No name

     He stood watching the red lights on the back of the train, which moved away, scarcely faster than a man could walk, until it rounded a curve and left no more than a humming of the rails to tell of its passing, and the long whistle of the locomotive echoing down the night sky.

    The dry grass bent before the wind, and seed pods rattled in the brush along the right of way.

    James T. Kettleman was ended, and the man who had borne that name, making it feared and respected, stood now where he had stood so many years before, without a name. He was now a man without a past as he had been a boy without one.

    "Good-bye," he said, but there was nobody to say the word to, and nothing to remember.

(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)