He sliced the sausages and heated them in the sauce for a few minutes. When the meal was ready, they all agreed that German sausages cooked in beer improved the taste of spaghetti considerably. Then they talked about Théo, and the old man declared that he couldn’t say if he’d run into him along the road.

“What do you mean!” Jack exclaimed. “If you’d met him you’d certainly remember him.”

“Six feet tall, two hundred pounds — that’s not uncommon out west,” explained the old man.

“Yes, but he . . . he speaks French, he has curly black hair . . .”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said the old man, “but I’m not sure. Maybe yes and maybe no.”

He had met lots of people on the roads and trains. One night he’d even met Jack Kerouac. It was in a train somewhere around Denver, and Kerouac wasn’t yet a famous writer. It was cold. They had drunk wine. He remembered Kerouac very well, but he couldn’t say about Théo.

Jack tried to be as objective as possible. He calmly told the old man everything he’d learned about his brother since the start of his journey. He gave all the details he knew, omitting nothing and adding nothing. He ended his account with the Oregon-California option, then fell silent. He let the old man talk. The account had been hard on him and he was glad it was over.

“If I was in your place I wouldn’t hesitate,” said the old man.

“Oh, no?” he said.

“No.”

“What would you do?”

“Go to California. Your brother isn’t the type you run into in Oregon.”

“It’s big, California.”

“He’d be in San Francisco at this time of year.”

“Why?”

The old man shrugged.

“Just like that,” he said.

“But you,” said Jack, “you’re going to Oregon . . .”

“I’m a rambler, even a tramp, you might say,” he said, “but I’m not a bum.”

After they had eaten, the old man helped with the dishes, then went off to sit and read; he read Jack London as long as there was enough light.

“Weird,” said the girl.

“He thinks he’s Hemingway,” said Jack. “Did you notice?”

“No.”

“He says he lived in Paris, on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine . . . He talks about Cuba and Key West, and he says he used to have a house in Ketchum, Idaho . . . It’s Hemingway’s life!”

“I didn’t know.”

Jack shook his head.

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but it’s no worse than the rest. We’ve travelled two-thirds of the way across America, following a trail that’s so slight . . . so slight and so incredible that if we told people nobody’d believe us. They’d think we were crazy.”

“A real pair of zouaves!”