Eugenia worked in the kitchen while Bob ate rhubarb pie and sugar. Then Eugenia sat with him and wrote a last letter in blue ink. She’d stare out the window, thinking of words, and then her pen would scratch. He licked the crumbs from his plate.

She screwed the cap on her fountain pen and flapped the letter dry. Bob rocked back with folded arms. She read: “Dearest Bob, My affliction has overtaken me despite my return to the health-giving climate of New Mexico; indeed, I now write you from this, my final bed, with the fervent hope that you are well and that I shall be at least a little remembered after my death by the one who meant so much to me in life. How curious it is that my malady of the heart cannot be healed even by the surfeit of love for you that is the cure for my pain, the consolation for my loneliness, and the only condolence I require as I now yield up my soul. I fear I shall draw my fatal breath soon, and soon begin that voyage toward our heavenly Father that is everyone’s last grand adventure. I pray, my love, that I shall forever imprint your heart just as you have mine. Yours, Eugenia Moore.”

Bob leaned across the table and kissed her. “That was nice, Honey. It really was. Dang. Every time I turn around you’re doing something else to impress me.”

Within two weeks she was stepping off a train in Silver City. She waited in the steam that hissed from under the wheels, lifting up the black veil of her hat, brushing her velvet-trimmed black dress. Then City Marshal Ben Canty walked up and took her elbow and strolled with her to the end of the depot, nodding as she talked.

Within three weeks, Whipple hurried to Guthrie and visited Mundy’s butcher shop to tell him what he’d just heard from a marshal, that Eugenia Moore was dead. Mundy kept chopping away at a rib roast while Whipple talked; then he sat down at his butcher block table with his forehead in his hand.

16

FORTY-TWO DAYS AFTER the Red Rock heist, we tied our horses in a copse of trees and camped overnight beside the Neosho River, there to wait on Bill’s perfect train, and on the first holdup Miss Moore hadn’t planned. It was unsurprising geography, since most of the Dalton boys grew up in the town of Vinita not too far north. The Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, where Grat had been a peace officer, was about forty miles southeast, and closer than that was Claremore where Bob accidentally shot Alex Cochran’s son and shortly thereafter resigned from the Wichita court. I could hardly remember being on the right side of the law. It seemed like I’d been a criminal all my life.