Passenger train Number 2 chuffed in and the volunteers boarded a spanking new smoking parlor car with cushioned green seats and gas jets lit and glass chandeliers on the ceiling. Then the train was rocking north toward Pryor Creek and the volunteers were bragging or hooting at jokes and it was as loud and hale as a men’s club excursion to see a baseball game. Three tubs of warm, bottled beer were carried in, “compliments of the Katy.” The conductor walked down the aisle, idly chatting with the men, showing them a derringer stuffed in his white cotton socks. Johnson, LeFlore, and Kinney sat in facing seats at the front and shouted over the noise about how they’d known the Daltons in the past—first Frank, then Grattan, then Bob and me. Sid Johnson still considered Bob one of his five or six best friends, and one of the profoundest marksmen in the West; he said he’d once seen my brother turn the pages of Amos and Obadiah in King James with a bent-sight .22.

In the Pacific Express Company car, the money attendant fastened a padlock the size of his fist onto the sliding side door. He sat in a chair in the dark with his hands on his knees. Slumped among mailbags in the dark was a boasted badman from Texas recently commissioned by the railroad to escort the safes for seven dollars a day. He never talked to the messenger. The messenger would turn and see the red ash of a cigarette or he’d turn and see nothing at all.

At Pryor Creek, a railway guard knelt at the back of the depot tying his laces over the hooks of ankle-high shoes. On the platform, a man in a derby leaned out and dropped cottony spit onto bed rocks that were blackened by soot. A man sat in a chair with a ten-gauge shotgun in his lap, breathing moisture onto each lens of his eyeglasses. Inside, the cash drawer was gone and the ticket window was closed and two men sat on the varnished bench while a man in white spats walked from window to window. There was a clock on the wall with Roman numerals that said it was 9:05. He said, “I bet they’ve seen us and called it off. I bet that’s what they did. They’re not stupid, you know.”

By that time the men in the smoker had begun their preparations. They snapped shotguns closed or pulled up their socks or stood on the platform between the cars urinating onto the couplings. Then the conductor opened the connecting door and said, “Pryor Creek, the next stop,” and they sat like quiet schoolgirls. “Sweet Jesus, the Daltons,” a man said.