Now I guess it’s even goodbye to words, for I can’t see to read them anymore, and don’t care to write them. Of course I was never one of the great heroes of the language, such as Mr. Dickens or the poet Longfellow or W. D. Howells—there’s a man who understood Yankees if anyone ever did—but, in my way, from the moment I picked up Hurricane Nell, Queen of Saddle and Lasso, I loved words and did my best by them.

I don’t know what’s to become of the old language now, thanks to a curious thing I myself had a small hand in popularizing. Once I was in Trenton—it was probably the time I heard of Isinglass’s death—and happened to be drinking in a tavern with an acquaintance named Eddie Porter. I got to telling Eddie about my comical failures as a train robber, which caused him nearly to split his sides laughing. The more I elaborated on how hard it actually was to get a train to stop so one could rob it, the harder he laughed. And I suppose it was ludicrous, the thought of me robbing something; but then, cowboys and Indians used to chase those trains just for the sport, and that’s all I was doing, really. I don’t know what I would have done if one had stopped: bought a ticket home, most likely.

Eddie Porter worked as a camera mechanic for old man Edison. Next thing I knew he’d rented a train and a few horses and cowboy costumes—this was up in East Rutherford, New Jersey—and persuaded the company to do a moving picture of my adventures. They called it The Great Train Robbery. The thing caught on and probably earned more money than The Butler’s Sorrow.

Eddie invited me to see it, and of course I did. The action moved so fast it made my eyes water a little, trying to watch, but I could tell it was my yarn that gave him the idea. Of course, his bandits got the train stopped, which is more than I ever did—the crowd whooped when they got caught as if it was all real.

I figured right then it was goodbye to the dime novel: for who wouldn’t rather sit in a vaudeville house, munch a sandwich, and watch the whole story flow by like a pure dream, with perhaps a snatch of burlesque afterward, than squint at print in a book?

Not long after that, I happened to be in Denver, and who should I run into but the old Whiskey Glass cowboy Dewey Sharp—one of the ones who had had the forethought to leave Greasy Corners just a few hours before Billy Bone got killed.