AFTERWARDS THEY SAT IN the narrow bed with a bottle of red California wine Bob had wrapped in a gunny-sack, and the two of them made plans. He said he was tired of being poor and he was tired of being pushed around and he wanted to make a strike of some kind instead of always reacting to whatever the railroads did. She said Bryant and Newcomb were hungry enough for anything, that it was Emmett who needed convincing, but she had an inkling I wanted to make a name for myself, make a haul that would guarantee lots of money so I could stop mewling about it.

The next morning they took the train to Wharton, Bob looking shaved and clean in the coach with a saddle under his boot and a horse in the cattle car, Eugenia in the smoking car dressed in Bob’s photographed suit, her bleached hair slicked back, to the color brown with pomade. She looked like a lady’s man.

Bob sat on the bench in front of the depot in Wharton, reading the local newspaper, and the man he got off with went inside to talk to the local express agent. “Hello!” Miss Moore said loudly, but that was all Bob could hear. His horse was coaxed down the ramp from the slatted car. He watered it and wiped the sleep out of its eyes and threw on a blanket and saddle. And the man who was wearing his suit came out of the office and crossed to the water pump with a ladle. Bob walked over with a canteen. “What’s happening in there?”

Eugenia said, “I told him I was a telegraph officer from New York; that the western air was medication for my lungs. He says there will be a shipment of currency on the Santa Fe-Texas Express, stopping in Wharton at ten-thirty on the ninth. Marshal Payne admitted the same thing; said he’ll be riding with it as escort.” She drank water and wiped her mouth crude as a man and smiled. “The agent looked a little scornful. I fear he thinks I’m effeminate.”

Bob smiled and put the stopper on his canteen.

She said, “He doesn’t know me like you do.”

That was May 6th. On the 9th Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant rode the hard dirt highway from Newcomb’s shack near Guthrie to the stockyards south of Wharton, which was a cow town of five or six stores made of foot-wide unpainted planks. It is bigger now; named Perry. The four of us wore chambray shirts and chaps with the oil worn off and twisted red bandanas at our necks. We hung our spurs on the saddle horns and tied up our horses at the railroad cattle pens and walked to the tracks at ten o’clock, loading our revolvers in the darker side of buildings.