“Lord, Lord,” she said, “are those awful things here yet? I thought they had been thrown away years ago. Johnnie, take them out and bury them somewhere. Throw them away so I will never see them again.”

These two old pistols made me feel important, established. I began to look about me. It was time I began to be somebody. My latest hero was the man that kept the bar in the hotel. He owned the building, leased the hotel, and ran the bar himself. He was a fat man, and he wore a fancy striped vest with a heavy gold watch chain across it and a twenty-dollar gold piece dangled from the chain for a charm. He had been out to California. It was the only twenty-dollar piece in the town. He was a small politician, the town fixer. When anybody got into any trouble and had to go before the justice of the peace, he went down to the hotel and saw Cy Near. Cy would say, “Leave it to me, that’s all, leave it to me.” When it was all over the fellow would come down to Cy’s and order drinks for everybody in sight, several times. Then he would say, “What do I owe you, Cy?”

“Owe me? Owe me for what?”