Bitter Creek Newcomb stole twenty eggs from a farm chicken coop and fried them with wild onion in a skillet, talking as he did so about the engagement ring he was going to buy for his fiancée, Rose Dunn. The other men loitered next to the fire or washed their faces in the creek and I napped with last year’s rusty leaves while a daddy longlegs walked over my neck and ear.

If I slept at all it was with a nightmare about that Adair holdup. That was the first time we’d really been shot at during a robbery, the first time I’d ever been scared of dying. I could hear Newcomb sizzle onions at the camp fire but with that I heard railroad detectives shouting and the noise of guns going off and the whiz of slugs crossing the air near my head. I could open my eyes and see Powers tamping tobacco into his meerschaum or tinkering with his alarm clock, but if I shut them I saw running men and muzzle flashes and pistol chamber sparks near a coal shed, or the drugstore and the shattered plate glass window and the exploded left eye of Dr. W. L. Goff. It doesn’t seem exactly real to me now; it seems like cap pistols and chicken blood and dead men who’ll rise up and dust themselves off and eat cafeteria food at the RKO film studio. But that morning in the Dog Creek hills I was pretty shaken and whenever I thought about Dr. Youngblood, I saw Bob lying there. My brother would see me staring and turn his head and blood would brim out of his mouth. “Help me,” he’d say. “Please help me.” And I’d run.

I wanted to quit but my brother Bob didn’t; he wasn’t haunted at all. He handled Adair like all the other jobs and after distributing the shares he delivered Bill’s percentage to Bartlesville in a shoebox and stayed for a lunch of fried tomatoes on toast with the child Grace in his lap, her steel and leather leg brace hanging from the back of the chair.

I combed out horse manes with a stolen lady’s brush; then Bob rode in at sundown, breaking through river cane, green circles under his eyes and dust and chaff in every wrinkle of his clothes. He told us to saddle up, so we did. And we walked our horses up to Coffeyville, Kansas, arriving at two in the morning.