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intuition renders absolute knowledge.”
    “Very interesting,” I say.
    Chance scrutinizes me with a searching look. “Don’t gainsay intuition, Harry. After all, it led me to you.”
    I shift uneasily on the sofa. “How is that, Mr. Chance?”
    “I had a feeling about you. I used to watch you crossing the road. There was something about you.… One day I pointed you out to Fitz and asked, ‘Who is that young man?’ He didn’t know your name. I told him to find out and bring me your file. When I read it, everything fell into place. I learned you were a scriptwriter, that you knew shorthand, that you had worked on a newspaper.”
    “That’s right.”
    Chance turns to where Fitz sits in his dark corner. “Denis, bring the bottle and join us in a toast.” The shadows part as Fitz wrenches himself up out of the chair and into the light; the floor groans under him as he makes his way to the sofa and replenishes our glasses. Chance lifts his whisky tumbler. “To the picture I hope Harry is going to help us to make. To the poetry of fact.” Our glasses chime against one another, we drink. I don’t know what it is I’m drinking to and so I feel counterfeit, ridiculous, but it’s good whisky, not to be wasted. Chance stares down into his glass and says, “Fitz has heard rumours about an old man, an extra and bit player in Westerns. It’s said the cowhands regard him as a tin god, the last bull buffalo of the old West. There are a lot of stories afloat about him. If he’s the genuine article he could be the basis for my movie of poetic fact. If Colonel Griffith gave
The Birth of a Nation
to his son, this old man may give me the picture I want to make. I do not overestimate the potential. Think of Al Jennings,” he says.
    I do. Al Jennings was an Oklahoma lawyer who had gone off the rails and taken to robbing trains and banks until captured by United States Marshal Bud Ledbetter in 1897. After his release from the big house, he parlayed a reputation as a rough, tough, and hard to bluff desperado into a career in Hollywood. Riding his new celebrity hellbent for leather he offered himself as a candidate for AttorneyGeneral in his native state, running under the confidence-inducing slogan, “I was a good train robber and I’ll be a good Attorney General.” Failing in this campaign, he made a bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination where he made a shockingly good showing. Now, his political career on hold, he was back in Hollywood making more movies about – Al Jennings. And he wasn’t the only Western outlaw who had made hay with his notoriety. Emmett Dalton of the Dalton gang starred in
Beyond the Law
, a picture which in 1920 broke box-office records in New York and Los Angeles. Even the legendary Wyatt Earp had a walk-on in Allan Dwan’s
The Half-Breed;
but a one-eyed old man didn’t have much future in the acting business. He did, however, temporarily bask in a kind of reflected glory. Among his pallbearers at his 1929 funeral were the Western idols William S. Hart and Tom Mix.
    “I see,” I say, “you intend to make this man the next Al Jennings.”
    “Better. Al Jennings produced with money. Al Jennings turned into art.”
    “All right,” I say, “but what do I have to do with Al Jennings and art?”
    “You were a reporter. Reporters are supposed to be good at tracking people down.”
    As a reporter on a small-town newspaper like
The Sentinel
I didn’t have much trouble tracking down the newsmakers. A walk down Main Street got you to the mayor; next door to the mayor was the office of the local constable. They furnished the newspaper with hard news. Nor did it take much digging to discover the woman who had grown the potato with the startling resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t say any of this, of course. It would sound flippant.
    “I think what you want is a private detective. Not me.”
    “No dicks,” Fitz growls. He has been quiet so long that this intervention startles