Blackface Charley had hired a buckboard to escort Miss Jean Thorne there and that was how I came to visit the Rock Island Hotel in Hennessey. I sat on the hard boards of the wagon-back, swinging my legs while Bryant hunched forward on the bench seat with his shirt collar pushed up where his scar was. He’d blotted ladies’ facial powder on it and it gave him a chalky look. He had a mean-looking canker sore pulling his lip awry.

It was ten at night by the time we hitched the team in Hennessey. There were paper balloons in the shape of donkeys tied to the hitching racks. Railroad flares were spitting and spewing in the street and some salesmen who were meeting at the Rock Island Hotel were pitching them back and forth at each other. The railroad men stood watching with their hands in their overalls.

Bryant took Miss Thorne to sit with him on a bench at the depot and I sat on the chintz furniture in the hotel parlor reading the newspapers.

A big blond man in chalk-striped pants and vest came out of his room and locked the door. He had the sleeves rolled up on his white shirt and a cowlick he’d tried to wet down. He must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. He asked the proprietor for the night register and wrote down all the names in a pocket notebook. He pointed to me. “Who’s that?”

Mr. Thorne told him he didn’t know.

The marshal stood on the parlor rug with both hands in his pockets. “What’s your name?”

I was reading about a farm boy named McLaughlin in Tulsa who knew how to make a baseball sink when he pitched it. “Charlie McLaughlin,” I said. “How’s your day been?”

He ignored that. “Where you from?”

“You ever heard of Liberal, Kansas?”

“I was city marshal of Woodsdale when they were battling Hugoton over the Stevens County seat.”

“Well, it’s near there all right.”

He read from his pocket notebook. “How come you aren’t registered?”

“I just come here to read the papers.” I folded it up and walked out.

I saw Bryant sitting on a pile of railroad ties alone while brakemen walked along the tops of boxcars, turning the brake-release wheels. I didn’t ask why Miss Thorne had left him. I just told him that Deputy Marshal Ed Short was in town and he’d better stay somewhere else. So he rode east to Mulhall where his brother Jim had a homestead, but there the same man kept walking his horse by the house day in and day out and Bryant figured him for a detective, so he took off again and stayed until late July in the cow camp at Buffalo Springs.