Old men forget, the Bard says; but I have not forgotten the puzzled look in Kate’s gray eyes, or the cloud of disappointment that crossed her face, the day I muffed our chance.

Not long after, she gave notice and married.

Still, I mustn’t falsify the ledger by making all my sadness the debt of that failure with Kate, fine as she was.

By the time we reached San Isidro I had been gone from home long enough to begin to feel foolish and low—after all, I had deserted a flourishing family just because some few hundred dime novels had been scrapped.

Having recently seen a living man disemboweled and two others shot dead, the loss of my little collection had shrunk somewhat in import.

Now I had come to a land where I had no ties and no skills—and for what? Was I happier? It didn’t seem so.

Worse, the one skill I had acquired through boredom, in Philadelphia—the ability to write dime novels—had atrophied almost completely in only a matter of weeks.

I parked myself each day under the shade of a fine old mesquite and scratched miserably at a little half-dimer, but I knew it was wretched work. The command I had shown in The Butler’s Sorrow and Wedded but Not Won had evidently been lost as I wandered the llano.

What the rest of my life would be I couldn’t imagine. All day I sat in gloom under the mesquite, filled with a sense of having missed something—something precious, something I would never be offered again.

What was it that I had missed? A sprightly woman, of course; and with her might have come a sense of fullness that I—though a born describer—cannot even describe, or really imagine. I could only miss it.

At any rate I felt more hopeless in those weeks in San Isidro than I had any right to, for the mesquite cast a fine shade, and the goats were as tasty as Katie had claimed, and no one was shooting at me—a luxury that could not always be assumed in our great Western lands.

2.

The historians come to me now with their questions about Billy and Katie, for I am the only living witness to the springtime of that famous love.

The federales destroyed old San Isidro when they were after Villa, or perhaps it was another of their bandits; when it comes to Billy and Katie, the Mexicans who live there now just know what they hear in their songs.

So the historians come to see me, but they go away annoyed, for my main memory of that time is how sad I felt, and how hard I found it to write that miserable half-dimer which I called Black Beans; or, The Texan’s Defeat.