After supper, Bob walked outside with Eugenia for an hour, discussing a railroad depot in Red Rock she’d visited. Then he stood at the doorway and nodded at Grat and me. I gathered up my saddlebags and my mother followed me. “Are you boys going—so soon?”

Bob sagged against the door frame and said something sonly to her.

She gave him a pinched look and said, “Well, keep your courage, and leave this wild country before you hurt anyone. Seems it’s too late now to do anything else.” She put a hand on my wrist and Grat’s. Grat seemed hypnotized by a lantern hanging over the door. “Promise me you boys will always stick together.”

Then we pushed out through the door and unhitched our horses. Bob said, “I hate that kind of stuff, don’t you?”

I was almost in my saddle when Eugenia remembered my harmonica for me. She held my horse by the bridle and when I returned to the table for my Harpoon, my mother asked me to pray with her. I took my hat off and bowed my head, sliding my eyes at my younger kin who were snickering at me in the restaurant. She said, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and may His light shine upon you, in this world and the next.”

I hung there.

“Say ‘Amen.’ ”

“Amen,” I said, and soon as I got out the door I hopped on my horse and galloped away as fast as I could.

I don’t recall the dates for any of that. I only know that it was in May that my brother Bill, sweet-talking and convincing, in brown jodhpurs and tie, rode with Bill Doolin to Ingalls and Stillwater and to a cattle lot in Texas, collecting Charlie Pierce and Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Powers and Dick Broadwell. And it was on June 1, 1892, that the Dalton gang, minus my brother Bill as always, but including Grat at long last, rode to the railroad station at Red Rock on the Otoe reservation.

It was a dinky town and still is: a depot and a section house and a cluttered store with all it sold lettered on its outdoor wall advertisement. Red Rock sat about twelve miles north of Wharton on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe lines that connected Wichita, Kansas, with Guthrie and Oklahoma City.