That was diamondback rattlesnake country. Newcomb and Broadwell stuffed their pants in their boots and hunted dry coulees and burnt ground and the stone rubble of hills with forked sticks and gunnysacks and they came back at two o’clock with a dozen live snakes that Broadwell dangled over the chopping block so they could strike and flutter their tongues before he lopped off their heads with a hatchet. Powers skinned them and Doolin fried them up and we ate them with scrambled eggs and strawberries on biscuits until the sun was glinting in the leaves of the trees and our black shadows were long in the grass. Eugenia stood at the head of the table and lifted a glass of warm tea. “Here’s to robbery,” she said.

Newcomb and Pierce went out back to the shed where they practiced leaping from the tin roof onto their saddles. Doolin and Broadwell arm-wrestled, the loser having his fist slammed into a plate of butter, Broadwell red-faced and grunting, Doolin laughing in that odd way of his, “Hayuk hayuk hayuk.” And Julia sat across from gentleman Bill Powers as he resined up his bow. He said, “My tomatoes burned up in the sun this year. Cornstalks went brown and shredded apart before they’d reached my knee. I chopped the heads off thirteen rattlers out by the privy. Walked everywhere with a hoe and was glad I never married. It’s too dry in the West for gardens.”

Julia looked especially genteel in that rough company. She had a parasol she stayed under for most of the hot afternoon and she gingerly lifted the hem of her white dress whenever she walked through the grass. My brother and I sat at the table playing checkers and she sat very quietly next to me while Eugenia sketched her with a copy of The Woman’s Home Companion that she was using to fan herself. I’d jump a checker and king myself and Bob would lean to gaze at Miss Moore’s drawing pad. “That’s very accomplished,” he said.

Eugenia wiped charcoal off her fingers with her shirttail. “Julia’s easy to draw. She sits still so long. Most people shift around all the time.”

I said, “She got rid of all that when she was younger.”

And Bob said, “You know, that’s really something to comment on, Julia. How’d you get grown-up so fast?”

“Are you teasing?”

“No! I swear you’ve got ten years on me.”

“You’re very mature,” said Miss Moore.

She turned to me. “They’re making fun of me, aren’t they.”

“Nope. I think that’s genuine.”

She smiled shyly at Miss Moore. “I can be awfully holy sometimes.”

Then it was dark and everything broke up and Charlie Pierce drove Julia home in a surrey he’d sold to someone in Kansas.