Broadwell and Grat jumped up inside the express car and covered the hired man in the corner. Grat hurled the man’s rifle out into the night and I saw it glint once, twice in the moonlight as it wheeled. Broadwell said, “You wanted that reward money pretty bad, didn’t you. Would’ve been Christmas in July, wouldn’t it.”

The hired gun ignored him. He glared at my brother Bob. “We ain’t gonna give you squat.”

But of course they did. They offered the worn-out argument about not knowing the combination and Bob tantalized Williams with a pistol shot that was so close to his brainpan it singed his hair and repeated itself in the messenger’s ear for most of the following week. The safe was opened and we carried money out in a mail sack and threw it down into the clattery springboard wagon that Pierce had driven down from the water tower.

My ox of a brother, Grat, pushed the ticket agent and fireman and engineer back to the front of the train where he told them to hurry it out of town. Then Grat hopped down from the ladder and bumped the ticket agent onto his seat just for meanness.

Doolin and Newcomb backed along the train with their rifles on the faces of the distraught volunteers; then Newcomb and Broadwell started laughing about something and instead of coming up with Bob and me, they jumped in the wagon with Pierce, and Pierce slapped the long leather traces against the horse team and they barreled down the siding past the coach cars, howling and kiyiing, shooting their pistols through windows. Broadwell stood on the wagonbox, glamorous as Custer, and shot a man of fifty-five in the shoulder, then plowed a bullet into the vest pocket timepiece of a passenger named Frimbo. Afterward, Frimbo laid the watch out on a sheet of paper and demonstrated for Chris Madsen’s men that it was in so many pieces it could be gathered up and sifted through his fingers.

Broadwell, Pierce, and little Newcomb ringed the train twice, taunting the volunteers, daring them to shoot; then the train clanked and squealed and strained in its hard pull forward.

Newcomb said, “Why don’t we board her and run through the coaches assassinatin’ the villains? Wouldn’t that be havoc?”

But they saw Bob fussing and me waving them back and they turtled the wagon over the moon-gleaming tracks.

I inquired of my brother, “Wasn’t that Sid Johnson shooting at us?”

Bob had on his surprised and mirthful and enchanted-with-life expression. “And Charlie LeFlore!” he exclaimed. “Can you beat that! You’ve got to help me think of a way to really rub it in next time I see those coots. Something really humiliating.”