As it happened, Dora was looking particularly well just then: she seemed alight again after some rather shaded years—and a woman can flash as brilliantly as any firefly.

I decided—after all, I was married to her—to try my human depth on Dora, so I put out a hand, only to have it slapped away quite briskly; no more than the publishers did Dora want the new, the finer, me.

“If that’s your attitude I wouldn’t care if you moved back to Cincinnati,” she said.

I did her one better, catching the train the very next day for New Mexico. Unwanted as a writer, or as a husband, there seemed little reason for me to make do with the small, smudged Pennsylvania skies and second-rate parlormaids, all of them a far cry from the glimmering ideal of the lost Kate Molloy.

In Las Cruces I built a fine house and did a good deal of reading. I acquired a mule with a better disposition than Rosy’s. Often I would ride to the top of the pass and look down on the ocean of plain, shimmering to the east. Now and again I would travel home, to marry a daughter and to marvel, only a little wistfully, at the lovely late light which Dora never again lost.

Though I never wrote another dimer or half-dimer—I never got over the fact that living had had such a disastrous effect on my powers of creation—the checks continued to flow in, from Sandycraw, from Orson Oxx, and from The Butler’s Sorrow.

It seems, now I think about it, that I had embarked without knowing it on a kind of endless goodbye, starting that morning when J. M. Chittim dropped dead on the sidewalk. Goodbye to Chittim, and Cook, to Dora and my girls, to the winsome Kate Molloy—how I wish I’d kissed her.

From that time it had been goodbye to everyone: to the buffalo hunters and the buffalo; to Hill Coe and Happy Jack and all the sweethearts of Greasy Corners; to La Tulipe and Des Montaignes; to Viv Maldonado and Barbecue Campbell; to Sister Blandina; to Esteván and the mutes of the Mesa; to los Guajolotes and their flying leader, Katerina Garza; to Bertram and Mahmood and Mesty-Woolah; to Bloody Feathers and Isinglass and my lovely Cecily Snow, whose tongue was as exacting as her draftsmanship; to Joe Lovelady and our rough friend, Billy Bone.