The cook put their suppers down on the tablecloth like she was irked, slopping beef stew out of my brother’s bowl, ham and split-pea soup out of Eugenia’s, with a basket of hot buttered biscuits between them.

My brother stared and stared at Eugenia’s soup. “Can I have that?”

“You’re smitten by everything, aren’t you.”

“Can I trade? I suddenly got this craving for split peas and ham. I don’t think I could stomach beef stew. I think it’d just lump up in my cheeks.”

There was such an appeal in my brother’s eyes that she passed her bowl across to him and he grinned around his soup spoon.

She asked, “Do these cravings come over you often?”

“Yep. Usually get my way too.”

I didn’t overhear all of this, lest you think me a sneak. Some of it I got later from Bob and some from Miss Moore’s letters to me at prison. Canty consumed two pieces of apple pie and I slumped across from him with my cheek on my fist. He scraped the plate with his spoon, glancing in their direction. He said, “They sparked right off, didn’t they?”

“I can’t figure it out.”

“I’ve seen ladies stir for gamblers, pimps, every kind of sinner. Seems to me the best sort of woman likes to be tainted a bit.”

Canty and I left the restaurant and I spent two hours in his office flipping through his brown photographs of outlaws hauled in dead by bounty hunters and leaned stiff as planks against jail-house walls.

My brother and Miss Moore remained in the restaurant until closing. Bob sat back in his chair with a toothpick and listened to her tell all she knew about the Daltons, which pleased him. Her information was substantial. Then the cook yanked shut her burlap curtains and Bob paid the bill and took off his boots and wool socks to walk barefoot with Eugenia on dirt streets as soft as talcum. They sat in deep blue-grass under mesquite trees beside the Mexican Catholic church, drinking rum from a hammered silver flask.