Later that evening, and after sending Donna “off on her merry way in a yellow cab,” Merle got Leroy into a local card game in Oklahoma City, at the somewhat seedy Baynham Hotel. Merle walked out at 2 AM with $1,673.53. “Sixteen hundred seventy-three dollars…and fifty-three cents.” The two of them later would sing that phrase on various road trips, at nearly the pentameter of the “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” song, mostly at inopportune times in front of clueless onlookers, and both thinking it would be great “as another version, this time as a country western song,” which it would be one day, recorded by both Roy Acuff in 1969, and then later, in 1994, by Garth Brooks.
Leroy and Merle, got into Las Vegas just before dawn on Christmas Eve, and decided to valet their Hertz Rent-A-Car®,
