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I made a great number of notes at the time and from these was able to check my memory. I wrote the book with the notes at my elbow. Raising my eyes, I looked into the past. It was as if I relived it all. Looking down I had these notes on the old sheets of paper, keeping tab on me. And these, I may say, I took at the time with no intention of writing a book about it later, but because it all interested me and I knew the experience would soon be over, all past, only to be remembered. I wanted more than memory. Hank's occasional prophetic jests to me regarding the book I would write did not seem to me then more than chaff.

I think that is enough to explain how I came into circumstances and places into which I summarily invite my readers, and to give assurance that the story I tell is not a hybrid of fact and fiction but a narration of actual experience.

So we can now get on to Hank and Slim, their lives, and the divulging of what lay under their skins, just in the way, by degrees, I got to know inside them, walking along with them.