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Show 19 while Ute Indians still wintered there, then drifted on up into Wyoming for a while, getting married in Sheridan in 1882, then returning to Colorado to settle down and start a cattle ranch. He buried his first wife, the mother of all his children, and divorced his second wife and lived in perpetual separation from his third. After he made money from cattle he invested in land and houses around Escalante and out in California, where Father Escalante never got, having turned back in Utah. He owned how many houses I don't know in San Diego, and lived there in tropical retirement. He came back often in his Packard touring car to tend to business and if I walked into the house and smelled cigar smoke it meant he was back in town, Wild Bill Brocken. Some old cowboys still called him Wild Bill and winked at my father, who looked abashed and pretended I wasn't there. I thought I knew what they were talking about, for Granddad had big handlebar mustaches and a larcenous cast in his eyes. But he was in his seventies by then, going bald and getting almost fat. He always gave me a big hug, smelling of cigars and sometimes brandy, the more brandy the bigger the hug. Each time he asked me what horse I was riding and was he any good. He loved to talk about ho^rses. He no longer wore boots but he still wore a Stetson, and he'd tell me about what a cowhorse this black one was, or how that dun broke her leg and he had to shoot her, or how a big bay almost drowned in a flooded river. While he talked his mustaches fluttered like wings and his cigar smoke ascended to Heaven. Undoubtedly he had been a wild cowboy, a child of the wild west, though he never straddled a horse when I knew him. "My belly's too big and my bones're too brittle," he would say, and make a smoke ring in the air. I loved cigar smoke. Years later when I was in the Navy out in California my father's youngest sister told me that Granddad Brocken usually brought along a |