Masterson

The year is 1919 and William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, frontier lawman, gambler, and crony of Wyatt Earp, is working as a sports columnist on the New York Morning Telegraph and enjoying the last legal Manhattan whiskey with his friends as Prohibition looms.Bat is bothered, not just by passage of the Volstead Act, but by the legendry that has grown up about him. He takes pride in the fact that, in all his years as sheriff and marshal in the West's most dangerous boomtowns, he has never killed a man. Yet over the decades since he abandoned his gun-toting life to carve a career in journalism as a respected sportswriter and boxing authority, sensational dime-novel stories have dogged his footsteps and made him a legend, literally, in his own time.Worse yet, Bat has to admit that while he respects the truth, he enjoys the legendry and the doors it has opened for him.To try to find the real Bat Masterson, he and his wife, Emma - a former showgirl who works as a costumer and confidante among the dancers in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies - take a train trip back West, where both spent their salad days.The journey takes them to Dodge City, Trinidad, Cheyenne, Denver, Leadville, and Los Angeles. In the burgeoning movie industry in southern California, both Bat and Emma are given parts in a William S. Hart silent Western film; in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Bat visits Doc Holliday's grave and makes his peace with him; in Denver, he springs a special surprise on Emma - the only woman he has ever loved.