Julia and I were married in Bartlesville in 1908 and two years later I was hired as a special officer by the Tulsa police department to scare off the worst of their badmen just by letting them know that one of the legendary Dalton boys was around. Then my wife and I moved west to Los Angeles where John Tackett and I filmed Beyond the Law and Julia and I had picnics on the beach after Sunday church services, and she’d lift her dress to wade out into the ocean while I sat on the sand in my suit and tie and watched children pay nickels to ride a horse in a roped circle next to the parked Ford Model A’s.

The movie got me script work in Hollywood and it resurrected my name and I traded off that as a real-estate broker and building contractor in the California land rush. I hardly needed to advertise. Smiling loan officers would stand up from their desks whenever I walked into the bank and otherwise self-possessed businessmen would sit enthralled at lunch while I storied. I made more money on one Los Angeles suburban development than I did in all those rustling and train-robbing years in my past, and I deposited it in the construction of a white stucco house much like you see among the parvenu down in Argentina, with red tiles on the floor and a paddle fan overhead in the billiards room and orange flowers big as a child’s face edging the pebbled driveway.

And not long ago my wife and I returned to Coffeyville, Kansas, for a second honeymoon. John B. Tackett invited us back and the Chamber of Commerce provided tickets to a first class Pullman on the Union Pacific’s Zephyr service east. So I spent three days at a club car window smoking cigarettes and staring out at badlands and hard-up farms with rusted machinery on cinder blocks, and at hired hands who would still stop their trucks and stand on the running boards to watch a train go by. Then we took the southbound Santa Fe and I sat in the morning breakfast car with Julia, gazing at Kansas wheat fields that were green as a child’s green crayon. A porter rolled a luggage cart down the aisle and said, “Coffeyville, next stop.” I poured coffee and slowly stirred sugar in with a spoon, and for some minutes Julia and I sat there in silence like a couple growing dead from a very long marriage, looking out the Santa Fe’s windows at leaning barns and a rusted Model T next to a lug-wheeled tractor, then at a white water tower and grain elevators and the tin-roofed warehouses of Coffeyville.

She smiled across the table at me. “Think your hometown’s changed much?”

“Oh, I suppose. Seems like everywhere you look it’s the twentieth century.”