That was summer 1889. And it was summer too when Grat was caught by a rancher named McLelland, moving among his bunched horses with rope leads and tack and the squint of a stock show judge. McLelland and two hired hands tried to take Grat into jail but they found he was hard to wrestle as a piano and lashed him to a McCormick reaper until they collected more company. They then tied Grat face down on a shaggy, swaybacked mare and he spit at the men and hollered like Satan and one of the Cherokee dropped off along the trail, he was so spooked.

“I’m going to put an end to this rustling,” McLelland said. “And a deputy marshal! I can’t believe it! What I ought to do is take an ice pick and scar your face like Cain.”

“I’d catch your children skipping home from school and break off their teeth with a chisel.”

The rancher looked so horrified my brother smiled and rubbed his nose on the horse’s hide. “Never mind what I say, McLelland. It’s just talk.”

When Grat didn’t return with the animals to our morning fire, Bob and I took off after him and caught up with the McLelland party while they were still a few miles out of town. They were too many for our guns, however, and we weren’t yet too inclined that way, so we hung back like wolves and skulked around the jail house the whole three months Grat was locked up.

Grat would sway at the bars, grating his belt buckle against them until the jailer had to hold his ears, and Bob and I would plunk ourselves down in the hard wooden chairs of the office and shine our badges on our pants legs. I’d write in a ledger the name of every man who walked through the sheriff’s door. If they sat around drinking coffee, Bob would say, “Isn’t there something you could be doing?” like he was a government inspector. He got a letter from Marshal Jacob Yoes, Grat’s superior, asking, “What’s going on over there?” And Bob sent back a long document stressing constitutional guarantees.

Soon after that Grat was set free without a trial and with the prosecutor maintaining that no one had mustered real evidence that theft had been intended. It would seem that we had survived the arrest, but it cast suspicion on the Dalton brothers and resulted in the dismissal of Bob and me from the Osage Tribal Police Force by the scrupulous merchants of Pawhuska.