Nevertheless, we stayed on in Claremore for the winter, pitching a Confederate tent outside of town. Grat had ceased being a deputy marshal after a letter of reprimand signed by Judge Isaac Parker was mailed to Grat’s office in Tahlequah, and he frittered away his time while Bob and I kept the peace. He bought a pint bottle of whiskey every morning and leaned on a pool cue most of the afternoon and every night about ten you could hear a ponk as he smashed his empty against a headstone in the graveyard. Bob would rent a surrey to take the quarter-breed girls to a slow river where he catfished, or down the road to the shanty of a squaw who told fortunes by burning hair. And I composed two pages of love letter with each noon dinner, mailing the envelopes off to Miss Julia Johnson with the address spelled in a careful hand of brown ink. The snows came and we hunted quail and jackrabbit. Grat chopped wood for a laundry in town and I was a regular at the feed store pitch games, the only one of us three that the locals accepted. Bob read the newspaper in the barber shop as well as the weekly Police Gazette. He wrote an eight-page letter to brother Bill in California and got one back of sixteen.

“Come west, young man,” my brother Bill wrote. “The women here are flaxen-haired; the fields are gold with ambrosia. You can smell the eucalyptus trees and watch the sun extinguish itself in the ocean.”

Our quiet served to distract the citizens from the true Dalton occupation; for we were stealing ponies piecemeal from the Cherokees and mixed bloods, collecting another tidy remuda that we’d already tagged for Kansas. We prowled at night in the snow and had some twenty good horses by spring when everything that was called Indian Territory—except for the reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes—became Oklahoma Territory.

That was in April of the year 1890. There were exploding anvils and barbecues and prayer groups giving thanks for hard-won civilization, and Bob and I visited a bordello run by our second cousin Pearl Younger, daughter of Cole Younger and Belle Starr, who took Bob upstairs for free because of the kinship while I stayed in the sewing room with a prostitute of fourteen who sat in my lap in a chintz rocking chair and listened to me talk about Julia Johnson. That is not me being fanciful either.

“How does she wear her hair?” she asked. “Does she have ivory barrettes? That’s what I’m saving for. A man promised me two but then he got the lumbago and it kilt him.”