Conductor Harry Wilcox got off the train and sent a telegram to the Santa Fe dispatcher in Arkansas City, Kansas, then unwound the wire from the wrists and ankles of the men in the express car. The station agent tapped out a message of the robbery to depots along the line and it was intercepted in Wharton by a spectacled widow who’d replaced the boy murdered a year previous by Blackface Charley Bryant. The railroad detective there showed her longhand transcription to the Wells Fargo man in the gray suit, then commenced organizing the others. The man in the fedora whistled a tune from his chair and then read the woman’s note when the others were done with it. “You have nice handwriting.”

The woman said, “Yes. I do.”

Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas pounded doors that night until he’d collected a reliable five-man posse, and he hurried north from Guthrie to Red Rock. About an hour behind him was Deputy Marshal John Swayne and the Santa Fe special officers from Purcell, Oklahoma. Logan County Sheriff John W. Hixon had breakfast with a newspaperman, then stood in front of twenty-five brand new deputies so they could be photographed with their shotguns and dirks and bandoliers, pistols at each pocket. He said, “We’ll press on until the trail ends or until the robbers are overtaken.”

Deputies Frank Kress and George Orin Severns and thirteen other lawmen chose to hunt us in the Cimarron Hills, which is country mean as a brickyard. Ransom Payne and sixteen men thundered westward for Greer County whence rumors had come regarding a married woman suspected of being Daisy Bryant. Cherokee police, some of them Bob’s deputies in a happier year, sat on the Red Rock depot floor, chewing on straw, and they rode out with whatever party they felt wouldn’t botch things. And some businessmen from Caldwell, Kansas, rented horses and strapped on three too many guns and went full tilt after the villains, horsewhips clenched in their teeth.

And nothing came of it. We were ex-lawmen and cowhands and horse thieves and we’d studied Oklahoma geography from a saddle. We likely knew as much as any marshal or Indian after us, plus we had my brother Bill’s expensive grapevine in our favor and the fact that we had considerably more to gain by getting away than any of those fifty or one hundred did in catching hold of us.