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the heart of your story.”
    And she drove me east onto dry land such as I had never before seen, bleak and desolate, and at the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, “This is how they found it. A vast emptiness. Nothing has changed in a million years.”
    In no direction could I see any sign that man had ever tried to occupy this enormous land—no house, no trail, not even a fence post. It was empty and majestic, the great prairie of the west.
    Miss Endermann interrupted my reflections with a promise: “When we reach the top of that next hill you’ll see something memorable.”
    She was right. As we climbed upward through the desolate waste, we reached an elevation from which I looked down upon a compelling sight, one that would preoccupy me for the next half year. It was a village, line Camp, she said, and once it had flourished, for a tall grain silo remained, but now it was deserted, its shutters banging, its windows knocked in.
    We drove slowly, as if in a funeral procession, through the once busy streets marked only by gaping foundation holes where stores and a church had stood. We found only devastation, gray boards falling loose, school desks ripped from their moorings. Somehow I must make the boards divulge their story, but now only hawks visited Line Camp and the stories were forgotten.
    Two buildings survived, a substantial stone barn and across from it a low stone edifice to whose door came a very old man to stare at us.
    “The only survivor,” Miss Endermann said, and as we watched, even he disappeared.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “We want you to tell us,” she said.
    It must have been obvious that I was captivated by Centennial and its environs, because at lunch we began to pinpoint my commission, and I said, “By the way, nobody has told me who wrote the story I’m supposed to fortify.”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “Obviously not.”
    “I did.”
    “You did?”
    “Yes. I researched this story on the scene for five months.”
    “I knew ...” I was confused. “Of course, I realized that the people here knew you. But I thought you’d been ...”
    “Helping someone else? Helping someone important?”
    She asked these questions with such a cutting edge that I thought we’d better get down to cases. “Miss Endermann,” I said, “you’ll forgive me, but your magazine is asking me to spend a lot of time on this project. May I ask what your credentials are? Do you mind a few questions?”
    “Not at all,” she said frankly. “I’d expect them. I know this is important to you.”
    “What do you think of Frank Gilbert Roe?”
    Without batting an eye, she said, “On horses, terrific. On bison, I prefer McHugh.”
    This was a sophisticated response, so I proceeded: “What’s your reaction to the Lamanite theory?”
    “A despicable aberration of Mormonism.” She stopped and asked apologetically, “You’re not Mormon, are you?” And before I could answer, she said, “Even if you are, I’m sure you agree with me.”
    “I respect the Mormons,” I said, “but I think their Lamanite theory asinine.”
    “I’m so glad,” she said. “I don’t think I could work with. someone who took that sort of bull seriously.”
    “What was your reaction to the Treaty of 1851?”
    “Ah,” she said reflectively. “Its heart was in the right place. But the government in Washington had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of Missouri that there was no chance—none ever—that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given. If it hadn’t been gold, it would have been something else. Stupidity. Stupidity.”
    This young woman knew something. I asked her, “What is your judgment on the Skimmerhorn massacre?”
    “Oh, no!” she protested.. “It’s your job to tell us what you think about that. But I will confess this. I’ve studied the Skimmerhorn papers at Boulder and the court-martial records in Washington, and I’ve interviewed the Skimmerhorns in