Eugenia rode out of red and yellow trees in buckskin britches and a sheepskin coat and a dark brown stetson with her blond hair pinned underneath it. She looked like a boy of sixteen. Bob smiled at her. “You’re great.”

Then the Dalton gang jogged along Onion Creek at 8:15, thudding and clanking like cavalry. Broadwell put on his dust goggles. Powers was so quiet you’d forget he was there. Grat gouged out some earwax with a toothpick and said, “When I was crossing the desert rattlesnakes struck at my stirrups and spiders drank from my eyes as I slept. I pried a tooth out with a dinner fork. I don’t think I can be scared anymore.”

“That happens,” said Bob. “I saw a soldier who was scalped and left for dead by the Sioux. Nothing else could ever touch him after that. He walked around like he was asleep.”

I unbuckled my saddlebag and handed my binoculars in their leather case across to my brother Bob. He hung them over his neck and they were later claimed by the undertaker W. H. Lape. Black crows picked their steps in the yellow corn stubble, and freshly shocked corn stood shredding brown in the fields. I heard the hound’s groan of a windmill.

Just then James Brown’s ten-year-old daughter was riding a barebacked mare to the schoolhouse in Coffeyville, and she saw six horses and riders ladder up the bank under a rickety bridge of curled boards. She followed close after us with her books strapped in a belt but turned east when we missed the shortcut.

In Coffeyville, Charles Brown, a shoemaker of fifty-nine, re-hung the big wooden boot on the signpost in front of his shop. Next to the sidewalk was a bare, twisted oak tree enclosed in a square picket fence that he swept around with a twig broom. The mechanic George Cubine, thirty-six years old, Brown’s partner, stood with his shoulder against the doorjamb, a coffee cup curling steam in his hands. He smiled. “See any evildoers?”

“Nope,” said Brown. “And ain’t that a cryin’ shame?”

Young T. C. Babb peered in the window of Mitchell’s restaurant and saw Charles M. Ball push an unfinished bowl of oatmeal away and put a dime on the table. Babb was crew-cut and twenty years old and worked only part-time at the Condon bank. Ball was the cashier. They walked across Walnut Street to the bank and Ball opened the southwest front door with two keys. “What was it again you had to get done?”

“Oh, those government checks to the Indians. What a pain.”

Ball kept the shades drawn and walked to the vault room and stood there watching the hands on his pocket watch until the safe’s time lock clicked off at 8:30. Babb slammed record books down on the counter. “That time lock’s quite an invention,” Ball said. He snapped his pocket watch closed.