My wife left with a dishrag she’d wrung out and I took the oaken stairs up to my locked study while a musician named Fernando lugged the combo’s drums out to a school bus. I used my key and closed the study door behind me and stood in a dark brown room that smelled of old newsprint. I sat at a library table with maybe fifty books about the Dalton gang marked with yellow paper scraps or weighted open with bricks. Framed under glass on the walls were browned reward posters, red-and-blue billboard paste-ups for some of the Dalton movies, and three newspaper front pages dated October 5, 1892. In one mahogany cabinet were magazine articles, mostly false, and in the other I had the more reliable files of Deputy Marshal Christian Madsen, manila envelopes once wrapped in twine and printed on each a name: Broadwell, Bryant, all four Daltons, Doolin, McElhanie, Eugenia Moore, Newcomb, Pierce, and Powers.

I switched on a study lamp and opened a cardboard box containing the clipping file on me. I unfolded my pocket bifocals and hooked them on an ear at a time, just as my brother Bob had when he said, “I can see clear to Nebraska with these.” Then I sat in a stuffed chair for most of an hour, turning the pages over onto the carpet after I’d read what they said.

I heard my wife’s high heels in the hallway and turned to see Julia in the room, a cup of hot milk and a saucer in her hands.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“There’s still a girl asleep on the floor of the bathroom and a barefoot man at the piano playing ‘Swanee’ with his left hand. The houseboy’s taking care of them.”

“Was I missed?”

She smiled. “They make allowances for you. They think you live in a foreign country. A reporter asked about you.”

“Did he use the word ‘truculent’?”

She ignored that and said, “There’s a young man here who’s read your book,” and in the doorway there appeared a boy in a green zigzag sweater and a white shirt with the collar spread out to his shoulders. I put him at twenty. I said, “What do you want?”

“I’m not sure. I drove all the way from San Bernardino.”

I flicked my hand out. “Drive all the way back.”

But Julia said, “You could at least visit for a minute, couldn’t you, Em?”

The boy stood next to the coat tree with a tablet in his hand. “I read your book,” he said. “It’s fascinating.”

I removed my bifocals and pulled up from the stuffed chair with pain. “Do you want to see my gun? I’ll show you my gun and you can go back to San Bernardino and brag in some soda shop.”