Bob said, “We were fifteen kids on a hardscrabble farm near Belton, and then again near Coffeyville. The barns leaned; snakes slithered under the porch; rats went into a frenzy every time I walked in the corn crib. In March the winds would strip off the roof, nine or ten shingles a day. My sisters used to have to walk four miles to town for sale merchandise marked down from three cents to two. My dad was not a good provider. He tended a saloon; he swapped horses for the Army; he worked as a carnival barker and played square-dance fiddle, a nickel a set. It brought in hardly nothing at all. One winter we got so poor I had to wear my mother’s high-button shoes. And I can remember one time watching my dad talk with two livestock buyers at the gate. They wore black wool coats and round-topped gray cropper hats and when they leaned in their saddles their big irons showed. Years later, when the James-Younger gang got shot up on the Northfield, Minnesota, raid, my dad said at the dinner table, ‘Well, I guess now I can say it. Those men you saw were Jesse James and Cole Younger.’ He put his thumbs behind his suspenders and grinned like he was the richest man in the world. I think it was then that I decided I wanted to be somebody people remember, and not some no-account fool sawing a fiddle for nickels or wearing his mother’s high-button shoes.”

Bob got up from the bed and squatted by the fireplace to pour more coffee into his cup.

Eugenia said, “One morning I looked in the mirror and saw lines around my mouth. It didn’t take any more than that.”

6

THE DALTON GANG STAYED in Silver City all of that summer and as long into the fall as our money held out, and Bob and the woman known as Eugenia Moore were together everywhere. They stood in front of the grocery store with the children and watched the circus parade and touched the nose of a camel. They sat on the blue lawn to the side of the moveable schoolhouse and heard a piano recital. And they got the photograph taken that is still around today: of Bob looking teenaged and haircut and stern in a smallish pink-striped tan suit and wrinkled white collar; of Eugenia Moore posed standing, her left hand on his left shoulder, she with a nineteenth-century woman’s hat and six yards of blue dress with a white frill of a blouse sleeve and collar showing; and neither of them facing the camera, both a little annoyed, as though the photograph was merely historical documentation and one of the obligations to their biographers they wanted done with soon.