Mr. Short was a hired gun who got federal money from Chief Marshal William Grimes for policing the second judicial district. Short had put on spectacles and read through the files of outlaws that a deputy marshal named Christian Madsen kept in the Guthrie courthouse, and Short matched the cowboy from Texas called Blackface Charley Bryant with the train robber at Wharton described by the fireman and engineer of the Santa Fe-Texas Express. So he’d rented an office in Hennessey and lived at the Rock Island Hotel where a drifter had told him Bryant had a sweetheart, and Short rode west on a regular basis to sit on his horse with binoculars and see an acre away the white-painted two-storey house that he’d been informed now belonged to the wanted man’s sister, Daisy. I guess Short never saw my brother. Bob was savvy that way.

By August the four or five or six of us at the dugout had wild vegetables and stray calf to eat and Doolin and I would sit by the river at night fishing for bullhead with bamboo poles while the others squatted around a bonfire and passed a brown jug, playing spoons on their knees while Powers played fiddle. I visited Julia just once, for a Saturday evening of doing nothing, which is what I could afford. She wore a yellow dress with a lace collar and we threw yarn balls at the cameos on the piano. I stuck a knife in a tree from ten feet away and I sat in the dirt while she sat in the swing and she wet my hair down and middle-parted it. She asked me questions about Miss Moore but she was still in a snit about her. Julia thought I was being corrupted. I was nineteen years old; she was eighteen.

By August, Bryant looked awful. There was green in his eyes and his skin was yellow and he couldn’t hold a supper down. Whenever I saw him he had a washrag over his face and his hands at his crotch, rocking from side to side on his bedroll. The disease had infected his brain too, and he’d sulk under a tree and contort his mouth as if he were yelling at hecklers in his own private saloon. Then he’d explode to his feet and dash out into the sun and punch his fists very rapidly, then walk back to his seat and repeat the brawl over and over until Pierce or Powers shook him.

He left for Mulhall and his brother’s doctor on August 1st, a pint of whiskey that was hot as Tabasco beneath his shirt, his legs tied to the saddle. But he fainted and almost choked on his vomit before he spurred his horse up onto the wooden porch of the hotel in Hennessey and yelled for the hostess to fetch him.