That wasn’t much of a blow because the federal government was still anxious for trained deputy marshals in the territories, so Bob simply transferred operations to Claremore in the Cherokee nation. There my brother and myself tried to make good and clean up our besmirched reputations, but Bob set out after a drunken Indian named Alex Cochran, who’d gutshot a deputy marshal, and accidentally fired his rifle at Alex Cochran’s son, striking him so hard in the back at two hundred yards, it looked like the boy had been hit with a shovel.

We gingerly walked our horses to the body while the boy’s mare looked down at her rider and then began chewing ditch grass. Then my brother discovered that the violent man he’d been pursuing had no more size to him than a smallish paperboy, and Bob moaned, “Oh my God,” and jumped down from his saddle. The bullet had nearly degutted the boy. Bob tore off his shirt to pack him in and rolled a saddle blanket in under the boy to heft him up. The boy was puking blood on Bob all the way in to town, and soon every Cherokee there knew about it.

Bob sat gloomily on the stairs up to the doctor’s office while I watched the surgery and handed the old man his sponges and clamps and silver tools. In the streets people talked among themselves and pointed at my brother, and twenty Indians stood on the porch across the street from Bob, staring and threatening and keeping their hands on their pistol grips. A girl in a gingham dress stood on the sidewalk and said, “A man paid me a nickel to ask you a question.”

Bob hardly lifted his eyes.

“He said to ask if you were the same Bob Dalton who gave Charlie Montgomery not the chance of a suck-egg dog.”