Bill stayed on after the others left and straddled the split-bottom chair and stared at me and leaned to slap my face. “You stupid idiots. What in tarnashun am I going to do for a living? Huh?” He bit his lip and slapped my head again.

“Cut it out,” I told him.

He said, “I’m glad they’re dead. I am! You ruined me in California and now you’ve ruined me here and, by God, that’s the end of it.” He stood up and kicked the chair away and stalked out in his three-piece tweed suit.

On October 11th, I was slid onto a stretcher and transported in a locked Santa Fe express car to Independence, Kansas, with an escort of six deputies, Sheriff Callahan, Chief U. S. Marshal William Grimes, and twelve railroad detectives. My brother Bill accompanied me and sat on a safe smoking a cigarette that he stubbed out when I asked for a drag. On meeting Grimes, he shook the marshal’s hand and said, “Extraordinary job of police work, sir. You had them every step of the way and they knew it. They got just what they deserved.”

My trial was five months after the Coffeyville raid. My brother Bill hired a smart attorney named Joseph Fritch who pleaded me guilty to the second degree murder of George Cubine, and as he expected, Judge J. D. McCue of the Montgomery County District Court dismissed the other charges of bank robbery and murder. Because of my comparative youth, Fritch predicted ten to fifteen years, the minimum penalty for second degree, but the Dalton gang was too famous for that and I was sentenced to life imprisonment at the gloomy Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, which is halfway between Kansas City and Fort Leavenworth.

I was twenty-one years old and still on crutches when I hobbled into prison and a foul, stinking, four-by-eight cell. I wore a black-and-white striped uniform and cap and I was made a tailor in the prison, a trade I’m still good at, and I worked nights on a prison education, studying difficult books in the library until I could make the sentences out, copying down words I didn’t know. I scrubbed the floor and walls of my jail cell with ammonia and kept it obsessively neat: a safety razor next to my shaving mug next to my hairbrush next to the pitcher. I spent my twenties and thirties as a stoic, devoting the last hour of each night to Bible study, and my only true entertainment was the mail from Miss Eugenia Moore.