So we were no longer peace officers when we urged our stolen remuda down the main street of Baxter Springs with bamboo fishing poles. We were grubby and unshaven horse thieves whose saddlery creaked from the rain. Grat was riding drag, Bob and I were middle and front, and we’d whipped the mustangs around a corner when we saw a posse of mixed bloods climbing out of their saddles. And carving his sprinter’s hoof with a pocketknife was Bob Rogers in his oily shirt and chaps and his hair rolled under a red neckerchief. He no sooner saw us than he snatched up his rifle and tried to blow off our foreheads. But I had shouted “Look out!” and wheeled my horse, and Bob spun around stropping the stolen horses sharp and hard with his bamboo pole. They bolted and collided and pounded up on board sidewalks and Rogers’s shots only smashed windows.

Bob and I bent for the wheel-rutted road out of town, lashing our horses with leather reins. The mud flew up like shoes. Before we were out of range, though, one of Rogers’s vigilantes got off a shot and the bullet chipped off part of the right ear of my horse. The blood carried back like a streamer. We had no more than six miles’ distance from the town when my horse played out and all I could think of was a rustler who’d been caught by some Indians and cut up by squaws to the size of trout fillets. Then out of the blue came a farmer with a team of hairy Morgans and a wagon and I lost no time in lifting my heavy six-shooter in both hands.

The granger was narrow and buttoned-up and he obeyed like a weakling pupil while Bob unhitched a Morgan and led it over to where I could cross over from my sagging horse. Then we put spurs to our horses and plodded heavily toward the trees and got away clean.

Grat was not so lucky. After Bob had stropped the horses with his bamboo pole, Grat took to a back alley at a gallop, kicking a garbage pail that rang and spilled behind him. He stopped his horse to hook a ladder that banged down and threw a pursuer’s horse on its neck. Then Grat pushed his mount through yellow weeds tall as its belly until he was on the cinder siding of the railroad tracks where he tied a rope lead to the two stolen horses that had trailed him and continued down the bank to a crooked stream that was swelled brown with spring rain.