We were all fools; we should have flopped right down on the street and caught a few precious minutes of real sleep—if we had been run over, our torments would have ended there.

Of course our new hats blew out the window almost at once; it only got windier and more bumpy as we traveled west. I passed an hour or two of time trying to calculate how many hats were lost along that stage route every year: the figure I came up with was fifteen hundred.

At least this made clear to me what might otherwise have been a puzzling fact about the West: why so many Indians and outlaws wore hats made in Brooklyn. If they grew dissatisfied with a particular hat, all they had to do was ride over to the stage road and pick a new one off a sagebrush or a prickly pear.

Otherwise, I spent a thousand miles trying to keep myself from pitching forward through thin air into the broad abyss of Mrs. Bargesley’s lap—though I’d have to admit that the farther we traveled the less thin the air grew, thanks to Mr. Brisket’s peculiarly foul cigars.

Leroy Pope, the harness salesman, was rarely sober during the trip, but it was he who first noticed that the Bargesley boys were quadruplets. I had averted my eyes so successfully from the retching, clawing brats that I had failed to catch this fact.

“Are those young ’uns all one litter or am I seeing quadruple?” he asked one morning, after awakening from a particularly hard souse. The boys were all clearing their tonsils by spitting at one another.

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Bargesley said with a look of motherly pride. “Matt, Mitch, Martin, and Monroe, born six years ago this week.”

I was in a bleary state, half mad from fatigue, but it seemed to me I had some vague memory of reading about the birth of quadruplets some years ago. Could it have been in Trenton, New Jersey?

Mrs. Bargesley—it’s only fair to allow that she wasn’t enjoying this dreadful trip any more than we gentlemen—brightened when I asked if the boys had been born in Trenton.

“Oh, yes, it was all in the papers,” she confessed.

My mind, already slipping its halter, was strangely fluttered by this news: for what were the odds that the only dime novelist with a mansion on Chestnut Street would end up losing his seat on a westbound stagecoach to the mother of the only quadruplets ever born in Trenton, New Jersey? A billion to one seemed to me about how the odds would factor out.

“I don’t waste no time counting odds,” Billy remarked, when I mentioned my calculations. “I just ask the Tulip if I want to know what’s happening.”

“Just because she’s old don’t mean she’s right,” Joe said. “Old folks can be wrong too.”