Please, do not suppose I mean that in a tone of courage or steely fortitude or of resolve or of any other florid soubriquet for manliness imagined by literary types: I admit I mean it as a sort of helplessness. When we say love conquers all, we might as well say it crushes—the word means the same thing. When I say a man can do naught but follow his destiny, I mean no matter what he does, that is precisely what he is doing, so I take no pride in saying this is what I have done.

However.

[He looks into his tumbler, exhaling.]

However.

[He cracks the slightest smile out the side of his mouth and raises his tumbler to it; perhaps he fogs the tumbler up as he laughs softly into it, smelling encouragement in his liquor and hearing encouragement in his own tiny echo: he places the tumbler down without a sip.]

[The fiddler now fiddles "She Calls To Me." The tune has a soothing, reinvigorating effect on Hastings, who seems to grow younger with every bar.]

However, that was not how it started.

Why, I remember when I first ventured West.

None of us knew where we were going. All the way to Fort Laramie we had not a single member of the party who had taken the route we were on and only one of us had ever seen Oregon with his own eyes. One hundred and sixty men, women, and children; 320 eyes and only two of them had ever glimpsed Oregon Territory.

The 16th of May was the day I was born as surely as my actual birthday:

Now, all was high glee, jocular hilarity, and happy anticipation, as we thus darted forward into the wild expanse, of the un-trodden regions of the "western world." The harmony of feeling, the sameness of purpose, and the identity of interest, which here existed, seemed to indicate nothing but continued order, harmony and peace, amid all the trying scenes incident to our long and toilsome journey.

I was not one whom the landscape cowed, but rather one exhilarated—one eager for the challenge of it! The more I saw the weak-willed and the womanish tremble, the more I volunteered to ride hard and scout ahead, the more I was inspired to find the danger I was too young to sense lurking! Why, I was but 23 years of age! Boredom did not intimidate me! Boredom would not cow me!

Which, of course, any middle-aged man can tell you means but one thing: boredom was the very thing of which I was most afraid.

[He taps his fingers next to the tumbler, but still does not lift it.]