The gang made Kansas by dusk of the next day and Coffeyville at midnight. This was practice, a trial run, Powers’s and Broadwell’s first real acquaintance with the town. We broke our horses out of a trot when we entered the Coffeyville city limits and walked Eighth Street past the Farmers’ Home into the downtown business district. The street lamps were lit at the corner of each block and Ozark breakdown fiddle music was coming from the Masonic Hall at Maple and Ninth Street, but it was quiet and black otherwise and Bob had some trouble making out structures. Out of a sock in his saddlebag he got some reading spectacles I’d never seen him wear before and he hooked them on an ear at a time. “I can see clear to Nebraska with these.”

He stopped his horse in front of the Opera House and said, “We’ll wrap the reins over this hitching rail. That puts as in striking distance.” Then we followed Bob in a walk around the west side of the Opera House past a short alley that no longer exists, that’s now filled by the Chamber of Commerce office, the side limit of that alley being the rear of the two-storey Luther Perkins building which was narrower in front than back because of the angled convergence of the side streets of Walnut and Union, the resulting trapezoid considered as baffling an architectural wonder in the Sunflower State as the Flatiron Building was to New York. It was an 1890 construction, the pride of the town, as fussy and gimcracked as wedding cake, and occupying its front windows and first floor was the C. M. Condon and Company bank.

I sat down on the porch under its tin awning while the other four in the gang walked across Union Street, Bob whispering names and instructions in a voice so low I couldn’t hear him three feet away. I read that the façade of the bank was designed by Mesker Brothers of St. Louis in 1887. The red bricks between my boots were manufactured by the Coffeyville Vitrified Brick and Tile Company, no date. Left across Union Street and hardly a spit away from the Condon’s southeast door was the plate glass window of its rival bank, the smaller First National, which Bob and I would take.