Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there had never been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the gang had been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way out here, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead, as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, and the needle, and in the early days of parole cuffs there’d been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contact nerve poison. And that was just the formal way—the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If the gang had been jumped by Rangers they’d be unmarked graves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture. Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombs out of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of the madness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Did they have jobs now?