My notes to her were brief, two or three sentences about what I’d heard of the outside, how prison was, how much I used to enjoy those nights at Big Jim Riley’s ranch when we would smoke cheroot cigars in her blanket-hung room; but she’d respond with nine or ten pages about the past, putting down everything she could recall. At the end of one of her letters she wrote, “I keep wanting to ask if you’re lonely, if you’re unhappy, if there’s anything you regret, but those seem such melancholy questions I’m a little ashamed of them. I suppose you are lonely, because I am. I’m lost without your brother Bob. I feel like a vacant house.”

A letter I mailed to her was never answered and another I sent was returned, so I thought she was worn of me until I heard that she too was dead; that she’d walked out of a muffling snow and into a bank in Wichita, Kansas, and demanded the cash drawer from the teller. She got away but she was shot from her horse three miles from town at the start of a blizzard. And when the posse walked up to her she was coated in white except for the splash of her yellow hair and the snow-flakes melting into her open brown eyes.

I don’t know if I ever swallowed that story. It seemed a fabrication as likely as that empty grave she arranged for herself in Silver City, and though some have claimed the real Florence Quick was laid to rest in a plot in Cass County, Missouri, I think of her now as alive somewhere in Texas, teaching arithmetic to children, and married to a brakeman on the railroad.

And my information is just as scant about the Doolin-Dalton gang. I heard that my brother Bill had put his law books down and gathered, together with Bill Doolin, Bitter Creek Newcomb, and Pierce, one of the largest gangs that ever scavenged in the West. And in early 1893, they chose to announce the corporation by robbing a train at Wharton, just as we had. But soon Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, and Bill Tilghman were assigned to head up a manhunt employing one hundred and fifty deputies, and the Doolin-Dalton gang didn’t last long after that. They divided in March of 1894, my brother to wander into Texas where he picked up a scrub gang of his own, Doolin to stay on in the territories with a gang that was picked off one at a time by the law.