It cost plenty but we needed the protection because we were hounded as badly then as the more vicious and profitable James gang had been twenty years earlier. A train was robbed in St. Charles, Missouri, on the same night that another was held up in El Paso, Texas, a thousand miles away, and yet we were blamed for both though responsible for neither. A rancher’s steer would turn up lost and he’d claim we chopped it up for flank steaks. A house broken into in Fayetteville; school desks overturned and ink bottles smashed on the blackboards in Durant; a jeweler burglarized in his Pullman coach at a nightstop in Amarillo: all bore, the newspapers said, the unmistakable traces of the Daltons.

And with that came detectives: Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, Bill Tilghman; then more. Book salesmen without sample cases walked door-to-door in Guthrie, looking the closets and living rooms over as they delivered a canned speech about encyclopedias; Pinkerton men sat on the cracker barrels in those general stores and post offices where Bill had received his steamed-open letters from his wife. The Southern Pacific sent Will Smith east to Kingfisher to interrogate my mother. He sat on the stuffed purple sofa with a burlap bag clutched to his stomach and his handkerchief pressed to his cheek, waiting for Adeline to return from the kitchen, while my sister sat leaning on a Shaker chair and touched her ankles together and stared. My brother Littleton stood in the kitchen doorway, drying his hands and frowning. Water spotted the front of his work shirt dark blue. “I’m given to understand you’re a distributor of sample garden seeds.”

My sister turned. “He’s waiting for Momma to finish cooking the ketchup.”

Detective Smith shoved the burlap bag aside and stood. “You’re Littleton, aren’t you?”

“We’re not informers, Mr. Smith. We’ve had about enough of your kind.”

“I know exactly how you feel. I must’ve lost all respect for myself to try this penny-waste disguise.” He picked up the burlap bag and walked over to the front door. He saw a robin in the yellow grass of the yard. “Looks like an early spring, doesn’t it?”

When he left he slammed the door so hard a piece of window caulking broke off. Then he turned the knob and leaned in. “I pray every night that your brother Grat is not being picked apart by vultures. Out in the desert. Where I can’t see it.”

All these intervening years of meditation and repentance have not leached away my contempt for that man.