And I _did_. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month's rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma's kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too. "You're craphounds!" I said. "All of you!" Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and clapped my hands. # Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching numbers talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good. He had an edge -- no one else knew that they were going. He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum. Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them. Our draw in the window is a beautiful mannequin I found, straight out of the Fifties, a little boy we call The Beaver. He dresses in chaps and a Sheriff's badge and sixguns and a miniature Stetson and cowboy boots with worn spurs, and rests one foot on a beautiful miniature steamer trunk whose leather is worked with cowboy motifs. He's not for sale at any price. -- <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> <Work rdf:about="http://craphound.com/place/Cory_Doctorow_-_Craphound.txt"> <dc:title>Craphound</dc:title> <dc:date>1998-3-1</dc:date> <dc:description>A science&#45;fiction short story by Cory Doctorow about alien thrift&#45;store enthusiasts, from the short story collection "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls Eight Windows press in September, 2003 (ISBN: 1568582862)</dc:description> <dc:creator><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:creator> <dc:rights><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:rights> <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" /> <license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/" /> </Work> <License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/"> <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction" /> <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution" /> <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" /> <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution" /> <prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse" /> </License> </rdf:RDF>