At Elmwood Cemetery I stopped first at my brother Frank’s gray stone monument and then strolled under the shade trees to the potter’s corner next to the railroad tracks. The burial plot was marked by white-painted stones at each corner, and my simple granite slab with three names chiseled in it lay hidden in deep blue grass at the head of the common graves. Tackett stole a red-flowered wreath from another plot and Macdonald wanted to photograph me placing it near the headstone, but instead I leaned against an elm tree and bent to light a cigarette with a match, and when I lifted my head Macdonald was standing across from me with his pencil in his pocket. “You miss your brother Bob a lot, don’t you.”

“I miss all my brothers.”

“But Bob especially?”

I squinted from the cigarette smoke. “I miss the past,” I said.

Julia and I had room service breakfast the next morning with Tackett and Macdonald and three representatives from the Chamber of Commerce who wouldn’t let go of my hand once they shook it, plus two other surprise visitors, Charley Gump and Jack Long. Gump was seventy-seven years old, a dealer in secondhand parts for motor cars, a lean, bald man with a dark mustache and eyeglasses with black circle frames. He seemed pleased as Punch just sitting with me on the sofa, and he was quick to show off the mangled scar on his thumb that my dead-eye brother gave him when he swung around at the First National Bank and blew his shotgun to smithereens. Then blond Jack Long, a stout and cheerful man who was by then in his fifties, spouted about leaning on the porch railing to stare at the Condon bank until I punched the windowglass with my rifle and yelled, “Get away from here, son, before you get hurt.” Then Tackett told the men, “It took three doctors to dig all the buckshot out of Emmett’s back. I stood over Emmett, fanning him with a magazine during the whole operation. He told everyone his name was Charles Dryden and wouldn’t admit his real name until they dragged the bodies of the gang upstairs so he could study their faces and allow they were dead.”

I managed to smile at most of the stories but finally I stopped listening. I put on my bifocals and sat under a lamp with my legs crossed, and I saw my company only when I licked my thumb and happened to look over the top of my newspaper.

There were photographs in it of yesterday, of me with my hat in my hands and my head bowed, praying for the souls of my brothers, and another of me with John Tackett in the hotel dining room, examining the chamber of my pistol, and a third of Emmett Dalton astride a dark horse in the woods of Onion Creek, “where the raid was planned.”