Joe Lovelady looked at me thoughtfully. He had done a perfect job of cooking the hens and had even provided salt and pepper, which he kept in a pouch in his saddlebag.

“You talk like you’re homesick, Mr. Sippy,” Joe Lovelady said.

“Oh, that’s why you cotton to him now,” Billy said. “You figured out he’s homesick, like you.”

I expect Billy’s words were true. For there we were, by a little flicker of campfire, on a plain so vast you couldn’t even think of the end of it, under a sky as huge as time. It was a place to make you homesick, if you’d ever had a home. Joe Lovelady and I had had one, but the notion had little meaning for the orphan boy, Billy Bone.

“You had a ma,” Joe said to Billy kindly. “You told me you remembered her.”

It was not the last time I would hear Joe Lovelady try to persuade Billy that he’d had a life like the rest of us.

“Oh, I remember her, Joe,” Billy said quietly. “She used to catch me between her knees and pick lice out of my hair. I remember that much.”

Joe Lovelady looked at me again. I think we both regretted that the subject of mothers had ever come up.

“What brought you out here, Mr. Sippy?” he asked me as a way of getting off a painful subject.

“Dime novels,” I said. It was true, true, true.

But Billy and Joe looked blank. It confused me for a moment. I would never have expected to find myself in the company of two people who had never read a dime novel. In fact, I was in the company of two people who couldn’t even read. Neither one of them could have read any of the hundreds of newspaper stories that would soon be written about them.

Well, if the West taught me anything, it’s that there’s different kinds of education.

We were all of us wakeful, in spite of the long day. Billy and Joe seemed to be in the mood to listen, so I talked to them as the sparks flew upward, and, once the fire died, under the freckling starlight, tried to explain why I had left the safe life in Philadelphia to become a laughingstock in New Mexico.

5.

The curious truth is that if I hadn’t chanced upon that first half-dimer at a cigar stand—it was Hurricane Nell, Queen of Saddle and Lasso—I might never have become an actor in this wild play. I would have gone on living the comfortable life in Philadelphia, suffering nothing worse than any man suffers who has nine young daughters and a disenchanted wife.