“Why? Because you’re wanted men? Because this makes me an accomplice?” I couldn’t see her eyes well enough to know if they carried tears but there was a pitch of anger in her voice, and she chose her words with care. She said, “I still care about you, Emmett. I know that doesn’t matter much to you but it’s more than enough for me.”

“You know what I heard about you? I heard you’d taken up with a farmer who honks when he laughs, and with a cowhand forty-five years old who calls you Daughter all the time.”

“They just live at the house. They’re boarders.”

I stared at the road and watched my horse twitch his right ear free of flies. I said, “What’s that mean when you say you care about me?”

She said, “I suppose it means I’m going to be steadfast. I’m going to be the girl you send pictures to and visit when you’re in the neighborhood, the girl who pines away at night and will probably soon be bereaved.”

My brother Bob rode over and she pulled her high-headed mustang around and galloped home in her brother’s clothes. He called hello to her but she didn’t answer; then he signaled the gang out of the trees. “You get everything squared away?”

“Everything is just grand, Bob. Thanks for asking.”

The gang sashayed across the Caney River about a mile away from the posse and we got into no trouble at all. Then we split up. Grat and Doolin went southwest to summer at Cowboy Flat; Pierce and Newcomb returned to Bee Dunn’s Rock Fort at Ingalls. Bob walked his horse off to Hennessey, where Eugenia had set up housekeeping again after her return from Silver City, New Mexico. Broadwell and Powers and I headed south for a bunkhouse at Skiatook, near Tulsa, where we could cover as hired hands and I could salt my money away for my South American fantasy.