one in it until I had been there and taken what I wanted. She was in her late 80s but she went up the hill as agile as a mountain goat.

As usual the room was spotless and orderly. A linen cloth on a round, golden oak table looked as if it had just been placed there. On it was a vase of paper lilies and a silver framed photograph of Oscar Wilde with "To Vince Affectionately Oscar," autographed in the corner. I was amazed. I had never seen the photograph, in fact I never knew he had it or had known Wilde. I asked Kate to explain.

She settled herself in a rocker and put her feet on a pine stump Uncle Vince had used for a footstool. "Your uncle was different from most men. Anything that meant a lot to him he never wanted to talk about. He was that way about the too-short friendship he had with Oscar." She looked at me and her faded blue eyes twinkled. "The reason he was so fond of you, as you probably guessed, was because he saw himself in you and wanted to protect you from what he knew you would be up against when you went it alone. As for him and Oscar-well, that was back in 1882April it was. I remember because Emma and I had just met. Both of us were working in Denver at Tabor's flossy hangout, The Windsor. Emma was washing and I had charge of the linen room." She pointed to the table cloth. "That's where all of Vince's good linens came from. Oscar was to speak at Tabor's Opera House. The old goat wanted to put him in the bridal suite at the hotel but some Texas steer with a silly blond had it and wouldn't give it up, so he had to fix up another suite for Oscar. They did the parlor in pink paper with funeral lilies on it. The paper in the bedroom was splashed with colored poppies, the kind they wear on those

Easter bonnet monstrosities. The night Oscar's train pulled into Union Station it was snowing hard. The streets were so muddy they looked like my pig pen after a cloud burst. You should have seen the bellies of the horses hitched to the hack that brought Oscar to the hotel, they were caked with mud. The train was an hour late. The audience was in the opera house waiting for him. Emma and I liked Oscar the moment we saw him. The papers always pictured him wearing silly clothes with a lily in his hand but he had on corduroys, a leather jacket, cowboy boots and a wide brimmed hat. He went to his room and changed to a frilly white shirt with a black velvet coat and britches that came to his knees. It was what the snobs wanted to see on him. Whether any of them understood what he lectured about I doubt it. Any foreigner was tops with them no matter what he said or did. Some women had their specs on long sticks and several had their fat bellies yanked in so tight they could hardly breathe. Taylor's clothes came from London. He waxed his mustache at the ends. It was so long it looked like a steer's horns. After the lecture he gave Oscar a big blow-out at the hotel. Euge Field was there. Ever hear about him?"

I had and through Uncle Vince. He was mining in Leadville. Every Saturday he hopped the train for Denver and spent most of his time in hotel lobbies watching the people. One night while looking at men's suits on the dummies in Daniel Fisher's window he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw a red wig, cheeks and lips as red as the hair, but the body that was in the dotted-swiss dress was too flat and angular to be a woman's.

"I'm Gracie. What's your name?" a falsetto voice asked him. Vince laughed. He'd recognized Field's voice, it was unmistakable. He'd met

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