Then I was alone in the house except for my sleeping wife, and I sat at the foot of our bed in the dark, smoking down a Camel. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and hung my suit and shirt on hangers. And I looked at my back in the long door-mirror, at the eighteen wicked scars of double-ought shot that were like cigarette burns on the skin, at the scar on my hip left by a rifle slug, that still registered rain and cold and too much time in my shoes with twinges sharp as cat bites. I peeled away a yellowed square of gauze taped to my festering right shoulder and squeezed a cream medicine from a silver tube into the ugly red eruption of skin, the result of a rifle shot that shattered the bone when I was twenty years old, that is still uncured forty-five years later. I tore the paper wrapper off a clean bandage and fixed it on. I buttoned on pajamas and tied my robe and with a glass of water swallowed three pills from three bottles, then carried my wife’s cup and saucer downstairs to the kitchen sink where I left them for the maid.

And I stood in the living room next to the movie projector with its motor switched to reverse. I lit another cigarette and waved out the match and squinted through smoke to see the film collect off of the take-up reel, but after several hundred feet I stopped the machine and flipped the switch from rewind to forward and turned on the projector lamp, so that I could view my nickelodeon film: Beyond the Law, a movie starring me and written by me, produced by myself and John B. Tackett, adapted from the reminiscence I serialized in Wide World magazine. Tackett and I toured the country with it in 1918 and made a boodle of money even though it was pretty awful. I’d stared down dangerous men in my time but I was scared in front of Tackett’s camera, the scowliest character ever on film. I flung my hands around, I slapped my shooting iron out of a polished black holster, I dressed like a buckaroo; and I was forty-six years old in that film, not the boy of my adventures; I looked ridiculous. Tackett was a fine showman, however, and he’d stand on movie-house stages in strange cities to deliver a stirring narrative about the Dalton gang, what trains we robbed and the way my brothers blazed to their deaths, ending with a list of the men we murdered:

“Charlie Montgomery, bushwacked over a woman. Then a Wharton ticket agent. Bill Starmer, after stealing his horse. Marshal Ed Short in a railroad car. An innocent bystander named Dr. W. L. Goff. And on a sunny morning in October, Lucius Baldwin, Charles Brown, George Cubine, and City Marshal Connelly; all of Coffeyville, Kansas.”