MUCH OF WHAT I know I owe to the letters Eugenia Moore and I exchanged during my first years in prison. Mine to her were unsigned and brief as the notes on Christmas cards, all mailed to post offices in small towns I’m sure she never lived in. Her letters back were long, nine or ten pages of history and recollection that I marveled at. She wanted to know everything about my brother Bob before she met him in Silver City, New Mexico, and she supplied me with stories about him thereafter.

I once wrote Miss Moore, “Horse stealing was how we occupied ourselves in 1889 and 1890,” and then rambled with suspicious detail for seven pages of cramped pencil writing on prison stationery.

She replied, “It seems rather headlong, doesn’t it.”

Rustling, it was called, and it paid well. A brood mare might fetch forty dollars, a gelding fifteen, and we could stay in hotels with plumbing and spend on ourselves like faro dealers. So we kept on as pretty good lawmen but at night we picked the hated Indian ranchers to pieces. We’d rope a stray or hobble the last of a string of ponies and generally take what we could without risk. The more comfortable white ranchers we’d deprive in a larger way, opening up corral gates sometimes and simply stampeding the stock.

For example, once on a bitter February morning, the three of us rode up to a ranch before daybreak. Bob stayed in his saddle on the road, like a general, hunched out of the wind in a white slicker and blowing on his fingers. Grat broke through crusts of drifted snow as he walked through a skimpy windbreak of fall-planted trees: apricot, apple, and pear. It was a plank house with mud mortar and a sod roof. There were yellow stains in the snow where the woman had thrown out a slop pan. Grat pressed his bare hand to the frosted window till the glass was glass again and spied through it. Red burnt logs were fizzing in the fireplace. Man and wife were asleep in twin beds. He waved his left arm up and down and I scurried out of the barn with rope halters and a feed bag of oats, my hat squashed down with a wool scarf for my ears.