Read Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) for Free Online Page B

they were good stories, and years later nearly every one checked out. Here was a rich repository of history and legend, and nobody was listening.
    Stein's Pass was right in the middle of what had been Apache country, and not far from there was Doubtful Canyon, of which I would write.
    Getting kicked off that freight train gave me a chance to see some of that country for the first time.
    It had been bitterly cold during the night but as day broke I found myself walking down a gravel road in lonely desert and mountain country with lots of distance everywhere and nothing that might be a roadside filling station or a ranch. If I did not get a ride I was going to be in serious touble for water. My only hope was to keep going and hope this untraveled road merged with a highway somewhere ahead.
    When I had walked at least five miles I heard a car coming up behind me, and I stopped, looking hopeful.
    The driver was a big old man, neatly dressed and wearing a white hat, a white mustache, and perhaps the sharpest eyes I had seen in years. He asked if I wanted a lift, which we both knew was an idle question.
    "I'm heading for Phoenix," I said, hoping he might be going there himself.
    "Thought you might be from one of the ranches.
    How'd you get out here?"
    So I explained about being put off the freight train, and added that I had a chance of a job in Phoenix. Then I commented, "I hate to leave here without seeing Doubtful Canyon."
    He almost stopped the car. "What do you know about Doubtful Canyon?"
    So I told him about working with an old man in the Panhandle of Texas who had been raised by Apaches, a white boy who had ridden with Geronimo and Cochise as well as Nana. He had told me about his first war party, which was an attack on a stage in Doubtful Canyon.
    He questioned me about where and how I had known the man and what he had told me. "Boy," he said, "you had a piece of history right there with you. That was a famous fight."
    He looked at me again. "You had breakfast, son?"
    "No, sir. I started out of Stein's Pass before daylight."
    "We'll eat breakfast," he said. "I want to hear more about this Indian."
    He was not an Indian, I told him, except by training and feeling. He was a white man who had been captured as a boy. He believed his family was Swedish but he wasn't even sure about his name anymore.
    We stopped at Bowie, eating breakfast at a roadside restaurant. People there knew the man who was driving me. The waitress looked at me and asked him: "You got you a prisoner?"
    "He's a friend."
    "Are you the Law?" I asked him.
    "In a way. Have you anything against the Law?"
    "My father was an officer up in North Dakota," I said. "He was a veterinarian but was a deputy sheriff too. And the man who taught me how to use a six-shooter was an officer. He was one of the old-time gunfighters."
    "Who might that be?" He was skeptical.
    "Bill Tilghman," I said. "He was a friend of my brother's in Oklahoma City."
    "Heard of him. Heard he was a good man."
    We talked our breakfast away and then drove on. He was going as far as Tucson, he told me, and would carry me that far.
    We discovered we had both read Porter's Scottish Chiefs and Scott's Marmion. He knew a lot about gunfighters and talked of John Wesley Hardin. "I knew him," he added, "and the man who killed him."
    Now I was skeptical, and he explained.
    "I was Chief of Police in El Paso, and before that I was a Texas Ranger."
    Any conversation reproduced after years is a matter of guesswork, but that was the gist of it.
    I told him of baling hay in the Pecos Valley and of meeting Tom Pickett, who was spending a few weeks there, and of meeting George Coe and Deluvina Maxwell, all of whom had known Billy the Kid.
    The old-timers I'd met were men he had either known or knew of. He had strong opinions, with some of which I did not agree, but I was not there to argue but to learn. Young as I was, I had learned that gunfighters themselves had definite opinions about others with such