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taken me to that party. It’s the only party there’s been around here and you let me sit home.”
    “Jessie, the dern party was right underneath you,” Wyatt said. “All you had to do was step out on the balcony.”
    “You know what I mean. I might have wanted to show up with my husband.”
    “So I’m forgetful,” Wyatt said. “I’m still your damn husband.”
    “Even so you don’t often perform.”
    “Maybe my resources are just limited in that line,” he said, wondering why women wouldn’t just shut up.
    “In your case it’s mainly that you’d rather drink,” she said.
    “Let’s change the subject, Jessie, we’re moving to Denver. Old Bill Cody has offered me and Doc a job in his show.”
    Jessie sat up and pulled her gown back over her breasts.
    “In his show, how?” she asked. “And what would I do?”
    “Me and Doc would pretend to be gunfighters and shoot blanks at one another.”
    “What if they weren’t blanks?” Jessie asked.
    “Doc thought of that too,” Wyatt told her. “Cody swears there’ll be no mix-up with the bullets.”
    “What about me?”
    “Denver’s a big place—we’ll soon find you another bar to tend—might call it the Mile High Saloon, unless Warren shows up with his own sign and wants to invest in a saloon himself.”
    “Okay,” Jessie said. She was sick of Long Grass.
    “Is Doc coming?” she wondered.
    “I believe he’s thinking it over,” he said.
    “Okay, I’ll come,” Jessie said.
    Denver was bound to be better than where they were.
    Then she got up and washed herself.
     

 
    - 17 -
    Lord Ernle kindly lent Bill Cody a private railroad car to get him back to Kansas, where he could get a train to Denver. At the last minute Nellie jumped in with him, though Denver was in the opposite direction of Rita Blanca, where she lived.
    Her reason for traveling a hundred miles in the wrong direction was that it would give her more time with Bill Cody—nobody in her life had meant as much to her as Bill. He had only shown her kindness and had helped her in a million ways.
    This evening, as they traveled, she wiped a trickle of tears out of Cody’s eyes, using a cotton handkerchief.
    “What is it, honey—what is it?” she asked. Cody was looking out the window. Both knew what it was.
    “I just tear up when I cross the plains,” he said. “Most of my happiest years were spent on the plains. I was here when the plains were so thick with buffalo you could barely ride through them on a horse.”
    “It must have been a sight,” Nellie said.
    “Oh yes . . . and the tall grass in Kansas was fine—I won’t be seeing it again, I fear. I’m done.”
    “Don’t say that, Bill . . . you know how much I need you,” she confessed.
    They exchanged a soft kiss . . . it left Nellie fluttery. They were alone in a private car. Her husband, if she still had one, was thousands of miles at sea. They kissed again.
    “We’ve never . . . we’ve never,” she said. “I hate to miss you.”
    “You didn’t miss me, honey,” Cody said. “We’ve done a bunch of kissing, and you’ve shown me your bosom a few times.”
    “Oh Bill . . . oh Bill,” Nellie said, pulling him close.
    Bill Cody put his hand on her and then he went to sleep.
     

 
    - 18 -
    Goodnight had scarcely swung off his mount when Mary Goodnight burst out of the shack she used for a schoolhouse and gave him an enthusiastic kiss, startling the three towheads Mary had been teaching and probably startling several of the cowboys too. Kissing like that didn’t occur every day, in the Palo Duro area.
    Odd how women change, he thought. In the several years he spent wooing Mary he had never been allowed such an aggressive kiss. Often, in those days, Mary would turn her head at the last minute, leaving him with only her shoulder to kiss.
    “It took you a while to drag yourself back here,” Mary told him.
    “We hung two horse thieves on the way back—that slowed us down,” he said.
    He knew at once