It was not difficult tracking in the soft earth, and within minutes the vigilantes were close enough to hear the splashing of horses that were led by a rope. They intercepted him at a beaver dam. He was still up in his stirrups and looking around like a tourist when the town sheriff yelled, “Reach for the sky, Dalton!”

My brother Grat shaded his eyes to look at the posse. He smiled and said, “I never been so embarrassed.”

5

SO GRAT WAS ARRESTED once again in territory under the purview of Hanging Judge Parker, his former boss, and my brother Bob and I went into hiding in the Ozarks near the Cookson hills. Reward posters were printed with faces not to our likeness but with the Dalton name bold enough, and newspapers carried slipshod accounts of Grat’s capture, characterizing us as “treacherous, renegade lawmen.” What all the publicity meant, naturally, was that we had to disappear from the territories, and that we had no influence with the judicial branch anymore; if we wanted brother Grat released, we needed to collect a gang.

Newcomb was the first. George was his given name, but I rarely heard it spoken. His nickname came from the lines of a song that went, “I’m a lone wolf from Bitter Creek and tonight is my night to howl.” He had an alias of “The Slaughter Kid,” having assisted the popular ranger John Slaughter in Texas for a while. He was five-feet-two inches tall, the shortest cowboy I ever knew, and women thought him pretty. He had a sunburnt nose and a carrot-red mustache and goatee, and brown freckles everywhere. He usually kept a plug of tobacco big as a baseball in his cheek, and he’d broken his knuckles so often in fights he could hardly close his hands. Newcomb was unschooled but he could spell his name and he’d spend nights around the fire carving it into his belts and holster, little pigtails of leather curling from his trench knife as he worked. Late in the evening he’d walk off into the wilderness where he’d close his eyes and stand with his hands behind his back, smelling the air. His best friend was the horse-racer Charlie Pierce, who was then dealing stock for Annie Walker but would sign on with us a little later and die with Newcomb on the Bee Dunn farm in 1895.