a spyglass. When his want overcame me, it drew me to similar objects. I would stand at the counter while some traveling woman adjusted her spectacles to better study our wares, and my fingers would ache. Donovan, by this time, was prizefighting in the grip of ceaseless and blinding rage. How to put to him that his little brother was alighting at the foot of my mattress in the dark eluded me. So did any reasoning for why a haul of rings, spectacles, thimbles, and bullets was massing under my bed. “I stole them,” I lied when Donovan found the box. “For Hobb.” He struck me, then held my head till my ears stopped ringing. We took the box out to Hobb’s grave and dug a shallow hole to pour all that theft into—which made Hobb furious, and for long nights his want kept me awake. I only minded a little. I hoped that if Hobb’s death had made me an older brother to him, it might also have made Donovan an older brother to me.
I started another box. The want never seemed to go away. Sometimes I’d give in to it and lift a watch or a book, which gave Hobb no end of glee. Later on, I wondered if his want had gotten into Donovan the way it did me. If that was what emboldened us both to robbery. At the outset, our mischiefs were bored doings, heists only in name. Roadside holdups of travelers who happened through the clearing where we shared our midnight whiskey. We had one sixgun between us, but our quarry didn’t know that. I would follow Donovan out of the bushes and stand behind him while he aimed the barrel at fat bilks and jabbering drunks, and every once in a while some cleric who tried to turn us godward. Pretty soon, we had a good haul under the bunkhouse floor: watches, coin purses, papers that probably meant something to somebody. Hobb eased off sitting on the edge of my bed and busied himself sifting through this junk. It was an all right way to go on being together.
Round about that time, Donovan caught a prizefighter in the brow a little too hard. When the kid roused up, his speech was all cotton and his eyes couldn’t fix on a point. The Sheriff came round, asking questions about the fairness of the fight and was Donovan packing his gloves? To Donovan’s claim that he wasn’t wearing gloves at all came an answering kick in the ribs and the question of what we could offer to make him look the other way. I sacrificed a silver watch from my haul, but a few days later here came the Sheriff, back again, asking, “How come ‘Robert Jenkins’ is etched on the back of my new timepiece? Ain’t he the man who were robbed just last week out on the Landing Road?”
This time, Donovan broke his jaw.
We were on the run all summer before our likenesses began showing up on bounty handbills. In Breton, in Wallis, in bayou camps, we peered into the charcoal renderings that bore our names and laughed at the lack of resemblance. “Might as well meet all this head-on,” Donovan said. So the next time we stood up a stagecoach, he made it known that we were the Mattie gang. “Say it back to me now,” he told the whip, who mumbled it around the gunbarrel in his mouth.
The next poster offered twice the reward.
We hid out in the barn loft of some laundress half in love with Donovan, who called us gentlemen in company till her neighbors softened up to the idea of having us around. This got us invited to a few suppers. We ranged, hatless and bewildered, through strangers’ kitchens. Held hands round the table with curiously smiling whitelace daughters and mumbled our thanks to God for his bounties and mercies. Somehow, nobody turned us in. “Who’d’ve thought,” they all said, “that Peyton County would be lucky enough to hide two boys willing to show the Federals just what Arkansas thinks of northern law?”
We joined forces thereafter with distant Mattie cousins, Avery and Mathers Bennett: dull, happy-cabbage boys from Tennessee. They had more muscle than sense, but Donovan reasoned that two Matties hardly made a gang. With four we could knock over a waystation. We could even knock over a packtrain—and we did, pouring in amongst the wagons in the dark, so the screams lit up like