But rustling Bob Rogers’s stock ruined us in the territories. He was an Indian thin as a pick handle and a man to scrimp and rage. He slept so little he never took off his clothes and usually just closed his eyes for three or four hours in a straight-back Shaker chair in the dirt-floor living room. That night he woke up about three-thirty and stood in the kitchen doorway mixing piss with rain and gazing at his mower and walking plow and the horses that were standing asleep by the feed trough. That they’d wandered down seemed odd to him, but then he squinted hard and saw how many he was missing, pulled up his right suspender strap, and got the loaded cap-and-ball pistol from the pantry. He walked barefoot in high weeds to the fence and took hold of the tail of the one sprinter Newcomb had left him by mistake. Then he started tracking us.

Newcomb collected twenty dollars from Bob and shoved it into the bottom of his boot and galloped back to the Turkey Track ranch for chores. McElhanie tried to stick around but Grat kept glowering at him, so he rode to Annie Walker’s tent camp to free-lance under the name of “The Narrow Gauge Kid.”

We sold half the bunch in Columbus, Kansas, a dozen miles northwest of Baxter Springs, where we loitered like punks, whittling a café’s chair legs or sitting in the saloon throwing peanuts at farmers or just straddling our horses and pointing unloaded guns at all the children.

He didn’t need the bother of being a deputy marshal anymore, so Bob resigned from the Wichita court the next morning with a letter he wrote four drafts of, appending to it a list of grievances, of which most dealt with money. My heart sank when he gave the profession up since my job depended on his and I guess I’d always believed the rustling was just another form of prank that I could give up further on when paychecks became more regular.