Chapter 19 uncovers the lodge in the desert that Ilf and Petrov made an emblem of the high American standard of living in both the published work and a letter that they sent to Stalin upon their return. They spun their “great literary material” into two distinctive literary products: a “weapon” in the “struggle for socialism” that they presented to Stalin and a sympathetic portrait of an American missionary, “the man in the red shirt.” To reverse engineer these transformations, the chapter follows clues in the travelogue and Ilf’s notebook to the source of their impressions and identifies both the hostelry, the Vermillion Cliffs Lodge, and the missionary, Hugh Dickson “Shine” Smith.