Doolin made a horrible face and swung the weight up and posed with the sledgehammer high as the ceiling and only a sudden fall away from dashing the messenger’s head down into his rib cage.

Bob sucked with horror. “No no! I meant on the safe.”

“Oh, I know, Bob! Damn it! I was just trying to get a laugh.”

Doolin tapped the safe mechanism with the sledgehammer head, testing. Then he laid into the latch once and the door indented; with the second blow it cracked. Newcomb pried it free with a crowbar and pitched the money into a mail sack while Bob yawned and Doolin looted the mail for boxes of merchandise.

Bob hopped down to the cinders, took hold of the bridles of Newcomb’s and Doolin’s horses, and pulled them to the express car.

Grat bounded down from the engine ladder and I took his horse to him; the others trotted along the siding.

In Kingfisher, my brother Bill opened a pocket watch and said, “Golly, ten o’clock. If I don’t get to bed pretty soon I’m going to turn into a pumpkin.”

Chris Madsen brushed his mustache with a thumb, put his untouched snifter of Madeira down on the coffee table. “What was the reason for all this tonight?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

Madsen pulled his vest down over his belt and looked at Bill without emotion.

Bill said, “I was going to be in a real jam if I couldn’t prove I wasn’t at Red Rock tonight. I needed an ironclad alibi.”

“What happened at Red Rock?”

“Oops! There I go again. Kiss and tell, that’s me. Well, you’re going to have to learn the rest by yourself. I’m not going to be the one to spill the beans, not even if you tickle.”

“Did your brothers stop a train?”

“You’re the detective, Chris. I just dabble in real estate.”

Madsen said, “It is only a matter of time, Bill.” He lifted his snifter, then put it down again. “It is now June of 1892. We’ll have them stopped before the year’s out.”

At Red Rock, Doolin walked off the express car platform onto his mount, strapped his rifle into its saddle boot, and snatched two lunch boxes off the express car floor. The guard and messenger were hog-tied with baling wire next to the broken safe. Their faces were red as apples. Doolin gave the lunch box with the liverwurst to Grat, and Broadwell came up from the caboose and then we all crashed through sunflowers and vamoosed west into the blue hang of rain.

15

THEN BEGAN THE GREAT manhunt.