Bob took a rag-leather suitcase with him and stayed there through the winter, making ten-hole wren houses. Eugenia would visit Mr. Mundy in Guthrie just long enough to soften him and stuff an envelope with his money and pick up any newspaper that had Bob Dalton’s name in it. Then she’d be back with Bob in the creaking bed at Greer with stories about the jasper and about incidents I would have been inclined to keep secret. For example, Eugenia’s night in Madame Mary Pierce’s house at Ingalls, with the girl of the henna-dyed hair. Bob said he’d heard already, from brother Bill.

“Does it upset you?”

“I find it mysterious, that’s all. Maybe I shucked it from my brain.”

He walked outside and shivered in the night air as he stood naked on the soft board floor of the outhouse. He smelled ammonia and lye. He imagined a naked woman kneeling to a woman on a bed. He walked back to the bedroom rubbing the gooseflesh from his arms and he stood behind her as she unpinned her hair in the tall dresser mirror. She said, “I wanted to find out what it was like with a woman. It was curiosity mostly. Afterward I was afraid that you’d feel spurned. You shouldn’t be, you know.”

He could see his clavicle, the jut of his hip, how each sinew was tied onto a bone; he saw the sway of her breasts under a collared white nightgown of flannel, and the hidden green veins of her hands. He picked yellow hair away from her brown eyes. He said, “I love you; I don’t own you.”

The money was gone, except what Bill had invested, which he claimed was turning profits like a small manufacturing business. We weren’t living that high, as the foregoing should’ve made amply clear, but we had to make payoffs and gifts to every tickbird and sheriff and nose-wipe of a farmhand who could identify us from the REA Express photographs. Bob paid for a four-hundred-dollar pinewood stable for a rancher who’d hinted he needed one pretty badly. Because we kept rustled horses in one farmer’s stalls and his wife wanted their daughter to know the joys of music, Bob had an eight-hundred-dollar piano hauled out on a wagon that flattened on its springs. Then we had supper of ham hocks and chick-peas and listened to the girl hunt the keys until “Lead Kindly Light” was over. A case of whiskey was dispatched every month to two craving deputies in Kingfisher. And in my study I can see displayed an 1873 Hopkins & Allen handgun given to a Dr. Steaman by my brother “for professional services.” Don’t know what those services could’ve been, but then I wasn’t privy to every blessed thing about Bob.