They’d known about the Pryor Creek raid since the 13th, when the two snipes who’d come by looking for jobs and stayed on to eat angel food cake were caught by federal marshals while bootlegging whiskey at the Watonga reservation. They said they could swap some information if the lawmen would go easy, so they were shoved down into chairs in Madsen’s office in Guthrie.

One of them was quiet and glanced under his eyebrows at everything and he kept squeezing pimples and wiping his thumb on his shirt. The other was a smirker, as doughy and slack-jawed as Billy the Kid. He slumped in the chair and rolled his boots on their heels and told Madsen how my brother had repulsed him because the gang was already too large. But he said he’d stuck around long enough to pleasure one of the whores there and he overheard some talk about the MK&T and Pryor Creek, set for sometime in mid-July.

“I hear tips like that all the time,” said Madsen.

“That don’t mean this ain’t true.”

So Captain J. J. Kinney, chief of detectives for the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad, was notified in Muskogee on July 13th, and when suspicions about us were confirmed by the boy at Pryor Creek two days later, Kinney called for Deputy Marshal Sid Johnson of the Wichita court, and Cherokee Police Chief Charles LeFlore, the cleanest Indian I’ve ever seen, always wearing an excessively white shirt, with his black hair oiled and cut and exactly parted.

Then fifty special deputies, of which thirteen were railway officers, bunched up on the Muskogee platform in muley hats and derbies, leaning on barrel-down rifles, spitting tobacco onto the railroad ties, speaking venom about us in ninety-four degree heat, while women blanched and squeezed their children’s hands and men in celluloid collars stood aloof and talked quietly to each other about the big surprise the Daltons had in store for themselves.