After the Louisiana Purchase, displaced eastern Indian tribes were moved west of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory, which then took up most of the plains states. Farmers and railway companies worked on Congress to reduce the land area over the years until it was only the Ozarks and badlands of what is now Oklahoma. The property was considered inviolable and owned “until the rivers cease” by a strange collection of Indians, but chiefly by what were called the Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole; nations with their own executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, their own laws and schools. The Indians leased their grassland to cattlemen for grazing and they traded with sutlers, but otherwise ignored the pioneers and immigrants as much as they could.

So if a cowhand woke up one morning with blood on his knife and sleeve, or if a boy stole the receipts from his uncle’s cooperage, or a woman poleaxed her husband as he snored with a two-dollar chippy, the territories were where they got away; a vast, rugged section in the middle of the United States where your name was what you called yourself at the time, where a man could ride a horse for three or four days and not see another human being.

But Bob’s Osage deputies could stalk a man who’d spent a week sloshing up rivers. They could root a child out of muskrat pits and smell a woman in the leaves she’d brushed against. I once locked ankle clamps on a man who’d been on the run so long he never stopped gasping, and another time I walked into a cave to discover a convict still in his prison stripes, squatted down and scratching himself, the smell of vomit near him. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “Only thing I’ve tasted for a month now is gopher. And I got chilblains from the cold.”

I’d drive an ox team with a stern Osage riding shotgun, and Bob would crouch in the back of the police wagon interviewing prisoners like that was his occupation. He’d ask, “What got you started in crime?” “What was your crucial mistake?” “Why aren’t you repentant?”

He asked, “Did you like the life of a cowboy?”

The man said, “Yes sir, I did.”

“Emmett seems taken with it.”

“Well, it’s outstanding education for the youngster and it’s a worthy and stable livelihood. Cowboys are going to be riding herds for eons. I’ve got myself a bunk and three squares a day and I’m paid thirty dollars a month, and by God that’s enough for a howl on a Saturday night and a savings account in a bank if I want it.”

“Then why were you rustling livestock?”

The waddy scratched his chin. “Forgot my upbringin’, I guess.”

Bob sat next to me on the bench seat. “I hope you heard that,” he said.