Bill purchased a farmhouse in Bartlesville, which was oil country then, about five miles from Julia Johnson’s place, about thirty from our hometown of Coffeyville. Soon after he arrived he took the train up to Coffeyville and stayed two days in the Eldridge House where he had businessmen up to his room to taste his Jack Daniel’s Green Label whiskey. He had his hair cut by Carey Seaman, bought buckle overshoes from Charles Brown’s shop, and reintroduced himself to the bankers, C. T. Carpenter at the Condon bank, Thomas J. Scurr, Jr., president of the First National. They were suspicious at first because the Dalton exploits were well publicized thereabouts, but you didn’t dislike Bill for long and by afternoon of the second day, he had them convinced that Bob and Grat and Emmett were merely bad seed.

Then he went around buying. A farmer would die and his widow would ache to go back East. Bill would handle the sale. Homesteaders from the East who rushed out to the territories to grab the cheap land would discover farm work was hard and the weather mean, and they’d give up the caboodle—barn and plows and ox yoke, dirt-floor house and artesian well—for barely five or ten dollars. Bill would pick up the title and split the resale profits with the railroad land bureaus that solicited settlers for the West. And he staked claims for us along the South Canadian River far ahead of the federal government’s approval for public sale: we were “Sooners.”

Whenever I visited Bartlesville, I’d sit in Bill’s rocking chair with one of his law books in my lap while Julia stitched a sampler next to me, and I’d see Bill at the dining room table with the kerosene lamp turned up, scratching out ten or twelve pages to his wife, long essays about the economy, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Royal Neighbors of America, the wolves of Wall Street, and the railroads: the Southern Pacific, the Atchison & Topeka, the MK&T, the Rock Island, the Santa Fe. Julia would put an ironstone kettle on the fireplace logs and lift it off with a kitchen towel. She’d ask, “Would you like some tea, Mr. Dalton?”

Bill would look up with glazed eyes. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Julia,” I said.

“That’s right, that’s right.” He touched her cheek as if she were his eldest daughter. “No, Julia, I’m very busy now. I have to put some thoughts down before they’re lost forever.”

Julia would bring me tea and a half-dozen macaroon cookies and whisper in my ear, “He’s kidding, isn’t he?”

I’d sip from the cup and stare.