“Then the night lessened, the clouds ashened slightly, and the men became starkly black and brown against the gray of the snow.”

“So it went. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.”

“He had given work to a nightwalker named Dorothy Evans and gradually became beguiled by her. She was a plump, pretty, cattleman's daughter, pale as a cameo, with the sort of overripe body that always seems four months pregnant. Her long brown hair was braided into figure eights and pinned up over her ears in the English country-girl style. Grim experience was in her eyes, many years of pouting shaped her lips, but everything else about her expression seemed to evince an appealing cupidity, as if she could accept anything as long as it was pleasing.”

“He also had a condition that was referred to as granulated eyelids and it caused him to blink more than usual, as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept.”

“Graham and the undertaker's assistants strapped the body to a wide board with a rope that crossed under his right shoulder and again over his groin, then they tilted the man until he was nearly vertical and let the camera lens accept the scene for a minute. The man's eyes were shut, the skin around them was slightly green, and the sockets themselves seemed so cavernous that photographic copies were later repainted with two blue eyes looking serenely at some vista in the middle distance. Likewise missing in the keepsake photographs was the mean contusion over his left eyebrow that wound convince some reporters that it was the gunshot's exit wound and others that it showed the incidence of Bob Ford's smashing the stricken man with a timber. The body's cheeks and chest and belly were somewhat inflated with preservatives, necessitating the removal of the man's thirty-two-inch brown leather belt, and making his weight seem closer to one hundred eighty-five pounds than the one hundred sixty it was. His height was misjudged by four inches, being recorded as six feet or more by those who wrote about him.”

“Craig inscribed something in the journal and Bob walked over to study the entry. "Does the name Bob Ford mean anything to you?Craig dipped his quill in the ink bottle and scripted cursively on a brown blotter. "Is that your actual name or your alias?""Actual," said Bob, and he grinned with delight when he saw the name recorded in Craig's elegant calligraphy. "Pretty soon all of America will know who Bob Ford is.”

“Charley's consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in the snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles.”