Meanwhile there was talk about forty Dalton sympathizers riding into Coffeyville some night to free me and burn the town down. Someone in Arkansas City, Kansas, wrote a letter that was mailed to John Kloehr and said: “Dear Sir: I take the time to tell you and the citizens of Coffeyville that all the gang ain’t dead yet and don’t you forget it. I would have given all I ever made to have been there the 5th. There are five of the gang left and we shall come to see you some day. That day, Oct. 5, we were down in the Chickasaw Nation, and we did not know it was coming off so soon.” And so on. Some cowhands got a little drunk and condemned the murder of the bank robbers and they were jailed. Some boys from Guthrie called themselves “The Dalton Avengers” and barged through town pushing tourists off sidewalks, shouting cusswords at the defenders, and they made such a nuisance of themselves that they got beat up in a side alley and one boy went home via stagecoach with thirty stitches in his head.

But Emmett Dalton was still the big show in that town and I hear the line of mourners and curious waiting to gaze at me snaked west on Eighth Street, then down Maple to Death Alley, which it is even now called, and down past the bent-pipe hitching rack to the jail, like I was a Hollywood premiere or Jesse James on his white satin funeral bier, and I wished my brother Bob were alive instead of me because I knew that he’d love that; how he’d love that. It would have been a discipline for him not to smile.

That night Eugenia Moore sank the springs of my bed when there was only a kerosene lamp in the room and the sheriff was gone somewhere. She still wore her greased wing chaps and a sheepskin coat that smelled of leaf smoke and horses. Her face was streaked with dirt and her hair strayed over her eyes as she reached to remove a cool washrag she must have pressed to my forehead.

“How’d you get in here?” I asked.

She smiled briefly. “I snuck in. I thought I wanted to talk to you but I guess there’s really nothing to say.” She folded the washrag and dropped it into a white ironstone basin and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to know that you were all right,” she said, and then she got up from the bed and walked out of the room, spurs clanking.