I didn’t say anything more. I just petted her hair until my brother came up, and then I rode off with him, pushing the animals pretty hard. Then we let them tarry on the road but I still didn’t say diddily-poop to my brother Bob who always got what he wanted. He knew what there was to be quiet about but he said at last, “How was it?”

“She fixed it all right,” I said.

He crossed his arms on his saddle pommel and we heard the mutter of a rainstorm somewhere in the distance. He said, “Emmett, you’ve got no idea how your life is going to improve. Pretty soon you’re going to have any woman you want. You’ll come back to your hotel room at night and they’ll be standing at your door. They’ll steal handkerchiefs from your pockets and buttons off your coats and they’ll write you letters pleading for locks of your hair. Wait a month and you’ll see. You just can’t conceive of what it’s like to be famous. That’s how special it is.”

And he was right. I couldn’t conceive of it.

Miss Moore had the gumption to steal six horses from her hated father, and the five of us stole our clothes. Bob used the keys the general store owners in Gray Horse had given him when he was the Osage police chief and he opened the front doors one night and the Dalton gang bumped into each other in the dark, hardwood aisles, pulling starched white shirts out of blue boxes mailed from Chicago, wadding and throwing out odorous long underwear, slinging striped pants and checked pants and corduroys on our shoulders. We skimmed our sweat-browned hats to the floor to try on white round-tops, black slouch hats, and bowlers, derbies, muleys, silk top hats, and tan stetsons with indented crowns. Powers buttoned a cable-knit sweater over a vest and blue flannel shirt; Broadwell wore an ankle-long gentleman’s coat over a sheepherder’s tweed; Grat stood his stiffened jeans against a corner.

From another store we got saddles: not just Texas working saddles with the leather soiling black and the lead wearing through the horn and the ties forever breaking off like shoestrings, but Mexican saddles, five of them, with stirrups of plated silver, all sturdy as pews and deep as trousers, with roses and tulips hand-tooled at tree and hindbow and side bars, and this leather so soft it was slow to recover from the prod of a finger. They creaked with the newness like boats and hinges and snow at ten below zero. I never felt so regal.