And yet, after many a poker game in which he had lost every tangible cent and more, he could throw his arm around his former opponent and now creditor, and make every moment of his future—now their future— sound like a party-in-waiting.

“Think of it,” he had said one summer dawn, his fingers spread as if they could contain all the purpling Arkansas sky, “think of the crowds who will come to see rugged pioneers and Onondaga Indians throwing rocks at one another!”

“Real rocks?”

“It’s important that they seem perfectly real.”

For much of his life, he genuinely wanted to present innovations, though the marketplace demanded only that Duncan parrot Buffalo Bill Cody: Indians storming a settlers’ village; Indians attacking the overland mail coach; Indians re-enacting the capture of White Feather. Just when Duncan had determined that he likely needed Indians in his show, Buffalo Bill outmaneuvered him by featuring the antics of scimitar-waving Cossacks, anticipating the audience’s previously untapped excitement for all things Russian.

Duncan knew he could spend his entire career being dragged behind Buffalo Bill’s nimble phaeton. To save his pride, in a blinding flash of mediocrity, his mind made a peculiarly American jump of faith, equating conviction with talent: his own ideas were good because they were his.

Except they weren’t. “Real New Mexico cactus with deadly spines” lasted half a season, supplanted by a hard-to-defend demonstration of fruitless gold-panning (“just like it was in the Old West”). Giant rocks? A failure. Which depressed him. Why were Buffalo Bill’s ideas successful? What did Cossacks have to do with the Wild West? Nothing!

It was a show that needed a rest as badly as any real Indian scout. Duncan was not a reflective man, but even he knew the moment his life had shambled down the wrong path. A summer in Sacramento, a county fair, one hour of roping and riding three times a day among the American Land-race judging and the pavilions of textile witchery. There had been a girl. She had been beautiful and domineering and suspicious. He had been tall, and he smelled appealingly of saddle soap, overpowering her domineering and suspicious parts. She had never met any sort of cowboy, for she had grown up in a lighthouse.

The long dusks were romantic, and there were walks along the Delta, his boasting and her laughter, the accompaniment of crickets and bullfrogs, which led from one thing to another. “You’re equal parts headstrong and feisty,” he said to her. “Equal parts difficult and difficult.” Which was fun, at first.

At the end of the week, they loathed each other. He began to think of her with fondness as soon as he left. No one had ever successfully loathed him. He even thought of writing her.