Then Amos Burton hitched a team of four horses to the wagon and left. Grocery boxes squeaked against each other; bottles clinked on the bumps. Broadwell and Powers watered and shoed Dan Quick’s horses while Grat and Bob and I took turns sitting under the freckled shade of a poplar with a bed sheet under our chins and a soap mug, black strop, and razor in our laps. Eugenia rolled up her dress sleeves to give us haircuts with scissors and comb. She brushed the snippings into paper bags she’d lettered with our names and she and Bob sat at a three-legged table out of the sun, gluing hair onto linen for imitation mustaches and beards.

Bob said, “We’ll have a hacienda with paddle fans on all the ceilings and hired women to iron the sheets and important men in white suits and Panama hats will wait on the verandah with teacups and secretaries while you and I sleep in the afternoon.”

She smiled. “You should see your eyes sparkle.” She pressed a goatee to his chin, then took it off and trimmed it. “I want you to look like Sir Walter Raleigh.”

19

SOON AS IT WAS dark enough, we saddled our horses and took a road to Kansas that was baked hard as adobe. The sumac leaves were bright red, the maple trees turning orange, and the farmers were burning firebreaks and weeds and scrub timber so a blue haze clung to the earth. I could smell leaf smoke in my shirt. I rode quite a ways with my arm up to my nose, intoxicated by the scent.

We made the P. L. Davis farm on Onion Creek by middle afternoon of October 4th. Broadwell cut the barbwire fence with nippers and then tied the horses under box elder trees while Powers and I snuck through Mrs. J. F. Savage’s corn patch stuffing husking ears in our shirts.

The gang ate supper on saddle blankets, not saying a peep to each other, and we were still awake at eleven when Bob knelt by a small corncob fire to draw the city streets again for Broadwell and Powers and Miss Moore. Then my brother emptied his pockets and dropped into the fire a bill of sale, a solunar table, and a business card with a calendar on the back. Broadwell had letters from his Hutchinson, Kansas, home in his saddlebag and these he burned one by one so he couldn’t be traced back to them. I used a penknife to pry a locket photograph of Julia from my watch fob and I saw it curl black on the embers. It seemed a solemn occasion until Eugenia performed, amidst guffaws, the dolorous farewell letter she’d sent to Bob via Silver City, which she then tore up and let flutter away from the fire on the wind so it could be found and puzzled together.