The older girl said, “Just don’t tarry,” and Bob walked his horse down the back stairs and through the staked vegetable garden.

My brother Grat was released from jail the next morning and the Elevator for May 8th used our language, explaining that there was “no evidence implicating him in the horse-stealing business.”

Grat walked out of town with his hands in his pockets. He could stand incarceration better than any man I’ve ever known. Parker had executed many rustlers in his past but Grat never suspected evil until he saw it plain, and all the time he was in jail he’d make gurgling, strangling noises whenever one of his keepers walked past, and he fashioned a hangman’s noose out of torn strips of his bedding and wore it under his collar like a necktie. And it was closing his collar still when I clambered up from under the bridge with a horse and a mule on a leash.

He whispered, “You better skedaddle, Em. I bet the law is trackin’ me.”

“I already checked. There’s a boy with field glasses in a Cottonwood tree staring at us right now. Don’t turn around.” I gave my brother a big-bore Colt Dragoon wrapped in a gun belt and said, “You’re supposed to ride north to a train depot and use the ticket to California I stuck in your saddlebag. Bob sent telegrams about you to Littleton and Bill, and here’s fifty dollars expense money, but that’s the bottom of our funds.”

Grat legged up onto his saddle. “Where will you boys be?”

“We’ve expanded operations, Grat. We got ourselves a gang now. Newcomb, Bryant, McElhanie. We’re traipsing off to Silver City, there to recover our lost kingdom.”

Grat smiled with all his brown teeth. “Kiss me an octaroon whore if you can.” Then he throttled horse and mule into a jog.

So Grat left the state unscathed and the Dalton gang rode the railroad tracks through Arkansas and the badlands to the New Mexico Territory, stepping our horses off the roadbed and down into bramble to watch the big locomotive engines and the smoke-blackened cars pass by, waving our hats at the passengers in the windows.

The gang moped into Silver City hunkered over in our saddles, our slouch hats yellowish with the dust and brown about the sweatbands. We all wore big red neckerchiefs and hide chaps and slickers that used to be white. A boy who was pumping water in a horse trough ignored us and I knew it was my kind of town.