“Three old cowboys, one of them former Ranger, stopped by to see him in the first week. (...)he let them do the talking. He felt like an impostor. He was no longer the man who had lived the old times; he was no longer even the man who had killed Mox Mox. That man was not the cripple who lived in a granary, in a barn on the Quitaque. That man lived back somewhere in memory, across a canyon, across the Pecos; that man had been blown away, as Brookshire feared he would be, on the plains of time. The cowboys felt awkward. He clearly did not want to see them. They regretted coming, and they left, disquieted by what had happened to a man they had once regarded as invicible.”

—Narrator