Miss Eugenia Moore left Silver City that Sunday afternoon in a buckboard and team she rented but would never return. Her valuables were in hatboxes. She stopped at an abandoned squatter’s shack and put on a blue cavalry shirt and tan suede trousers and wore a headband without a hat. She clucked the team along a vacant road that went toward the Oklahoma Territory, and stopped for two men who were standing by their horses, rolling cigarettes with a bag of Bull Durham tobacco. One was Blackface Charley Bryant, the other Emmett Dalton. My arm was in a sling and I winced whenever I moved. I climbed up to the front with her while Bryant lay down in the back and smoked.

I said, “Bob and McElhanie have the pack mule and six hundred dollars. They’re heading west by train to my brother Bill’s place near Paso Robles, California. He said he’ll send for you when he’s established out there. I’d be with them except I got torn up by a greasy Mexican. Got me in the shoulder.”

Eugenia frowned sympathetically. “Anyone else would be flat on his back right now.”

I didn’t say anything. I merely stared at the blank terrain as we jostled east toward Jim Riley’s isolated ranch where the three of us would hole up that winter while Newcomb went back to his homestead claim near Guthrie.

I slunk down in my coat that night with my shoulder nagging me with a pain as sharp as the squeal of a saw blade finding a nail in the board. I couldn’t catnap; I couldn’t imagine the pale, naked women I’d seen on McElhanie’s deck of playing cards; all I could do was remember the smell of the oiled gun stock against my cheek and the blue glint of my rifle barrel as I swung it at the rearing horse of the man with crossed bandoliers. And it only struck me then, in that complaining buckboard, what scary things these outlaw notions were. Besieged as we’d been it seemed the most natural, sensible idea in the world to aim a shot at the throat of a man I had no argument with minutes before, and my finger sought the trigger with no more heed than you’d give to an itch near your eye.

I looked at Bryant who was hunched next to me then, driving the team, slapping the reins on the rump of a horse while Miss Moore curled in sleep under a blanket pulled out of a hatbox. And for want of conversation I said, “Where the bullet went in you can see blue and red and a smatter of white which is bone. I think it’s going to scar up real good.”

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