My brother stayed in bed with Pearl for most of the afternoon and he said afterwards he unfolded a newspaper on the floor and scraped the mud off his boots with a coffee spoon and his second cousin walked naked in the room with Bob’s pistol and holster slung low on her hips.

He asked her, “Suppose I put an outfit together like your daddy Cole did. How would it be if I was the foreman?”

She stooped to look in a bureau mirror and brush wisps of hair from her cheeks. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Poor old Grat, he’s dumb as a salt lick and knows it. He can’t even count to ten on his fingers. Emmett isn’t but eighteen and he’s always watching to see what I’ll do next; he’s not all that independent. I think I have to be the top candidate, and that’s without boasting. I’ve got the brains and I don’t get rattled and I don’t have hardly a vice except for stealing horses and this. Down deep a man knows what he’s best at.”

Pearl unbuckled the holster and tied on a robe. She pulled a brush through her hair. “Do you think I’m pretty, Bobby?”

He looked at her. “Sort of.”

“I don’t consider this sinful at all. This is what I was raised up to do.”

After that, Bob and I returned, to Wagoner where Grat was minding the stolen remuda. I wanted to bring the batch distinction before we sold it, so I convinced my brothers that we should raid Bob Rogers’s pastures for all his prime stock and racers. We saddled up at midnight and drove our winter haul of animals down a mud road in the rain. Young William McElhanie and Bitter Creek Newcomb had hired out to us by then and they kicked off with Bob and me to bring back what we could with lariats, while Grat squatted in his slicker with the twenty horses and made coffee for our return.

It was not a warm night. The rain hit our hats like pellets. But Bob managed to set fire to a cigar, which was merely occasional with him, and he sucked it down to a nub before we got to the loam where horses were walking in that absent-minded way they have, like they didn’t notice the thunder-showers. My brother and I herded them toward McElhanie and Newcomb with dangling lariats that we slapped now and then on their rumps.

The horses spraddled out and then they collected and threw conniptions when McElhanie noosed them. But we got them out of there somehow, separating the choicest from the swaybacked and lame, and drove them with whoops and kiyi’s back to our other remuda.