Whenever we saw cattle that June night, we rode among them until our hoofprints were lost. We lassoed whatever ponies we could and pulled them along for confusion, then let them stray wherever they would while the eight of us split up into fours, then twos, and the rain soaked our hats down to our ears. Dick Broadwell and I sat under hackberry trees by a creek bed until four in the morning, anticipating the divvy, watching mud collapse into the brown water rush, listening to the pattering in the green-leafed summer trees.

I have maintained for over forty years that our take from that train was eleven thousand dollars. The Wells Fargo Express Company’s accounting was sixteen hundred dollars lost and that’s closer to the truth, which was actually about four thousand.

Bob divided it honestly this time, in the presence of the gang at a surveyor’s monument forty miles west of Red Rock, and we each got about five hundred dollars. And though five hundred dollars or thereabouts went farther then than it does in 1937, I had trouble seeing it last out the year, let alone get me and Julia out of the country to South America. But I was not hangdog. I recall I was weary and saddle-sore and my eyes hurt from staying awake that whole night, and yet I got out my harmonica and played without finish the tune about sweet Betsy from Pike who crossed the wide prairie with her husband Ike, and my brother Bob ambled ahead of Grat and me to the ranch of Lee Moore on the North Canadian, fifteen miles away.

I don’t know where Newcomb or Pierce or Broadwell went after the distribution. It could have been Cowboy Flat or the Rock Fort, where Bitter Creek could romance Rose Dunn. I know that Powers and Doolin made their getaway to a ranch on the North Canadian near the Texas panhandle, owned by a beefy man for whom Powers, then using the alias Tim Evans, had once been a hired regulator.

The rancher inspected their slavered horses, skating his hands along the withers and croup and cannon, wiping the sweat on his pants, and traded them for a piebald and a red he had stabled.

Doolin walked backwards to the barn. “How bad are we gettin’ twisted on this deal?”

The rancher smiled, his hands in his pockets. “The marshals are thick as fleas around here. I’m gonna have to lie pretty good.”

They gave the new horses a nose-bag of oats and then the two Bills stripped their shirts off and dunked their heads in the trough and saddled their mounts, dripping water. They cantered between two rows of fruit trees to a creek and saw three deputies slowly riding a gulley, looking at the ground.

Doolin said, “I could have myself three notches right this instant. They’d topple like boxes of cornmeal.”