Newcomb busied himself and made connections, and three saddle hands I’d roped with on Oscar Halsell’s Bar X Bar ranch, the same three Bob stole me away from in his peace officer days because he considered them bad company—Dick Broadwell, Bill Doolin, Bill Powers—stopped by in late June and stayed on.

Dick Broadwell was a wild and comical man, the second son to a prosperous family in Hutchinson, Kansas. He’d married a green-haired woman who’d run away with his belongings after a mere two weeks in Fort Worth, Texas, and he moped back up to the territory with the alias of Texas Jack Moore. He was thin and pale and book-smart and suspicious. He wore canvas goggles with glass lenses to keep the blowing dust from his eyes and he was bald to halfway back on his head where he kept his dark hair eight or nine inches long. It would lift in the wind like pages and scatter over his eyes. He’d do anything on a dare: leap off the roof of a boxcar, swallow a live cigarette, throw a jackknife between his toes. He came to the sod hut with a black kitten he called Turtle that he fed sardines from a tin. He had warts on his fingers that looked like cauliflower.

I spied Bill Powers three miles off from the dugout walking his horse through grass high as the wooden stirrups, solemnly staring at the cedars and the light snapping off of the river. I recall he had a red bandana over his nose for the chaff, his shirt collar buttoned, a rifle crossed over an apple-horn saddle, and a violin case in his left hand. He was using the name Tim Evans in those days. I never discovered why. He was a tall and clean and handsome gentleman with a big mustache and no sideburns, as quiet and unemotional as a good butler walking upstairs. He spoke fluent Spanish; he could make a pipe draw two hours; he had chipped fingernails that were pale as piano keys. He used to sit on a bottom bunk with a meerschaum and an oil can and an alarm clock with its hundreds of gears and pins and washers on the blanket, wiping each down with a handkerchief, fitting each with its mate, until he could lie back with the ticking next to his ear. He’d eat lunch in the sun with his eyes shut and he’d walk the Canadian with my binoculars and Mr. Audubon’s book, identifying birds. Broad-well would call out, “You see any of those double-breasted mattress-thrashers, you be sure to call me, okay?” Powers would smile and strike a match to his pipe bowl.