“I’m tired of the chase, is what I’m saying. My stomach’s all topsy-turvy.”

“You want to split up,” said Bob.

“That’s it,” said McElhanie. “You put the hammer square on the head of the nail.”

So they sold their horses to a man in a shepherd’s kraal and hopped a train for the Oklahoma Territory where the two split up. “The Narrow Gauge Kid” hiked to Arkansas where he would eventually work a small farm and die in his bed with a kitten under his hand and the radio on in the kitchen.

Bob would have gone to the family home in Kingfisher except he’d crouched in the top limbs of a sixty-foot cotton-wood tree all of one afternoon and saw that he was being trailed across the badlands by a railroad detective in a dark suit and gray businessman’s stetson who would kneel by a track and look around and pack down his pipe with a match stick.

So instead Bob sequestered himself in a twenty-five-cent room in the ex-slave settlement of Dover, Oklahoma. Cowhands in flophats and raincoats would canter their horses down the main street, frowning and spitting and acting like nobility, but otherwise it was dark men in suspenders and rough wool shirts, dark women in bandanas, and children with their hair tied who’d throw things at Bob and run. My mother visited him once in the afternoon behind the Free Will Baptist church. They linked arms and strolled under blossoming trees and she smiled as he told her of Littleton and Bill and her grandchildren. Her only comment about money and work with him was that they were hiring in the coal mines.

Bob stopped shaving and took up snooker with some of the males and paid for a teenaged girl who smelled like a cellar floor and who had straightened her hair with a clothing iron.

He walked back from snooker one night and saw the curtains flying out the window of his upper room. He took the stairs three at a time, his pistol cocked high at his shoulder, and pushed the open door to see Eugenia Moore smoking a cigarette by the window, a kerosene lamp the only light. She turned and smiled and unbuttoned her blouse as she walked to him. “I hope you haven’t used yourself up.”

8