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fight, and only then after Pa had gotten some high-ranking Yanks to speak on my behalf.
    Yet I ain’t one to quit no fight once I’ve started the ball. Folks call me fun-loving, but not when there comes a ruction. Hell, I had rode with Bloody Bill, Arch Clements, and the boys. Enjoyed it, and later I got pleasure a-keeping the fight alive, a-robbing banks and trains with Dingus. Sure beat a-sweating on that Gentry County farm with my younger brothers.
    I come of age riding with Bloody Bill. That’s where I met up with Dingus. Hell, I was there when we give him that name.
    He wasn’t much older than me when we met, near Plattsburg, him a-cleaning this old Colt’s Dragoon when it went off, as them old horse pistols be prone to do, and taken off the tip of his middle finger on his left hand. “That’s the dodd-dingus pistol I ever saw!” he snapped, dodd-dingus being something he could say whereas Ma James would have nailed his hide to the barn for a sacrilegious god-dangedest. We got a good chuckle at that, and, afterward, all the boys called him Dingus.
    Yet after such an auspicious beginning, Dingus sure proved hisself a soldier to the cause, and I grew to respect and admire him, so when he propositioned me with this plan to ride up to Minnesota, well, it didn’t take much propositioning. I’d done all right with him since Corydon, was plumb proud to be in the company of a man like Jesse James. And, since I’m a-being all truthful here, I was right ready to get out of Missouri by the summer of ’76. Reckoned things would be a mite quieter for us amongst the Philistines than at home with the Midianites amongst us.
    “It’s time,” Frank announced an hour or so after Ma James had gone back to her house, and we crawled into the back of a buckboard with our dusters and saddles and gear and such. Dingus, Frank, and Chadwell covered us up with a canvas tarp, then Frank called out to their nigger boy: “Perry, you may open the door!”
    The James boys mounted their horses, Chad-well climbed up onto the buckboard driver’s bench, released the brake, and once Perry Samuel, who had been a-keeping a eye on things outside, had the doors flung wide, we left the farm afore the moon rose.
    That’s how our little adventure to Minnesota begun.
    We had met at the farm one last time, to see if anybody wanted to turn yeller and quit the job, but nobody did. Cole had his little say, that he wasn’t for this plan, no, sirree, Bob, and that it was mighty poor judgment to be at the James farm when half the laws in Missouri was after us, and we bickered a mite, but we was all in this together. Frank and Dingus wanted to ride their own horses all the way north, but Cole called that pure folly even though Frank said he had just bought a mighty fine dun horse over in Kansas City and he wasn’t about to trust no plug mule they’d get in Minnesota, and Cole allowed the dun had a lot of heart and bottom but he hisself was too damned old to ride 400 miles to Minneapolis. And Frank, he just grinned and said: “Bud, it’s closer nigh to five hundred miles to Texas, and you never complained about your ass all the times we rode down there.”
    “Well, the rails suit me now,” Cole said.
    “You might regret that come September,” Dingus said, “when you’re trusting a Northern horse to get out of a fix.”
    “I thought you said there wouldn’t be no fix, Dingus.” Cole’s temper started a-festering again, but before they could commence a-fighting, Chad-well, he said horses wouldn’t be no problem at all up yonder. Jesse then said he’d ride his own damned mount anyhow, and Bob Younger didn’t know what to say or do, just kept a-whipping his head toward Dingus and then Cole and back again. So the argument went ’round and ’round till Ma James come in to say her fare-thee-wells.
    Anyway, how things turned out was we rode out of the farm that night in a wagon and, with Frank and Dingus on their horses, rode on till dawn and