In April I’d almost resolved to board a train for Fresno or San Francisco and turn myself in to Special Agent Hickey as the vaunted Emmett Dalton and thereby confuse the prosecution’s case, but word came to Miss Moore via Ransom Payne that Bob Dalton had escaped the state, and I waited for his opinion, staring at the ceiling, flat on my back, listening to Bryant pare his toenails with a knife or mutter nonsense about a man named Esterhazy or take his pistol apart and assemble it, with a pocket watch near his knee; sixteen reconstructions in an hour was his best time.

By then I had resumed courting Julia Johnson and I didn’t hanker to leave her again, for she was not so moon-eyed or convinced about Emmett Dalton after she heard I robbed the cantina. I’d ride a horse on slick roads to Bartlesville and shamble up to her porch steps in goat hair chaps that were snaggled with mud, and mud splattered on me like freckles and moles. And with an idiot’s grin spreading over my face, I’d scratch my hat-matted hair and say, “I’m a regular tar baby, ain’t I.”

I’d wash in her kitchen and smear her dish towels drying my hands and I’d scatter cookie crumbs saying how pretty she was. A pharmacist from town would stop by in a spotless, pencil-striped suit to ask Julia to a church social, or an Army surveyor wearing dress blues and a sword would return from someone’s party with a pint carton of melting ice cream, and he’d skewer me with one of those haughty first lieutenant looks before he galloped away. She was flattered and wooed by every unmarried man in the district and I was no woman’s prize. I was a raw, scruffy, clumsy ranch hand, without education, without a cent, without even swarthy good looks, and with little more than my brothers’ wanted posters to offer the girl I yearned for. I was infected by Julia’s heartsickness. I worried so much over what we’d talk about that I’d outline conversations in advance and practice fancy ways of putting news about sorghum and down spouts and rim-fire cartridges. I’d work up an enlarged vocabulary with Eugenia, then insert the words cleverly in my spiel: “But I’m being verbose, aren’t I?” I said. And yawning in my chair I’d say, “The cold weather months really bring on the ennui.”