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Wylie, prodigal businessman, justified his instinctive and acquired pessimism. As if it needed justification.
    â€œGentlemen, behold. Not the gods can turn back time.”
    â€œMr. MacCormack . . .” Dale began.
    â€œGentlemen, we are presented with an example,” MacCormack continued, ignoring him. “I will not say a warning. I will neither say a beacon. An example. The man who took a chance and failed. What are we to think?Are we to respect his courage or condemn his folly? By what calipers are we to measure a man? By the scope of his ambition or the size of his achievement?”
    MacCormack gazed on Dale with a tender and bloody contempt.
    â€œHow would we judge the ancient Romans? By their achievement? They have achieved, ultimately, a pile of dusty old stones. Or are we instead to worship dreams of eternity, the visions of the Jews in their desert?”
    He pulled open a chair behind a stall, and shooed its disgruntled inhabitant over a half-desk’s width. “I do not need to inform you gentlemen that time goes but one way. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to rate the value of municipal bonds. Time leaves us, at least, with something to evaluate. Something to look at. So what are we looking at now, gentlemen? Are we looking at a pile of dust or the elusive remnant of a dream?”
    Dale sat back in his old chair. Nobody needed to explain.
    *  *  *
    After Alberta, Champlain wasn’t enough for Max Wylie’s body. He roared onto the autumn harvesting crews in Indiana, and beyond to the lumbering in Idaho and Washington, returning to spend the winter and the money in Champlain. Max would materialize without warning, gathering crowds as he strolled like a lord down Flora Avenue, everyone wanting to breathe in a bit of the winds that coursed around his strength, because he brought the smell of the whole country with him, the grandeur of the wild man. The boardinghouse women adored his stories of men who rode single logs down a hundred miles of river, and bets with Chinamen about who could climb a mountain faster, and murders in distant towns that hinged indirectly on Indian curses.No need to boast anymore. He could speak softly. The girls would lean in.
    Over dinner to celebrate his return one July evening in 1921, one of the frail office girls asked, “Mr. Wylie, what is the West like?”
    He launched into a romance of the plain’s grandeur, pausing on its homely churches, and the honey-storm music that seeped through the stained glass on a Sunday morning. When his mother had passed out of the room, he asked them quick, “You want the truth, girls?”
    The boarders insisted they did, and Max rolled a thick slice of bread into a ball, popped it in his mouth, and whispered, “The West smells like pussy.”
    *  *  *
    Max meant that the West smelled like money, Dale knew. The West smelled like having a piece, not having to account for every nickel in your pocket to Mother, to MacCormack. Freedom and spending. Free-spending. Dale found out about the smell of the West soon enough. In the 1920s, MacCormack and Sons, expanding beyond Pennsylvania, promoted Dale to “director of the sales force,” a grand title for a hardship post in the timber and mining counties selling axe heads and rope, engine grease and bulk seeds, biscuits and blue jeans, selling whatever he could figure out that people wanted to buy.
    In 1923, Dale arrived for the first time in Atkinson, a mining town on the Minnesota–Dakota border. The founding myth of the town of Atkinson is an appropriately bleak fairy tale. The town sits on the site of a chicken farm where the original owner, over a supper of cockerel’s gizzards, sunk his teeth into soft metal. The bit was solid gold. Immediately, he slaughtered all his chickens and rummaged through their guts for more.
    Atkinson fit its foundational myth well, a bloody mess made in the quest for a little