She—Emily Wheeler, of course—returned to Crescent City and the lighthouse, where she worked the lantern room, rebuilding the hydraulic pumps from scratch, and occasionally, if bothered while welding, throwing cauterized pipe at her parents, should they dare to voice an opinion.

Her judgment of her absent beau rose and fell. She wrote him once to announce her pregnancy, and then she awaited a response. Meanwhile, she still loathed him, she missed him, he angered her, she missed him, and as weeks became eight or so months and he never wrote her, her course went fixed: she hated him.

She sent him an announcement of Leland’s birth, the only letter he ever answered. Emily sent back the five dollars, adding that he would never see her or her son, “but know Leland will be brought up to embrace responsibilities and to stay away from degenerate influences,” which a tiny piece of her heart hoped would cause Percy Duncan to return.

The separation hardly depressed Duncan, for he never really thought of his son as a creature that would crawl, then walk, then go to school and reel in his emotions and play crafty, and desire to be good enough to have his dreams come true. Instead, he every so often imagined a future drinking partner, strong, quick, a slayer of the ladies. They would meet, it would be a hootenanny, and then they would part again.

The entire future was a hootenanny to Duncan, every new tour a chance to make up for the last tour. Even members of his company who had been on the disastrous Georgia tour of 1907 (floods), or the Southwestern tour of 1909 (brush fires, train wreck), continued to trust the twinkle in his eye as he declared their next destinations—Spokane! Coeur d’Alene! The Montana Highline!—and made them sound like villages made of candy.

Which is how, in the summer of 1914, with the entire continental United States dried up and no longer booking his antique entertainment, Wild Duncan Cody took his show, each and every one of his twenty-two cast members, the hangdog cowboys and Onondaga Indians nursing knots on their heads, and all of their wives and children, to the final place on earth still starved for the attentions that only a Wild West show could provide.

He took them to Berlin.

If, in July 1914, you asked the average Berliner which was coming first, rain or war, he might look to the slate-colored sky and note that at least no rain was expected today. With countries lining up to defend one another from blows no one had yet inflicted, all the nations of Europe were like children at the dinner table, waiting for Father to get the belt.