She kept mostly to herself that winter in that house. I’d nudge her privacy blanket up with my toe as I lay on my bunk, and see the blond hair on her ankles as she walked across the room to her drop-leaf table, see a green buttoned shoe pump up and down at her treadle sewing machine, see her step naked out of the pool of her fallen robe and hear her twist a sponge into her white ironstone basin as bathwater speckled the floor and balled up on a dropped magazine. On Saturdays she was allowed the claw-and-ball bathtub off the kitchen, and after supper she and I smoked black cheroots together while she read to me. Cowboys from the bunkhouse visited Miss Moore constantly, presenting her with boxes of candy and dates and dried fruit, conducting themselves as if they had an audience with the queen. It was enough for them to hear a lady’s voice and kiss her hand when they left, but some would get drunk and incautious and I’d have to brain them with a bronze ashtray that bore the name of the Hotel Savoy.

My brothers in California sent letters and telegrams about the railroad frame-up, so Eugenia was not very much surprised in March when Deputy Marshal Ransom Payne stopped by to interrogate Riley as to the whereabouts of Newcomb and Bryant and McElhanie, who’d been seen once or twice on his spread. Eugenia was polishing silverware and had the sleeves of her dress rolled past her elbows and she brushed her yellow hair off her forehead as she pulled open the door for Payne, who mistook her for Daisy Bryant, Blackface Charley’s sister, an identification he never swayed from unto the very last.

Payne was a tall, vain man born in Iowa and educated in Kentucky, a former real-estate agent who was forty years old and considered himself a rake. His pride was a waxed blond mustache that was wide as his ears, and when he sat in the parlor to make his inquiries, he was careful of the crease in his pants. Eugenia made tea and he talked of himself for two hours, mentioning his investigation of the Dalton gang for a California railroad. And he visited her again and again, giving her iris bulbs, a mezzotint of the new Eiffel Tower in Paris, a chocolate Easter egg that you could hold to your eye to view a handsome Jesus sitting among small children, and withal Eugenia got such complete information from Payne about the troubles in California that we were more enlightened one thousand miles away than any of the alleged conspirators.