It was Thursday evening of our third week there and I was speaking on subjects I knew nothing about to an audience of Bob and City Marshal Ben Canty, when the woman walked into the restaurant. Canty had a mouthful of boiled potatoes but put them out onto his spoon and stood with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar. “My, what a pleasant surprise,” he said.

The woman walked over and smiled. She said, “Hello, Ben,” and that sort of thing, shook the hands of the two Dalton boys, and spoke with me about Cass County, Missouri, where Bob and I were born and where she had her early raising, and where they say she’s buried now. Bob let me talk, as was his custom. He sat back in his chair with a toothpick in his mouth.

Eugenia Moore was her alias; she was baptized Florence Quick. She was five-feet-nine inches tall and twenty-five years old and wore her blond hair in a bun. She was brown-eyed and pretty, if somewhat boyish, with teeth so white it looked like she’d never drunk tea. She had a sultry voice and a sturdy, broad-shouldered body and breasts that were not large; her hands were strong and branch-scratched and calloused; she chewed her fingernails down so close to the quick they looked like cuticle. When she wasn’t in boots she was barefoot, but that evening she was wearing a white calico dress with ties on the sleeves and looked more like a lady than she was. She’d been to Holden College and she taught school for two years and there was a lot of that in her speech; when she didn’t hear what was said completely, she’d say, “I beg your pardon?” She had blond bangs that she kept brushing with a finger as she talked. She said meeting us was a pleasure and glided away to sit at a smaller table by the burlap-curtained front windows. Her face was brown from the sun.

Bob leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of his chair, staring at her. He seemed about to speak and then thought better of it. He stood from the table, bumping it, and to Canty said, “Excuse me. There’s something I wanted to ask her.” Then he walked over and straddled the chair opposite her.

“Looks like somebody’s in love,” Canty said.

I said, “He’s going to wind up in bed with her tonight. It always happens that way. You wait and see.” I cut my steak up into forty pieces and then I added, “Dang it.”

Bob asked her if he could join her and she nodded her head. He said, “You’re really Florence Quick, am I right?”

She said, “You may be. Where did you hear it?”

“That’s the least interesting thing I could say.”