Bob hammered the door to the Farmers’ Home on Eighth Street, a hostel no bigger than a camera store. I could see the owner sleeping with his wife in a brass bed in the dining room, saw him scrape a match and feed it to an oil lantern and spread the window curtains apart. What he saw was a hulking young man with a dark, brooding look and my black pistol cocked and pointed at his eye.

He opened the door to Bob Dalton, who pushed in followed by Powers and the rest of us, stamping our boots on the rug, opening cabinet doors, letting a water glass roll off the table and crash loudly to the floor.

The owner’s wife was sitting up in bed, drawing a sheet up over her nightgown. I’d only seen her before with her hair braided and circled on each side of her head like earphones. Now it frayed long over her shoulders. Bob sat on the bed and bounced it, squeaking the springs. He smiled at her. “Am I a figment of your imagination?”

The woman cooked supper and the cleaner four of us used the bathwater in a single wooden tub, and then we slept on iron bunks in the rear of the place, an hour of nightwatch assigned each man.

I woke up at noon to see Bob on the striped mattress beside me, the very same on which I would lie dying in something short of three months. He had a tin cup of coffee and the Coffeyville Journal, the Stillwater Gazette, and the Kansas City Star, each spread open to the story of the daring train robbery at Adair. I got up on an elbow and he handed me a small, handwritten, railroad poster that was torn where the tack holes had been. Dated yesterday night and rushed out to every depot in three states, it said the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway Company would pay five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of each of the masked men engaged in the robbery, to an amount not exceeding forty thousand dollars. (I have that poster on file.)

Bob grinned at me as I read it. He said, “Forty thousand dollars. That’s the largest reward ever put on the heads of an outlaw gang, bar none. And that’s not mentioning the offerings attached to us still from California and Wharton, Leliaetta, and Red Rock. I am impressed as hell with myself.”

I groused, “Well I’m plain, flat-out tired of trains. I don’t want to hear one word about them. What would make me darn impressed with myself right now is if I was to interview and land a two-dollar job digging sump-holes, or filing nails to a point, or stacking canned figs in a grocery store. I’ve had a bellyful of excitement.” I plunked the newspapers onto his mattress.