Or my brother Bob would ride through undulating prairie grass on patrol and he would rhapsodize: “When Dad first came to the territories, he was swapping brood mares and Army mules under government contract and this whole countryside was wild savannah and savages and prairie chicken and bears. There were buffalo then by the hundred thousand. Ground would shake nine miles away whenever they stampeded. Indians would climb inside the bleeding hides and skulk right into the midst of them, spear bulls so big it took two men just to carry the head. Twenty years later and his Great Plains were chockablock with sod houses and barns; squaws had all turned into oily nags; weather went sour and rivers dwindled; snakes dangled from branches of trees. Dad used to claim he traveled the entire Louisiana Purchase on twenty cents a week and he recalled neither hunger nor want. He was refreshed like the Israelites. Now he sits in a chair and forgets himself and the Army sends him six dollars a month in pension for duty in the Mexican War.”

I said, “I onetime put salt into the sugar bowl just so’s it would ruin his coffee. I once put a note in his shaving mug that said, ‘Why don’t you die!’ I used to shove his left boot under the sofa and watch him thump through the house hunting it down. You never seen anyone so creased.”

And Bob said, “Must be that you and I have different ideas about the Fourth Commandment.”

The two of us would camp at sundown and he’d chop brush with a machete while I cooked pinto beans and sorghum in an old lard bucket. Then I’d lie with my head on a saddle, learning songs on the harmonica, while Bob rubbed his deputy marshal’s badge with silver polish and made entries in his diary with a carpenter’s pencil.

Mostly he commented on sunrise and sunset, the direction of the wind, and the relative temperature: “balmy and pleasant,” or “chilly, frost on the grass until late morning, could see my breath when I talked.” About every two weeks he’d take stock of himself and then there’d follow a list of commandments: “Resolved: to be more charitable in my speech; to be generous to those less fortunate than I am (for example, a meal, or an unexpected gift); to conduct myself like the knights of yore; to sit tall in the saddle.” He wrote on January 11th: “Why am I so quick to ridicule and criticize others, yet so eager to hear flattery and praise of myself? Am I trying to deprive them because my need is so great? How can I mend the fences I’ve broken? These questions revolve in my brain as I gaze up at the galaxy of stars, and I have no satisfactory answer.”