I hung my coat on the hall tree and heard Bob and Grat whispering in the front room so quietly all I could make out were the consonants, the k’s and p’s and t’s. It was like hearing a fire snap and hiss and fall apart in a far-off kitchen stove. I walked into the front room. Grat said, “I believe that’s what I’d do,” and Bob shoved past me into the kitchen and let slide out of its brown suede case a Winchester 1866 carbine that was then called The Yellow Boy for its brass. He slammed the back door behind him.

Apparently Minnie had crawled out through her window and plunged through cornfields to Seymour’s in her Sunday dress in order to deliver a warning to her lover.

I asked, “What’s Bob going to do?”

“I make it a point not to meddle,” said Grat. And I sat in a stuffed chair ruminating, staring at the coffin, while my brother snapped cards over into an upended hat.

I fell asleep shortly thereafter and woke to see Bob in the kitchen, opening pantry doors and closing them. He got a handful of oatmeal cookies and piled them on the kitchen table where he was cleaning his unused rifle. I straddled a chair and ate one.

“The lovers flee,” he said.

I brushed cookie crumbs off my shirtfront. “How does that make you feel?”

He oiled the trigger mechanism and ignored me until I left.

Simon’s funeral service the next day was fairly well attended. Children scrunched at the house windows, staring in, and farmers stood reverently in the yard while the minister read from the Psalms in the front room. Then participants and grievers alike mounted buggies and buckboards and clucked their teams in a slow walk to the Elmwood Cemetery and a plot next to Frank’s where Grat had dug the grave himself, swinging a pick so hard the ground chipped up like arrowheads.

There was a lunch at a neighbor’s farm and then Bob rode with Grat into the Coffeyville business district to help him lay in winter supplies. They bought deviled ham and raisins and boxes of dried figs to stuff in their saddlebags, and flour and lard and beef jerky to store in the Tahlequah office. Then Grat threw up his arm in a wave good-bye and Bob crossed Union Street to have his boot heel restitched by Mr. Brown.

Bob put a penny down for a paper and saw Charles Montgomery walk into Rammel’s drugstore and walk out again with a paper bag. He was riding a horse with the Ted Seymour brand. Bob read the newspaper through with coffee in a café. The Kansas State Grange and Patrons of Husbandry were meeting in Olathe, it said. Ted Seymour had taken his wife with him to the Armour stockyards in Omaha.