William Marion Dalton was six feet tall and twenty-eight years old in 1891, seven years older than Bob was, two years younger than Grat. He’d married, in 1883, a rich girl from Merced County named Jenny Blivens, daughter to a reaper. Bill was a happy man with a quick wink and a slap on the back and a memory for names, a man with blue eyes and great political ambitions and a chin beard like the martyred President Lincoln. He could talk like an editorial and he was as well-liked in Clovis and Paso Robles as the class clown in a boys’ school. He considered railroads the enemy. They were the “they” in all his sentences. He’d been the campaign manager for Ed O’Neill when he won the job of sheriff for Fresno County on the anti-railroad ticket; and he was the boy-I-never-had to the respected criminal lawyer T. W. Breckinridge.

He had both those men and their wives over for a dinner of roast pork and rhubarb pie; then he kissed his children in their beds and sat in the front room with his friends and smoked green cigars while the women washed the dishes and sang hymns. The men discussed a try for the seat in the California Assembly. Bill could run as a Democrat or as a Populist, with the likely financial backing of Adolph Sutro, the railroad pamphleteer. My brother Bill rolled the cigar in his mouth and listened to himself being praised.

Then Mr. Smith of the Southern Pacific knocked warily at the door and stood there all shoulders and eyebrows when my brother Bill opened it. Bill grinned at him. “You a voter?”

Mr. Smith identified himself and Bill joked that he’d let him in anyway and the chief of security sat to the front of a pulled-out dining room chair with a handkerchief pressed to his face. Lawyer Breckinridge poured himself some bourbon and stood to the side, observing, and Sheriff O’Neill, whose face was so much nose he had the nickname of Mouse as a boy, kept a simple conversation going with Smith about police work. He asked how the Southern Pacific was doing in terms of profits. He asked if they’d determined who the perpetrators of the last two robberies were. Breckinridge brought over a drink for Bill and sat down. Both Bill and the lawyer were listening like they had nothing better to do. O’Neill asked if the railroad had taken any further precautionary measures to stop the looting of express cars.

Smith said, “We are keeping a close eye on suspects; that’s the main thing.”

“Ah,” said Breckinridge. “Good.”

Detective Smith turned toward my brother Bill and said, “There’s a lot that’s not being said here, so I’m going to get it over with. I predict a brilliant future for you, Dalton. You might even be president some day. Just stay clear of your brothers.”