Three black workmen were prying loose the bricks of the plaza where they’d buckled up in front of the Opera House and the Eldridge House, and the hitching rack was torn down in a mess of disrepair.

“Ain’t this a pisser,” said Grat.

One of the black men leaned on his pick. I said, “I guess we call it a day and go home, huh Bob?” But my brother was already wheeling around and he kicked his horse back to Maple Street and swung south and our horses jostled to follow him. Left on Maple was the office of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and the Davis blacksmith shop where a man was banging iron on an anvil. He did not look up as we jogged our horses past. We turned left into a wide alley of cinder and dirt that ran east and west between Maple and Walnut streets, with the Long-Bell lumberyard along it quite a ways. An oil tank wagon with a dark brown workhorse team belonging to the Consolidated Company, later Standard Oil, was parked up ahead in the alley and near the city jail halfway up there was a stonecutter who was tilting a rock curb up, examining it, and cracking it back down. Otherwise the alley was empty and it was 9:30 on an autumn Wednesday morning in 1892. The sun was yellow and warm, and leaves were burning not far away.

Bob tied his horse to the pipe that was the top railing of the hitching rack at the rear of Police Judge Munn’s lot, which was brown with cornstalks and braced tomato plants that had burnt up in the sun. The rest of us got down too and the horses cropped grass as we strode east in the alley, not speaking; Grat, Dick Broadwell, and Bill Powers in front, Bob and me after, five Winchester rifles loose in our arms and the gang dressed in black hats and silk-trimmed black coats and trousers as fine as you wear with tuxedos.

Aleck McKenna was in a denim apron smoking a cigarette under the rolled-down awning of the McKenna and Adamson store to our left. He looked at us as we walked into Walnut Street and he later claimed he recognized Grat by his slouched walk, but he just stood there then, holding his elbow. Dray wagons were slanted up to the hitching racks of Union Street and a woman in a white bonnet walked down that board sidewalk from Barndollar’s store at the corner to Brown and Cubine’s shoe shop where a bell rang when she opened the door. Cyrus Lee chopped an ice block in the back of his wagon and shouted small talk to a man in Slosson’s drugstore to my right. Lee ceased stabbing his ice pick and frowned at my artificial beard.