She cooked pork sausage and four eggs for him every morning and washed the breakfast dishes. Then she window-shopped in a bustled dress and veiled blue hat and drank tea across the dirt street from the office where Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen worked at a rolltop desk with his files and newspaper clippings—he’d lost Bob and he’d lost Daisy Bryant; there was a rumor they’d left for Tampa. Tall Heck Thomas, who had a harelip scar from a pistol shot by the outlaw Sam Bass, was Madsen’s closest buddy and he’d carry in jars of banana peppers or chili; Deputy Marshal Ransom Payne would stop by to chat and rock back in a chair with his white sombrero on his boot toe; or dignified Bill Tilghman, later Oklahoma City police chief, would pull a miscreant handcuffed to him across the street planks to the office so Chris could copy a statement about us: we were planning a bank job in Carthage, Missouri; we’d stolen twenty-six cases of dynamite from the Army; Bob and one of the gang had fought and Bob’s eye was poked out with a spoon. Chris Madsen checked out every lie. And Mrs. Mundy would note all that and, wearing chaps and sheepskin and a ten-gallon hat, Bob’s red woolen scarf over her nose, she’d meet my brother Bill at cold feed stores in Stillwater, Vinco, or Agra.

Sometimes Doolin was with my brother, smoking his corncob pipe in a ladder-back chair and turning away when they talked about Bob. In Stillwater, in a snowstorm, she sat with my brother Bill and Powers and Broadwell in a wagonbed with a potbelly stove bolted to it. They roasted corn and drank to the holidays with grain alcohol and made coffee from snow in a frying pan. Then they decided to visit Bitter Creek Newcomb at the close-by ranch of Bee and Rose Dunn. She was Rose of the Cimarron; pretty and dark-haired and convent-schooled, for several years the sweetheart of both Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Doolin, but eventually the wife of a prosperous man whose name I won’t divulge. Her brother Bee Dunn was a badman himself so he made every kind of rapscallious outlaw welcome on his place; he even constructed the famous Rock Fort on Deer Creek, as lodging for men on the scout.

My brother Bill took Eugenia on a tour of the property. Their horses broke through snowdrifts and the two riders ducked their heads from the sleet; then Bill, in his fur-collared greatcoat and three-piece suit and galoshes, jumped from his saddle and waded through snow and tore away some stacked tree branches until he’d revealed a dirt cave. Eugenia nudged her horse to the entrance.