Blue gun smoke hung in the trees and Dixon was writhing with pain in his sleeping bag and Cole walked up to the tent with his pistol hanging by his leg, and out of nowhere that teenaged kid, Towerly, shot a hole in the deputy’s chest just above his right nipple, knocking Cole backwards over a tent rope. Cole bellied through sump mud into the trees and slumped against his saddle. My brother Frank was on his knees and so bent over in his agony that his face was in the dirt and Cole thought Frank was dead until Towerly walked up to the tent in his gray long Johns and hip waders and pushed Frank over to his back.

My brother had tears in his eyes as he rasped, “Don’t. Please don’t shoot. Let me be.” But Towerly cocked his pistol and shot Frank in the mouth, and he cocked his pistol again and blew the top of my brother’s head off.

I mention that miserable episode because it meant a lot to my brother Bob. He was seventeen years old at the time and he’d just been hired as a Cherokee policeman under the half-breed John W. Jordan, and it was Bob who escorted the body home in that mahogany box filled with ice.

He hunkered down out of the cold next to my brother’s coffin, which was transported in a slat-sided cattle car. Bob wore a sheepskin coat and a broad hat that was pulled down and tied close to his ears with a wool scarf, but he didn’t have gloves so when the train stopped for water and coal somewhere south of Chelsea, my brother got off and poured a brakeman’s coffee on his fingers to take the bite away. And when he returned a railroad inspector had the coffin lid unlatched and leaned against a slat wall, and the man gazed at Frank’s corrupted remains with a cheek of tobacco that he was spitting on the floor. “Lookit the fearsome holes in this man,” he said. “Isn’t it pitiful?”

So my brother stared at the body of a man with no more face than a plate of food and he puked into the straw and swore God’s own vengeance on the wicked, much like a boy steeped in the romantic adventures of The Wide Awake Library and Beadle’s Half-Dime novels. But I think he also made some other resolutions because he was very different after that.