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The French publisher gets me this weekend--then I'm all over the U.S. for The Dark Horse tour. My wife spent another afternoon in the Louvre, and I waited reclining on the steps underneath the archway Denton in the great courtyard. I like art but I think it's important to set limits in any relationship. I'd already traipsed through a half-dozen museums looking over the heads of Japanese tourists and their cameras, so I decided to forgo the greatest art museum in the world and, instead, do a little people watching. Of course now to watch one must be willing to be watched-that's just the way the rules are written.

After about an hour, I was getting a little bored, so I slipped my cowboy hat down over my eyes, crossed the pointed toes of my size twelves, and closed my eyes. I'd been that way for about twenty minutes when I heard some whispering and shuffling on the steps below. I raised the brim of my hat and saw three little boys about seven years of age with their backpacks and matching red caps studying me. "...Le cow-boy."

They retreated behind the nearest hundred and fifty foot tall column and disappeared. I lowered the brim, but after a moment I heard more whispering, so I re-raised my hat and discovered that they had doubled in size and there were six of them now.

When they saw me looking back at them, they scampered again.

I didn't lower my hat quite as low this time ‘cause I wanted to see if they were going to continue to multiply in multiples of three. After a moment, a pretty young woman came around the corner with, you guessed it, nine little boys, and asked in perfectly serviceable English. "Excuse me, but you are a cowboy?"

I guessed it was a reasonable question, me being out of context. "Yes, Ma'am."

"The boys of the class, if it would not be an imposition, would like to have lunch in your archway?"

I looked around at my archway, as big as the end zone on a football field. "Um, that'd be fine."

She looked around the column and nodded, whereupon thirty or so little boys in matching red caps and backpacks came running around and into the archway-they completely surrounded me. The French, even the very young French, have no problems with personal space, besides, I was offered morsels of sandwiches, treats, and fruit as they peppered me with questions about cowboys, Indians, horses, and the literary life Occidental.

When my wife found me surrounded by this gang in my archway, I raised my hands and introduced the posse. "Les cow-boys..."

Craig Johnson, The Dark Horse, Walt Longmire, Penguin Books