He didn’t go outside any more during the winter, but he would sit out on the front porch sometimes in the summer and stare past the rose bushes in the front yard to the street beyond where life calendared its days without him as if he had never existed out there at all.

That wasn’t true, though. He used to be a great dancer and would dance all night long in the 1890s. He was famous for his dancing. He sent many a fiddler to an early grave and when the girls danced with him, they always danced better and they loved him for it and just the mention of his name in that county made the girls feel good and would get them blushing and giggling. Even the ‘serious’ girls would get excited by his name or the sight of him.

There were a lot of broken hearts when he married the youngest of the Singleton girls in 1900.

‘She’s not that pretty,’ refrained the sore losers and they all cried at the wedding.

He was also a hell-of-a good poker player in a county where people played very serious poker for high stakes. Once a man sitting next to him was caught cheating during a game.

There was a lot of money on the table and a piece of paper that represented twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon. That was part of a bet.

The man’s cheating was made public by one of the other men at the table reaching swiftly across without saying a word and cutting the man’s throat.

Cameron automatically reached over and put his thumb on the man’s jugular vein to keep the blood from getting all over the table and held him upright, though he was dying, until the hand was finished and the ownership of the twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon was settled.

Though Cameron didn’t talk any more, you could see events like that in his eyes. His hands had been made vegetable-like by rheumatism but there was an enormous dignity to their repose. The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history.

Once he had spent a winter as a sheepherder in 1889. He was a young man, not yet out of his teens. It was a long lonely winter job in God-forsaken country, but he needed the money to pay off a debt that he owed his father. It was one of those complicated family debts that it’s best not to go into detail about.

There was very little exciting to do that winter except look at sheep but Cameron found something to keep his spirits up.