“Come on out with your hands up.” “Why don’t you come in for coffee and we’ll chat?” Lindsay opened the screen door and Bill ducked next to the black stove and the posse in the backyard saw a drape thrown aside as Bill crouched out through the open kitchen window. They shot everything they could at him and window glass shattered and sash wood flew and bursts of paint flakes floated with gun smoke in the breeze as my brother jumped down, somehow unhurt. Bill ran toward a ravine but tripped on a rusted spade and he bent to catch the ground and then Marshal Loss Hart aimed a .44 caliber slug that slammed into Bill’s kidney and exited big as a coffee can at his heart and my brother fell dead as a tire in the weeds, scattering grasshoppers. He was displayed in a coffin covered with window glass at a mortician’s parlor in Ardmore until he was badly decomposed. Spectators journeyed by train from everywhere and stereoscopic pictures were made and thousands of people crowded the street in front of the mortuary so they could file past and solemnly stare at the last of the notorious Daltons.

22

SEVEN WARDENS OVERSAW MY years at the Lansing penitentiary and I surprised them all with my quiet. There was a riot over bread pudding that I refused to participate in. There was a hullabaloo when some prisoners released all the cell doors and escaped up an elevator shaft, but I spent the night on my bunk in my private cell, reading The Virginian. My reward was that I became the first prisoner under sentence of life allowed jobs in town as a trustee. And in 1907, when Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state, I was pardoned after service of less than fifteen years by Kansas Governor E. W. Hoch.

I was thirty-five years old and gimped in the leg and I needed work pretty bad, so I stayed with a family in Bartlesville working as a hired hand on local farms, chopping weeds and baling hay and riding the spring-iron seat of a reaper. And nights and Sundays I courted Julia Johnson just as I had as a boy. I’d sit with her on a porch swing and play my Harpoon, or I’d stroll downtown with her to see a nickelodeon film about vaudeville or train robbery, and at noon she’d ride through the corn rows on a mare and I’d sit against a fence post in blue bib overalls, eating apple slices off a knife blade, drinking lukewarm tea from a jar, grinning at my boots while Julia talked.