And then as a surprise, an added attraction, I’d walk onto that stage with him and stare over the footlights to the farmers and clerks and secretaries who gasped or hushed or whispered to each other while the children slunk down in their seats like I was an ogre that feasted on noses and toes. Maybe I’d wave my white hat, maybe I’d autograph a program that was pushed at my fancy lizard-skin boots; then Tackett would signal the projection booth and I’d sit on a chair next to the curtain cables offstage, my back to the screen while three vicious, two-gunned bandits crouched out of the Condon bank and scurried across the bricked street to a dirt alley where two other glowering outlaws in frock coats fired pistols at clerks in a hardware store.

It was two in the morning in my Hollywood house and I saw myself with a boot in a stirrup and a money sack wrapped around the saddle horn, my damaged right arm hanging down in its sleeve as my eyes slid to take cues from the director behind a ratcheting camera. I jerked my skittering horse around and it balked at the artificial blue smoke and the hammering gunfire while actors with shotguns and sleeve garters stalked out into the street. I rode into a cross fire and I leaned down for my brother Bob without stopping my horse, bent as far as I could to pick him up, with blood dripping off of my fingers.

I stayed with that streaked, brown film to its slam-bang end and then the projector lamp flashed a square of white and I sat there hearing the film feed through the sprockets and onto the take-up reel.

Jesse James was shot in the back and Bob Younger died of tuberculosis and his brothers Cole and Jim were paroled from a Minnesota prison after twenty-five years on a life sentence. Jim took a job as a traveling salesman and committed suicide in 1902. Cole spent his last years with carnivals, lecturing on the evils of crime, and just before Frank James died of consumption in 1915, he was paid to stand by a theater door and tear children’s movie tickets in half.

And Emmett Dalton spent his last years in Hollywood, California, or walking the streets of Coffeyville, Kansas, with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where getaway horses were once tied to a pipe, and then at peach crates stacked at the rear of a restaurant that had been the barn where my brother Bob lay dying.

Bob is dead; that’s what I’m sorry about. Sometimes it seems I return for him over and over again.

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