I had the alias of Charlie McLaughlin when I worked on that Skiatook ranch; Broadwell was Texas Jack Moore again, and Powers was calling himself Tom Hedde, after a local badman he had a resemblance to. It was unbelievably dull work. I’d be in a saddle under an unpleasant sun sometimes seventeen hours a day, sore in the crotch, perspiring, walking my horse among hundreds of Hereford cattle. Their hides were glossy with sweat and their white eyelashes opened and closed on bluebottle flies, and incapable steers would keep climbing up on heifers until I kicked them off, raking my spurs on their pink nostrils if I could. I’d look across a panorama of heat wave and dust and dry yellow grass and see Broadwell in his dust goggles and his red bandana over his nose, dragging a wide-looped lariat, and Powers would have a brown-stained sombrero off and canteen water dripping from his hair, and the cattle would ruminate and stare as if I were the least challenging example of God’s creative imagination, and I couldn’t hardly believe that I’d ever robbed a train or scared any of the brave, stout hearts of the West. I forgot my fears and my arguments with Bob that quick. And I canceled out everything Julia had said. I wanted to be a dangerous man again.

Bob stayed quiet in the two-storey house near Hennessey. There he and Eugenia had a milk cow and three chickens and zucchini, green peppers, and corn in a garden marked with string. He walked the plant rows in the hot sun, sloshing water from a bucket, a soaked bandana tied to his head, while Eugenia sat in the shade of an elm tree with a wooden butter churn.

Then my brother Bill rode out to visit, bringing along a newspaper he’d picked up at a barber shop. He drank whiskey and water on the front porch swing while Bob read an account of an outlaw gang that had walked into the town of El Reno and robbed a bank in broad daylight. It had been ten in the morning and the streets were crowded with wagons and surreys, and women walked from window to window in their bustles and parasols, but the bandits strode right in and the wife of the bank president fainted and the gang remounted their horses with ten thousand dollars in a satchel.

When the article stated the outlaws were presumed to be Daltons, Bob slapped the newspaper down. Then he and Bill walked with their heads down and threw apples against the barn wall and made plans that they discussed with Eugenia as they washed and dried the supper dishes.