In fact, it was a slow day in the dime-novel trade that concluded matters between Dora and me.
Inevitably there came a morning when no bales of booklets were dropped. I rode home with a heavy heart, oppressed by the knowledge that not a single new dime novel was likely to enter Philadelphia that day.
Once home, I trudged miserably up to my study, thinking I might reread a few chapters of an old favorite, Boiled in Yellowstone; or, Mustang Merle Amid the Geysers. My own hero, Orson Oxx, had somehow strayed into Africa and was about to be boiled himself, though in a cannibal pot rather than a geyser. I thought it might be best to revisit a tried-and-true favorite, so that I might better bring my own adventure in progress to the boiling point itself, in a manner of speaking.
And then, calamity! My study had been stripped! The thousands of dime novels, so neatly stacked in sequence, were gone. Not one remained, not even the half-read Saul Sabberday left on my desk the night before.
Ashen, I raced down to Cook, who was up to her elbows in bread dough.
“Oh, yes,” she confirmed. “The scrap-paper man came by and Missus told him to take them all. She said your color had not been good lately and it might be because of the dust from them old books.”
My color! Dear God! I raced to the scrap-paper dealer, but too late. As dust goes to dust, pulp had gone to pulp.
Had I hurried home then, I might have murdered Dora and left our nine cheerful turnips motherless. Instead, I went to my bank, secured a substantial letter of credit from an astonished officer, and took the train to New York, burdened by not even so much as a shaving mug.
I didn’t need it, for that day I ceased to shave, or to be the Benjamin J. Sippy who had resided so unobtrusively all his life on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.
The next afternoon I settled myself in a small cabin on a boat bound for Galveston, Texas. I had meant to book for New Orleans, but the Galveston boat was ready to lift anchor, and I took it.
“You may meet with some brashness in Texas, but you’ll like it,” the captain said. He was a thin little Yankee with the worst-fitting set of false teeth I had ever encountered—if the seas were even moderately rough they clicked like a telegraph key.
“They can keep their talk of Saint Louis,” he said. “I say Texas is where the real West begins.”
“Then I made the right choice,” I said. “The real West is exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Oh, it’s real, mighty real,” he said briskly, before the sea surged and his teeth began to click out a code of their own.