“I’ll bet that well-shooter’s a crook,” said one of my companions. He had, I remember, a great deal of mud in his hair and on his face. He kept complaining as we went along. “He could have stuck that nitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s what he could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by the entire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooter was not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, my dad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunk and beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared. It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have a hero, who wants just a teamster? It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whose Machiavellian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness. NOTE VIII IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life began to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience, someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is something of the actor in me. When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing marvelous tales, poems, novels--that would never be published. Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well--I had died and had been buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer--whatever you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say, John, who is that fellow over there?” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or a gambler to me.” You see, I dreamed of something like that--dead and buried away--and then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house. He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without much interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!” You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I didn’t. As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.