After his record-making one-hundred-and-seven-day journey over two thousand treacherous miles, my brother Grat rode into Oklahoma and the pole corral that Charlie Pierce had constructed in the cedar brakes near my dugout. A tickbird supplied the directions to it. Nobody was there of course, which surprised Grat; he didn’t know Bob had dissolved the gang. He found tins of deviled ham, sardines, and apricots I’d cached away in the damp earth next to the stove. He flopped back on a bunk mattress and jabbed open the cans with a pocketknife and spooned the food out with his fingers. Then he slept until the next day, washed with a brick of laundry soap in the South Canadian, and sat naked on the warm stones, letting the spring sun bake him dry, waiting to be discovered.

The same tickbird who’d got him there told us where he’d be and was rewarded with ten dollars, half what he demanded. I rode down to the sod house to see a bearded, gaunt, and pitiful-looking man, all eye sockets, cheekbones, and ribs. The first thing he said to me was how his pal Dangerous Dan could balance a bowie knife on his tongue.

I rode with Grat to a hotel in Dover and he told me about a woman from the East he may or may not have met on his trip. “I told her I’d read all I wanted to about New York. I said, ‘You got trolleys and art museums and foreigners selling hot pretzels. You got Wall Street and sneak thieves and dandies who wear spats and chew chocolate-covered cherries.’ I said, ‘I’m glad you decided to venture west and discover human beings.’ ”

“You get anywhere with her?” I asked like a bumpkin.

He said, “I’ve been so long without, Emmett, I’ve lost the inclination. And I don’t like the way women smell.”

The family made a whoop-de-do over my brother’s return. Bob hired out a Dover restaurant and the entire clan, including Eugenia, excluding my inamorata, partook of a Sunday meal served by shy black girls wearing bandanas over their hair, bossed to the kitchen and back by the black cowpuncher, Amos Burton. The women were happy, the men ate with rifles crossed in their laps, the girls sang “A Frog Went A-courtin’ ” and “Shoo, Fly, Shoo,” and I stood guard, leaning against the doorjamb with a shotgun in my arms, looking out over puddles of rainwater in the street, worrying about when the massed lawmen would attack and wipe us out. They could’ve had us easy then.

My mother kept a hand on Grattan’s wrist and just gazed from one to the other of us most of the way through supper. She weighed about ninety pounds then and her weak right eye drooped pretty badly. She smiled and said, “Have all my boys come home at last?”