The gang passed a dairy barn of mortar and stone and the cheese factory where a boy was shrugged under the weight of two sloshing milk cans. Soon thereafter I could see white church spires over trees piled with colored leaves and rattling under them was a maroon carriage with fancy gold trim containing Mr. and Mrs. R. H. Hollingsworth, who later swore that we were six, not five, that our appearance was peculiar, and that we were heavily armed. Grat and Broadwell swept off their hats for the missus and bowed low on their steeds. Two brothers, J. M. and J. L. Seldomridge, approached in a weathered gray wagon with crates of white hominy and onion they were trucking to Sedan. J. M. was blowing his nose in a brown handkerchief and did not recognize me because of my beard. He stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket and knelt on the box seat to stare backwards at us. He shouted, “Hey, which posse you with?”

Powers turned in his saddle and glared and J. M. sat down in his seat facing front.

They too claimed there were six.

It was only when we got to what was known as the Hickman property on Eighth Street that Eugenia kissed Bob on the cheek and wished us good luck and skirted her horse south through yellow bars of light in the trees. The sixth man has ever since been a mystery, becoming at various times Bill Doolin, whose horse at the last minute came up lame, or a Coffeyville hoodlum named Alley Ogee, or a gabby liar named Buckskin Ike, or Caleb Padgett, who made that confession from his deathbed in 1934. The sixth man was a woman named Eugenia Moore, who stood her horse at my brother Frank’s grave in the Elmwood Cemetery and walked down the rows reading headstones with her hands in the pockets of a man’s sheepskin coat.

20

THE DALTON GANG LOPED our horses along Eighth Street with our gear slapping and clanking and the road loud as wood under the horseshoes. There were houses to the right and left of us with women in aprons at the screen doors, shading their eyes, and a man in suspenders in a backyard with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, and a small boy in short pants and a lunch box, kicking a tomato can down the sidewalk. We were still two and three in formation, with Bob and me to the front, as we crossed the street where the limestone Episcopal church was. A girl sat on the board sidewalk in a yellow dress, staring at us as she yanked up her stockings. Our coats skirted up off our holsters and the Dalton gang was riding hard to Walnut Street when Bob pulled his horse to such a stop it almost sat down. The four of us stopped with him or circled our horses around until they quit and road dust drifted over us.