But the Dalton gang wasn’t at Pryor Creek. Kinney stood on the iron walkway between the smoker and baggage car and squinted into darkness and cinder smoke, his tie flying wild in the wind. Then his tie settled on his shoulder as they slowed and he saw three railway detectives with legs spread wide on the platform, rifles relaxed in their arms. He saw the fireman swing down and talk with a man in white spats. They waited three minutes and all they heard were crickets and the slow pant of engine steam.

The bandits were at that time striding the main street of Adair, the next stop north, in every variety of wide, scurvy hat and striped collarless shirts and famous black raincoats, blue bandanas loose at their throats. The horses were tied to the town water tower where Pierce sat on a springboard wagon peeling the sunburn off his thumb of a nose. Three-pound pistols in grimy brown holsters sagged from our trouser belts near our front pockets. Doolin had a Winchester crossed over both shoulders; Newcomb, Powers, and Grat had their rifles hugged close, as you’d carry a long loaf of bread.

The night train was a summer event in small towns and Adair wasn’t sleeping at all. Lace curtains curled out under a window sash and I could see a girl with her short legs stuck out straight on an overwhelming stuffed chair while her father picked at a banjo and the oil lamp flame grew and lessened in its glass chimney. There was a girl skipping rope with petticoats flouncing and a bent woman weeding marigolds who straightened when we passed. A boy was riding a bicycle in circles with a small squealing boy on his handlebars. Two doctors were in the drugstore reading the label on a brown remedy box. A woman sat on an upstairs windowsill for the breeze, looking on like we were railroad crew and that we must be especially hot in our coats.

I hunched at a back depot window, smelling window putty, and I saw the unsuspecting Katy ticket agent chewing the hairs of his mustache, turning the pages of a Prudential life insurance brochure. Then my brother Bob banged the back door open and the man’s head jerked up and seven giants stalked in, spurs clanking and black raincoats shrieking and boot heels pounding the slivery floorboards like we were stallions in heavy lead shoes: a bad nightmare of meanness, the stuff of night chills and story books, the scariest bunch of desperadoes that ticket agent ever saw.