McElhanie winked at Bryant and they scrabbled up the mountain for an hour, arriving at our camp in a rain. Our tents were in a green clearing in a greener forest. There was moss on all the trees. Bitter Creek Newcomb had already come and was off somewhere with the horses; I was squatted down at a fire that was mostly blue smoke from the weather, an oil slicker draped over my head and an ancient Colt braced on my knee to point in their direction until I recognized them. Then I rose up and holstered my pistol and said, “You two are slow as the mail.”

The two men covered their saddles with a tarp and slapped their animals into clover. McElhanie fired three shots into the air and I grudgingly put a can of water in the fire for coffee. Soon Newcomb clopped out of the woods on my stolen Morgan horse, a currycomb still in his hand. He was grinning and hallooing. He slid from his mount and shook their hands and the four of us joshed and heckled and carried on around the smoulderings. The rain fell thin and straight as fish line. Bob rode in after sundown, doubled on his horse with a half-reformed whore and spiritualist named Kate Bender who hugged him under his coat. He grinned at everybody and Bryant cooked a slab of ham that we ate with refried beans and pan bread.

Then we washed out our mouths with moonshine from a jug while the woman talked about how she communicated with Jesse James in the murky other world. She looked at our palms and felt the lumps on our heads and predicted ailments and satisfactions; and she dangled a witch’s thimble over our hands to see if we’d become rich and if we’d get Grat out of jail.

Bryant wrapped a scarf around his face and came over to watch her work on Newcomb while my brother crouched close to peer at the thimble and thread. Bob said, “I bet I’ve met a hundred witches in my travels. Chickasaw woman I knew could throw her hair on a dead lake and largemouth bass would jump for it. Saw a gypsy down in Tulsa who could drop hailstones in her mouth at dawn and spit ’em out unmelted after noon. Walked into a tent at the Bailey circus in Joplin, Missouri, once and walked out with memories I never had: mumps in Rhode Island, white sailboats in Norfolk, Virginia; a fat Cree squaw nursing a striped coral snake at her breast. Returned me to Scripture, that did.”

Bryant said, “It’s the devil’s work, sorcery is. I’m not surprised at anything.”