This is the story as it was first told — a western love story about Cowboy Kitty, the most notorious train robber in the West, and Diva Kitty, the railroad princess he was never supposed to meet. It is not finished. The original draft ran thirty-four parts and stopped in a cavern under a flamingo palace, with a gator in the dark saying the cat had taken the bait. That is where this book stops too.

He is a black-and-white tuxedo cat in a rust hat and a black bandana, green eyes under the brim, a dusty-rose nose with a dark central spot. She is black-and-white like him, a pink harness snug around a dainty frame, the same dusty-rose nose with the same dark spot, a diamond-shaped blaze. Put Pumpkin, his older sister, is the orange tabby in the terracotta poncho and the worn chocolate-brown cowboy hat — older leather than his. Gary the Gator wears a pale scar through his left eye. Kingwin is an emperor penguin in a black tuxedo jacket, cream belly, yellow-orange neck patches, a cane with a diamond the size of a fist. Terry the Terrible is the scarlet macaw on his shoulder — red chest, white facial patch, pale hooked beak. Those faces do not drift.

They steal. They run. They almost lose each other more than once — a gorge, a river, a desert grave, a cage, a flood. Nobody in this book dies. Nobody is taken from the other for good. When it looks like Diva Kitty has turned, read the next page. She shoots the sniper, not him. She rides back for the grave. Love, in this story, is not a double-cross.

Every side plot from the original telling is here: Fort Ironshell, Versailles, Dustwhisker, Elkhorn, Silas’s canyon, Devil’s Hollow, the Black Feather Syndicate, Dust Valley, Frankie the Flamingo, the Leviathan whose true name is Sorrow. The contradictions are cleaned. The twists stay.

What follows is that story, told as a book. It ends where the draft left it. To be continued.