He was carried to an upstairs room and Miss Thorne gave him a pan bath. Then, while a local physician attended him, she walked across the street to what was once a lawyer’s office. Ed Short had a checkered dinner napkin spread on his desk and his revolver disassembled under the light of a kerosene lantern. He raised his eyes to the woman in the doorway.

“He’s here,” said Miss Jean Thorne.

The next morning she walked into Bryant’s room with a tray of breakfast under a white hand towel. He was flat on his back in bed with his Winchester against his leg on the blankets. All he moved was his eyes.

“I don’t think I can eat,” he said.

She left the door open and set the tray down on a bureau and then United States Deputy Marshal Ed Short appeared in the doorway in a black suit, his gray hat held over a pistol.

“We’re going to Wichita, Charley.”

Short took Bryant’s rifle and put his six-shooter in his suit-coat pocket. He let him use the bedpan and wash himself in the basin, then handcuffed him and pushed the limping man into the hallway where the pregnant girl who cleaned rooms was wiping lamp smoke off the ceiling. Short and Bryant stayed in the deputy marshal’s office that night, eating chicken gizzards, playing cribbage. And on the afternoon of August 3rd, a crowd followed the two men to the Hennessey depot and stood behind them as they sat on the bench awaiting the northbound train. A tall man with a stationary face told Short he’d heard the Daltons were going to stage a desperate rescue. Short said, “Let ’em try.” Then the train came chuffing in and they boarded with two coach tickets.

The train stopped again at Enid and Bryant asked to have a cigarette, so they both walked forward to sit in the smoking car. Short rolled one for Bryant and one for himself and then he looked around at the smokers on the parlor furniture: men with handlebar mustaches and dark suits and derbies, reading newspapers or the Bible. One opened a pocket watch and snapped it shut. The cars banged forward into a roll and the tobacco smoke grew toward the opened tops of the windows where it was sheared off by the breeze. The men were staring at Bryant, who had to raise up both manacled hands to take the cigarette out of his mouth.

“They’re gawking at my face,” said Bryant. He turned his shirt collar up.

“They never seen a murderer before.”

“That’s just the excuse. It’s my scar they’re staring at.”

He said that so loud the men turned their heads away.