It brought him to a halt. The two men were fifteen, perhaps twenty feet apart. The Kaiser shifted in his seat, passing along a silent suggestion of missed opportunities. The understanding passed between them, as chilling as an ice cube pressed to the back of Duncan’s neck. Numbness shot down Duncan’s shoulders and through his left arm to his fingertips. He went gray. One gun fell from his hand, and he clutched at his chest. With a small gasp, he toppled into the dirt.

There he lay, one arm under his body, the other extended. Neither hand held a gun; the pistols had tumbled, end over end, away from him. His hat lay on its brim, upside down.

An intake of breath among the crowd. Followed by laughter.

The next few minutes were vague for Duncan, involving mostly strange, grainy flashes before his eyes, his vision rendered into points of light, scratches in a negative, a hallucination of numbers counting down. He was removed via stretcher and taken back to his tent, the crowd all the while applauding and letting loose strange hoots and whistles which he could not interpret—was that the crowd’s contempt, or had they, for a moment, a flash of gold, at least loved him?

Later, years later, the summer evenings of 1914 were remarked upon for the light’s reluctance to leave the sky. It seemed at seven o’clock or seven-thirty to be tranquil and infinite twilight. Nimbus clouds whose bellies were dappled with streaks of orange glowstone faded as the Wells Fargo wagon began its circuit around the field.

The Kaiser watched in the same way he listened in church: he looked rapt. Meanwhile, he tended to his own discontents. Just as a sermon had its inexorable rhythms, so did the finale of the Wild West show: A Wells Fargo stagecoach, defended by riflemen, chased by savage Indians, must have its horses panic in harness, the lead two rearing up to show fear. A cowboy, the Kaiser noted, must fall from the wagon as if shot, seeming to be trampled by a hundred horses, so that the crowd gasps. As the light wanes, there must be flaming arrows that turn the body of the wagon into a candelabra. The stagecoach must collide with a pioneer cabin, it must explode as if packed with fireworks, a family must scream for help, there must be the threat of unspeakable violence against them, and the crackling and the dazzle of the flames must be the backdrop for the Indians to whoop and holler in ersatz gibberish that could as easily be Malay as Cherokee.

He had seen everything now. The form was exhausted. How can we possibly fight without gold? he wondered. He calculated how quickly the other securities—bonds, promissory notes, stocks, government loans— could be converted into cash.