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through what there was of the silent town, and headed down the road toward Tucson, somewhere far off to the west.
    I never saw him again, and never wished to.
    It was many years before I visited Stein's Pass again, and on that occasion it was just after my wife and I had left the film set of Heller in Pink Tights, a movie made from one of my stories, [Heller With a Gun] with Anthony Quinn, Sophia Loren, and Steve Forrest.
    Wishing to see again the area I had written about in Shalako, Kathy and I drove east into New Mexico, and stopped briefly at Stein's Pass. The street was empty, the buildings falling down, and nobody in sight. Almost thirty years had passed, so I did not expect to see my former traveling companion. No doubt, wherever he is, somebody is building fires for him, or maybe he took the time to grow up and become a man.
    When I walked away from Stein's Pass, I had never considered writing a western story.
    At home I had been brought up on stories of Indians and Indian fighting but writing about them had not entered my mind. I did plan to write, to tell stories, but the nature of those stories was something that remained to be seen.
    However, I was used to listening to older people talk, and enjoyed their stories. Moreover, I had an insatiable curiosity about places and people, so I was never content to just pass through a town. I wanted to know about it, how it came to be where it was, and who was responsible. I wanted to know about the country, and had read just enough in geology and botany to know something of land formations and plants.
    Education, as I have said, takes many forms and there are many ways to knowledge and awareness. From the very beginning of my knocking about, I tried to learn about the country I was seeing, and soon discovered that in any hamburger stand or restaurant, in any barbershop or filling station, there is somebody who knows the area, or can direct you to somebody who does.
    Usually a question was all the was needed. If the one questioned did not know, someone was sure to overhear and respond.
    Before I was ever to read of them in books or diaries, I heard stories of John Wesley Hardin, John Selman, Jim Gillette, and Jeff Milton. The stories were told in the places where they happened, although often details or dates were mistaken, to be corrected later.
    Too often, though, in the places where travelers or tourists stopped, I would hear men boast only of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen. I must say that is less true today, but for many years people were enthralled with distance covered, not what country they had passed through or what they had seen.
    Every road in the United States, or any other country, has its places of interest.
    There was an evening in Colorado when we walked into a restaurant just as a man we had seen that morning was paying his check.
    "What happened to you?" he asked. "Saw you this morning when we started. Just get in?"
    "We stopped to see the old stage station,"
    I told him.
    He looked blank, then curious. "What stage station?"
    "You drove right by it. Interesting old place. Jack Slade, the gunfighter, used to hang out there."
    They are out there by the thousands, wonderful stories. Many have never gotten into the histories, although occasionally told by local newspapers or in privately printed booklets. Stories of wagon-train massacres, buried treasures, gun battles, cattle roundups, border bandit raids--no matter where you go, east, west, north, and south, there are stories. People are forever asking me where I get my ideas, but one has only to listen, to look, and to live with awareness.
    As I have said in several of my stories, all men look, but so few can see. It is all there, waiting for any passerby.
    There was an old man in Kingman, Arizona, who would tell stories to anybody who would listen. People around town scoffed. "Aw, he's full of hot air. Don't pay any attention." Or, "He's an old liar."
    Well, I listened. True or not,