I woke up to the whispering of doctors and saw my bloody, sopped shirtsleeve being cut up the seam with silver medical scissors. Blood from my wounds traveled twenty-five feet across the floor. Wells had called in doctors G. J. Tallman and W. J. Ryan to assist him in what looked like four hours of surgery, prying out buckshot and tying my lower guts together, and amputating my arm. They had buckets of water under the table to splash their instruments in, and Dr. Ryan walked up the stairs with a bone saw he was wiping with alcohol.

I said, “I’m gonna keep my arm. This arm is gonna stay.”

Dr. Wells said, “It’s badly smashed. You won’t even be able to pick up a pencil with it. And the chance of infection is enormous. The poison will shoot straight up to your brain.”

“If I’m gonna cash in, I want to go to the grave in one piece.”

The doctor named Tallman continued snipping my shirt away at the collar. “Let him keep the dang thing. Let the arm rot off. It’s better than seeing it pickled in a jar at county fairs for the next twenty-five years.”

I kept sliding in and out of wakefulness, but mean, thumping pains, like your fingers slammed in a car door, were with me constantly for a week. I remember hearing the clink of instruments and Dr. Wells’s voice on the wooden stairs as he argued with a shoving crowd that wanted to lynch me. He convinced them that I was already dead and he was just filling out coroner papers, and suddenly it was late afternoon in the room and a cool sheet covered me to my chin and I saw vomit on my shoulder and felt a puddle of it next to my ear on the table, heard it dripping to the floor, and one of the deputies was frowning, a rifle crossed in his lap. He said, “You’re making a mess of yourself.”

I could see the alley still but now there were two thousand gawkers walking the scene like it was a crowded museum, all of them brought in from Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma on special half-fare railroad excursions. Bob and Grat and Broadwell and Powers were piled on the dirt floor of the city jail with stiff erections and fouled clothes and hundreds of blowflies walking all over them, so visitors could hunch at the barred windows and poke the bodies with sticks and John Tackett was already developing the pictures that would become three kinds of post cards.