Then my brother and his fiancée retired to a blanket by the river. She lay between his legs and scratched her name into his stomach with the fingernails she’d grown for him. And Bob sat up on his elbows in the autumn leaves and said, “You know, when you think about the kind of prig I was as a kid, it seems peculiar I ever got into stealing. I wanted to be a saint back then. I wanted to be as great a lawman as Pat Garrett, as noble as King Arthur’s knights. I don’t know where those notions went but I think they’ve vanished forever. Thievery isn’t my vice anymore; it’s my habit.”

Eugenia smiled and drew a valentine heart where his heart was, her chin on her other fist. She said, “Same here. I can’t look at a hundred-dollar horse without thinking it’s mine by default. As a girl I used to see handsome men I wanted and I’d wonder how they could possibly consider themselves married to anyone else. Whenever I walk through a store, I see thousands of exquisite things that I’m sure really ought to belong to me, and it’s as if I owned them already.”

They were quiet in the dark. The river moved. She said, “Chris Madsen once arrested me and asked how an educated lady could ever involve herself with rustling. I didn’t really have an answer.”

My brother said, “You should’ve told him the temptation was very strong.”

I don’t think they slept a wink that night because the two of them were walking in the trees when Broadwell shook me awake for the dogwatch at four. I cooked some coffee and hunkered down in the chill under the sickle moon and I shivered there with my rifle against my cheek until I could hear the roosters crow on the farms.

I walked among the men in the bedrolls, kicking them in the feet. Powers jerked up with a gun in his hand and looked around at the morning. I cooked bacon in an iron pan and made another pot of black coffee and observed Eugenia kneeling in front of Bob sticking a brown mustache and fancy goatee to his face, and holding a mirror up. “I look Shakespearean,” he said.

“At least you don’t look twenty-two.”

My brother Grat kept scowling and chewing his bacon as she worked on him and he merely glanced at the mirror and scratched his face when he saw the dark mustache and side-whiskers they call muttonchops, which, Colonel Elliott later claimed, “gave him the look of an ancient pirate.”