Also from the Turkey Track ranch was Blackface Charley Bryant, the victim of a freakish gunpowder burn that he explained in a varied way every time the question came up. A third of his face was pale and handsome but the rest was a mottled patch, blue as a bad tattoo, with dark hair emerging from it so that he had to shave clean up to his left eyelid. It made him keep to the night and the darker corners of a room; it made him standoffish and resentful. He wore his coat collar up and his slouch hat down and he rested his blistered cheek on his fist whenever he sat down at the table. He was mean and stubborn and possibly insane. He once snapped the little fingers of a prostitute just for entertainment. Except for Bob and Grat, I never met a man who wasn’t afraid of Blackface Charley Bryant. He hardly spoke at all to me. Maybe he knew all I’d do was stammer. Bryant rode three days to get to the Ozarks, pulling a mule with beans and flour and baking powder and cured ham folded up in a tarpaulin, and, at a windmill where he’d stopped to water his animals, he was joined by William McElhanie.

McElhanie was a loudmouthed straw-haired boy, one year younger than I was, who’d been working from a saddle since he was six and therefore limped a little, both legs. He considered himself successful with the ladies and bragged that he’d raped two Choctaw squaws and a Mexican nun and a nine-year-old colored girl, but that is likely bandit talk he’d encountered in magazines. He wouldn’t’ve had a chance of staying on with us except that he worshipped Bob Dalton and my brother was coaxed by the attention. Sometimes Bob was all McElhanie could talk about. He shifted his holster to duplicate Bob’s; he watched how Bob cut up his meat; he traded a box of bullets for one of Bob’s shirts and never took it off for a week. He once said to me, “You know what I just asked Bob? I asked him who was his most respected American—so I could read something about him? Bob said the American he respected most was Alexander Hamilton. That just illustrates how smart Bob is. I never even heard of Alexander Hamilton. Nothing gets by your brother.”

McElhanie and Bryant rode into the Ozarks until they saw a fat woman with her hair pinned tight, slopping a pen of shoat pigs. She told them she’d seen two strangers yonder on higher ground, and that they had a string of ponies with them.