Bryant kept himself at the cow camp in Buffalo Springs and Pierce was busy with rodeos and horse racing all that summer, and Broadwell, Doolin, and Powers didn’t arrive until almost July, so about the only man besides myself who was constant at the dugout was a black cowpuncher named Amos Burton, forty-four years old and raised by whites and one of Bob’s good friends. He’d drive a buckboard to the nester settlement of Taloga and come back with flour and beans and baking soda, or he’d load a shotgun and hike along the river stuffing a grain sack with rabbit, squirrel, grouse, and wild turkey. Afternoons I’d lay in my bunk in a small square of porthole light and read the Sears Roebuck catalogue, pointing at things I wanted, and Amos would just hum to himself and carve duck decoys out of beechnut.

I rode up to Bartlesville on a Sunday in June to visit Julia Johnson, who’d managed to convince both herself and her parents that the railroad and Wells Fargo claims against me were preposterous; and yet she seemed remote and subdued despite my strenuous attempts at humor, and I feared that she was lost to me forever. We walked under fruit trees and I rolled my jeans to my knees and waded out to watch the Caney River move over my toes. I ate ham hocks and navy beans at a supper table of women in bad-smelling dresses and hired men in suspenders and white shirts with brown stains under their arms. I smoked a cigarette on the porch with Texas Johnson and listened to him chastise President Benjamin Harrison and the Republicans. He had already decided that he’d vote for Grover Cleveland in 1892, that is, if Sockless Jerry Simpson didn’t run.

He said, “What we need is a man to take on the national banks and twist them around to the farmer again. Then he’d have to roll up his sleeves and take on the railroads. You know it costs three times as much to freight wheat east to Chicago than the longer distance from Chicago to New York? Corn was selling for ten cents a bushel in Kansas—ten cents!—and the shipping rate on it was nine. A man had to harvest a bushel for his kids and another for the railroad. That don’t seem right to me. I go along with Mary Lease: I think we oughta raise less corn and more hell. The railroads forgot the little man a long time back. They favor large shipments over small, cities over country towns; they own every dang legislature west of the Susquehanna—the railroads miff you too?”

“They could use some enlightenment,” I said.

“You said plenty.” He tamped a pipe and struck a match on the chair bottom. “You gonna tenant farm or cowpunch?”