Broadwell had his cat Turtle along and it slept on his belly in the sun or it pawed at millers and mosquitoes, or it dropped from branch to branch hunting sparrows in the trees. Doolin was full of Arkansas voodoo and superstitions and his eyes would glass as we squatted around the firestones at night and listened to Bob story about the headless horseman or the premature burial. For my part, all I did was sweat and itch and cuss at anybody absurd enough to try to cheer me up. I was weary, weary of my occupation; and Julia wasn’t having much to do with me of late. Her father had put me off-limits.

On the morning of July 15th, we crouched around a blanket mottled with sunlight while Grat dealt out playing cards that would indicate our jobs. But then I looked up and saw a teenaged boy in plow boots and a wide straw hat battering through Devil’s Walking Stick and blowing his nose because of the weed dander. He wadded the hankie inside his sleeve and saw the eight of us grouped at the blanket and the boy just stood there in the heat and dust looking pop-eyed and brainless, with ears as big as butterflies. He had a smile so wide his molars showed. “Campin?” he said.

Grat would have snatched up a rifle and plugged him but Bob had pressed his toe on the muzzle.

“Just passin’ through,” said Broadwell.

The boy didn’t walk out of the weeds. He had stickers of every sort on his shirt and nettle bumps all over his hands. He said, “Say, just for shits and grins: I’m lookin’ for some shoats strayed out of the pigsty after sloppin’ time this mornin’. I can’t find hide nor hair of them.”

None of us said anything and the silence was so overpowering that the boy got the message and walked back through jabbing, pocket-high weeds until he got to the Katy railroad tracks. I met that boy once again in 1907 and he told me he then stomped clumsily along the ties, scratching his hands and panting, until he got to the Pryor Creek depot. He jumped three steps onto the platform and leaned against the door. Inside a man in a fedora was drinking water from a ladle.

The boy flopped down on a bench. “It’s the Daltons all right.” He held up eight fingers. “Eight men. Camped up on the Neosho.”

The man looked at the telegrapher. “Wire that to Kinney in Muskogee.” He carried the water ladle to the boy who grabbed off his straw hat and emptied the ladle on his head.

“How do you like being an operative, Loren?”

Loren kicked off his plow boots. “Oh, boy. It’s really tiring.”