I remained a cowboy through August and most of September, and Bob and Eugenia vacationed on their stolen money. They watched the sun go down from the porch swing with their coffee cups and saucers in their hands. They lay on top of clean linen sheets and saw the morning sun whenever a breeze pushed the bedroom shade. He told her again about the thousand longhorn cattle they’d have on the ranch in Bolivia or Argentina where pasture grass grows so high it tickles your chin. She told him about the white plaster walls and the red tiles on the floor and the orange flowers in vases of crystal. She told him she’d wear a sun hat and carry an easel down to the beach where she’d paint pictures of the surf and sea gulls and South American fishing trawlers.

They picked green apples from the trees behind the farmhouse and they made love in the cool of the morning and night. And he smoked a pipe of Danish tobacco on the sofa while she read him poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

“ ‘Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ ”

Eugenia closed the book. Bob blew pipe smoke and sat there.

18

I THINK THE INFORMER was Bill. I think he rode down to Cowboy Flat, fifteen miles southeast of Guthrie, and talked with Doolin on the stoop of the Fitzgerald bunkhouse with tin cups of whiskey in their hands.

It would have been night and the wind would have smelled like cattle and they’d talk about partnering in an outlaw gang, the Doolin-Dalton gang. My brother Bob’s plans for Coffeyville, Kansas, would be somewhere inside of that. Doolin would glance at my brother and act like he didn’t hear what was said about the two-bank job and he’d stand up to piss into pigweed, but before the month of September was half out, some cowboy with green scales on his teeth and a smell strong as turpentine would tell Marshall Jacob Yoes some of Doolin’s gossip about how it was with the Daltons and banks.

Yoes took it kind of personal that his bank was being considered and he printed the man’s words on yellow tablet paper and mailed a letter to Chris Madsen in Guthrie. “What do you make of this?” he wrote. Three cases of government issue rifles were shipped to the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store in Coffeyville, and a dozen men wasted the last of September and October 3rd and 4th clicking magnets together, picking through plumbing supplies, expanding and closing monkey wrenches, while they stared across a brick plaza at the Condon and Company bank.