When I woke up again it was morning and I was on the mattress in the Farmers’ Home that Bob had slept on after the Adair train robbery. If I lifted my eyes I could make out strange faces at the mullioned windows behind me and children squealing that they wanted to see. And next to me was Julia Johnson in a black lace dress, a white handkerchief clutched in her hand, and she was like a woman with an appointment; she’d marshaled herself into something as crisp as the snap of a closed pocketbook.

I said, “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

She glanced across the room to where Sheriff Tom Callahan sat in a split-bottom chair reading a stack of newspapers Colonel Elliott had brought in.

I noticed the headlines and said, “I went and done it, didn’t I.”

She whispered, “Emmett, please don’t make me cry.”

“I do love you,” I said. “I mean that. I think you were what I wanted all along.”

She stared at me without emotion for a minute. She said, “A newspaper reporter stopped me before I came in here and asked if I was your sweetheart, and I realized that I was nineteen years old and your sweetheart is all I would really ever be; that’s as important as I’d become.”

Sheriff Callahan pulled up from his chair with the newspapers under his arm. “I think I’ll stand outside for a while.”

She waited until he was gone and said, “I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll stay with you as long as I can and I’ll wait for you, no matter what happens, because that’s what sweethearts do. I love you too but I’m property and I’m not used to that feeling yet.”

I couldn’t think of an answer. I said, “I don’t have anything more comforting to say, Julia. My brain’s empty.”

“You’re very tired,” she said.

I closed my eyes and she petted back my hair and I woke with her gone and strangers in plow coats and yarn shawls and bonnets filing past the window, buttons scraping on wood.

I asked the sheriff, “Can you turn this bed around?”

He saw the people staring down at me and thought it over for a minute.” I don’t see why the hell not,” he said.

Not only that, he put the bedposts on bricks so I would be raised up a bit, and after that you just had to stand two-by-two in the dining room to walk by, and railroad men would sneer, “You’re not so tough now, are ya?” and glum women would freeze me with scowls and pray that God have pity on my soul, and a man leaned on his fists at the foot of the bed to tell me, “This is the Lord’s way of saying, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ ”