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county government were yet two years off. This humble ambition achieved, and having next got out of its system a couple of bloody, traumatic events, Harding pulled in its horns, hunkered down, and resolved to tough out the twentieth century the way it was. It had had its excitement early. The third act of its drama had preceded the first. Very well, if that was all she wrote, why not ring down the curtain, tell everyone the show was over, douse the lights, go home and go to bed?
    My impression, however, as I toured it slowly, was not that of a town long defunct, nor even of one lapsed into dusty senility. On the surface it seemed an amiable, sturdy, damned near idyllic place, a minor glomeration of gentlefolk entirely reconciled to, and at peace with, each other. The main drag east and west was Gold Street, its counterpart north and south Silver. All the streets had mineral names: Platinum, Zinc, Slate, Iron, Tin, Nickel, Quartz, Mica, Mercury. The trees were mulberry and cottonwood and cypress and chestnut, and rooted among them were low houses of adobe and stucco and brick painted yellow, lavender, and pink. Most had bottles of bright blue glass in their windows.
    I did the peripheries, too. On the northern edge, squeezed between the Southern Pacific tracks and the interstate, was a huddle of smaller dwellings made of wood, of unpaved streets, of mailboxes smeared with Mexican-American surnames. On all four sides the land rolled away into cattle ranches and irrigation agriculture. To the south, in the direction of Columbus and the border according to my map, three conical peaks called the Tres Hermanas, or Three Sisters, I was later told, up-thrust close to one another.
    So this was Harding, New Mexico. Most burgs bypassed by interstate highways kicked and screamed and went up the economic wall. Harding could not, apparently, have cared less. It sat there on its arid plain like a rock, sun-warmed and self-sufficient. If, under its placid ass, rattlers and scorpions lurked, they had long ago shed their fangs and unscrewed their stingers. It was a town with a bumper sticker on its heart: “Harding—Love It or Leave It.” And nobody ever left, except Tyler Vaught. Oh yes, and Max Sansom. In a WOODEN BOX.
    I parked on Gold Street to wait for five-thirty. The business establishments within my view included the Rio Mimbres Realtors, a Sears Catalogue Sales, the Manhattan Café (Especidistas en Comidas Mexicanas), the Harding Saddlery, a Ben Franklin five-and-ten, and a pool hall which vended liquors. The street hummed. I counted pickup trucks till I grew weary. I counted tall men in big hats till I grew spiteful. Why I couldn’t imagine, but my car attracted much attention—oblique from adults, unabashed from youngsters. At one point the sidewalk was actually blocked by a rabble of urchins. I forgot to say that my wheels are those of a 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith two-door saloon, its coachwork by Freestone & Webb. Fenders and paneling are black, the top and top of the bonnet a brilliant cardinal.
    When I bounced into the reception room the nurse was just leaving. I identified myself, gave her a syphilitic smile. She paled, said the doctor would see me now, and sidled around me out the door.
    I did a double-take at Dr. Jack Shelley II. Long and burly, no older than I, a black handlebar mustache, a white jacket, and boots which, when I said I’d come to see him in his capacity as county medical examiner, he promptly cranked up to his desk top. I said I was out here from New York to check on the death of the writer Max Sansom, and wanted to have a look at his Accidental Death Report.
    “Help yourself.” He waved at a file cabinet. “Top drawer, first folder. Matter of fact, the only folder. I’ve only been on the job three weeks—appointed to fill an unexpired term.”
    I got out the folder and gave the one-page typed carbon a quick run-through. “Multiple abrasions and contusions.” “Fractures of patellae.”