“I don’t think you need to worry about becoming a butler,” I assured him.

“You never know, though,” Joe Lovelady put in. “You just never know.”

I later learned from Billy that it was the death of Joe’s young wife and month-old baby that had so ingrained in him a sense of the uncertainty of life.

6.

I tried to explain to the boys how much I grew to hate writers in the time of my mania. Many a day I cursed their laziness, their irregularity. Finally, driven almost to despair by the four-month absence (never explained) of Solemn Sam, the Sad Man from San Saba, I decided to effect his return myself, which I did. If I couldn’t buy adventures, I would simply have to write them; nothing less than my sanity hung in the balance.

Fortunately I soon discovered that I could write as rapidly as the next man—a good deal faster, in fact, than the sluggard responsible for keeping the nation informed about Mustang Merle. For a while I sailed along fairly happily in the broad wake of my own pen.

But only for a while. The more I read and wrote, the more I burned. For hours each day—having read all the available adventures and written till my hand stiffened and my arm cramped—I would sit in a kind of agitated lethargy, staring out my study window at the familiar lawns of Chestnut Street and seeing in my mind a horde of gaudy figures streaming across an endless plain. Cowboys, Indians, buffalo, stagecoaches blew through my vision like leaves.

At night I tossed and turned and dreamed of Black Nick, a bandit and lecher with rotting teeth whose adventures must have been composed by a human snail, so slowly did they reach the newsstands.

“He sounds like Des Montaignes,” Billy observed, when I described Black Nick—and when I met the old beaver man I had to admit that the resemblance was striking.

It was obvious to me, in the month or so when the fever was highest, that I was passing up the Dim Trail toward the Plain of the Crazed—insanity, in less flowery words. I was, at the time, one of the most popular dime novelists in the nation: Orson Oxx was plodding into his seventeenth adventure, with Sandycraw just ahead in his twenty-first. It didn’t matter: I was racing toward madness on an uncheckable steed, as a dime novelist might have put it.

“Men don’t go crazy just from reading books,” Billy observed skeptically. “You was probably crazy anyway, Sippy.”

7.