Molly needed advice. But she did not know how to ask for it, or what to ask, or whom. She did not want to share the secret of her ride, or of her assignation for the following Saturday; that event and the event-to-be had changed her situation with respect to Jericho altogether. She thought it likely, but did not dare to say aloud (for the very thought was vain and wicked, and cursed the chances of its coming true), that he would kiss her. She did not know what she would do if he did. She did not know if she could kiss. She had practiced with her own reflection in the mirror, but that was probably different from the real thing and she did not know if she was doing it right. How do people know? she wondered.
    She was not going to ask advice on kissing, but was aware she needed advice on something, and hoped the person she asked would know what it was. That person would not be Candy, she knew. Since Jeremy's departure (another of those subjects no one would talk aboutr) Candy had withdrawn from her associations with everyone, except to direct the business of the household: do this, do that, do the other. One look told Molly she was in no state to hear another girl's problems, especially those involving her beau–good Lord, no! she mustn't call him that! She thought of Biddie. Throughout the school day, whose demands on her concentration she satisfied but meagrely, she promised herself more than once she would talk to Biddie.
    When she got home it was time for afternoon tea, which the brides did not take except on special occasions, but which Biddie's horrid relations did every afternoon. Today it was in the parlor, with Biddie serving. "Why can't we go back to the tea shop?" her sister was asking, all petulance. "We may meet some lumbermen."
    "Hardly likely," her mother opined. "And if there are any they'll be soaked in sweat. The men here work all the time!" Neither of her daughters having an opinion to offer on this marvel, she turned to the tea tray Biddie had brought in but not had time to put down. She Cloom lifted the lid of the cream jar and sniffed the contents. "This isn't clotted cream, it's plain. You know I can't abide plain cream in my tea!"
    "Poor Mama," Maddie sighed. "Her digestion is so delicate."
    "And where are the cucumber sandwiches? I particularly asked for cucumber sandwiches!"
    Biddie, who had not had a day and a half to spare for the preparing of a trickle of cream, or any cucumbers on hand (unless they were pickles), forgot her manners for a moment. "Well, excuse me all to pieces!" It would have been a shriek if she had not bent all her effort to suppress it. She banged the tray down on the table, and several sandwiches leapt out onto the carpet.
    "Clumsy!" Mrs. Cloom yelled, not suppressing it. "What was I just saying, Madeline? What was I just saying? Always the clumsy cow." Biddie stood as if debating whether to reply. "Well? Why are you still standing there? Pick them up!" She still did not move. "Go on, go on, you stupid chit! What do you think I pay you for?"
    Listening from the kitchen, Molly could not help cringing. There was a long silence, which was finally broken by Maddie's whisper: "Alice, Mama."
    A few seconds later Biddie stormed in with the spoiled sandwiches and cast them into the pail by the door with the rest of the day's scraps (which she had not had time to empty yet). "I need advice," said Molly.
    Biddie was at the broom closet, or alcove, picking up the hand broom and dustpan. "Not allowed to talk." She shook her head in a tic-like repetition. "I'm handmaiden to the queen. And her precious little princess." Molly asked if she knew whether Kate were upstairs. "Ask the queen! She sees everything." She gave a shrill cackle and traipsed back out to the parlor. Molly wondered if she might be going crazy. She hoped not, for she liked Biddie very much. But the two of them could still be sisters; many people had crazy relatives; Biddie did herself.
    Cheered by this reflection, Molly tripped upstairs to her own chamber. There she found Kate sitting on the bed. Molly felt an onrush of relief; Kate could tell her what she needed to know. But her expectation was short-lived. Kate was gazing at one of the drawings tacked up over the bed: a portrait of Ben Perkins's raccoon, which had the run of his store and (till Jericho had taken it over) the backroom. "This is the best you've done," she said. "Or maybe it's just my favorite." She continued studying it. "He looks as though he hadn't decided whether to stay a pet, in a place where he's grown secure and content, or run away to the forest, where he won't know the way but will find it out as he goes along. Whichever he chooses, he knows he'll be looked after, but the wilder place calls to his spirit." She looked up at Molly as if asking her advice. "Which will he choose, do you think?"
    "I think he's chosen already," Molly said regretfully. And the twenty-one days were only half over. Kate broke into tears, of what type the younger girl could not judge. She stood and hugged her and then ran out. Molly could hear her footfalls on the stairs.
    She sighed. Kate had been her last hope. Alone she must face the hour of her–of her what? Assumption? No, that was something religious. But the other words that came to her sounded religious, too. Maybe there was no word for it, or maybe she did not know it yet. If she could have asked Jericho, he could have told her, she guessed. But a proper young lady would never ask, and anyhow he would expect her to know it already. She understood that much about herself and him, but not much more than that.
    Early on the Saturday evening Clancey was hanging about the dormitory keeping watch when a tap on his shoulder brought him around to face the creature he was watching for. "Shan't be seeing Molly tonight," the creature said quietly, cocking an eye toward the house. "Thought it only fair to apprise you."
    "By your whisperin' I take it herself don't know."
    "Oh, she had some notion of taking in that key-pounder again. But I've other plans afoot. So you may have the night off." He pulled a silver dollar from his pocket and slapped it into Clancey's palm. Clancey grimaced; his touch was too soft. "Buy yourself a drink. And tell Miss Hatfield...tell her I'm taking her advice." Clancey inquired what advice that might be. "To seek my own kind," the creature said, and he was away.
    Passing the cafe, he encountered Mrs. Cloom with her younger daughter, who made a great show of pleasure on seeing him. He made a detour round both of them. Maddie asked what the matter was. "I've no need of an imitation," he informed her. "I know where to find the genuine article."
    At about the same time a woman slightly overdressed for her age, or vice versa, even by Lottie's relaxed standard, strolled into the saloon, affecting to ignore the grins that greeted her (and the slap also). She was carrying a wicker basket, which she rested on the counter. "Felice Duvet," said Lottie, "my, my."
    "Your what, dear?" said Mrs. Duvet.
    The traditional exchange of greetings concluded, Mrs. Duvet called for six of Lottie's best. "Take your pick," said Lottie, waving toward the room. "I daresay most of them have had the pleasure already."
    Mrs. Duvet broke into a laugh from which every trace of reality had been expunged. "Lottie, you are droll. Six bottles of your best whiskey."
    Lottie moved to fill the order. "Expecting company?" It was a foolish question.
    "Always. That is...my daughters."
    "Daughters?" Lottie raised her eyebrows.
    "Adoptive daughters. Very popular girls...so many callers to manage. But yes, this evening they're entertaining a particular guest. I wager they'll be hard-pressed to satisfy him." She reached into a flesh-colored pouch whose tie-cord had been wrapped around her fingers, made payment in paper rather than coin, and waited for the change, which was very little. "Don't misconstrue, they're quite looking forward to his visit." She took up the basket, which she handled easily despite its awkward bulk. "He's promised to paint them!" With this intelligence, which surprised Lottie more than its deliverer knew, she trotted out.
    Jericho was therefore not at the opera house, or anywhere within Molly's sight, but Clancey was. He had come on the hunch of finding her there and then hurried off again. A few minutes later Brian appeared in front of her. Whether he had advanced entirely on his own power, or been pushed in her direction, it was not clear. His hair was pressed down again and he was packed into his Sunday suit. She greeted him politely as she had last time, all the while peering about, but with failing hopes. Clancey watched them from the corner. The doors were open now, and everyone else was going in.
    After several seconds Brian worked up the gumption to ask, "Are you–that is, would you–that is, can I buy your ticket for you?" Molly stared as if she had not understood. "That is, and sit next to you?" he added, to make it clear.
    Her other concerns retreated momentarily as curiosity advanced to the fore. "You can't afford it. Can you?"
    The dollar Brian had got from Clancey (the same dollar Clancey had got from Jericho) would pay for them both. "It's okay. Capt–" He remembered that Clancey had told him to keep that part quiet. "It's okay."
    After a last despondent look around, Molly consented. But her heart was heavy enough to sink her to the bottom of the Sound. "I have to leave at the intermission," Brian said. "I don't want to, but my folks said. Is that okay?"
    "Oh, Brian, it doesn't matter!" She was instantly sorry for having spoken so. He could not know how she was hurting, and even if he had, she had no call to hurt him. He was being very nice in paying her way; had saved her really–saved her from looking foolish. She had not realized it till Miss Essie, who was ahead of them in the line, gave them a wave. She must believe, everyone must, that she had come there on purpose to meet Brian! A few days before that would have been intolerably embarrassing; now it was a mercy. Better that than to have been left standing!
    Not till they were inside, and her gratitude and (something she had never expected to feel for Brian) affection turned her attention away from herself, did she recall a fact about the last recital which, as she learned by checking the program, pertained to this one as well, and concerned Brian closely. As the curtain stirred she whispered it in his ear: "There is no intermission." He looked at her in alarm. Then the curtain lifted, the musician walked out onto the stage, and the murmur of seconds earlier was washed away in applause. Molly smiled at Brian encouragingly. "I'm sure it will be all right," she said. If he did not hear her, he read her lips, and forced a smile in return. She patted his hand, and his cheeks reddened. Poor, dear Brian. She realized she quite liked him.
    –but not like Jericho, of course. The music–Schubert again–brought him back to her mind and carrried on its tide a strong sharp pang which drove into her as into a waiting hollow: a pang for the loss of that elation the same music had wakened the first time, a feeling concentrated and made flesh (though she would never have used the Bible phrase) in Jericho. This time he was not with her. He was...where was he? She was so much stricken by his absence, she had not thought to worry for him.
    She might have done if she had known where he was comporting himself. The widow Duvet's cabin stood on the edge of a ravine outside town, a big bumpy shoulder of rock with dead and rotting trees at its base. Jericho could not mistake the house; there were no others in sight. When he rapped at the door, it was opened by a young woman who made him think of Rubens. She introduced herself as Cinnamon. Her sisters, so-called–Cumin, Curry, and Coriander–and their foster mother, as she pleased to represent herself, awaited him in the candle-lit interior. They might all have been formed of the same wax as the candle. Abandon hope...what was the line? He passed in, and the door, hanging askew on its hinges, swung shut crookedly after him.
    He enjoyed his evening, and Molly hers, in their respective degrees. He spared not a thought for her, and before eight o'clock she had discovered how much of the bliss she had enjoyed on the previous occasion she owed to the composer rather than the company. Later, as Brian walked her home, the moon, working its way to fullness but falling somewhat short of it yet, seemed to have singled her out for special emphasis, as if she had been the performer of the recital. She looked to Brian more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen, not excluding herself up to now.
    As they stopped at her gate he observed that the–the–the moon was mighty purty. Molly agreed, a little distantly. And so–so–so were the stars, he said. She agreed again and waited for him to say more. After a little she gathered he had nothing more to say, and she reached over the gate for the latch. "And so–so are you!" She shushed him; what if someone heard? "Well, you are." It was easier to say now that he had let it out the once. "Purtier'n all of 'em put together."
    She could not help feeling pleased, though she knew how silly he was being. But sweet, too. And he was here, while Jericho was not. She had not said much this evening, and he had respected her silence with a sensitivity she had not known he possessed. If he had blundered once or twice, out of ignorance or nervousness, he had hastened to make it right again. Indeed he had been the very gentleman he envied Jericho for being (and on that day when he outgrew his youthful tomfooleries, the gentleman would remain). Molly gazed at him with an admiration she had never expected to feel, or Brian to see. That and the moonlight made him bold.
    "Molly," he said, "I...." She put up a hand to hush him. He took it. Under the moon, isolated from any other visible being as only a young couple can ever manage to be, they kissed. He was never sure afterward who had first stepped forward, who had first leaned in, or whose lips had first touched the other's. However it was, the lips touched, and then untouched. The young couple stood regarding each other for a moment. Then Brian spoke again, and his words disappointed her, as Jericho's had. "Wow!" he said. "That was plenty nice!" As before, the expression was paltry, earth-bound, mean: didn't men have any finer feelings? Sensitive to the shifts in her affections (which had been numerous that night), Brian became uncertain. "...wasn't it?"
    The question struck her as irrelevant. "Mm-hmm," she said shortly. "I have to go in. Good night." She unlatched the gate and went through it. Brian moved to follow, meaning to see her to the door as a man should, and hoping of course for a second kiss. She blocked him. "You mustn't. Candy doesn't know I've been out." (This for once was true.) "Thank you. For the recital, and for walking me home, and for...." She left the remainder understood.
    "Sure!" he said. He moved to embrace her. She evaded him, making it look as if she had not done so deliberately, and started up the path. "Can I walk you home again some time?" he asked hopefully.
    "I suppose so." She sounded almost annoyed. She was wanting to get inside, to sort through her feelings, including her feelings about him, and he, in his actual person, was getting in the way of them.
    He felt baffled (as he often would feel in his dealings with women all his life). On the whole he believed he had done well, but his standing with her was more indefinite than he had expected. He wanted to clarify it if he could. "Molly, do you–"
    She turned to him with an air of finality. "Hadn't you best get home now? Your parents–"
    "Jeepers!" He had forgotten about the lost intermission. Without a word of goodbye, he high-tailed it up the street. Molly laughed. But he was sweet. His night was done; hers was not, though she did not know it yet.
    The widow Duvet's guest, who had brought along his paints and brushes but no canvas, had strung up one of the widow's bedsheets, on which he had commenced to make visible, with violent slashes of the brush, all black (and without flowers), the likenesses of the girls he had promised. He did it between the distractions they continually proffered and swigs of the whiskey the widow had laid in. By the time Brian and Molly parted, the portrait had been buried forever in a chaos of wild zigzag lines and spirals, with a decorative border of impolite words. The girls had taken turns defacing the masterpiece over the artist's half-hearted protests, and finally he had joined in, too.
    Coriander, the youngest of the girls, and the only one at present not entwined in one of the guest's limbs, went to fetch him the fifth of the six bottles on hand. Mrs. Duvet took occasion to impart a word in her ear. "He likes you best, Cory," she said.
    Cory shook her head rather wistfully. "He don't like any of us. Not really. He just wants us to think so."
    She gave a cry as the widow's nails dug into her wrist. "Then think so!" she hissed. "It's his party." Cory nodded, a little frightened, and hurried back to him. Aware of the widow's eye on her, she strove to please by grabbing his neck and descending on him for a voracious kiss. Her "mother" was satisfied, for the time being, but doubts still nagged. Really, sometimes the girl acted as though she had no one to answer to but herself. Such foolishness would have to be knocked out of her head, and the widow fancied herself as one who could do the knocking.
    Meanwhile Molly had not gone inside as she had intended. Her mind had returned to Jericho, whom she was willing to grant little charity. She knew from reports she had overheard that he visited Lottie's every night. I bet he's there now, she thought, and had no sooner thought it than an unwise notion hatched in her brain, making her pause on the step. She would go to Lottie's and see for herself. If he were there she would tell him a thing or two, or turn up her nose at him and leave without saying anything. If he were not there, she would give him a chance to explain tomorrow and might–might–forgive him if the explanation satisfied her.
    She set out, but in the event did not have to go so far, for she met two of Jason's men coming back from the saloon. One of them, in answer to her query, informed her that they had passed Jericho on their way into town and that he had been headed out toward the ravine, to the widow's place. The other man hushed him. As they walked on she heard him say behind her back, "Girl like her don't need to be hearin' that sort of thing."
    "She asked, didn't she?" said the first.
    Molly had known of the widow's place but could not imagine why Jericho would be going there. Mrs. Duvet's girls were held in disparagement by the whole village, and rightly, too. Her sympathies usually rallied to the underdog, but that bunch was awful, at once vulgar and superior-acting. True, the youngest had once done her a favor by returning a bracelet Molly had lost, which the girl might have kept with Molly none the wiser, and she evidently had no pretty things of her own. But when Molly offered her a quarter in reward, Coriander had disdained it. Whatever generosity had moved her to the good deed, she masked it, as though with the face paint she wore. Molly put her from her mind. If she wanted to hide her better nature, Molly was not about to go hunting for it. She had not seen the girl since.
    But tonight she would, for tonight she would go out to the ravine. Whatever attractions it held that had lured Jericho there in preference to the opera house and herself, she wanted to see. Then she could carry out the thing-or-two-telling which his absence from Lottie's had deprived her of.
    She returned to the corner of the dormitory but instead of going back sheered at the corner, up the side road. She was not afraid of being seen, for the building had no windows at its ends. She took the road as far as the darkened church. Beyond lay the wood that ended at the ravine. She knew the way but had not taken it more than once; that stretch was grim and desolate, as if a curse hung over it, and she did not like it. But she did not fear it, either, even at night; she was too much at home in nature for that. Perhaps she feared it too little. Looking and feeling in her cloak for all the world like Red Riding Hood, she entered the waiting reaches of the forest.
    She saw the tiny patch of gold, flickering distantly ahead of the trees, long before she made it out to be a window. As she neared it, sounds filtered out through the cracks into the chill air: thumps, crashes, and bursts of incoherent song, all against a steady counterpoint of devilish laughter–Jericho's, she was certain.
    He was sitting in the one big chair with Cumin on his lap, more or less, and bending her back so she was nearly parallel to the floor, his left hand cradling her head. His lips executed upon hers (which were only a little fuller) a long, smooth, insinuating kiss. When he looked up, he saw that the view had changed slightly. He could always spot such things. But where was the difference?
    There, at the window!–a face staring in. That had not been there before. He was sure he recognized it. He struggled to determine why as he struggled to keep it in focus. At last he remembered. "I'll be damned!" he said. He pointed for the others to look. The shocked countenance they beheld grew even more extreme when its owner realized all of them were staring at her. "If it ain't the innocent abroad!" said Jericho.
    "Not for long!" Cumin rejoined, and the entire party shrieked with laughter–all except Cory, the youngest. She recognized the girl at the glass as the one who had once been friendly to her, or tried to; she was about the nicest girl in town. Cory's heart went out to her. She wanted to stop the others from mocking her but knew it was impossible.
    "Let's invite her to the party!" said Cinnamon.
    "Ooh, not her!" said Curry. "She's too fine for us." She had recognized her, too. She held up the tip of her nose and paraded across the disordered room (the product of those crashes and bangs Molly had heard) in a crude parody of daintiness.
    "Bring 'er in," the widow ordered. "We'll find out how fine she is."
    The girls lurched forward. But Coriander leapt out like a wildcat to face them. "Leave her be!" Dismayed by the unexpected opposition, they cowered back.
    Now Jericho rose, a little unsteadily. "What the devil for? Girl c'n dance. I seen 'er dance." His face changed into something the girl at the window did not like to see. "By God, I'll give 'er a dance!" He shoved Coriander aside and fell onto the door–fell literally. The other three rushed to buttress him.
    By this time Molly had fled in a panic for the woods. She looked back to see him stagger onto the porch, with the others clinging to him like barnacles. "Come back here!" She ran on. "Don'cha want me to kiss yuh?" she heard behind her. "Child's been dyin' for me to kiss her!"
    "Kiss him! Kiss him!" the girls squealed.
    "If yuh don't know how it's done, ask these gals! They'll learn yuh!" The whole band laughed raucously.
    Molly kept running, as fast as she could move, away from that place, away from them, away from him. Her feet would not go right and kept misstepping. She felt clumsy and ungainly, felt as if her body were not hers, and she did not know it. Her face was burning; they had laughed at her; he had laughed at her, and said horrible things–she shook to think of them–things she tried to expunge from her mind. This was what he thought of her, then.
    But for all the disgust she felt toward him, behaving like a drunken animal, what surpassed it in awfulness and lay on her like a felled pine was the consciousness of her own inferiority as he saw it, as they all saw it, and as she could not but see it herself: all the small things she hated about herself, which now appeared not so small: those pockmarks (freckles, people called them), that strawlike hair, her shortness (why oh why couldn't she have been born tall like her sister?). She was small and wanted to be big, young and wanted to be old, plain and wanted to be beautiful. Candy had once told her it would change when she grew older. Well, she was older, and it had not changed; not enough. Other girls her age were tall and round and womanly; why not she?
    Behind her she heard a voice calling urgently to her; not his but a female voice. "Girl!" it called. "Girl!" Molly stopped and swung round. When she saw who it was, she was practically ready to fight, and the girl was no bigger than herself, either. "What do you want?" Molly shouted, making clear in her tone the depths of her contempt for the lot of them. She had fled too soon to hear and see the stand the girl had made on her behalf.
    Stung by the rudeness, but thinking it no worse than she deserved, Cory halted a few yards away and hesitated before speaking, but went ahead since she felt it her duty. "Don't let him git to you. He don't mean nothin'. He jist don't know how a girl feels." Molly was instinctively offended that the girl would presume to place them both on the same level. Had she thought more about it, considering the nature of her present discontent with herself, she would have felt flattered.
    "Many's the man that don't," Cory continued, "and still worth the bother. But this 'un ain't for a girl like you to be cryin' over. For all his airs, he ain't no better'n me." Though Molly had been thinking much the same herself, the defense her feelings immediately threw up was evident in her face. Again Cory accepted it as her due. "You think I ain't fit to be sayin' so. And maybe not. But somebody had got to tell you." With that, she ran off into the trees.
    Not till later did Molly come to recognize the kindness of this advice and her own ungraciousness, which she then repented. But this night her grief was swelling so within her as to shut out any great care for anyone else. It had been of a fair size to begin with, as she was running from the cabin, and each time she stopped to think about it–fixing it in her mind, as it were–the feeling expanded further, as if to justify the thought, metamorphosing into something far vaster (but, strangely, easier to bear) than the original hurt: something more tragic, melodramatic, operatic–at all events theatrical–with herself as the leading player: "love," in other words.
    By the time she got back to town all the lights had been extinguished, even at Lottie's. She had never before wandered the streets so late. Not another soul was abroad, not even a dog. She wished for an audience to behold her grief, though she did not say so to herself. Then the dark village grew darker still. A mass of cotton that had escaped ts bale had blown across the moon, which even before had been unwilling to show its full face; that old friend had deserted her, too. She was alone, unloved, and unlovable. Jericho, and nature itself, had rejected her. She might as well end it all.
    The impulse steered her feet down the hill and onto the long pier, to its very edge, with her toes extending beyond it by an inch. Farewell, Seattle; farewell, her friends. When Jericho saw her laid out and garlanded for burial, how sorry he would be! He would hurl himself on her coffin and call on his Maker to forgive him the wrong he had done her. And serve him right!
    But wait; she did not want to kill herself. Over him? She had lost her father and mother, lost her friends by coming West. What did Jericho count for, compared to them? Or Candy and Christopher? Or her drawing? If she drowned herself, she could never draw again. That settled it; she must keep living. But she had forgotten how close to the edge she was, and in turning she lost her footing and fell off.
    "Molly!" cried a figure who had just appeared at the head of the pier. She ran to the spot where she had seen Molly drop and was relieved to find her sitting on a bumpy projection of rock a few feet below with her legs out in front of her and her underskirts spread. The sudden landing and the slippery surface had slid her off her feet. "If you mean to do away with yourself," the woman above said wryly, "you'll have to clear the pilings first."
    "Lottie? What are you doing out here?"
    "Rescuing you, dearie." She stooped down and reached out to her. Molly gathered herself to her feet with a moan. "Are you hurt?"
    "Sore," said Molly. "Behind."
    Half pulled, half pulling, she clambered up onto the pier. Lottie looked her over. The only damage she observed was a torn hem on one of her petticoats, which had probably met with a bramble bush in the woods. "You deserve it," she said. "Mooning over a man who isn't worth the powder to blow him up with."
    "What makes you think I'm mooning?" At the moment, in fact, she was not.
    "Never knew another reason for an otherwise sensible girl to act so foolish. Come with me." Molly hung back. "Come on! We have to get you out of those wet clothes." "Partly wet" would have been more accurate, Molly's careful mind told her. But she let herself be led.
    They did not take the main road but a lane that led toward the saloon. Molly asked how Lottie had known she was there. "Saw you from my window as I was heading to bed. I was afraid I might be too late." She regarded her narrowly. "I'm not, am I?" Molly blinked up at her. Lottie breathed her relief. "Then that's all right."
    At the doors of the saloon Molly hung back again. "Candy said I'm not to habitate saloons."
    "Was that her word?' Molly's blush gave the answer. "Did she say you should throw yourself off piers? Or go running out to the widow's?"
    Molly's mouth fell open, confirming the guess. "How did you know that?"
    "I know more than you think. Sounds to me as if you haven't been paying any mind so far to what your sister says. Why start now?"
    She was holding one of the doors open. Without further argument, Molly passed under her arm into the building. It looked remarkably like any other business after hours, chaste and museum-like. "Everything's so quiet," she said. The owner admitted that this was her favorite time of day.
    She led Molly upstairs to her own bedroom and directed her to remove her dress, gesturing toward a black lacquered screen figured with dragons which stood in the corner. She rummaged in the wardrobe. "I'll find you something."
    Molly was apprehensive of what it might be. Lottie's own style of dress was rather more...forthright than Molly could imagine herself being or Candy allowing. "You don't have to–" she began earnestly, but then Lottie turned, holding up what she had chosen. "Why, it's pretty!" she said with an astonishment that might have been read as slightly insulting. The skirt and the matching bodice were of a peacock blue foulard with ivy green trim, whose only offense against taste, if it could be called that, lay in the intensity of the contrasting colors, which together with the epaulettes on the sleeves marked the dress as not quite new, though it looked so. And it looked about Molly's size.
    "It was a birthday gift for...a girl I knew," Lottie explained while Molly changed. "I hadn't seen her for so long, I hadn't realized how much she'd grown." Then her voice grew queer (for her), delicate and distant like Miss Essie's. "You spend a lot of your time roaming the woods." Molly guessed she did. "Tell me, in all your roamings, did you ever meet up with a unicorn?"
    Molly peered over the screen to see if she appeared to be joking. "There are no unicorns! They're only in stories."
    Lottie nodded sadly. "It's the same with second chances. You read about them but they don't ever seem to come along."
    Not sure what she meant, Molly returned to the last statement she had understood. "Where is she now?"
    Lottie knew at once whom she was referring to. "Married."
    "Do you ever visit her?" Lottie shook her head. "You think she misses you?"
    "She can't miss what she never knew." As Molly stepped out from behind the screen, looking beautiful in the borrowed dress, Lottie saw the image of that other girl, like a ghost, standing in the same place with her. "But, oh, how I do." Something in her face moved Molly to hug her. "Now...," she said, but she was clearly pleased. She brushed at her cheeks, just below the eyes. When she and Molly had disengaged themselves, they stood regarding each other with affection.
    "Her father was quite the charmer, too." This was nothing like what Molly had expected to hear and seemed not to follow from what had preceded. Who else was a charmer? "Quite the rogue, quite the cad. Everyone warned her–the girl's mother, I mean. But she had to find it out for herself." She smiled in sympathy. "We all do."
    Now Molly knew the identity of the one who had gone unmentioned. "There is good in him." She was surprised to hear herself saying that after his callousness to her. But she realized that she believed it; more than that, she knew it.
    "You see it in everybody," Lottie replied gently, "but in this case I'm afraid it doesn't go any farther than the tips of your own eyelashes. He's not worth it." With the last statement Molly was inclined to agree. For the rest, she was sure Lottie was mistaken but saw she would never convince her of that, any more than Lottie would ever convince her of the opposite, and so she kept silent.
    As they returned downstairs a voice trumpeted out from the shadows. "Well, well, well!" Molly's heart stopped for a second. The man was standing at the bar, resting on his elbow. As soon as she recognized him, which she did even in silhouette, her fear evaporated. "And what might be keepin' two sich elegant ladies up to the wee hours of the morn?"
    "You're a man, Clancey," Lottie said as she reached the bottom stair. "You wouldn't understand."
    "Wouldn't I, now?" He gazed into the imagined drink in his hand. "'twouldn't have anythin' to do with that Jericho fella, would it?" As Lottie brought up the lamp near the bar he saw the stains of tears on Molly's cheeks, or imagined he did; perhaps it was only the look on her face. And there was also the dress, hanging damp on Lottie's arm. "What's he done?" Clancey asked darkly.
    Lottie shrugged, as much as to say it was Molly's business to tell if she wished. "He promised to take me to the opera house–"
    "Ah, that!"
    "–but he went out to the widow's instead."
    Clancey had not known this. He bent an eye on her. "And how would you be knowin' that?"
    Molly was embarrassed to tell. "I went there looking for him."
    Clancey slapped the bar. "Then ye've learned a great lesson, ye have. You don't want to be followin' the likes of him about his business because it's apt to take you where decent maids shouldn't ought to be took. And I'll tell himself the same when next I lay eyes on him." He bent close to Lottie and muttered, in a less jovial tone, "Blatherskite. Treatin' the girl so."
    "You intend to horsewhip him? If so let me know, because I wouldn't mind getting in a lick or two myself."
    "Darlin', I never know what I intends to do till it's already did. You ought to know that much about me." He tipped his cap to them both and left. Lottie noticed he had not even cadged a drink.
    But her curiosity gave place to the immediate duty before her. "Come on," she told the girl she thought of as a goddaughter. "Time to return you to your family's loving arms." After the excitements of the night, trying as they had been, Molly could not help feeling a sense of disappointment. Nevertheless she looked forward to the comfort of her bed.
    Candy had not known she was out. Having discovered her absence and divined something of its cause, Kate had worked up the story that she was visiting an ailing schoolfriend. It was a mark of the debility Jeremy's absence had wrought in Candy that when Kate presented the story to her she did not even ask who the friend was. Doubly surprised therefore by Molly's late return, the condition of her habiliment, and her arrival in company with Lottie (and after making a promise to herself, which for various reasons she never kept, to have a word with Kate), Candy accepted, in the daze of the moment, Lottie's explanation that Molly had fallen into a puddle and borrowed a dress of hers. "Must have shrunk in the wash," Candy observed.
    Lottie handed over the garment it had replaced and asked if she might talk to Candy privately. Candy directed Molly to bed. "We'll talk about this tomorrow," she said (another promise that went unkept). Molly did not obey at once, as normally she would have done. Her head was too full of things she would have to sift through. Now, standing in the hall, with her sister frowning down on her, she felt as if everything that had happened to her that night had been a dream.
    Lottie sensed, or remembered from her own past, what Molly was feeling. "Your head will be clearer after a night's sleep," she promised. Molly nodded. Then, unexpectedly, she ran to Lottie and seized her in a tight embrace. Without waiting for an acknowledgment, which in any case Lottie was too much moved to have given, she ran upstairs. Candy looked wonderingly from one to the other of them.
    "This town's no place for her right now," Lottie advised her when the pair had retired to the parlor and Lottie had disclosed more of the night's events (excluding the widow Duvet and her girls in deference in Candy's sensibilities).
    "Because of him?"
    Funny how all of them shied from speaking his name. "Not only him. She's outgrown Seattle. Give it another few years and it'll catch up. But she may not."
    Candy saw the truth in this. "What can I do about it?"
    "Send her to a proper school. One with a good drawing master." She added, lightly, "I know of one."
    "I could never afford that."
    "But I can."
    "Lottie, absolutely not!"
    "Why? My money not good enough for you?" She smiled mischievously, for the question of course recalled Candy's admonition of a few days previous.
    "Lottie...." was all she could say.
    "I knew another girl once." Her tone had become dry, matter-of-fact. If Candy had only known the maelstrom that churned beneath! "I helped send her to school, but she never knew it. To be able to do the same for Molly and see her return an elegant young lady would be...." She searched for a comparison. "...like finding a unicorn. A second chance." She seldom begged, but she did now. "Please. I can more than afford it. And I do so want to."
    "I'll have to think about it." That was what she would have said no matter what. "I'll ask...." Whom could she ask? Jason? Aaron? Most likely she would have asked Lottie herself. "I suppose...I'll ask Molly."
    "Thank you!" With a clasp of hands, the happiness streamed from her into Candy.
    "Thank you. And thank you for bringing her back. Someone ought to give that–" She still did not like to name him. "–that scapegrace a good...talking-to." Privately she had in mind something worse.
    The hopes of his foes notwithstanding, it was not till the middle of the week that anything out of the ordinary befell him. He was trying to saw a log–his first–no more than half a foot across and two feet long, propped between two sawhorses, and making a poor job of it even by his own reckoning, when he heard himself hailed from the terrace below. "Bolt! Mr. Jericho Bolt!" He looked up hopefully. Any interruption (that was not more work) would be a mercy.
    Almost any interruption, he amended, as he saw the portly, bristly old Irishman waving at him from the supply wagon whose driver he had entreated to convey him up the hill. After climbing out he forced his legs to scale the smaller hill that separated him and Jericho. He halted at the crest, panting. "Mr. Jericho Bolt. That's you, ain't it?"
    Jericho had returned to his sawing, or his attempts at it. "You know it is. What do you want, anyway? You see I'm working."
    "Are ye, by the saints?" Clancey chuckled, as if that were in itself grounds for amusement. "Well, sir, I've got–I've got–" He brandished a flat cream-colored object.
    Jericho had not noticed it before. "Is that a letter? For me?" He threw down his saw.
    Clancey spied a stump and went over to deposit himself on it. "Got to drop anchor for a spell. Winded, don't ye know?"
    Jericho followed him. "Is it from France?"
    Clancey was using the envelope to fan his face. "Settin' at the top of the mail bag it was, so it leapt to me eye at once. Says I to meself, Mr. Jericho will be wantin' to see this straight off, and no mistake. So I come to deliver it to ye with me own hand." He made to give it over, but as Jericho reached for it he whisked it away again to scratch the back of his neck.
    "Then I'd be grateful if you would."
    "Eh?" Clancey stared at his outstretched palm. "Oh, aye, aye."
    No sooner did he have it in hand than Jericho tore open an end with his teeth. He extracted the letter and read hungrily. His eyes grew as wide as Molly's. "Great day in the morning!"
    "Bad news, is it?"
    "Bad! It's astounding–unbelievable! How they found me, I can't fathom."
    "'tis from France, then?"
    "What? No, nothing like that." He pored over it again. "'An artist of your stature.' Of course, that will explain it. And they want to see my work." He had been pacing as he read but now stopped. "I've nothing to show–only the one I brought. And their man will be here in a week." He consulted the letter again. "Less than a week! I must do another." He resumed pacing. "But I'll need a fit subject."
    "The girl Molly, perhaps?"
    "No, not her. I've still not found her flower. Or her, come to that. I need more–more." He stood picturesquely at the brink, beating his forehead with his fists. "O why did I come to a place where there is no true beauty?" The evergreens on all sides gazed sadly down.
    Clancey feared for his skull. "Hadn't ye best calm down a tad?"
    The question only stirred him the more. "Calm down! You've no idea, man." He waved the letter at him. "This is from the Union League in New York."
    "Veterans of the late troubles, no doubt."
    "No, they're...." Jericho realized he did not quite know himself what they were. "Nothing to do with that. They're starting a National Museum of Art. It says so in the letter. They're looking to acquire paintings by"–he searched for the line–"'the foremost American artists.' I qualify, you see, because I was born here. And they want my work. Mine!"
    Clancey considered. "And that'll be a good t'ing, will it?"
    "Good! It's unheard of. At my age."
    Clancey rubbed his chin. "Now, who would have supposed it'ud get you so fired up? Fella like yourself that's got his pictures in the Loo-vree." He squinted at Jericho. "That is what ye told Jason and them, ain't it?"
    Jericho suddenly looked as if his shoes fit too tightly. "That," he said, "wasn't entirely true."
    "Wasn't it?" Clancey seemed profoundly surprised. "And which is the part that was?"
    Jericho floundered. "I expect to be hung there. This fall."
    "So soon as that?"
    Confound the man's persistence! What did it matter, with the National Museum on offer? "Maybe not quite so soon. But I assure you I'll be hung one of these days."
    "That, I don't doubt," said Clancey. He raised himself with a grunt and tipped his hat. "Top o' the mornin' to ye." He started down the smaller hill that gave on to the larger; walking down did not pose the challenge walking up had because gravity would be with him. With his departure Jericho's mind returned to his immediate need. He recalled, and as soon dismissed, the girls in the forest. But as he stared after the old man a new idea sprouted in him, one that he alone could bring off, if anyone could. It appealed to him the more for that.
    He had to fix his easel in place with stones fetched from under the pier, so vigorously did the keen shore breeze persist in knocking it off its legs. When at last it was standing securely upright, he mounted the canvas he had brought along and lashed it in back.
    He had brought something else, too, which he removed from his bag and held up to the view of the Seamus O'Flynn's captain and crew, who had been watching curiously as he set up beneath their port bow. He greeted the captain more cordially than he had earlier and asked if he would be good enough to have one of his men perform a small favor for him, provided the captain himself approved of the modification to his vessel: the flower to be clenched between the teeth of its figurehead, a mermaid that so closely resembled Lottie in face and form, many supposed one to have been the model for the other.
    The crewman who took the liberty of climbing over her could not do the job assigned him; the space between the upper and lower jaws was only painted on, like the teeth themselves. Jericho bade him settle for any placement he could obtain. After many affronts to her person, he succeeded in lodging the mock blossom between two of her mock fingers, the space between which was authentic. He rejoined his shipmates at the side as Jericho set to work.
    First he stood back and regarded the nymph critically to see if she truly incarnated what he had envisioned, a variation on his signature theme: artificial woman with artificial flower. He decided she would do. He took out his paints and palette and commenced choosing the hues he would require, moving his eyes from the palette to the figure and back. Some colors had to be mixed to suit; the process seemed to take as much time as swabbing down a deck, and the sailors and their master observed it with great interest.
    When the spectrum was complete and daubs of every shade he would require sat arrayed on his board, he returned his attention to the wooden woman, taking views of her from several nearly adjoining angles. Sometimes he crouched, sometimes stood on tiptoe. Often he held his arms out in front of him, separated by the width of his canvas, and studied the image so framed. At last he found the vantage point that best pleased him and moved his easel there, six feet to the left of where it had been. This also required him to lug over the half dozen heavy stones that pinned the legs in place. Clancey had spent enough time himself gazing idly on the lady to wonder if the change could make much difference.
    Now the actual painting began. This was evidently no easy task either, for it provoked many changes of temper in the artist. Sometimes he laughed, sometimes grumbled, sometimes swore, sometimes exclaimed, "Aha!," sometimes hummed tonelessly, all the while applying his brush, sometimes with abandon, sometimes with great care. One of the crew, having witnessed this much of the spectacle, looked to the captain and tapped his own skull questioningly. "Ah," Clancey said, "'tis the artistic natur'," upon which judgment he ordered them back to their duties. Jericho had wasted more than enough of their time.
    It was not till mid-afternoon that Jason tracked him down. He had spent an hour at it, more counting the walk down, and that was more than he had to spare. Jericho did not answer when addressed, or even look over at him. His concentration was bent on the small section of canvas he was working. Jason had a great tolerance for disputatiousness; it kept the camp running. But he had none for outright disrespect. "I'm talking to you," he said, more loudly than before.
    "I hear you." Jericho still would not look at him.
    "Seen nary hide nor hair of you since lunch."
    "Nor I you. Queer how that works out, ain't it?"
    Jason strove to stay reasonable. "Corky tells me you up and left without a word to God or anyone. Why?"
    "I'm painting." He nodded at the canvas. "As you see."
    Jason sighed. The boy simply didn't understand the way they did things. That was Joshua's fault; he should have instructed him better. Now Jason would have to do it. "Come along. I need you back at camp."
    "Not now."
    Jason thought he must have misheard. "What did you say?"
    "I said, not now! I told you, I'm painting!"
    "You're...painting." His voice had that rumble in it again.
    Jericho gave a huff of impatience. Must people always be bothering him? "There's a man coming to view my work," he said, as if it were self-evident. "I must have work for him to view. You understand now?"
    Jason walked up to within two inches of his ear, which was as much as Jericho had deigned to present to him. "You're not only my brother, you're my partner. Partners don't run out on their obligations." He paused. "Neither do brothers."
    "It'll only be for a few days." Why couldn't the fool see how important this was?
    Jason made a last effort to get through to him. "What's the company to do the while? Shut down while you play?"
    Jericho took offense. "You call this playing?"
    "It sure ain't working!"
    "You have plenty of other men. Use them!"
    "It's you I want."
    Jericho turned on him, pointing his brush as though it were a knife. "Well, you can't have me!" He remembered his unhappy experiment with sawing. "Not sure I'm cut out for logging anyhow." This sounded to Jason's ears like rank ingratitude. "I've business of my own to attend to."
    "And Bolt Lumber?" Jericho did not reply. "Bolt Lumber!" he repeated. "What about Bolt Lumber?" He knew men well enough to know he was pressing to the limit, but he had to find out his man. And not only for his own peace of mind; the future of the business depended on it.
    "The devil with Bolt Lumber!" Jericho fired back. "What have I to do with it? Your woods can burn to the ground for all I care! I'd dance on their ashes!"
    All the men in earshot, on ship and quayside, froze. You didn't say a thing like that to a lumberman. In Seattle it was worse than blaspheming, or speaking to one of the brides as if she were a girl of Mrs. Duvet's. And to say it to Jason, of all people, was like taking a skiff out in a hurricane; more than any sensible man would dare.
    But Jason had passed beyond anger to an irrevocable hatred. Now he saw Jericho for what he was; Jeremy and Joshua had been right, after all. And he had hugged the viper to his bosom, given over a fourth of his kingdom to him. How easily the fellow had taken him in! Him, who knew all the tricks, or had thought he did! Well, he had learned a new one now. "First time I ever laid eyes on you," he said, "I threw you out of town. Should have trusted my first impression." He gave a heavy sigh. "Looks like I'm the last of the Bolts." He started to go and then turned back for a last word, perhaps the last he would ever say to any of his brothers. "Keep off my mountain."
    Jericho saw him go with some regret, but less than might have been expected. Though he had lost a family, a partnership in a business, and a comfortable future, all had been dimmed for him by the prospect of a lifetime's toil that must accompany them, which he had foreseen all too clearly. He worried a little for the belongings he had left on the mountain, but these were few; most of his things, he had moved to his studio (as he thought of it) and he always kept his money with him. If he lost the rest, he had gained Jason's coat (whose loss Jason had still not remarked); more than a fair trade. He turned back to his painting.
    From the balcony that overhung the saloon, Joshua watched Jason storm up from the wharf and across the town square (as Stempel liked to call it, in the hope of making it so one day) and thence up the trail to camp. Joshua had been sitting there most of the day, and a little earlier he had witnessed Jason's nosing about at the saloon, the store, and the dormitory. Collating the two sets of observations, he drew the correct conclusion. "Looks like he's driven off Jason," he called back through the French windows.
    Lottie, who had just turned up the covers, came out and stood in back of his chair, laying her hands on his shoulders with a slightly proprietary mien. This had been his residence since leaving the camp, and she was letting him board rent-free in exchange for the stimulation of his company. Hardly ever did she find him uninteresting. He knew more than she would have thought possible for a boy who had grown up in the backwoods, and he could imagine a lot more than that. She was perhaps a bit in love with him.
    She had taken his meaning at once and was just in time to glimpse Jason before he disappeared around a bend of the hill. "That completes the set," she remarked. "Since you're all in agreement about him, why not find Jeremy and the three of you make it up?"
    "It won't be that easy. What Jeremy did–"
    "If he did it." He looked up at her. "I was a believer, too." She rubbed his shoulders gently, persuasively. "I wouldn't be so quick to believe now."
    "He admitted it."
    "Didn't you admit you were about to take money from the fund? It's all in how the facts are...painted." Joshua considered it as he luxuriated, eyelids closed, in the warmth surrounding him: the sun soaking into his face, the fingers exploring the ridge of his shoulders and the top slopes just under, digging in and around, bringing pain that felt pleasant or pleasure that pained. He loved Lottie's rubs. Perhaps she was right about Jeremy.
    Whether she had played a part in bringing it about, he never asked, but late in the evening Jason came knocking at his door. He knew Joshua was in; she had told him. When he got no answer, he ventured in. Joshua was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, as Jason had seen him do many times before when he was meditating on whether to come round or not. "Josh," he said.
    He had predicted Joshua would not look at him (not right away, anyhow), and he was correct in this. "Jason."
    Jason knew he had blundered and felt himself a failure for it. He was a big a fool as he had been when he was young; he had learned nothing in all those years. His primary responsibility, the only one that mattered, was to look after his brothers, to protect them from other people as well as from themselves, and from him. And he had bungled it. "I was wrong," he said. "About Jericho."
    Joshua was inclined to be generous in that respect: even he had underestimated him. "We all were."
    "Maybe about Jeremy, too."
    Joshua shook his head. "I don't think so." He sat up and faced him. "But we shouldn't have driven him out."
    "You mean I shouldn't."
    "That is what I mean."
    "Think we can find him?"
    "Think he wants to be found?"
    Jason had not considered this possibility before. If it were so, his failure as a brother, as almost a father, as a man might be permanent. Sadness weighed on him like the stones under Jericho's easel.
    That easel, and another Jericho had hunted up somewhere (likely borrowed from some weekend painter), filled most of the cabin on the Seamus O'Flynn in which he had found a berth for a few days in exchange for a promise to paint the captain's portrait. One stand held the jungle picture, the woman with gladiolus; the other, the representation (a little below Jericho's standard, but a striking piece nonetheless) of the ship's figurehead with paper rose, insensate figure clutching that which could not be sensed. The painting communicated this so clearly, even Clancey perceived it (but then he knew the lady well).
    The day arrived for the promised visit of the Union League's delegate. He was coming on the steamer from Olympia, which was due at one o'clock. The whole morning, Jericho had spent below adjusting and re-adjusting the positions of the easels, switching the paintings and then switching them back. Silly it might look to the crew, but no pains were too great (or too small, would it be?). He could not risk letting his chance flit away through laziness or inattention (both of which he suspected himself prone to). If only he had more to show! But two would be enough; one would be enough, if it were good. And these were; he knew it.
    "Steamer to starboard!" called the lookout. This was it! Jericho raced up to the deck, where he found Clancey sitting unconcerned, indulging his own artistic nature by whittling at a figure doubtless intended to be female. He never once raised his eyes from it, not even long enough for a glance at the approaching craft. "That's the one he's on!" said Jericho from the rail.
    "Aye, so ye told me."
    "Is that where she's to dock? That landing there?"
    "Oh, aye, aye." His eyes remained on the doll.
    "Thank you for the use of the cabin, by the way."
    "Ye never slept. I heard your mutterin'."
    "I was practicing what to say to him." He looked back out. Oughtn't the steamer to be changing course? Yet she was not; she was heading on up the Sound. Perhaps she would dock in some roundabout way? Within minutes that hope died, too. There was no doubt of it: she was passing them by. "She's not stopping!" Jericho said. Then he said it a second time. Clancey did not answer. "But she must! Hey!" he yelled hopelessly after her. "Hey!"
    Clancey got up. "Guess she'd no passengers, after all." He headed for the companionway.
    "When's the next steamer arrive?"
    "Not till Monday."
    "Monday! Two days!" He looked forsaken. "And I brought all I had to show him. Spent all night getting ready for him. Damn his eyes! Damn his damned eyes!"
    "Well, well," Clancey said. "Ain't life after bein' an unpredictable t'ing?" He started down the stairs, chuckling to himself.
    A suspicion stirred in Jericho's mind. "Wait a minute!" He pulled the envelope from his coat pocket and turned it over. In his enthusiasm he had neglected to examine it carefully. There was no stamp, no postmark. "This never came by post." He glared down at Clancey. "You wrote this letter! Or had it written."
    "Did I?"
    "Admit it!"
    Clancey scratched his head. "What letter is it, now?"
    "You know what letter! The one from the museum."
    Clancey ascended to the deck again and asked to see it. "Wit' all me captain's duties, me mind's apt to let slip one t'ing and another." After studying both sides he shook his head. "No, I don't remember seein' the like of this in the post." He handed it back. "So I s'pose you're right and I made it all up meself."
    "You put me through all this! Why?" He searched for reasons. "To teach me a lesson of some sort?"
    Clancey regarded him curiously. "Well, I don't know. If there any lesson ye suppose yourself to be in need of?"
    "You–" Jericho turned away, feeling too much hurt to call names or to act superior. The imposture had left him defenseless. "The thing I wanted most, wanted so badly I could taste it. Then to have it dashed from my lips, and me left with nothing but this stinking emptiness–it's misery. Plain misery!"
    "Aye," said Clancey, "that'll be it."
    "But I never–"
    He was about to say he had never done anything to deserve such treatment, and Clancey whirled on him in a fury. "Did ye not, indeed? That poor little slip of a t'ing that's been makin' calf eyes at you ever since you sashayed into town–do ye truly not know what ye've done to her? Are ye so far gone in your cups and your filthy excuse for a life that ye can't remember what it is to be young? To have your heart sing for the first time and to have it sliced clean through till ye quail with the torment of it?"
    Jericho remembered all too well, but fought the memory. "A person steels himself to laugh at those things. If anything, I did the girl a service. Pulled the blinders off." Clancey stared coldly at him. Jericho began to sense that his usual affectation of indifference would not serve here, but he made a last attempt. "After all, I never meant any of it seriously."
    "Ah, but there it is, y'see," Clancey said, mercy tempering the justice in his tone. "She did."
    At a loss to reply, Jericho went below to collect his things. He was a long time at it, for his mind could not keep to the task. Up top he had not shown–had not been willing to show–how far the captain's words had penetrated, and had upset the elaborate mental framework he had erected long before to permit him to live as he pleased without regard to the consequences for others. That defense had been breached and was no protection. He found himself facing a battery of moral quandaries of the kind that governed most people's lives, but to which he was now exposed for the first time. He was still bracing himself for their first assault as he walked up from the waterfront, laden down with easels, canvases, and the rest.
    On the far side of the street he spied a party of three who had just left the dormitory bound for the tea shop. The three were Maddie, Molly, and Biddie. All of them, for different reasons, pretended not to see him. Maddie was out because she had wanted tea, Molly because Maddie had wanted company (and her mother, poor little dear, had been feeling indisposed), and Biddie because she had not been about to leave Molly to her sister's mercies.
    A wagon rattled past. "Biddie!" Molly exclaimed. "Isn't that Jeremy?" It was. He had the driver's seat, and at his side sat a young woman cradling a baby. They looked for all the world like a farm couple come to town for supplies. The resemblance was accentuated when the woman lifted her hand to Jeremy's cheek. "Dear me," Biddie said.
    "How can we tell Candy?" Molly asked.
    "We won't have to." She nodded back toward the dormitory. Molly turned to see Candy at the gate. Obviously she had glimpsed Jeremy from a window and run out to greet him, only to discover that he did not need her welcome, for he had found someone else. But why wouldn't he? She had cast him off. The surprise of seeing him had made her forget that. It had filled her momentarily with the giddy mingling of relief, expectation, and simple happiness in his being that his return from a journey had always elicited. This made her disappointment the worse when she remembered it was all ended now. She looked like a wilted flower as she returned slowly to the house. "Dear me," Biddie said again.
    Jeremy turned the wagon onto the side road and took it as far as the doctor's shingle, where he drew up. He helped the woman down and the two of them went in together. He was sorry to have seen the others, especially Candy. He had hoped to make his visit and leave again unrecognized. Since everyone in town knew him, that hope was probably foredoomed, but he had always been one for trusting to long chances–that is, till the night he had left Seattle.
    He had walked most of the night, making up his mind what to do next. Expelled from the garden, like Adam, he would have to chart his own course for a change; the world was all before him which to choose. One thing was obvious: he must find a job. What kind of job was obvious, too; it was all he had ever done. With a lifetime's experience to offer, he wass confident of receiving a hearty welcome anywhere he applied. Timber bosses were always on the lookout for seasoned men.
    The first company he called at lay a few miles off the road near Snohomish, northeast of Seattle. He arrived a couple of hours before first light and sat within sight of the skid camp till the men bestirred themselves. The smells of their early breakfast–coffee, ham, eggs–brought stabs of hunger and homesickness. In a few minutes Jeremy expected he would get a taste of that food. But the boss, who knew him slightly, turned him down flat. He thought it must be a trick of Jason's, sending his brother to spy on the operation and undermine it somehow. Jeremy's protestation that he was striking out on his own, apart from his brothers, the man refused to believe. Everybody knew those three were bound together as tight as if they was Siamese twins.
    So Jeremy missed the meal he had been looking forward to. By the time he reached the next outfit he had heard any good of, breakfast was long over. He sought out the boss (who was one he had not met before) and introduced himself, making sure this time to explain that he was seeking work because he had had a falling-out with his brothers. The man asked him what the cause had been; Jeremy could not well say. And so he lost that place, too.
    By mid-week he had almost given up hope. Rumors spread through the lumber camps so fast, the crows must have carried them, and once it got about that Jason had banished him from his woods, he found at every place he stopped that suspicion had gotten there first and barred the doors to him. He caught fish for his suppers and washed them down with stream water. He once took milk from a farmer's cow but it tasted guilty and he did not repeat the crime. Mostly he subsisted on nuts and berries. So he had taken on a lean and hungry look by the morning he came on what threatened to be his last chance at a job, of the only kind he was fit for. Resorting to the one tactic left him, he told the foreman his name was Jared Barnes.
    But fate had marked him. "No, you ain't!" said a logger nearby, who must have worked for them once; his face was familiar. "I know you! You're Jeremy Bolt! Heard your brother give you the boot."
    "That's why you was ashamed to give your name." The foreman shook his head.
    "But I know the business! Backwards and forwards!" It was near lunchtime, and he was desperately hungry.
    "I should think you would. But if your own brother disowned you, I got no use for you here. I'll have no black sheep in my camp."
    Jeremy seemed to have switched places with the hollow inside him; now he was inside it. He could not make a living under his own name or any other. What future remained to him but to live as a hermit like one of the mountain men, an outcast from society? The hollow was reflected in his eyes and in his face. The foreman knew the look; he had seen it in soldiers, prisoners, tramps. He took some pity on the boy. "Try down the road at the Magpie Forks. They ain't so picky there. And if they won't have you, there's always Pariah." Jeremy asked where that was. "Due east," the man said. "The next valley over."
    Jeremy did stop at the Forks, and what he saw so revolted him he decided he would rather starve, and might in any case if he hired on there; some of the crew had ribs showing. They resembled a prison gang, and their overseer (whose ribs were far from showing) a prison guard, which he probably had been. Their habitation, what Jeremy could see of it from the trail, was like a sty, even by the lax standard of logging camps. He did not want to imagine what made up a meal there. He would go on to–what had the foreman called it?–Pariah.
    By evening his legs were ready to fold under him like a puppet's. He topped a hill–yet another hill–that looked out over a forest–yet another forest; they all looked alike now. He heard the sound of an axe: could it be from Pariah Camp? He followed it to the edge of the forest, where he found a lone man chopping firewood outside his cabin. His disappointment was tempered by the sight of another human being after a day of lonely trudging and by the likelihood that the man could point him to his destination. He was old, and so was his cabin; both must have been there a very long time.
    "Evening," Jeremy called out as he approached. "Need any help there?" The old man did not look up. "Looking for a lumber camp called Pariah. Ever hear of it?" The man still gave no sign of hearing. Well, he was old; perhaps he was deaf, too. "Thanks for the conversation," Jeremy said, and he started on.
    "'tain't a camp," the man called after him.
    Jeremy stopped. "Huh?"
    The man continued cutting wood, still not looking at him. "It's a settlement. Next valley over."
    "It's always the next valley. I've been up and down four already." He sighed as he adjusted his pack and steeled himself for further travel.
    The old man straightened stiffly and stared at him. "What you goin' there for?"
    The question was nosy but Jeremy was too polite to refuse an answer. "I was told they'd take me in if no one else will."
    "Oh, they'll do that." His voice was high, nasal, somehow birdlike. "But you don't look to me like a feller who'd be needin' their kind of hospitality."
    "Yeah. Well, thanks." He started off and then looked back with a half-grin, the closest he had come to smiling that day. "For the conversation." The old man half-grinned himself and returned to work.
    Jeremy walked on into the woods, one valley beyond which the settlement (perhaps) lay. Now he half-remembered hearing rumors of it: a town started by Quakers or Mennonites or some such and populated entirely by outcasts–jailbirds, reformed prostitutes, runaway apprentices, assorted half-breeds–all welcomed into the community if they were willing to make a new start, give up their old ways if those had been abhorrent, and do their share of the labor.
    It was not the next valley over, or the one after that, but just as Jeremy was concluding that Pariah was a myth like El Dorado, invented to assuage the relentless hopes of the downtrodden, he gained the crest of yet another hill and looked down on yet another valley, but this time it was one with a town in the middle that stretched almost to the hills beyond. He knew at once it was the place he was seeking.
    It was pretty and orderly-looking, with few buildings and only one of any size, neat and square and shiny with recent repainting. It reminded him of the brides' dormitory. In fact, as he learned later, it was a dormitory, where the unmarried residents lived, the men in one wing, the women in the other, with a common dining hall between. The handful of frame houses among the fields, built in the same spare style, belonged to those few who had married or had been married when they arrived. The day was new but men and women were already at work in the fields. Jeremy concluded they kept farmers' hours, which were only a little less stringent than loggers' hours, and so he did not mind that. And he liked the look of the place. Far from being a despised last recourse, it felt like home already.
    The man in shirtsleeves who trotted over from the field where he had been hoeing was dressed simply and without adornment, but not like a Mennonite, and his first question–"May I aid you?"–showed he was no Quaker. He introduced himself as Isaac. From the brisk authority he radiated Jeremy guessed he was the leader of the community, and perhaps its founder. Both conclusions were correct. Above them stood a signboard that read "Welcome to Pariah." "Is it true, then?" Jeremy asked.
    "That this is Pariah?"
     "What I've heard. That outcasts are welcome here, with no questions asked."
    "Not all were cast out. Some were treated so abominably they chose to leave. But yes, all are welcome."
    Jeremy looked around at the others hoeing and planting. "How do they find you?"
    "As you have."
    "Suppose I was an outlaw on the run?"
    Isaac laughed. His face was like a miniature sun, with happiness its natural state. "But you are not."
    "But suppose I was?"
    "Then you would be asked to leave."
    "And if I wouldn't?"
    "You would, in time. But why do you fear so for what has never happened? I think it never will."
    He saw the young man's face darken with the recollection of some terrible time. "The things you think won't happen are the ones you have to watch out for." He cast off the memory, and with it, Isaac judged, the life that had led to it. "I can stay here, then?"
    "You may share in our bread if you share in our labor."
    That seemed to suit the young man. "Name's Jeremy. Jeremy–"
    Isaac put up his hand. "One name to call you by is all that's required here." He gave his own again, and the two shook hands. Isaac led him to the dormitory and offered him his choice of unassigned beds. Then he conducted him on a tour of the building. As they passed through the kitchen, the delight that poured into the young man's face at the sight of a loaf of bread moved one of the women there to cut him a generous slice and heap it with butter. Before handing it to him, she looked to Isaac for permission, which he was quick to give. Jeremy devoured it almost in one gulp. Isaac chided himself for not having seen his need before.
    The woman had noticed it at the same time she had noticed him, which had been the moment he entered. Her name was Lizzie; she was young and fair, with eyes as blue as his own, which she kept on him all the time he was in the room, and as he left. He found out later that the baby lying on a crib in the corner was hers; Miranda, her name was. Except for her, Lizzie would have been outdoors in the fields, where she would sooner have been, though she did not mind the kitchen, either. But she would have liked it better with someone to cook for, someone in particular, that is, instead of a whole village.
    Isaac had been a Shaker, and though he professed to have left the sect, he had organized the community and constructed its buildings along Shaker lines. It was a self-sufficient enterprise with its own cottage industries, of which the chief one, and the one at which Isaac himself excelled, was the same as in the settlement he had left back East: furniture making. On discovering Jeremy's knowledge of woods and their uses, he immediately took him on as his apprentice, halfway to becoming a journeyman. So Jeremy spent his days in the woodworking shop that adjoined the dormitory.
    He loved it. Surrounded by carpenters' and joiners' tools–saws, planes, squares, spring dividers–and by furniture and parts of furniture–cupboards, tables, chairs at various stages of manufacture, fashioned from the woods he knew and loved, in his way, so well–pine, cedar, oak–he felt himself an initiate into an esoteric order that alone understood and could impart to him the mysteries of their transmutation into objects of beauty. They far surpassed anything that had ever come out of Stempel's mill. He would sit and gaze on one of them–on a simple chair leg, for instance–and try to work out what made it the thing it was, a thing out of the common. And sometimes he would almost–almost–see.
    He would watch Isaac as he scraped and planed and sanded, and when Isaac allowed him a turn would strive to do exactly as he had done. And usually Isaac would nod in approval, for Jeremy was an apt pupil. Before a week was out he felt himself becoming for the first time someone on his own account, not just Jason's brother; a craftsman who could make his own way. After the days spent in wandering with no promise of a home, or a slice of bread, on the horizon, his new-found worth imbued him with a strength he had never before known, or needed. Isaac saw in him a different man from the one who had come in that first day. His acquaintances in Seattle would have seen the difference, too.
    Lizzie would stop by when he was alone in the shop, cleaning up at day's end or working late at the small table he had undertaken to attempt on his own. "It can be Miranda's some day," he told Lizzie, with no sense of any implication for the future the promise might contain. She spoke little of herself but told him what she knew of Isaac's history and how he had come to found the settlement. One day, in an unusually expansive mood, and perhaps seeing in Jeremy the possibility of a successor to himself when the time came, Isaac told him more; more indeed than he had ever told anyone else.
    "I was of the brethren," he said, "like others here." He named some of them. "We might be so to this day, but we violated the unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not dispute a judgment of the elders'. They judged us prideful and decreed that we were to be shunned. I tell you, this shunning is a fearsome thing. None would speak to us, work with us, give us bread or meat, or show by any sign that they recognized our presence. Sooner than endure it, we left. And we soon learned that the world's people are not so much different, in that custom at least. When the war came we would not take a side, and so were despised by both. Finding no welcome in one place, we moved on to another, west and farther west, until we could go no farther and so we stopped here and founded this refuge for others who are adrift like ourselves."
    "My refuge," Jeremy said, "was a little cabin, and a whole mountain. I thought I'd always be safe there. That I had people who'd look out for me. But in the end they turned away. They wouldn't even listen."
    Isaac nodded sagely. "The deaf and the blind. They stay secure where they are, fools content in their folly, while those with ears and eyes are driven to the high roads that bring them here."
    That evening Lizzie looked in to remind Jeremy it was suppertime, as she had had occasion to do before. "Yeah," he said, "the big bell ringing was kind of a clue."
    "When you hear it you're supposed to quit and come eat. I wasn't sure you knew that."
    They exchanged a look of mock contention. "Out of that whole crowd, you notice it if one man isn't there?"
    "Depends on the man." She leaned against the door jamb, smiling.
    Jeremy began hanging up his tools in their respective places. "You're pretty young, aren't you?"
    "All of eighteen."
    "I meant young for this place. What happened to bring you here?"
    She looked away. "Those questions aren't asked. We all came here to escape the past. Same as you did."
    "Sorry, I didn't–" But she had slipped away down the hall.
    After supper he finished his apology. Lizzie was sitting quietly in the kitchen, cradling Miranda. The bustle of cooking, serving, and washing up had given place to a cozy domestic tranquility that her own manner helped create. "My tale's no secret," she admitted. "I carried the proof of my infamy inside me. My shame"–she spoke the word ironically–"and my heart's pride." She kissed that pride's forehead. "Must you know the particulars of how she came to be?"
    Jeremy shook his head. "It's enough that she's here." He took a chair. "Can I hold her?"
    The request surprised the mother, but she consented happily. He took the baby with infinite care, as though she were his own, and amused her by turning two fingers of his right hand into a pair of legs and taking them on a walk through the air which ended at her nose. Lizzie saw what kind of father he would make: father and husband. "The common run of men," she said lightly, "are apt to steer shy of a woman with a child who's not their own."
    "You don't want them. You want someone like me." He looked up to find her smiling broadly, and realized how that must have sounded. "What I meant was–"
    "It's all right!" she assured him, in a tone that implied it was quite all right.
    He seemed to miss the implication. "What I meant," he repeated, "was that I'm used to it."
    "Don't tell me you ran out on your young'ns."
    She had meant it humorously (in part, for his remark had made her wonder), but it had made him think of Molly and Christopher. "Not exactly."
    She mistook his expression. "Now I'm the one who's asking things. Sorry." They were sitting closely together, heads bent over the baby. "You're a sweet man. Whatever happened, it was no fault of yours. I can tell."
    He met her gaze. "Funny. So can I."
    "I'd trust you with my life. And hers, if it came to that."
    She reached down and touched his hand. His head and his heart were dancing a two-step. He had felt like this only once before in his life, and he had not known what to make of it that time, either. "You think it might...come to that?"
    "Hard to know." She searched his eyes. "What do you think?"
    "I think...." He took her hand in hers with a bravery that surprised them both. "I think trust is something I haven't had a lot of lately. It feels pretty good. No, it feels damn good!" This came out as almost a shout. "Hope Isaac didn't hear me."
    "I don't care if he did." She slipped her fingers into his. "I don't care if the whole world hears us...Jeremy." Now both their hearts were dancing, as partners.
    He thought a moment. "I used to stutter."
    "I used to–"
    "Bite your nails?"
    She laughed. "Yes, how did you know?"
    The two pairs of lips, those that had stuttered and those that had bitten, met in a long, deeply felt kiss.
    As they left the kitchen and parted for their separate sleeping quarters, Isaac saw them. He approved of the match. It ought to keep his young assistant there, if anything would.
    On the third morning after that, Lizzie and Miranda failed to appear for breakfast. On inquiring of Isaac, Jeremy learned that the baby had come down with the croup, and on inquiring if the doctor had seen her yet, he learned of a want in the community that Isaac had not advertised: it had no doctor. "I'll take her," Jeremy said at once. "In one of the wagons." He started out to the carriage barn.
    "There's no doctor nearer than Seattle."
    Jeremy was glad Isaac could not see his face. That was the one place he did not want to see ever again. Yet he had to, for Miranda's sake, and for Lizzie's. "Then I'll take her to Seattle."

Part Five

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