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learned the best way to sell a man something he didn’t want was to refuse to offer it to him.
    He learned also to dress consistently and with dash; nothing so tawdry as a gold tooth, but an article of clothing that set him apart from the bowler-hatted drummer and the sharp in the straw boater. In Jefferson City after his release, he picked a pocket hanging on a peg in a barber shop, bought a readymade suit, and booked a coach to St. Louis. On the platform, a fellow in a cloth cap and mackinaw smoking a cigarette thrust a flyer into his hands, printed in square-serif letters on coarse stock:
    OPERA HOUSE!
    Friday & Saturday, November 17 & 18
    Civilization v. Savagery!
    Border Perils! Indian Fights!
    Performed Right On Stage Before Your Eyes!
    BUFFALO BILL!
    (W. F. Cody)
    TEXAS JACK!
    (O.B. Omohundro)
    PRINCESS DOVE EYE!
    (Mme. G. Morlacchi)
    CALE DURG!
    (E. Z. C. Judson: “Ned” Buntline)
    in
    Scouts of The Plains
    After a glance he crumpled and threw it into a trash barrel, but was accosted three times on his way to a hotel by similarly attired ruffians bearing identical leaflets, and shook his head at a street peddler offering cartes d’visites bearing the photographic likenesses of Cody, Omohundro, Morlacchi, et al; others were not so difficult to persuade, as a small group had gathered on the sidewalk to consider the man’s wares.
    The hotel was a rattrap, the best he could afford while he considered the business of acquiring dash . There he made the acquaintance, by proxy, of one Jack Dodger.
    He read Brimstone Bob’s Revenge in one sitting. When he stood at his window and craned his neck, he could just read the gaslit legend on the marquee of the St. Louis Opera House:
    SCOUTS OF THE PLAINS
    *   *   *
    With what a lending library gave him for the twenty-five copies of Dodger’s opus—and it was glad to get it with the Wild West in residence—he bought a better suit and a fine Stetson hat. He hadn’t enough to buy a new pair of boots, but at a bootmaker’s he procured a pair in glossy black glove leather for the price of resoling, as they’d gone unclaimed by the customer who had brought them in. They pinched his toes, but when he stood before a trifold mirror he decided he could bear them until he could afford a replacement.
    By the end of the week, for the small expenditure of a printer’s bill, he’d sold enough rolls of tickets at wholesale price to Scouts of the Plains to order a pair in his size.
    He resisted the temptation, however.
    Custom bootmaking takes time, and he had to clear out before the exasperated manager of the opera house set the police looking for the man responsible for two hundred enraged customers who had to be turned away at the door.
    When Scouts of the Plains closed in San Francisco after a wildly successful tour, William Frederick Cody had become famous. On a smaller scale, it made Abraham Cripplehorn’s reputation for disgruntled theater operators all along the circuit, and the only fiction he ever wrote was the names he signed in various hotel registers when Cripplehorn and Dodger were too dangerous to use.
    Chicago was always his destination of choice when his pockets sagged with cash. Its pleasures were many and its expectations few. There, in the fall of 1877, he was sitting up in bed in his suite in the Palmer House, eating a princely breakfast and reading the Sun, when he first read the names of the Messrs. Locke and Farmer, and saw his way toward a lifetime of the same.

 
    SIX
    A man of patience is always content, whereas an impatient man is always suffering from thirst, even when up to his neck in fresh water.
    Randy waited for Frank to find him in San Francisco until his money ran out. That process was accelerated by the incentives he’d left among desk clerks in all the likely hotels and porters at the train station to report the arrival of strangers whose ears didn’t quite match.
    Ten days