But Dewey was as foolish as Tully Roebuck; he argued up and down that he hadn’t left Greasy Corners at all; he had ducked out on Waco Charlie and the rest, got drunk in a wagon, and woke up just in time to see the shooting. I didn’t argue too strenuously; by then half the old-timers in the West had convinced themselves they had been in Greasy Corners the day Billy Bone got killed.

The point about Dewey is that he was just finally getting around to his long-awaited trip to California. He had bumped into a motion-picture man—they were as common then as buffalo hunters had once been—and filled him full of Greasy Corners stories, all of them featuring that young Galahad, Billy the Kid. The man got all fired up and wanted Dewey to come right away to Hollywood, California, so they could make a picture about it.

“Come with me, Sippy—you know more about it all than I do,” Dewey said. It was an unusually generous admission, I thought.

Having little else to occupy me, I did go with Dewey and saw the first palm trees I had seen since Dora and I did the Nile. The motion-picture man was a fan of my Sandycraw tales and promptly hired me to do the scenario for Dewey’s stories. All Dewey got to do was wrangle the horses—it annoyed him bitterly. We called the picture Sweethearts of Greasy Corners, and it turned out to be the biggest hit of 1908.

I had better specs by then and could see fine. I don’t know where they came up with the little actor who played Billy, but for my money he was not only good, he was too good. I cried all twenty-five times I saw the picture: it reminded me of all my hard goodbyes, and of my murdering friend, the wandering boy himself, Billy Bone, white star of the West, whose dust is now one with the billions and billions of particles that compose that ancient plain.