GRATTAN DALTON HAD BY then arrived at my brother Bill’s wheat ranch but he did not stay long. His sister-in-law complained of him, as did brother Littleton’s wife, so he packed a duffel bag and moved to the Grand Central Hotel in Fresno where the furniture was not so frail and he could poke three-dollar whores in his room and drink until his forehead struck the table.

His occupation was gambler in those days. He would sidle up to strangers in the bar, anyone with striped pants or checkered vest, and he’d be amiable for about an hour, grinning with brown teeth. Then Grat would haul the man to a gaming table where he cheated brazenly, like it was cards of a higher intellect he played. Those who argued with his calls he glowered at until they got up out of their chairs and departed. He bashed one man in the head with a cuspidor, then dragged him outside where he slammed the man’s mouth against a wood curb. The man rolled bloody but the teeth stayed there. Looked like someone had dropped a white bracelet. The bartender, Patrick J. Conway, Grattan’s sometime friend, made sure the fearsome story got around and my brother’s winnings improved measurably. Grat paid Conway ten percent.

But my brother began to notice a hotel resident who sat in one of the Queen Anne chairs and smoked a long cigar down to a stub each night, watching Grat at five-card stud. He was a large man with a black mustache and a face made ugly with brown cancers on his cheeks that were eating into the pink. They were wet and he dabbed at them with a handkerchief. He lived not much longer than Grat did.

One evening the man put a penny down and picked up the Fresno paper and read it front to back, twelve pages. Then he folded it and slapped it down to the floor and walked over to Grat’s empty table and sat down. Grat was shuffling cards.

“What game is it you’re playing, Mr. Dalton?”

“I know ’em all. What’s yer pleasure?”

The man smiled and leaned forward with his hands under the table. Grat felt the barrel of a pistol punch him hard in the crotch. He groaned and snatched for the gun but the hammer clicked back.

The man said, “Woman once asked me what that felt like, getting punched like that in the oysters. I said it was close to having your eyeball poked with a spoon. Is that pretty accurate?”

Grat pushed away from the table an inch.