He hadn’t thought what to do with the heaped sets of sheets donated in good faith, but conscience spoke to him. When he reached Eureka, he presented them to a local church, which thanked him profusely (it turned out the local shut-ins really did need them, and the reverend shook his hand and complimented his grip, and the woman who mopped the floors and lit the candles told him he was the most handsome boy they’d ever seen).

He had brought a small advertisement from the back of Photoplay which indicated that the great cameraman George Barnes (credited with Betsy’s Fatal Slip, Traditions of the Tartans, The Woodsman and the Fall, etc., etc.) would be traveling by automobile from location to location to seek new talent. Leland hadn’t heard of Barnes, and was embarrassed to think of the other lapses in his education, what with being at sea so many weeks of the year. Luckily, Barnes’s advertisement said he did not care for know-it-alls; he wanted talent. He would accept professionally composed photographs, and if the applicant was deemed to have potential, he would shoot twenty seconds of film and send it to his contacts at a Hollywood studio whose identity he could not divulge for, he said, obvious reasons.

Leland also brought the five-dollar processing fee, which would be refunded when a studio called for his services.

The office in which they met was a room off the kitchen in a boarding-house, with a sign on the door that said, “George Barnes, Talent Discoveries,” a sign that was scarred and gouged from having been removed in haste more than once.

Barnes wore a tweed cap and jodhpurs, but was otherwise a man of neither discernible traits nor outstanding features. “If he were to rob a bank,” Leland thought, “you’d arrest half the town before you found him.” He was unsure of the whole setup, which now struck him as possibly a dupe. But then he learned that Barnes was delighted by his photograph.

Barnes pointed at certain features, such as the diamond stickpin and the top hat, and then, encouraged, Leland talked about how he had achieved them. “I borrowed the clothes. As far as that expression on my face, I just thought about a girl I know,” he said. “The rest was easy. You like it? Honest?” The photograph was his “elegant” pose, showing him in a black dinner jacket and white tie, chin up, hair slicked back with Macassar, gazing with brilliant eyes toward the unknown—perhaps even destiny—with resolve and wisdom.

Measuring his words, Leland said, “I also have a cowboy photograph.”

“No! Do you realize how few people have that kind of range?”