O Woe, what is left when all Hope is gone? I had been tricked by Fate and Fortune and doomed to wander alone across the mountains and high plateaus of the old Southwest without a way of telling about any of it. I needed a laptop now!

At my nadir of despair a reader miraculously appeared. He had a laptop for sale at an attractive price. It would be a bridge until we reached the Promised Land of the mini-notebook, that is, the Asus Eee PC or its Wannabees.

I was so eager for this laptop to arrive that the notion of a Silver Slug and a Wandrin Wagon transmogrified into something else. I thought of little Ronnie Howard singing about a Wells Fargo wagon a'cummin for him, in the movie version of The Music Man.

And here came the Wandrin Wagon, over Monarch Pass on US-50, headed for Gunnison, CO. He sits up on top of the Wagon like they did generations ago, flicking the whip at the horses, the dust flying. He saved us just in the nick of time.