Then my wife and I stood on the platform between cars as passengers got off the train at the depot. A soldier in brown embraced his girlfriend, a mother with a pheasant feather in her hat straightened her boy’s belt and tie, and a farmer in blue bib overalls stared at me from his bench. John Tackett sidled along the train in his white flannel suit, then discovered our Pullman and saw us and reached up to pump my hand. “Golly, it’s great to see you two again! This is a red-letter day!”

He helped Julia down on the porter’s step stool and then I climbed down to the step stool and cinders, using my left leg, and I was introduced to A. B. Macdonald of the Kansas City Star, a man my age in a gray serge suit and a camera case looped over his shoulder, his eyeglasses reflecting white in the sun. He asked, “Is this Julia, the sweetheart of your boyhood you talk so much about in your book?”

“This is she,” I answered, patting her wrist like a doddering fool. “Did you ever read Longfellow’s Evangeline, that wonderful story of how a woman followed after the man she loved, searching for him all her life, from girlhood to old age, and the beautiful words of the poem: ‘Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion, list to this mournful tradition.’ Remember those lines? I committed them to memory when I was in the state prison. Well, all that Longfellow said of Evangeline’s love and devotion I can say about Julia’s. I owe all that I am to her.”

My wife had the grace to seem flattered by that sentiment, and it was printed verbatim in the next edition of the Star, along with everything else I said during that long afternoon. A hotel limousine carried us to the Eldridge House, passing under a banner that welcomed my wife and me, that swelled and subsided with the winds. And we were shown to the Governor’s Suite, where lunch was wheeled in on four wooden carts. My wife and Macdonald huddled together, discussing the schedule for that day and the next, Julia canceling the more rinky-dink affairs with a simple cross of her pen.

John Tackett dearly loved playing host, and he entertained us with stories through most of the meal. He said, “You know what I was ruminating about this morning? About how it was when you and me casted that movie about the raid.” He turned towards Macdonald. “There must’ve been a hundred boys in audition, each of them scowling worse than the one before and shouting bandit talk as they waved two pistols around, and every one of them giving Emmett scared looks as he sat there in a theater seat putting check marks next to their names.”