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made us a firm offer. A price that makes me sick to think I’m passing up. He’s a man who is sincere. Well, he’s not sincere, but I’ve been dealing with him a long time. We play poker. I can tell when he is bluffing. He is not bluffing. He wants the property. He makes no pretense on this.”
    Shatner poured himself his third drink of I. W. Harper on the rocks, sloshing the whiskey around on the ice cubes. “Any calls, Clay?”
    Stuart glanced up, scowling mildly. “Why? What kind of calls? What do you mean?”
    “Hell. Anything. I was wondering if you were showing any interest in anything — the studio — anything like that.”
    “No,” Clay said. “Nothing like that.”
    • • •
    They had to leave Clay’s station wagon locked at the lower parking area. The road upward to the guide’s camp was a mule trail. “We might make it driving,” Shatner said, “but the engine would boil, might burn a bearing. What’s the sense? Who needs a car up there?”
    They packed their gear on their backs and carried the broken guns and fishing gear. Shatner had three long pulls at the fifth of bourbon while Clay locked the car.
    “Against the cold,” Shatner said. “Against a hex from my old man. He doesn’t like me to go off and stay overnight. And me, I’m afraid he’ll burn the place down while I’m gone.”
    “Heating pennies to toss to the kids.” Stuart said it for him.
    “You think I’m joking about that, don’t you? My old man throwing heated pennies out on the sidewalk for the neighborhood kids?”
    “You’ve been telling that same joke a long time.”
    “It’s no joke,” Shatner said. “Anything I tell you about my old man is no joke. Maybe I laugh. I hate to cry at my age. My age. You got any idea how old I am, Clay? No chicken. How old does that make my father? I was a child of his old age. I swear to you. How long is that old man going to live? With his little black cap he looks like a monkey now. I tell you. It’s punishment for my sins.”
    “You wouldn’t know what to do without him,” Clay said. “What would you have to talk about?”
    “God is my witness, you’re right.” Shatner nodded. “I yell at him. He yells at me. I talk scandalously about him to anybody who’ll listen … I tell you, Clay, I’d be all dead if anything happened to him.”
    He winced and cursed aloud, realizing what he had said. He plodded after Clay, wondering what he should say. He never wanted to hurt Clay because they were like brothers and he owed Clay one hell of a lot.
    Not a showman or head of any studio, that didn’t light Marc Shatner’s cigars for him if he hesitated, and nobody kidded Shatner. The town belonged to the agents, but he was the boy who had represented Clay Stuart, and Clay Stuart was the boy who had never made a turkey — damned few could say that, Jerry Lewis, Abbott & Costello — hell, even Garbo hadn’t always knocked them dead at the box offices.
    Shatner peddled flesh exclusively. He never represented writers any more because he’d painfully learned that nobody in Hollywood knew a writer’s name unless he’d won the Nobel prize last week — late last week. Nobody in Hollywood ever read anything except the analyses prepared by studio readers.
    Shatner got along well in all the studios, peddling his actors. The producers all liked him, and the ones who disliked him were quickest to invite him past their secretary. He sat on their desks, smoked their cigars, criticized their newest tailored suits, visited their homes, toyed with any of their wives who weren’t shaggy dogs, buffaloed them, bribed and blackmailed them — and was recognized by them as a successful agent, a top-flight man — and only he in the darkness of his own bedroom admitted it was because he represented one of the last of the super-stars, Clay Stuart, the boy who asked and got a quarter of a million per picture, plus a cut of the gross.
    Shatner plodded after Clay on the trail — a small man of