his wispy blond hair. He was foreign-born, forty-one years old, a Dane; slow to anger, methodical, organized; a retired Army supply sergeant from Fort Reno who’d bought sides of beef in the past from Nannie’s husband, J. K. Whipple, and who knew my brothers and me and Eugenia Moore—whom he called “a hardbitten bitch”—ever since my brother Frank was shot dead and promoted to Glory.

He had a three-ring notebook of wanted posters and a mahogany file cabinet with information about every criminal who’d spent any time whatsoever in the territories. When he boarded the train for San Francisco, he had a twine-wrapped bunch of manila envelopes and printed on each was a name: R. Dalton, E. Dalton, George Newcomb, and so on. When the train made a water stop at Kingfisher, he looked up from his notes to see my brother Bill with a goon face on, his nose smashed up against the window so that he resembled Charlie Pierce. Bill backed away, grinning, rubbing his nose, and shouted through the glass, “Hello, Chris!”

“How’d you get back here?”

Bill cupped a hand to his ear. “What say?”

Madsen glowered at him.

Bill said, “Maybe we can chat a little longer next time you’re passing through.” He strolled down the platform into the station house and then the train banged into motion.

Deputy Madsen stopped first at Visalia to talk with Sheriff Kay and see the green London-made safe with three thousand dollars stowed inside, the reward for Grattan Dalton, dead or alive. Then Madsen interviewed a trustee in the Tulare jail, Sheriff Ed O’Neill, the railroad’s chief detective Will Smith, and lastly attorney Breckinridge who would die shortly thereafter with a glass of port wine in his hand, five thousand dollars richer, it’s said, for his perfunctory defense. Then Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen, with more material for his files and three new photographs, took the train back to Guthrie, the territorial capital.

Not thirty miles west of Guthrie was the Kingfisher farm my mother Adeline was working with two of the girls. Bill would shovel silage or nail tar paper down on the roof or lard his arm to shove it up a cow to feel that her unborn calf had turned breech. Soon there weren’t many heavy chores left to do, so he borrowed a stable mare and took it to Woodward where Eugenia Moore had rented a small bungalow that was completely darkened by sagging evergreens.