Jenny answered her husband’s letters with daily notes mailed general delivery to whatever remote post office Bill considered safe that week: Cleo Springs, Anadarko, Bushyhead, Sapulpa. Whenever legal fees were required on deeds, he paid the court officer something extra. Wherever he went he made friends with the sheriff and attended the local trials, taking notes on procedural matters on the backs of his wife’s envelopes. He flattered and joked and gave horehounds to children; he had a private table in Guthrie’s Silver Dollar Saloon where he weighted his stack of greenbacks with a shot-glass and poured “toddies” out to strangers and talked like a newspaper about monopolies and jurisprudence. He got people to believe the Daltons were on their side, near saints, that in stealing from the railroads we were doing them a good turn.

Bill talked and strutted and Bob and I laid low. I’d stay in the bunkhouse on Jim Riley’s ranch and ride fence for a couple of weeks or I’d sojourn in Dover to chat with my mother and bobber fish on the Cimarron, or I’d spend a month in my brother’s farmhouse in Bartlesville reading the middle sections of Bill’s thick ancient books in a rollaway bed, listening to the squeal of a pumping oil derrick, visiting Julia Johnson at her papa’s big boarding house, which wasn’t far away.

I’d devour a peach and throw its stone at her window and she’d hunker down with me in the weeds beside the Little Caney River, a quilt thrown over our shoulders and her black hair against my cheek.

I asked, “Do you need any money?”

She shook her head.

“Because I’ve got it. I’ve got plenty. More than I can spend.”

“You’re very nice but no thank you.”

“Late at night I stroll the road in front of Bill’s house smoking a cigarette and stargazing and somehow I see you sleeping naked under a sheet and I want to be next to you and kiss you under the ear and have you turned to me in the dark.

“I want you in whichever house I’m at, I want to hear you singing in the next room when I look up from work at my desk, and I want you to bring me pump water when it’s hot and I’m chopping weeds in the sun. I’d be willing to pay a lot for that. I’d give you the best I could afford. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.”

“But it’s ill-gotten, isn’t it.” She gazed at me. “Isn’t it. That makes it impossible. That makes your romance just a storybook dream, doesn’t it.”