“Nothing wrong with them,” said Bill. “They’re just young.”

“They’re brash and they’re heedless and they ain’t gonna get much older,” said Smith, who got up from his chair and left.

My brother Bob and Bill McElhanie had started out sleeping in my brother Littleton’s fruit cellar. Littleton was in his middle thirties then but acting even older. He had a stern wife and a black beard that made him look Mormon, and he hardly talked at all and the couple went to bed each night at eight. Bob decided it felt like purgatory, so the two younger men kept mostly to cousin Sam Oldham’s two-storey house near Kingsburg, playing rummy and nine-point pitch or walking alongside girls they didn’t know, introducing themselves. They went to a Saturday night dance at the Brick Hotel and lounged against the women’s side of the ballroom like tough customers, with pistols tucked under their belts and placed just-so to look like erections. My brother was interrupted in a dance by an oily city councilman and two others who let him know that gun-toters and thugs weren’t welcome in their town, and Bob got into a fistfight later on with two teamsters and woke in the morning on a pillow crusty with blood.

The next day Bob and McElhanie gave up on Kingsburg and rode their horses up the gangplanks into a cattle car and then sat forward in the smoker as train Number 17, known as the Atlantic Express, made its regular run from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They stayed at a health resort two days, taking steam baths and drinking mineral water and bowling on a green lawn. Bob wrote a letter to Eugenia Moore that he mailed to Jim Riley’s ranch. They ate oranges picked off a tree and rolled up the legs of their suit pants to wade into the Pacific. McElhanie walked into the ocean as far as his knees and turned to my brother, grinning. “I’d say this here is a major accomplishment for a simple Arkansas cowhand.”

“William,” said Bob, “you’re going to have a long happy life.”

When they returned to brother Bill’s house, Bob gave his nieces dolls with heads of porcelain and mailed our mother two fifty-dollar bills with the face of Ulysses S. Grant on the front.

Sheriff O’Neill didn’t show for Christmas dinner though he’d previously accepted, and lawyer Breckinridge stood in the doorway only long enough to see that Bob was there and leave his presents under the tree.

“What is it we’ve got that’s catching?” asked Bob.

Bill said, “You’re Satan’s tools, that’s all.”