Bolt Upright: Seattle Tales

by Galen Peoples

Stories based on the series Here Come the Brides: Has Aaron won the Bolts' mountain, after all?...Lottie's unexpected windfall proves unwelcome...Jason takes Jeremy on a river run...Seattle has to build a university almost overnight...more.

4. Tale 11

11. The Flowers of Jericho

Beth had died.

Spring was breaking, and by its end flowers now in bud would blossom, though in Seattle or the surrounding woods you would see blooms of some sort, if you were looking for them, at any time of the year; rhododendrons especially. For a few weeks yet, rugs of white snow still lay randomly in the middle hills, but every one would shrink, and one morning you would wake and discover it was gone. If you woke in time, as Molly Pruitt did always, you could watch the pale gold dawn marry itself to the unpretty, malelike grey around it and slowly beautify its mate, for that morning at least.

In the natural processes of the world Molly often saw weddings and marriages. It was unavoidable. She lived among brides, as they were called (prospective brides, they were actually), and the chief object of their hopes, the chief subject of their conversations, the reason for their being there at all was to be married. So also, it almost seemed, with the men. The centrality of the conjugal union to everyone's thoughts had surprised her at first, but since few dimensions of the adult social world either in New Bedford or here seemed much more logical or explainable, she accepted this as she did the rest, confident that by and by the mysteries would open themselves to her understanding.

She had a brother, Christopher. The two of them had sailed to Washington together, a pair of small adventurers otherwise without friend or protector against storms, hunger (they ate from the sailors' mess), and rough handling by heedless grown-ups. Then, and for a long time after their arrival, they had been as close as peas in the same pod, and inseparable. But in the previous year something queer had happened: her brother had nearly disappeared from her life. Neither of them had set out to estrange himself from the other; it had just happened. What was even queerer, considering how lately the society they had created between themselves had seemed perfectly sufficient, was that she did not miss him, nor he her, as far as she could judge. At school she had her friends and he had his.

At the brides' dormitory they supped together, but in company with the brides, dozens of them. But there were always a few too much upset to eat because their boyfriends were coming around too little, or too much, or always at times when they could expect to see some other girl. In this mood, from which none was exempt, they behaved like perfect ninnies in Molly's estimation, and she so told her elder sister Candy, herself a bride but also duenna to the others. Candy did not contradict her; could not, since she knew very well that Molly was right. But she knew also that Molly in her turn would succumb to the same silliness, as Candy had herself; the true curse of Eve perhaps. She did not insist on this, for she knew Molly would only argue about it and deny she would ever descend to any such foolery, as Candy remembered having once vain-confidently supposed of herself.

Yet Beth had died, and here was Molly on this Saturday morning, after breakfast but before chores, and before the liberty Candy allowed her daily to visit the woods nearby and add to the pencil studies of nature that made up the matter of her latest sketchbook, as of its precursors—here she was lying curled up in bed, rocked by waves of tears for the dead girl, tears she had not expected and could not make sense of, tears quite unlike her (as she believed), tears of deep mourning, as it felt to her, and not for this loss alone; yet there was no other.

Her brother was not there to see it. Their adjoining beds had at last (and rather too late in Candy's view) been sundered, and Christopher had been either banished or upraised, depending on the view one took of it, from the nursery at the end of the dormitory bedroom, separated from it by a wall erected latterly, to a solitary berth in the attic. He had begun to show altogether too much curiosity about the brides in their boudoir; a knothole in the attic floor had permitted him to continue its pursuit till Candy discovered it and employed her boyfriend Jeremy Bolt to plug it up. How permanent the plug was and what ingenuity the boy may have applied to the scientific problem of its removal and replacement at will were matters known to him only.

So it came about that Molly lay unaccompanied in the wan light and the cool breeze (more like a breath) of a day not yet brightened or warmed and, having found no consolation in it, faced her pillow and poured out her sorrow into its enclasping billows. For all the noises that filled the house at this early hour—the rattle of plates, the clatter of feet on stairs, the flapping of bedcovers around the corner—her sobs, which sounded midway between mouse squeaks and a song without words or tune, could be heard to the bottom of the stairs.

There they aroused the concern of Biddie Cloom, always the sharpest-eared of the crowd, and brought her (after she had laid aside the pile of napkins she had been carrying to the laundry basket, which were those too badly spotted or smeared for consecutive reuse) to Molly's bedside, only a little sooner than her sister. "What ever is the matter?" Biddie asked. Molly's answer left her none the wiser. Nor did its elaboration after Biddie, unable to recall a Beth among the brides, had inquired the surname. "Beth March? I don't believe I know a Beth March."

"She's in the book," Candy said at her back, startling her a little. She pointed to a volume on the stand next to the bed. Biddie stepped nearer to read the title. "Oh," she said, and then, a moment later, "She dies?" She had been reading the same book but not gotten so far; indeed could not since, as she now discovered, Molly had taken the copy she had been reading, the only one in the house.

"I thought sure she'd recover," Molly was croaking between sobs, "but she didn't." The loss was personal and irrevocable, and the grief it brought of such power that it had caught her defenseless and claimed her for its own, momentarily at least. She felt sadder than when she had lost her mother, protest as she would to herself that this was not sensible. She had vowed never to pick up the book again; she could not bear to, though she had taken care, when anticipating the onrush of the flood, to close the book neatly, not bending a page, and to return it to the bedstand, as if a part of her foresaw a time beyond the crisis when it might again be desired.

Biddie had a bright idea, as was her wont. She always knew "just the thing," by which name she always announced it. In Molly's case this morning, just the thing would be a trip to the Seamus O'Flynn, which was just docking. Biddie had heard the news from one of the brides, who had heard it from another, who had heard it on her trip to the pump from one of the citizens who made it a point of keeping watch for Captain Clancey's arrivals and alerting all their neighbors. His appearances were no longer met by mass congregations at the waterfront; in the few years since he had made Seattle his home port, he had seen his craft, once the center of everyone's interest, dwindle in significance to one of a flotilla that crowded the harbor increasingly, most of them at or near the sawmill pier.

But the O'Flynn still held excitement for Molly. It was the ship that had brought her and Christopher there, and its captain was the first friend they had made. She had been drawn to it more often lately, as an arm of the past that reached into the uncertain present and comforted her with a familiar embrace. At the mention of the name, the clouds lifted from her face, and the flood began to ebb. "Go greet her," Biddie urged brightly. "The captain is always full of good cheer."

Molly put the suggestion into practice almost at once. After wiping her cheeks and blinking her eyes dry, she all but jumped from bed and ran to her small wardrobe (a gift from Aaron Stempel, whose sawmill had made it) for her coat. Only then did she remember to look to her big sister for permission. There were chores to do (there nearly always were), and even if there had not been, she would have expected Candy to say no. But she replied with a nod, accompanied by the semblance of a smile, which was enough for Molly's purpose. She ran out and down to the landing, then remembered her sketchbook, returned to grab it up, and disappeared again for the last time; the quick drumbeat of her exit confirmed it.

But now Biddie had a misgiving. From Candy's expression she began to suspect that perhaps her suggestion had not been just the thing, after all. "I've said something wrong again," she ventured.

Candy made her best effort to sound uncritical but was not very successful. "I've tried to discourage her from spending so much time down there," she said. "And over at Lottie's."

Biddie's eyes resembled a pair of silver dollars. "But what ever for? Lottie is a perfect lady, and Clancey is a perfect—no, that's not right. But you visit Lottie's. We all do."

"But at Molly's age..." Candy hated to hear herself, at her own youthful age, taking the same tone as a maiden aunt of hers she had always disliked, but now she understood better whence it sprang. "...she has to learn that certain things aren't done—or oughtn't to be done—or...oh, I don't know."

"And then go and do them."

"Yes. No!" Candy gave up. "Biddie, honestly..." Looking past her to the window, she saw Jeremy approaching. He was whistling; she could hear it from all the way up there. That was a good sign. If he was happy and his brow uncreased, it meant he had come on no particular business but only to say good morning. She went down to greet him, allowing herself to ignore the immediate problem for the moment. The problem was: how to tell her dear friend Lottie Hatfield to have nothing more to do with Molly, but to do it without hurting her feelings. It would not be easy. Jeremy would have said it was impossible; that was why she did not intend to mention it to him.

He had met Molly as she came out the gate. "Don't see much of you these days," he said.

"No." Her despair had been cured, but on facing Jeremy she found herself reverting to it, or the pose of it. Her inability to tell which it was or why it was recurring, to prevent it, or to control her feelings in the least at that moment (though she had felt perfectly self-possessed an hour before) confused her so greatly it churned up further unhappiness on its own account, and in only a few seconds. She ran on.

"What's wrong with her?" Jeremy asked as he came up to the porch.

He had meant it, of course, in the simplest sense, and so Candy answered him. "Beth died." She saw him endeavoring, like Biddie, to recollect a bride of that name. "Little Women," she assisted. She saw him puzzle more as he imagined a community of midgets. "The book."

"Oh!" he said, and then, "She dies?" He had not gotten so far, either.

"You're reading Little Women?" Occasionally he still surprised her.

"Found it at Ben's. It had 'Women' in the name, so I thought—" He quickly buried the thought. "But it's a good story! It's about these four sisters—"

"I've read it, Jeremy!" She sounded more impatient with him than she was. Her attention was on Molly, hurrying, almost running—now she was running—toward the wharf and the Seamus O'Flynn.

The captain was always glad to see her, and that was one reason she kept coming. He would have been too much abashed to say why, but he knew perfectly well himself. A want had made itself felt in his soul as he sat alone of a night in his cabin, peering into his whiskey glass. After Lottie sent him home, sleep might or might not be waiting for him there, but what was, some nights, was a realization, at first showing itself dimly and then with ever greater clarity, that his long life had left little in its wake.

He was thankful for the job he had with Stempel and the Bolt brothers, delivering the little lumber his craft would hold. He knew they no longer needed him; the publicity attendant on the brides' arrival had brought them more business than he could handle, and they contracted with larger carriers from the cities for major orders. But they continued to use him to ship their smaller loads, and would as long as he was able to ship them. At his age, and with his disposition, he had had no right to expect so much. Besides, he had the run of the saloon, at a fluctuating but generous discount, and he had Lottie to listen to him (more or less). A good woman and good Irish whiskey: what man could ask for more?

Yet he remained unsatisfied. In all the world there was nothing he could claim to have produced himself. The cargo entrusted to him came and went rapidly, and he had never settled anywhere long enough to raise anything—crops, livestock, children. But now there was Molly. He had brought her there; she had been his special cargo, and he had been charged with seeing her safe through. Well, so he would. (He had been responsible for her brother too, but he believed a boy could take care of himself.) And however she turned out, he would be able to take a measure of credit for it.

She reminded him of a girl he had known as a boy before going to sea. The two of them had played together. When next he saw home, and her, an army of suitors surrounded her too closely for him to so much as wish her top of the morning. On his next visit, which was also his last, he heard from his brother she was married and childed and living in the next village; his brother, recently ordained, had performed the wedding and the christening. That girl's name had been Molly, too, and in this one he saw, whether in fact or only in his fancy, the reincarnation of her shining virtue.

Clancey had a regard for virtue which his intimates, if he had had any, would not have suspected. He had never practiced it to any great extent himself; he had first shipped out when he was still young and had been worldly-wise before ever he set foot on a deck. But just for that reason, he was quick to spot it in others (in Jason Bolt, for example, under his veneer of high talk) and set great store by it. He saw in Molly—this Molly—the virtuous wife and mother to be that the other had been but that fate or justice (if the two were not one) had prevented him from seeing. Sentimental of him it was, but there, he had been too soft where that girl was concerned, and it was the same with this one. He therefore treated her with deep respect and an observance of all decorum.

Notwithstanding this, her sister had suggested—more than suggested, more than once—that he was not fit company for a girl like her. The suggestion did not offend him; he quite agreed. The only thing to do was to sneak around behind Candy's back and meet her in secret. That was what proper folk did in such situations. And now they would be forced to it for another reason, which Molly did not know yet.

She mounted the gangplank, as she had so many times, in long, forceful strides, almost leaps, holding up the hem of her dress with her free hand. Her mode of progress was not very ladylike but was the only way she could get where she was going with tolerable speed. At the top, however, she encountered the large form of the first mate in the dead middle of the gangway. She tried to squeeze round him; he moved to block her. She tried to squeeze round on the other side, with no greater success. She thought he must be playing a game with her, but he did not look like the game-playing sort. But also, though she had never talked to him, he had never acted unfriendly before.

"Stand aside, please," she said clearly. "I'm here to see the captain." The mate scowled down at her and shook his head. Now she got angry. "Let me through!" She tried to dive under his right arm, but he caught her and then threw her off. He had not said a word the whole time. She might have persisted all morning (she was Candy's sister) to the point of embarrassment—the crew's, that is, not her own—had not Clancey happened onto the bridge just then. Molly waved her sketchbook at him around the mate's forearm. "I have something to show you!"

Clancey nudged the mate aside. But instead of standing back and beckoning her on board as she had expected, he stepped onto the ramp himself, with a backward glance at the mate that was every bit as stern as he had meant it to be but also, Molly thought, a trifle nervous—and now she noticed that the other men were looking at them, too. He lay his arm gently on her shoulder and turned her around. "Another time, darlin'," he said as he began to guide her downwards.

She was not to be moved so easily. "I've drawn your ship!" She threw open the sketchbook to show him.

"So ye have, and very nice it is"—he had barely looked at it—"but jist at present I'm terrible busy, I am, haulin' bowlines, battenin' down hatches, and the like of that."

"Then I'll wait till you're done." Her smile was so full of trust it like to broke his heart.

He gave her a small push forward to start her down and walked a little behind, with one leg at her back to prevent her wearing about, all the while adjusting his cap, scratching his chin, pulling his nose, squinting into the sun, and showing other such signs of the awkwardness he was feeling as he told her what he must, what the others had insisted on. "Am I the captain here or ain't I?" he had blustered, but it had not been convincing; he knew, and they knew he knew, that there was a sailors' code which ruled their masters as well, and any man who failed to honor it would be betraying his calling. Not only would other ships learn of it; the sea itself would know, and his next voyage would be steeped in misfortune. So he had no choice.

"Darlin'," he said (giving more signs of awkwardness), "the truth is, the men won't have you on board, and there's an end of it."

Molly stopped and stared up at him. She thought she must have heard wrong. "All the men?" He nodded. She looked back to the deck, where they had resumed their duties. One of them overtopped the others by a yard; almost his entire upper half showed above the bulwark. "Even Storky?" she asked unbelievingly. Next to Clancey he had been her best friend there. She called and waved to him. He immediately ducked out of sight, or tried to, but she could still see him. "I thought they liked me," she said mournfully, and stepped off onto the landing with heavy finality.

Clancey was quick to buck her up. "'course they do. 'tain't that. It's jist that they don't hold with women on a ship. 'tis a common prejudice of the profession. Speakin' for meself—"

Molly's face was puffed up with the look common to girls of her age when thwarted unjustly, as they see it, born of a state midway between a tantrum and justifiable indignation. She felt ready to cry again. "But I've been on your ship hundreds of times!"

Clancey smiled gently. "But, y'see, you was a girl-child then. That was different." Now she felt truly desolate, and a little fearful, as if a section of the landscape she knew had suddenly been erased. "Besides," he went on, "your sister don't approve of your keepin' company with the likes of me. Wasn't she after tellin' me so jist t'other day? Tuesday it was—no, 'twas Wednesday."

"Then I can't see you any more?"

"'course you can. Soon as I've got everything ship-shape." He scratched his neck again. "Long as your sister don't find out."

Molly released a sigh of exasperation. She took a last look at the haunt now forbidden her, and got a shock—or, rather, a surprise; there was nothing frightening in it, or ought not to have been. But it wiped the sorrow of banishment from her mind for the moment. Staring back at her from the rail was a face she had never seen, either on the ship or anywhere else. It did not seem to belong in Seattle; it belonged far off, in some place she had never seen and probably never would see.

The man might have been twenty, though he seemed at once older and younger. His sandy yellow hair, which fell to his shoulders, was being combed lovingly by the wind. His eyes were of a shining silvery grey, and Molly felt as if their light were flowing into her. His cheekbones were high and his nose high-bridged, almost like an Indian's. His lips, half-puckered in evident amusement, were almost as pretty as a woman's. Molly felt faint; she realized suddenly she was not breathing. The man laughed outright—at her? She felt herself color—no, she must not blush now! What would he think?

Without so much as a goodbye to Captain Clancey, she ran off up the hill. Not till she was halfway did she remember she had her sketchbook with her. She should have drawn him! No, he would have seen her doing it. If she got another chance, she would. But would she? Oh, what did it matter? He wouldn't pay her any notice. Yet he had seemed to. Because she had looked pretty? Or because she had looked ridiculous? She put her foot down, literally, in an effort to stop the kite-tail of her thoughts. She made a promise to herself not to think about him any more. But she broke it before the next ten seconds were up.

Clancey had observed the look that had passed between the two and understood a little of her reaction; enough anyhow so that when he climbed back on board and his passenger asked who she was, Clancey answered him coldly. "And why would you be carin' to know?"

The grey eyes were still on her as she ran, and stopped, and looked back at him (he knew for a fact, though all he could actually see of her at that distance was a small sprig of white). "Her face," he said. "Somewhere I've seen a flower with that face." He turned away from the rail.

Clancey made a note to keep his eye on that fella if he stayed in town longer than a day, and if he should set his sails toward Molly. She was just a child; only the men's edict seemed to prove otherwise, and before much longer... Curse the spinning of the world and the speeding of the days! He retreated below for a drink.

The grey-eyed man preceded him. On the companionway he met two fellow passengers whom he had been rather at pains to avoid. He would not have minded them so much if they had not always been yammering at him or each other. In contrast to his simple grey suit (his only suit, as it happened), they were overdressed even for this weather; his taste recoiled from it.

The younger one was pretty, he had to admit, but an imperious smugness suffused and spoiled her features; she had clearly inherited it from the other, whom she addressed as "Mama" or "little Mama" or even "poor dear little Mama." The usage also excited distaste in him, though it was accurate enough: the woman was her mama, was little, and was doing poorly enough: she had had a very trying voyage. After he had continued down the companionway (he certainly did not seem to them very companionable, since he had dodged every attempt to strike up a conversation), Mama resumed the stream of complaints her daughter had been having to placate all morning, and every morning since they left New Bedford.

"If I'd known—if I'd known, Madeline—that the rooms were as small as this, I'd have sought alternative transport. And the first boat was worse! At my age, and in my condition—"

"Poor little Mama. I hope my sister only appreciates all you've gone through to visit her."

Molly did not go home, as she knew she ought to, on reaching the main street. Instead she turned in the other direction, toward Lottie's. After the woods and the ship, it was her favorite place; not for its customers and even less for its spiritous odor, but for the eternal presence of its owner, who always smelled heavenly. "Imported," she had confided once to Molly, and promised to award her a cache of her own on her sixteenth birthday, which was not so far away.

As she started into the saloon, she heard a voice she knew but had not expected there: Candy's. She stopped and held the door where she had it, open far enough to hear inside. She did not see but could imagine her sister standing at the counter and Lottie busy as always behind it. And this is what she heard:

"The right thing to do about what?"

"About Molly," Candy said. Molly blushed despite herself.

"Becoming quite the young lady. Pretty soon I'll have to break out the damask napkins when she comes visiting." Molly smiled.

"What a coincidence your saying so!"

"Is it?" There was a pause. "What have I said?"

"Well, you know. About her being at an impressionable age." But Lottie had not said that. Into Molly's mind there flew, with its great black wings outspread, a horrible presentiment of what was to follow. First Clancey, now Lottie. Molly wanted to run in and drag her sister out the door before she said more. But it would have done no good; the idea was childish.

Already Candy was asking, "Do you think it's right—proper, I mean—the best thing for her—" The difficulty she was having in finding the right (proper, best) description verified Molly's premonition. Drat it, drat it, drat it! she thought (and she seldom came so close to swearing). "—in an establishment of this type?" Candy proceeded. "She needs to associate with people who can set her a good example. I don't mean—well, you understand—don't you?"

The last question had been put rather timidly. The reply, when it came, was glazed in ice. "I understand. You don't want her consorting with unsavory characters, and soaking up their bawdy reminiscences. The next time I see her"—the hurt was seeping plainly into her tone, despite her efforts—"I'll let her know she's no longer welcome in this neck of the woods."

"Oh, Lottie!"

She would now try to cajole her, charm her, make it up with her—and Molly knew it would not work. In the midst of a heartfelt expression of hope that Lottie did not think for one second Candy held her in anything but the highest regard, the saloon mistress said, in the voice used to clear the place at closing time, "You've made yourself quite clear, Miss Pruitt. Better vamoose yourself before my reputation rubs off on you."

"Oh, Lottie!" she tried again. But Molly knew the discussion was over. She hurried away before she was seen.

She fled to a clearing in the woods that was her first (and now, it seemed, her only) refuge. She went there to draw, and when she was done drawing, to think, and when she was done thinking, to feel—to feel the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the air, the smells that were piled one on top of another: flowers, leaves, woods, grasses, earth; some easily recognized, others mysterious, from exquisite perfumes to an occasional fearsome stink.

Some town men found the woods boring because "nothing ever happened there." But things were always happening; the seeming peace and quiet was what permitted you to see and hear them. The forest was more alive than any town, for all the noise and exertion human beings threw up, and Molly felt it as deeply as anyone could have. And yet...

The forest was not everything; or if it was, it should not be. The town, the dormitory, one's duties: these were meant to be at the heart of her life, especially of that life approaching, the distance to which was growing shorter all the time. Sometimes she knew it (or thought she did), sometimes felt it, sometimes only guessed at it, but at all times it was present to her consciousness, as was her fear of it, sometimes known, sometimes felt, sometimes only guessed at. From this the forest and the ship and the saloon (strange as that seemed, since it was the hub of village society) had been her escapes. Temporary ones, to be sure, and from something she did not, down deep, seek to escape but longed to be able to welcome.

She could not welcome it. She felt unready, and much of the time she was sure she would never be ready. But also the world that offered itself to her was not all it should have been. She loved the earth of the woods, but not the mud of the streets—not true streets like those she had known in New Bedford but one big expanse of mire, unchanged since before the buildings had arisen in its midst. It was always surging into her shoes and spattering her stockings and soiling her petticoats and dresses, which were so pretty when she left the house but always had their lower rims end up soppy or caked with brown. To Molly (who could watch with detached curiosity as a fox tore into a hare) it was a horror and a mark of the town's lack of civilization.

In fact it was civilizing too fast for some of its first residents. Businesses were appearing almost weekly, the university was creaking into operation, and much more, which only Stempel and a few other progressive-minded men knew about, was soon to follow. But most of the new additions meant little to Molly. They answered men's concerns, not hers. Those few she could appreciate, like the tea room, only pointed up how far the community all about them had yet to climb. If I could only be back home, she would think, and then correct herself, for this was her home: In New Bedford, or in Concord with the March family.

What was Seattle's pride? The mill; and if you stretched it to include the Bolts' mountain, the logging camp: noisy, dirty, sawdusty places, full of noisy, dirty, sawdusty men. Much the same could have been said of the places she liked, Clancey's and Lottie's, but the first preserved her past, which threatened to fade like a dawn sky, and the second offered a promise of her future in the person of Lottie herself.

Not that Molly expected to be like her, but Lottie was more fully a woman than anyone else she had ever met, and Molly knew all there was to know about womanhood; the bits of information and advice she had placed in Molly's way as they seemed useful had proved it. She had even shown Molly how to wear a corset as comfortably as possible, which was none too comfortably. "In time you won't mind it so much," Lottie had promised, and on her promising, it was already true. But that was not all. Lottie was also exciting in a way the brides were not, with a colorfully romantic past of which she would only allow Molly glimpses till "some day when you're older"; but would she ever be older? Could she look forward to such a colorful future?

Her brother, it should be noted, did not share her affection for Lottie or Clancey, though he liked both well enough, and Seattle was every bit as civilized as he wanted it, lately rather too much so. This is almost the last we shall hear of him, for, as has been said, in this chapter of his sister's life he scarcely figured.

This morning the woods seemed vibrantly atremble, as if some cataclysm were about to befall, yet all was quiet except for the sounds she herself made in walking. The trees watched her progress respectfully. Some towered behind others, like tall, gawky boys peering over the heads of those they had outgrown. Sprays of a yellow-green fern protruded from them like unruly cowlicks, held in thick furred fingers of moss.

Through a break in the trees she glimpsed the forested mountains above, fuzzy with mist, like a watercolor half sponged away. Over them hung a gigantic inverted pyramid of cloud, layer on layer, like layers of paint; oils this time. The billows to the left diminished gradually to trails of wisp, but below, through a valley between the hills, clouds flowed in a thick white cascade that bubbled out at the sides. It exhilarated but also frightened her, for it was more than she could comprehend.

As she passed among the leaves light and dark, the trunks of reddish brown, and the rare show of new and brilliant green, she became aware of a new sound, for this place: the pinging and ringing of a dulcimer. She knew the tune, too—"Blind Mary"—but never before had it pierced to the heart like this. It seemed to speak of something going or gone, something sweet and fleeting and ever after to be missed. She followed it to a ring of maples with a round glade in its midst, one she had never entered, though she had passed it many times. Here was the source of the music; here the player must be sitting.

Suddenly she knew who it was: the man she had seen on the ship. She did not know why he would have come so far, or how he could have preceded her there, but no matter; it must be so. She was not yet ready to enter the glade and meet him there, not ready to venture so deeply into the dark (for it was shady). She backed away, a step at a time.

Her foot landed on something tiny, which collapsed under it. She looked down, and her hand went to her mouth. It had been a pheasant's egg, and now it lay broken. A sudden shrill cry—the mother's, perhaps—made her jump. She could not draw today. Anyhow, she had neglected to bring her pencil case. She always kept a stub of pencil and a charcoal wrapped in a handkerchief in a pocket of her dress, but at present her hand would not keep still long enough for her to use them. With a last look at the glade, she set her steps toward town.

Candy being out and the usual chores being done, Biddie had undertaken to give the porch rugs a good paddling which they had done nothing to deserve (she said to herself, laughing). They were doubled over the railing and she was having away at them with a will when she was interrupted by someone calling her name. The importuning steepness of the cadence, the conscious refinement of the accent, and the purr of self-contentment that this did not quite disguise were unmistakable. And Biddie knew the voice was always accompanied by another, as sharp and even as a knife blade, but no less self-regarding for that.

Sure enough, on the instant of her awareness, this one jabbed out at her. "Bridget! Bridget, d'you hear me?" She needn't worry about that, Biddie thought, as she turned slowly and reluctantly to face her visitors. She had been humming before, tunelessly but with gusto; now the light had gone out of her face, and her form appeared to have shrunk. But she steeled herself and stood her ground as the two approached up the walk. "What are you doing here?" were her first words to them.

Madeline (or Maddie, as Biddie called her) gave a little pout. "Now, is that kind, darling? When your mama and little sister have traveled all this way to see you?" Biddie appeared unmoved.

"I'm used to it, my dear. We should pity the girl if anything." She then conferred the favor of her attention on her elder child. "You always did want your sister's graces, Bridget. I'm not saying anything the world doesn't already know. Would it be asking too much of you to show us where we're to put our things?"

The question nearly made Biddie gasp. "You assumed," she managed to say, once she had regained her breath, "that you'd be staying here?"

"But where else, foolish child? It's where you girls board, isn't it?"

Biddie sought a reason to refuse (apart from the truth) and could not find one. But she could say honestly, "It's not up to me. You'll have to wait till Candy gets back."

"Candy Pruitt?" Her mother arched her eyebrows. "I should hope a Pruitt would find a place for a Cloom."

"She always was a bad influence," Maddie said. "Remember, Mama?" She leaned close as if she were whispering and wished to remain unheard, but her words came out loud and distinct.

"Ye-es." Mrs. Cloom did remember. "She's the one who brought you" (she was speaking to Biddie now) "out to this godforsaken country. Always the wild one, since she was a girl. But you would take up with her."

"And she never had any suitors, either," Maddie interjected.

"Her own fault." Mrs. Cloom sighed with unfelt regret. "Oh, she's presentable enough. But parading about in men's trousers! I was shocked her father permitted it. But then he never was—"

"And how long do you intend to stop?"

The interruption was so loud, it disarranged her mother's thoughts for a moment, but they returned to formation, out of habit, before she had to command them. "How long? That depends, dear. If we can bear the privations of this place—"

"Poor little Mama!"

"—I say, if—we may relocate for good. Then the three of us can be a family again."

The horror with which Biddie received the prospect showed unmistakably in her face, yet neither of her relatives seemed to notice it. "Won't that be cozy?" said Maddie. "We can sit and recall old times. Mama, remember how the girls used to tease her?" She broke into a chant:

"Biddie, Biddie,

Isn't pretty,

Soiled her stockings—

What a pity!"

Then she laughed and clapped her hands. Her mother smiled and nodded. Biddie did not laugh or smile and, when Maddie began to repeat the verse, suggested to her that once had been enough. Maddie stole a smirking look at their mother. Biddie paid no notice; she seemed to be working something through in her mind. Apparently angered by the existence of a rival claim on her daughter's attention, Mrs. Cloom inquired sharply whether she at least intended to offer them breakfast instead of standing there like a dumb sheep. "It's too late for breakfast," Biddie said, studying her as she might have an insect in an effort to determine its species. "You'll have to wait till lunch."

Mrs. Cloom treated herself to another theatrical sigh. "Well, if we must we must. What time is it served? Madeline will have to speak to your cook and advise her of our preferences. If she's having fish, she must take care not to overcook it. But fowl is another matter altogether—"

"Mama," Maddie broke in gently, "I'll see to it. You needn't fret yourself." She smiled at Biddie. "But, darling, would you have the kindness to direct us to where we might freshen ourselves? Long journeys so mar one's complexion—though of course you won't have had occasion to notice a difference yourself." Her smile took on a pitying air.

Biddie was moved to answer in kind but restrained herself. "Are you mute, girl?" her mother prodded. "Your sister asked you a question!"

Biddie looked from one to the other. "I suppose I have no choice but to put you up. I'll speak to Candy. You can sleep with the other girls." She laid down her paddle, which she had been clutching all the while, and started up the steps.

Behind her she heard her mother entreat, "Isn't there—some sort of private room?" Biddie allowed herself a very little growl.

Molly would have been back home to observe this exchange and to take up what remained of her morning chores if she had not decided, on reaching the last fork before town, to take the turning to Mrs. Owsley's. There she would sit with the old woman, one of the first settlers, and share tea with her as she often did, and hear again (it was the main reason she went) the story of Mrs. Owsley's arrival in Seattle. The visit would make her later than she should be in getting back but she knew Candy would be lenient about it; she always was these days. She treated Molly gingerly, as if she expected her to burst into tears at any moment. Yet Molly was not that kind of girl. Or was she? she asked herself, considering her behavior earlier that morning. Oddly, since then she had not thought about Beth once.

The one room of the cabin had little space in it for furniture, and there was little to be seen. The central and most used piece—Mrs. Owsley's pride—was a curved rocking chair. Molly sat in a smaller chair, almost a nursery chair, opposite. (Till recently she had sat on a rug with legs akimbo, but she had come to feel the position insufficiently genteel.) With the sun almost overhead, everything in the room lay in shade: the lace laid across the table, the embroidered comforter laid across the bed, the browned portrait of Mrs. Owsley's late husband on the wall. But Molly had seen it all before, indeed given it serious study, and could have drawn it from memory.

As they sipped their tea she asked Mrs. Owsley to tell her again about the night she and the others had first landed in Seattle. The old woman blinked. "The night we landed?" Her eyes searched the room. "No..." But in a few seconds the memory returned. "Of course." She settled back. "It's like nothing you've ever heard." Molly could not count the number of times she had heard it. But she never tired of it. She shut her eyes the better to see.

This was how it had been: There had been a steady rain all afternoon and the dusk was gathering as the ship's boat brought them in to shore. They clumb out, the lot of them, men and women and children, and slogged through the mud onto the beach, the cold grey waves lapping at their heels. The boat left; the ship left. The men went off to seek shelter for the night. The women crawled into the berry bushes and stretched a muslin sheet over them to keep the rain off.

While the men were away, what should come slinking out of the woods but a gang of half-nekkid savages? They circled the bushes, peeping in and sniffing at the women, like as if they was wild wolves. Why, there was no telling what they might do. But by and by they slunk away and left the women to themselves, setting huddled up together holding their knees and shivering. One of them commenced to cry, and then they all did. Mrs. Owsley held out almost to the last. But then she minded her of her sister, lying safe at home in her featherbed while she cowered there in the wet, and she knew the truth of it: the hand of judgment had fallen on her, on them all. They had ventured out beyond the edge of the world they knew, and there was no turning back.

Molly repeated the last phrase over to herself as she looked out over the site of the landing, called Alki Point, from a hilltop to which she had climbed after leaving Mrs. Owsley's. She felt sure she had identified the very clump of bushes where the women had sat cringing and weeping. Imagining the view from inside, she began to draw it in her sketchbook. First the line of bushes appeared, running to the borders of the page, and then a face took shape in their midst, that of an Indian peeping in (and maybe sniffing). Almost all his features were delineated when Molly stopped in mid-stroke, recognizing whose face it was, and the knowledge made her blush. It was the face of the man on the ship.

Not having seen Jeremy since leaving the house, Molly had no way of knowing that at almost the same moment a hope of his was seeing fulfillment. He had expressed it aloud to his brother Joshua, who was holding up the other end of the case of ginger beer (homemade by the brides to Mrs. Beeton's specifications) that the two of them were carrying from the shed at the back where the girls stored their homemades that were too big for the pantry, to the lawn at the front, which was to be given over to a wedding reception the following afternoon. "Hope this isn't all they'll be serving," Jeremy had said.

"If they do, the crowd'll be all women and no men," his brother observed sagely. He reassured Jeremy that two kegs of the real thing were waiting in the wagon their elder brother was now unloading.

Candy was waiting for them on the lawn. After her return from Lottie's she had issued a summary decree authorizing the stay of Biddie's relations, inquired Molly's whereabouts (more for form's sake than out of true concern) and learned they were unknown (as she had expected), and then prepared for Jeremy's return, with his brothers this time, by planning where things were to be put for the reception, as far as she could in advance of seeing them put there.

That was not far, as the brothers discovered. "Put it down here," she ordered, pointing at her feet, but no sooner had they brought it and begun to lower it slowly (not that the bottles would break easily, but if shaken up they were apt to pop their corks) than she amended herself, moving left a few yards, "No, over here," and then, as they were about to comply, returning to her original position, "On second thought, I think I like it better over here." The brothers looked at each other, exchanged a brief nod, and plunked the case down where they were standing, according to the latest instruction but one. "Well, that's not where I told you to put it," she objected.

Joshua combed his hair back with his fingers. "But this is where it's going," he said. She looked to Jeremy; he folded his arms in concurrence.

She probably would have given up then anyhow but had no chance to argue further, her attention having been drawn to where it was needed more urgently. This was at a front corner of the property, where the eldest Bolt was hauling one of the beer kegs from the wagon. He had it lifted high above his shoulders, weaving a little under the weight, and had just taken the shortest path inside the yard by stepping over the low fence (low for him) when Candy met him there. With a show of nonchalance as if his burden posed no strain at all, he grunted, "Where would you—like me to set—this little article?"

His brothers exchanged a look. "Glad Jason's never tempted to show off," said Jeremy.

"Mr. Light-under-a-Bushel," Joshua agreed.

None of them had noticed the sandy-haired stranger standing at the far end of the fence, who had been watching Jason's labors and those of his brothers with evident amusement. Near him stood a flat tan carrying case, which was too tall for the fence to support it, so that he had it leaned against the oak behind. A smaller bag sat alongside. He continued to watch the others, his lips curled into a smile that had something of mockery in it, as Candy, having some concern over Jason's ability to remain upright very much longer, looked for a spot where he could set down his load promptly.

By the time she had settled on just the right spot, his brothers were on either side of him doing the job for her. "Put it here," said Jeremy. "No, over here," said Joshua. "No, on second thought—" said Jeremy. They raced round him like squirrels, causing him to step backwards and lose his balance. He brought the keg thudding down in front of him, and himself after it, but managed to pull one of his tormentors along, and kicked out to trip the other, so that the three of them landed in a heap, one on top of the other, and lay there flailing and shoving and hollering, while Candy shook her head, till the three of them and finally she, too, melted in helpless laughter.

"Hey, big fella!" came a voice. They turned to see the sandy-haired man at the gate. His bags remained at the corner where he had left them. "Yes, you!" he said as Jason pushed himself up, using the barrel as a brace. "Your name Jason Bolt?"

"That he can't deny," said Joshua, also rising. He extended a hand to Jeremy.

"For that he can't deny," Jeremy sang.

"For he's a jolly good—" the two of them began.

Jason clutched them by their necks. "I'm called so," he told the stranger. "What of it?"

The man beckoned him to the gate. Jason glanced at his brothers doubtfully and, with a shrug, ambled over to him. The other two watched curiously. They could not hear what the man said, but there was no mistaking Jason's reaction to it. Hellfire blazing in his eyes, he grabbed the man by his lapels, threw him off, then leapt the fence, grabbed him again by the collar, and led him away up the street. Joshua watched thoughtfully. "Musta wanted the keg put some place else," he concluded. Jeremy agreed.

As Jason marched the stranger past Ben Perkins's general store, he bade good morning to the owner and Aaron Stempel, who were standing in conversation. Aaron took on a look of incredulousness bordering on suspicion, which the doings of Jason and his brothers generally produced in him till he had reminded herself that they were, after all, mostly foolheads. He turned to Ben for his opinion on this latest freak, an opinion he would have ignored anyway if it did not dovetail with his own (and he was one of the few to use the word who knew what a dovetail was), but Ben only said, "Don't ask me!"

Jason took the stranger as far as the edge of town (which he defined for his purpose as the end of the street, excluding the sawmill) and, having discharged him and ordered him to stay out, trudged back as he had come, dusting his hands one against the other metaphorically and indulging a smile of satisfaction. He nodded at Ben and Aaron as he passed again. He was followed, at twenty yards' distance, by the man he had just removed. Aaron looked after the two of them with a hammerhead grin. "Come on," he said to Ben. "This ought to be good."

Molly had been returning from the Point by way of a hill path that narrowed to a short cut between two buildings onto the main street when the man whose face she was carrying in her sketchbook had flown past, making her stop short with a gasp. He had not noticed her, his grey eyes being fixed on the man ahead of him, whom she had not seen till she stepped into the street. Both were heading for the dormitory. Wondering, and clutching her sketchbook to her, she made her way after them, but so timidly that the two men from the store preceded her. They stopped and she stopped behind them (keeping two steps back to avoid the scent of bay rum that Mr. Stempel always exuded) across from the dormitory in the shade of a maple and watched as the stranger returned to his place at the gate.

Jason was just explaining the thing to his brothers, unheard by Candy, when a nod from Joshua directed his attention to the grey-suited figure behind him. "I don't believe it," he said. He started for the gate, but Joshua, having heard his explanation, volunteered to do the honors himself this time. He did it just as Jason had, except that the stranger shook free of his hold, proceeding on his own power, and Joshua was content to take him only as far as the general store, ordering him out the rest of the way.

He enjoyed no greater success than Jason had, however, for no sooner had he returned than Jeremy observed, grinning, "Something's sticking to you." Joshua whirled around, and damned if the rascal wasn't back! If the brothers had ever seen a bullfight, they would have recognized the look on his face: the look of the bull after goading. For that matter it was familiar enough to those who knew the Bolts, but they did not recognize it, and so Jeremy confidently announced that now it was his turn.

The stranger stopped him with a hand to his chest. "Hold on here," he said. "I allowed you all to run me out the first time because I didn't want to fight you. All right. Well, the second time I didn't give much of a hang one way or the other. But by all the powers, you'll have to pound me into the earth like a tent peg before I let you run me out a third time."

"You know," Jeremy said innocently, "you're right." He smiled and extended his hand. The stranger studied him for a moment and then put out his own. He had only an instant to recognize his mistake, for as soon as he was off guard Jeremy dove at him headlong, grabbed him in a waisthold, and bowled him into the dirt. They grappled and punched at each other, the stranger uncaring of his clothes as they were tossed about in the yellow dust. The two fought like young bobcats.

When it became clear neither was likely to gain the prize, Joshua came out to break them up. The stranger happened to be on top; Joshua seized him under the shoulders, and his elbow shot back like the bolt of a rifle into Joshua's stomach; the reaction was immediate and fierce. He flipped over and lunged at Joshua, who skidded back ten or twelve feet before going down, with the other on top of him. They had hardly landed when Jeremy jumped onto them both, apparently not reflecting that the weight would fall harder on his brother as the bottom man. Their joint enemy dealt out blows in both directions and took as many as he dealt but showed no sign of flagging, let alone of a willingness to capitulate.

Having decided the struggle had gone on long enough, Jason walked out and shouted, "All right now." When that had no effect, he reached down with the intention of pulling them off one by one. Somebody clouted him on the jaw; as likely as not it was one of his brothers, since by then they were all hitting back in any direction a blow flew from, heedless of its source, and Joshua and Jeremy had landed a few on each other. The punch Jason had received was followed by another to the ribs; this one was the stranger's doing and no accident, for as he delivered it he was looking square into Jason's eyes. His lips curled with pleasure at his success.

This was too much for Jason to take. "Why, you—" He pounced on him, or what had been him a second before; the ball was continually rolling, and Jeremy's face was now at the fore. "Hi, Jason," he said brightly. Jason pushed him aside, saw the prey he was hunting, and swung at him. But Joshua, and now Jeremy, shouldering back in, were after the same, continuously moving target and were getting in his and each other's ways; and the stranger was holding his own against them all. Jason could not but feel a grudging admiration for him.

Under the maple Aaron was wearing an uncharacteristically balmy smile. Ben turned to him and asked if they shouldn't—he didn't know—do something. "Oh, no need for that," said Aaron, and he folded his arms and settled himself against the tree to watch. He had never seen a man beat and belabor all the Bolts at once. Had he been capable of daydreams, this at one time would have been the foremost of them, and even now it made him feel darned good, as he did not mind admitting. "I've no idea who that fella is," he said to Ben, "but he can have a job with me any time."

The sentiment moved Molly to a smile, and with it the realization she was smiling already, which shocked her down to her shoes. The man was fighting, like the silly boys at school, and fighting her friends—well, her sister's friends. And she was enjoying it, like a bloodthirsty savage, and regarding him as something of a hero. "Horrid girl!" she chided herself, and realized too late she had spoken aloud. Happily, neither of the men had heard, or seen the change of color in her cheeks at the thought of the word "hero."

If a fight is no respecter of persons, neither is it of picket fences, as Candy discovered when the human tumbleweed that was occupying everyone's attention rolled through hers and pulled up several stakes. She ran down to them and then hopped back as they continued in their erratic course. "Stop it!" she cried. "You're pulling up our fence!"

Jason's head popped up briefly. "We'll fix it," he said, and then disappeared again.

Now they rolled back into the gate and forced it free of its top hinge. "Oh-h!" Candy moaned, stamping her foot. "Now you've broken the gate!"

This time it was Joshua's head that surfaced. "Fix that, too."

She jumped aside again as the tumbleweed rolled toward her. She spied Aaron across the street and shouted to him, asking the same question Ben had. Aaron shrugged lazily; he was still enjoying the spectacle. Men! Candy screamed silently.

And now the quartet fell over onto the case of ginger beer. The one who landed first felt its edge and bottle tops poke him in the side. Yowling, he slid off onto the grass and took along the others interwound on top of him, whom he left off attending to long enough to wriggle around and deal the box a retaliatory kick. It tumbled across the grass, strewing bottles like rose petals as it went.

Inevitably, in the eccentric orbit they were pursuing, the fighters struck some of the hard, round-necked protuberances, bruising a shoulder, an elbow, a shin against the cursed nuisances, and flung them out of their way, thereby stirring up the contents, which (hardly needing provocation anyhow) began to burst out in arching fountains of froth. Molly was delighted; Aaron thought this was carrying things too far; Ben was estimating the cost of the ingredients. One of the sprays traced an arc that ended, quite unfortunately, at the waistline of Candy's dress, which she had washed only last week. The men on the lawn stopped fighting to look at her. "Don't think we can fix that," Jeremy said. The observation was sound but probably mistimed.

"You idiots!" she screamed. "Idiotic—idiots! What could be worth this?" She gave a gesture that encompassed all the surrounding damage.

The men took a breathing spell. "You don't know," Jason said darkly.

"No, Jason, that's why I'm asking. Whatever it is, settle it before you ruin everything! Oh, my poor gate!" She ran to tend its wounds, showing no concern for those the partisans were cradling, or touching and quickly untouching. They brought themselves to their feet, with further soreness, and the younger Bolts gravitated to Jason, leaving the stranger by himself a few feet away.

"Only one way to settle it," said Joshua, less to Candy than to the world at large. "See this liar out of town."

The stranger, who was then in the midst of brushing his suit off, glanced sharply at him. That flash of his eyes, Joshua could have sworn he had seen before somewhere. "Don't take kindly to being called a liar," the stranger said.

"And we don't take kindly to being lied to," Jeremy answered for all of them.

"Dead right," Jason seconded.

"What has he lied about?" asked Candy.

Now another voice made itself heard, inquiring in an officious tone with which the brothers were well acquainted, "What's the trouble here?"

Jason looked over at what had been the gate. Aaron was standing there with Ben and Molly. "Bolt brothers' business," Jason said curtly, "and none of yours."

"Always the gentleman," Aaron observed, not without humor. "As it happens, any disturbance inside the city limits is my business."

"Or you make it yours."

"Which I'm doing. Who is this fellow you keep trying to evict, with"—he grinned appreciatively at the stranger—"such scant success?"

"Confidence man," said Joshua. "Claims—" He stopped, not liking to say it.

Jeremy finished for him. "Claims to be our brother Jericho."

The others all turned to the stranger, as if they could test the claim by inspection. Molly looked at him shyly, with her chin down—and discovered to her embarrassment and great pleasure that he was looking back, with recognition. He smiled and winked; she quickly dropped her head, hoping no one else would notice that she was blushing flamboyantly. He had, certainly, for when she glanced up again he was still looking at her and still smiling, almost laughing. She was not sure whether she liked him; but it hardly mattered.

Through her discomfiture she remained dimly aware of the talk continuing about her. "Your brother?" Aaron said. "Now why would anyone want to claim that?" He grinned again.

"For a fourth of Bridal Veil Mountain, to make a start." Jason met the grin with a harder one. "You'll understand the temptation."

"Gosh," said Ben, "you mean he's nothing but a sharpie? I thought he was an anarchist or something, the way you was all laying into him."

"That's right," said Candy. "Why treat him so roughly?" At that the man assumed a suitably put-upon look, the transparent falsity of which nullified the sympathy she had begun to feel. "Even if he is a liar."

"There are lies," said Jason, "and lies." He admitted there had been a Jericho Bolt once, before Joshua or Jeremy, and after him a Jurgen, a Judson, and a Jeroboam, but none had survived.

"Yet here I am," the man said.

Jason would not look at him. "Say it again and I'll run you out again."

On finding his air of victimhood had profited him nothing, the man had dropped it, and now he appeared perfectly sincere. But Candy knew this might be pretense, too. "Is there any chance he's who he says he is?"

Jeremy shook his head. "Impossible, Candy. They were all still-born or died in the cradle."

Now she understood, as well as one could who had not lived it. Beneath the hostility the impostor had ignited in Jason, she saw the old sorrow reawakened, and its reflection in his brothers. Yet she could not keep herself from asking, "What if"—she knew it would be kinder to stay silent out of respect for their dead, but what if...?—"one of them didn't? What if your parents only told you he'd died?"

"He would have known," Joshua said, almost before she had finished. He looked to Jason. "Wouldn't you?"

Jason did not answer. In his eyes, for the first time, Candy saw a glimmer of acknowledgment that the story was, not true by any means, but not altogether as fantastic as it had sounded. What if—?

"Why would they have done that?" Jeremy asked, in a cadence that declared they would not. 'It's crazy."

The sandy-haired man addressed himself to Jason alone. "You were having a hard winter. Wasn't enough food for the three of you, leave alone a fourth. And our mother was dry."

Jason was staring off into a distance the others could not see, and when he spoke they could hardly hear him. "I remember that winter."

"A couple drove through. Canucks."

Jason turned his head, and his eyes met the stranger's for the first time since he had shown him the way out of town. "I remember them, too."

"They had food in the wagon, and the woman had milk. But no child; she was barren. Our father made a trade with them—me in exchange for provisions enough to see out the winter." He stopped there, but the narrative seemed to lack a conclusion. "That's how it was," he ended.

The others had listened with astonishment, the degree of it varying with the listener. The two least affected were Joshua and Aaron, and by a brief exchange of glances each recognized in the other his own frame of mind. In situations like this (though neither could remember any quite like this) they usually found themselves allies, and sole allies. Jeremy felt in a daze. And Jason...

Jason was listening to Candy with more attention than usual, but then she was making more sense than usual. She retailed the simple facts: the man had been thrown out three times and kept coming back, had fought the three of them together sooner than cry uncle. "Does that remind you of anyone?" she asked with all emphasis.

Jason stood almost (but not quite) dumbstruck. The hood of ignorance was lifted from his eyes; the light of revelation shone forth. (Actually the sun had just come out.) He seized Jericho in a logger's hug that knocked the wind out of him. "Brother!" he cried.

A second or two later Jeremy joined in the embrace, but Joshua stood back. "If you are who you say," he observed, "you must hate our father. And us."

To his surprise Jericho laughed at this. "For saving my life? Never! I thank—" He stopped on the verge of invoking deity, whether from an absence of faith or an excess of it. "—whatever stars are to be thanked he was willing to give me up. Reason I came back was to thank him. And our ma. But from the way you speak of them" (or don't, he might have added) "I judge I'm too late." Jeremy asked what had happened to his foster parents. Jericho said they were gone, too. Bad times had hit, and his father had not survived them. His mother had returned to her birthplace in France and taken Jericho with her but died shortly after. "And I soon went through what little money she'd left. I was living a pretty high life as an artist."

"Artist?" said Joshua, with more interest than he had shown before.

"Oh, didn't I mention it?" He gave a smile. It was one they were to see many times in the weeks ahead, and every time (if one were in the mood to notice, as Joshua did now) it came a shade too easily. "I paint."

A stranger, a handsome one, who had stared and winked at her and had lived in France, and a Bolt, and a player of music in the woods (of this she was still convinced), and on top of all else an artist—the impress of each of these causes for admiration, if not adoration, swirled together in Molly's head like brightly colored paints and made her slightly dizzy. If she had ever sneaked more than a sip of champagne she would have had an experience to compare it to, albeit imperfectly. It filled her eyes (spring was here indeed) and her hands (she wanted to draw) and feet (she wanted to dance). No one had ever made her feel like this.

When she first arrived in Seattle she had formed an infatuation for Jeremy (who had never guessed it), and when it had subsided, another for Joshua (who had), and after that for Jason (who had taken it for granted, since from boyhood he had regarded such attention as his due). But none of them was anything like Jericho. She could not see yet how he was like them; a picking from the same ingredients newly mixed.

He led them down to his carrying case, which was still leaning on the oak at the corner. Molly could guess what was inside, but not the character of it; no one was prepared for that. Jericho slid out the canvas, wrapped in cloth, and set it down on the empty case, in preference to the dirt. The others assembled in front of it as he removed the swaddling. "Holy smoke," said Ben.

It was a picture in oils of a woman holding a flower, a jungle blossom (the gladiolus, which none of them knew), blazing fiercely orange and red at the tip of a cool green stalk. The woman's wrap sported stripes to match. She had skin of a rich brown, which darkened as it peaked into twin aureoles— "Oh, my," said Candy. Then she remembered Molly's presence and felt the urge to rush over and shield her eyes. Too late; they were absorbing every detail. Molly saw that the woman was like the flower, was the flower. Both were so beautiful she had forgotten she should be blushing till she noticed Jericho's eye on her again. He seemed amused but also intrigued by her reactions—or was her conceit running away with her?

"You do paint," Joshua said in a respectful tone.

"And I'm always searching for the right subject," he replied, his eye still on Molly. This was not lost on her sister, nor the change in her complexion. She was luckily relieved from others' scrutiny when Jason, who stuck to a view of art more prosaic than his brother's, asked loudly if Jericho really earned a living with "those."

"You'll find me hanging in some of the best houses in Paris," Jericho bragged.

"And in the Louvre?" Candy prided herself on this knowledge.

"Oh, the Louvre," he said in an offhand manner, incidentally correcting her pronunciation. "That goes without saying." It had rolled off his tongue too easily, and Joshua exchanged another glance with Aaron.

"How'd you like to come work for the family?"

Joshua knew Jason was prone to brainstorms, often to his later regret, but this seemed more dubious than most. "Has he ever done any lumberjacking?"

"Not as a lumberjack! As the camp artist."

Jeremy thought for a second. "We've never had a camp artist."

"We have now." He clapped Jericho on the shoulder. "You can redo all our signs."

Jericho's smile had an air of tolerance about it. "I think he's a long way past sign painting," Joshua said, with a nod toward the canvas.

Jericho surprised him again. "Not at all. It's how I make ends meet. Between commissions," he added quickly.

"Then it's settled," said Jason. "I'll show you about the camp. We can leave the rest of the setting up till—" A glance at the lawn revealed the wake the brawl had cut: a litter of bottles, an upturned crate, soaked patches of grass, and a stretch of fence that sprawled drunkenly. "You stay and fix up the mess," he ordered Joshua. "You won't mind?"

"Well—"

"That's fine, then." He threw his arm around Jericho. "Come, brother."

Jericho resisted. "My picture—"

"Don't forget the picture," Jason called to Joshua over his shoulder. Jericho frowned a little at this but allowed himself to be bustled away. Jeremy hurried along on Jason's other side, happy at having escaped the cleaning detail. "You'll sleep in the tent with us," Jason was telling Jericho.

Where? thought Jeremy.

He said it aloud when they got to the tent. The climb uphill had taxed Jericho less than it would have most newcomers. Jeremy was forming an admiration for him and would have loved having him there for long talks before turning in, but it was plainly impossible. "There's hardly room for three."

"Yes," said Jason. "Ah..." No further words came.

"Appears you need a bigger tent," said Jericho.

It had been an idle pleasantry, but Jason lit on it. "We'll get one! Biggest tent you ever saw. Meanwhile you can sleep in the bunkhouse with the men. You won't mind?" Jericho opened his mouth. "That's fine, then."

Unlike Joshua, who had left it at that, Jericho felt moved to give his express consent, as if it had preceded rather than followed the close of discussion. "Believe me, I've slept worse places."

Jason led him out to introduce him to some of the crew. "Boys," he said, "meet our brother." The stares and open mouths his announcement produced pleased him greatly.

The one who had been the occasion of it looked content enough but had a different source of satisfaction in mind, as Jeremy learned when he bent his head close to whisper, "That saloon in town. Is it the closest?"

"Closest and only."

"How late's it stay open?"

"Long as there's a dry gullet."

Jericho broke into the first broad smile Jeremy had seen from him. And he did not waste the knowledge gained; after supper, he invited his brothers to Lottie's for a drink, which the two elder ones declined, to celebrate his induction into the family.

On the way down he showed himself miffed by the refusal. "Shoulda thought the least my brothers could do would be to drink my health." Jeremy told him it was nothing personal: Jason always went to bed early, and Joshua had been up late the past several nights figuring out how to set up a machine they had just acquired; Jeremy did not know the details, for Joshua was keeping them secret. Jericho seemed little placated by the information but said no more.

Or said no more then, but he returned to the theme later, long after Molly was nestled snug in her bed (and it would not have been incorrect to say that visions of him danced in her head), when his tongue was feeling rather freer. Jeremy's felt as if it had turned to seaweed, as well as having ideas of its own about which way to go. Lottie had warned him that while his brother might have two hollow legs he did not, and he had best modify his intake accordingly. Jericho had responded to this by ordering two more whiskies, for which Jeremy would be paying, as for those that had preceded. "Still don't see," Jericho said, "why Jason couldn't 'a' joined us." He wagged his head. "Don't see at all."

"Don'cha worry 'bout it," Jeremy assured him, patting him clumsily. "Th'ow yuh big welcome t'morra at the weddin' r'ception. Big t'do—hurrah!" He waved his hand in the air and then remembered he was in the wedding party. "Gotta get home," he said with a sudden sense of duty. "Early t' bed, early t' rise, makes a—makes a—" He turned to Jericho. "Wha's it make?" Jericho shrugged. Jeremy gave up on the question and started for the doors with a wavering step. Jericho pulled him back by the arm and ordered one more for the road.

"Better leave while you're both upright," Lottie counseled. Her eyes were on Jeremy, who had already broken free of his brother's grip and was staggering away. Jericho resigned himself with a roll of the eyes, drained the few drops that remained in both their glasses, and after nodding Lottie a good night trailed Jeremy out. She watched him with curiosity and disapproval. She had seen his kind before, but he had veils around him, like Salome; she preferred her men (and women, come to that) plainspoken. Yet she did not like to judge from a first acquaintance, however revealing; she would wait and see.

Had Clancey been there, the two of them might have conferred on the subject, on which Clancey had already formed an opinion. But tonight he had chosen to stay on board, meditating on the two Mollies, and retired early.

Out on the Sound, a pulling boat he would not have recognized was gliding through the moonlit water toward the main landing. Standing in the bows was a tall figure in a long black coat with wide lapels, a black broad-brimmed hat, and at his throat a white ruffed collar. The man rowing was dressed about like any other sailor. When he had moored, the man in the coat climbed out and mounted the ladder-like steps to the landing, from which he looked up the sloping street. At its crest he could see the north end of the brides' dormitory. This, he said to himself, and this only can it be. He headed up the street while his man waited.

The bride-to-be was wakeful. Most of the others had fallen off to sleep. For their sakes Candy made sure to keep her voice soft as she sat with Kate on her bed buoying her spirits, as she did every bride's the night before the event. "Ready for the big occasion?" she asked, as she always did.

"No."

This was the answer always given, and Candy always gave the same reassurance: "Wedding day jitters. Everybody has them."

Instead of smiling gratefully, as most brides did, Kate gasped. She had happened to glance out into the yard; now she clutched Candy's arm. "It's him! There, by the fence!"

Candy stood to look out. "I don't see anyone."

Kate's eyes swept the whole of the street within their view. It was certainly empty now. "Imagining things," she said, without saying whom she had imagined. "You're right, I am jittery. Do you suppose...a thimbleful of sherry...?"

Candy smiled mischievously. "The perfect cure." She rose and beckoned to Kate to follow. "Don't tell the others—especially Biddie." Kate nodded.

While she downed her restorative, the two roving Bolts were recovering in part from the effects of theirs. The climb in the cold wind had cleared their heads a little, though Jericho continued to manifest a sodden disappointment that Jason and Joshua had not come along. "Told yuh," Jeremy said, "Joshua's workin' on our new machine." He put his finger to his lips. "But iss secret. Shhh."

"Didn't hafta to do it tonight, did he? Coulda did it tomorrow."

But Jeremy was one up on him. "No, he can't. And yuh know why? Account of the weddin'. Everybody's goin'. Jason—Joshua—Jason—" He tried to think of others. "You and me—"

"Jason says you all stop work every time one of you gets married. Take off the whole day. That so?"

Jeremy nodded. Then he remembered that tomorrow was Sunday and so reminded Jericho, who had not known it, either. "But we'd take off, anyway," he allowed. "Pay our respec's to the brood and grime." That had not sounded right. "Grood and brime. Gride—"

Jericho was shaking his head. "All them weddin's must make for a lotta days off."

To Jeremy it did not seem so. "There's only a hundred brides. And they don't all of 'em marry loggers."

"A hundred women! Whee-oo!" His whoop was echoed in the hills; perhaps it was the echo that made it sound hollow. "I bet you know all their secrets, too."

Jeremy wrinkled his nose. Secrets? he thought.

"Come on, tell me one. Just between brothers. And I'll..." His mind fished about. "I'll tell you a secret on one of the women that's set for me."

He was walking a little ahead. Jeremy stared after him. "Why'd they sit on you?"

"'cause I'm a painter," Jericho said with pride.

"Oh-h," Jeremy said, and then, after considering further, "Why'd they sit on a painter?"

"Aw, forget that!" He stopped to let Jeremy catch up and lay his arm around him as they proceeded side by side. "Tell me one of those gals' secrets, now. Somethin' they wouldn't want told around."

Jeremy was now able to command his thoughts better than he had been, but even at his best he would have been hard put to satisfy the wish. He finally dredged up one thitherto unrevealed confidence, but this involved Molly more than anyone else. She had dropped one of the china cups hanging from the sideboard, and the handle had broken off; Biddie had glued it back and returned it to its place. They had never told anyone, not even Candy. Every day since (Jeremy did not tell this part, for he did not know it) Molly had dreaded the cup's first use, anticipating it would fall apart, but this had not yet come about. Jericho, who knew none of these people by name, even had he cared about the loss of a cup, did not hide his disappointment, but Jeremy did not notice it. "Now you tell me yours," he said.

"Painted a girl once that had a tear in her petticoat." Jericho sounded almost as if he were yawning.

"That's it?"

"As good as yours!" But after a few seconds he reconsidered. "You know, I will tell you a secret. Something I've never told anyone. Then you have to tell me one of your own. We're brothers, ain't we?"

"Darned right we are."

"Darned right. But we never had the chance to be brothers—to share things. And I want to. Don't you?" He squeezed Jeremy's shoulder tightly.

"Yeah! I mean, I guess so." He felt somewhat confused.

"One time," Jericho began, "I took a job outside the law. Copied a Delacroix so's a dealer could pass it off as the genuine article."

Jeremy did not recognize the name but understood the sense of the story. "Did he tell you that's what he was up to?"

"No, but I knew. He went to jail for it. I didn't. I'll say this for him—he may have been a swindler but he never gave me up. He'd took a kind of a liking to me." He suddenly slapped Jeremy on the back. "Now you. I bet in your business you've took money for something or other you oughtn't. Maybe did it on your own without telling your brothers."

If Jeremy had been stumped for a revelation earlier, he now found the sum of his life's dealings disappointingly free of duplicity. "All we do is cut trees. Nothing shady in that. 'cept the trees," he added as an afterthought. "Being shady—shade kind of shady, not—"

Jericho had stopped listening a few qualifications back. "You mean to tell me you never overstepped some other fella's property line and swiped yourself a few of his trees while he wasn't looking?" The giant lengths in which the lumbermen trafficked had not yet been fixed in his awareness.

"We got two hundred square miles of our own. Why'ud we go to the trouble?"

"For the plumb hellaciousness of it!" Like the earlier whoop, this sentiment sat on him like a borrowed cap, as did the next. "Or maybe you fetched in a load of scarlet women to keep the men happy?"

"We did. Only they weren't scarlet, and they didn't make 'em happy. Not that way—well, not too much. I mean—" Again he found himself in an impossible tangle.

"But you musta sold your soul some time. Everybody does." Jeremy continued shaking his head, to Jericho's increasing impatience. He seemed set on finding some blemish that would put the lie to his brother's apparent virtue. "Somebody wanting you to hire 'em or buy from 'em, getting you to put in a good word with Jason..."

"No..."

"...talk him into it..."

"...I told you..."

"...and sneaking you five hundred bucks to do it."

Jeremy looked sharply at him. "What'd you say?"

"I said, somebody that wanted—"

"Five hundred bucks! What made you say that?"

"Then there was something!" Jeremy's face had betrayed him, as it always did, making it appear he had been caught red-handed at some misdeed. "I'm right, ain't I?"

"Once," Jeremy conceded. "I'd forgotten about it, almost."

"And Jason don't know?"

"Nobody does."

"Tell me!" Jeremy shook his head, tight-jawed. "I told you mine. Are we brothers or not?"

"Sure we are, but—"

"Bet you and Joshua have secrets you've never told nobody else." Jeremy thought it likely but could not remember any. "All that the two of you have had, I've missed and can't ever get back. Can't you share this one thing with me so we can be brothers for real? If only for tonight."

His sad grey eyes, his heartfelt tremolo, his rueful air as of a boy cast lucklessly adrift: these gifts had gained him greater conquests than this, some of a nature that would have set Jeremy on his heels were he to have learned of them, but, as it was, confronted with those eyes, and the knowledge that they were those of a brother and boon companion on this dark night (and being himself in a partly liquid state), he had not the heart to refuse Jericho anything—almost—he might ask.

But for all that, he was still cautious. "You mustn't tell Jason, or anyone. Not ever. Promise?"

"Ain't I just said it's our secret?"

"Well..." He hesitated a long time. His confidant waited. At last, and with a feeling he was venturing onto a side path from which he might be unable to find his way back, Jeremy said, so quietly that Jericho had to strain to hear him, "One man knows, besides us. The one whose five hundred bucks it was." He paused. But he knew it was too late to stop.

"Who?" Jericho could not help asking.

Jeremy quivered at bringing the name out into the open air, where God and all His trees could hear. "Aaron Stempel."

On waking the next day (at five, an ingrained habit) Jeremy felt a deep sense of regret. But this proceeded more from the late-night carousal he had permitted himself to be drawn into, and the picking at his head it had left behind for a memento, than from the confidence he had disclosed almost accidentally. The telling of it had taken him and his listener almost to within earshot of the camp, where he had again enjoined secrecy and again had his worry allayed, for the time being; this morning he felt its bite again. But this took second place to his headache. He roused himself for breakfast nonetheless.

Jericho, bedding in the bunkhouse, did not. He was woken by the trampings and mutterings of huge male flannel-suited forms that filled the room. Had he joined an army? No, he was sure he would never have done that. Then he remembered. One of the men, Corky, yelled above the others to ask if he didn't want breakfast. "Now?" said Joshua, horrified by the thought. Corky said it was that or go without. Jericho chose the latter and rolled over in his bunk. Corky snorted. Ain't cut out to be no lumberjack, he thought, if he's a late riser.

The dormitory was the reciprocal of the camp, all women and no men, and the morning before a wedding was one of the few times its occupants held sway and the men had only to be led (not that they did not always, but on occasions like this both sides frankly admitted it). Under their direction the Bolts (mainly Jason and Joshua), with some of their men to help, finished setting up for the reception on the lawn.

Earlier the dormitory's floral committee had visited the church, not a five minutes' trot away, carrying baskets of rhododendrons, simply but tastefully arranged, which they set on stands made from pine stumps, positioned at the sides of the altar. That was all the decoration there was. The Reverend liked a tidy house, and besides, with marriages so frequent till lately, they had not time or money in the committee fund to do more. "Rustic" was Jericho's comment when he saw it.

The seamstress committee, which was much larger, and was assisted at some point by almost every one of the other brides, had labored longer on the wedding dress. In the first weeks of residence in Seattle, the women had seen the impossibility of sewing a hundred dresses at the same time (for so their hopes had promised, and the initial flurry of couplings brought about by the excitement of being in a new place, and one where nature danced around them always and everywhere) and decided to make three dresses, one of average size, one a little larger, and one a little smaller, to serve for all.

That is, for most. A few of the brides received money from their families or their young men to have dresses made to special patterns or from fabrics specially imported, and the committee was always ready to oblige—and able to, for some of the girls had a great gift for sewing. (In later life two of them were to open a seamstresses' shop together.) One bride, not easily (or ever) pleased, had gone to a woman in Olympia to have her dress done and had liked the town so much more than Seattle she had insisted to her husband she must move there, which she did, to no one's regret.

A few dresses had to be sewn to order for those brides who were much larger than the rest, or much smaller, like Kate. Molly, who was not tall herself, had watched the creation of Kate's with excitement, for she thought it likely to pass to her one day. Her own uniform as maid of honor, she had worn in the same capacity on previous occasions; so also the bridesmaids. At every wedding in Seattle these numbered more than the customary six, the size of the complement depending on how many particular friends the bride could claim. Today they numbered eighteen.

One of Kate's particular friends was Molly, who was with her in the vestry helping her dress in front of the one narrow mirror. Molly loved Kate and was sorry to see her go, but after all she would not be going far: Andrew was one of Jason's men and would build their house nearby. Not a cabin, she hoped; Seattle had enough of those. But there was scant chance of that, since no one was building cabins any more.

She gazed at Kate in her white lace, her chestnut hair cascading down behind. "Wish I had your hair," Molly said, not for the first time.

"We all wish for what we don't have." Kate's eyes moved to the door and seemed to look beyond it. Whatever her fancy, she shook it off after a moment and returned to the business at hand, and to the puzzled girl beside her. Kate smiled to show everything was all right. "When I was your age I'd have given my eyeteeth for those sunflower tresses." She stroked them affectionately. "As we grow up we learn to appreciate what we have and be content with it, even if—" She checked herself.

Molly's mind had strayed in a different direction. "Wish my name wasn't Molly. Wish it were Meg. Or Amy."

"When you were reading the Odyssey, it was Penelope. Tell you what, you pick one and that's what I'll—Molly, what are you doing?"

The answer was clear: Molly was pinching her cheeks and watching in the mirror to see how red she could make them. "I've seen you do this before you go out sparking with Andrew."

"Molly! You shouldn't say things like that."

"Well, don't you?"

At this Kate dropped the look of prim reproof she had put on. "Yes," she admitted, laughing, "I do." She saw that Molly had drawn her small belly in, turned on her heel, and was studying its reflected profile. "What's this now?"

"I could lace my corset tighter."

"Molly—"

"I could! I've seen some of the girls do it a whole two inches!"

"And turn blue because they can't breathe." Molly looked about to do so herself. "Molly, breathe!" She let out a huge exhalation, and her midriff with it. It left her feeling defeated. Kate put an arm halfway round her. "Why the sudden need for ruby cheeks and a cinched waist? Is it for a boy at school?"

"No!" Molly said in surprise. "The boys at school..." She realized Kate was waiting for her to finish. "They're boys." She did not know how better to describe it. "They're like children."

Kate began to reply that they were children, and so was Molly herself. Then she remembered how she had felt at that age, not so long before, and for that matter still did. "I know," she said, as one woman to another. "And a lot of them never do catch up."

One of those she had in mind was the bridegroom himself. He was waiting outside the church with Joshua, his best man, and best friend before Andrew had come to work at the camp. The distance that Joshua had to maintain as his supervisor had ended their hunting trips, which sometimes had lasted all night. Neither begrudged the loss; they accepted their estrangement as natural law. Jason and Jeremy had no friends among the men, either; no boss did.

But for today the old intimacy was partly restored. Andrew had seen an omen. A black crow had landed on a stump by him and stared at him all through breakfast. He had tried to shoo it away, but it would not budge till he got up from the table. "Something'll go wrong," he said to Joshua. "I can feel it."

"Wedding day jitters. Everybody has 'em." He had heard Candy tell this to nervous brides, and it always seemed to work.

"You ain't forgot the ring?"

Joshua produced it from a pocket. "See? You got no cause to worry."

The church lay at the end of the half-formed avenue that led up from the wharf and crossed the main street. A man in a long coat was standing at the intersection, looking beyond to the crowd gathered for the wedding; half the town, it must have been.

The wedding party was forming in disorderly fashion. It had loggers for ushers, each in his one good suit (if he had one), and brides (as they were hopefully called) for bridesmaids. Several of the latter were clustered about a grey-eyed, grey-suited man, a stranger to them at first but now, by joint consent and design, a stranger no longer. Since his circle was the liveliest in the crowd, Andrew and Joshua, who had nothing else to do, could scarcely help watching them, though Joshua did so reluctantly. "Your new brother's sure made a hit with the ladies," Andrew remarked.

"Yes, hasn't he?"

His old friend did not miss the sarcasm in his tone. "You're jealous. You was their favorite before he come along."

"It's not that." Andrew peered at him skeptically, in a way he had that always made Joshua smile. "Or not only that. Something about his eyes...I don't know. Man should be able to laugh, don't you think?"

"Why, he laughs all the time." Andrew pointed. "See, he's laughing now."

Joshua looked; it was as Andrew had said. "Only he's not."

The laugh, or not-laugh, punctuated a description by Jericho of the latest Paris fashions, for which the brides had begged. "They're wearing their gowns cut all the way up to here," he said, grazing the nearest shoulder, "and all the way down to here"; and he brought his finger dangerously near the adjacent bosom.

Ben and Aaron were watching him, too. "He's a bigger charmer than his brothers," Ben said enviously.

"Then there oughta be a law against him," Aaron declared.

One who was not watching was Biddie, although on his having been pointed out to her she had permitted herself a few seconds' observation, which had led her to the opinion that he was a very handsome fellow. But she had had no further leisure to think about it or about anything else, except as her houseguests bade her.

"You never were an attractive girl, Bridget," her mother was saying, "and never will be, best resign yourself to that. Your sister inherited all the looks in the family from me—not meaning to say anything against your late father—but you, dear, plain as a post you were from the day you were born, and it was obvious to all of us we'd have a job finding you a husband. There was that hunchback, and he was comfortably off, too, but then he would die—well, it's water under the bridge now. But what I say to you, Bridget, what I say is that despite the disadvantages nature burdened you with, you might have tried to be a pleasant girl, sit still off to the side and mind your betters—and listen, for heaven's sake, a man likes a girl to listen to him once in a while. But no, you'd chatter on and on, without a tittle of sense in it or a care for anyone but yourself, wouldn't brook interruption—"

"Mama—"

"Hush, I'm speaking to you! You might have made something of yourself, truly you might, and the whole world laid it to me that you didn't. But honestly, I said, look at her, I said, what can one do with such a plain, stupid, contrary girl? And, knowing you, of course they agreed with me. But she's my own, I said, it's my obligation to do what I can for her, I said, and I tried, Bridget, heaven knows I did. And how did you repay me? How? Up and emigrated to the Indian territories with that Pruitt girl, without a thought for me who raised you and did for you all those years and looked for you to do as much for me after your sister married. Who's to take care of me then, I ask you? Who?"

She seemed ready to weep, but Biddie knew her better than that. "Yes," she said, happy to change the subject, "I thought she would be married by now. When I left—"

"Oh, let's don't talk about Barclay." Maddie gave a little shudder, as if at the very mention of him.

"Barclay? I thought his name was Roland."

"Roland," she said, "was before."

"You've been engaged twice?"

"Three times—or is it four?"

"What happened to them?" Biddie asked, not quite innocently.

"The fools," their mother interposed, "didn't appreciate what they had. Forever harping and carping at her—and she was only saying what everybody already knew. Though, to be frank, dear, you ought to have known better than to speak of Roland's sister to him in those terms. Because what I always say is, blood's thicker than—"

They were left to fill in the last word themselves, for at that moment Corky, appareled in his good coat and his only pair of town shoes, and with his hair slicked down for the occasion, stepped up to greet Biddie. She attempted to wave him away but he paid no notice, figuring she was only fanning herself. "Biddie?"

"Not now," she whispered. She glanced nervously at the others. They were regarding the intruder rather in the manner of visitors to a zoological park. Darn it, Biddie thought, and bit at her lip.

Corky did not see it because he was looking at his shoes as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I was wonderin', can I have the first dance at the reception?" He asked for it every time, and every time it was as if he had never asked before. "You always let me have the first one." Her mother and her sister looked at each other in amazement.

"I suppose so," she said rapidly. "Yes. Goodbye."

"You gonna introduce me to your friends?"

"No. Go away!"

Maddie was already moving around Biddie for a closer look. "And who is this darling little man?"

Corky scowled up at her. "Name's Corky."

"Corky!" She gave forth with a highly theatrical laugh. "Isn't that just the perfect name for you? Like a puppy's!" She laid a hand on his shoulder. "Look, Mama," she announced, "it's Biddie's little friend, Corky." She elongated the name in a way he hated. "And have you known our Biddie long?"

"Your Biddie?"

Maddie introduced herself and her mother. Corky began to tip his hat and then remembered he had left it behind at Jericho's suggestion. "I'm sure she's spoken of us many times." Corky tried to remember one. He scratched his tiny bald patch. "In any case," Maddie trilled on, "it's kind of you to treat her as though you were glad of her company."

"Huh?" He thought he must have heard wrong, but he was sure he had not.

"We love her, of course, ugly little duckling that she is. But the attentions of a man, whatever his qualities—or lack of them—always leave her so absurdly grateful. Like a little mongrel dog, grateful for whatever scraps she's tossed. I recall when she was a child—she still is, really—"

Biddie told Corky he could go. "You bet!" he said, and he gratefully made his escape.

"You needn't have insulted him," she said quietly. "I don't mind how you speak of me—"

"What ingratitude, girl!" her mother broke in. "Madeline shows one of your local bumpkins a smattering of courtesy and—"

"Why, Mister—Bolt, isn't it?" Maddie said in an affectation of breathlessness, blinking girlishly. Jericho had stepped into the center of the circle they would have made if they had been less few.

He ignored her and her mother. "Miss Biddie, I believe?"

"Mr. Bolt." She blushed a little; this was the first time he had spoken to her.

"Jericho," he insisted. "If your friend has the first dance claimed this afternoon, may I have the honor of the second?" Biddie was flabbergasted at his knowing about the first, but he had been eavesdropping during his own, more tedious conversation, which had been proceeding not far away, and what he had heard had finally stirred him to leave the girls who were both charming and boring and rush to Biddie's rescue. Those girls were miffed at the slight, and so now was Maddie.

Biddie thanked him for the offer. "I know you're only being kind."

"Looks as though someone here oughta be." He glared at her companions. "Come away from these two. The show'll be starting soon."

Biddie shook her head firmly. "Thank you again. But no."

He stepped close to her and spoke in a low voice. "Why? You don't have to stay here and take their guff."

"Yes," she said simply. "I'm afraid I do."

He studied her for a moment and then shrugged. "As you like." He left shaking his head.

Almost at once Candy fell into step with him. The sight of him leaving the other girls to pay court to Biddie had so stirred her protective instinct, and then her curiosity, that she had left off molding the wedding procession long enough to listen to the exchange. "That was gallant of you," she said.

"It was gall, not gallantry. Those two—" He stopped, remembering he was speaking to a lady; not one of the type he was used to, but the real thing. "Why don't she consign 'em to hellfire and have done with them?"

"What's the longest you've ever taken to paint a picture?"

The seeming irrelevance of the question escaped his notice because it was about himself. "Can't say, 'cause I ain't finished it yet. Will one of these days, though."

"Why go to so much trouble? Why not consign it to hellfire and have done with it?"

"Too stubborn to let it lick me." He had answered seriously before recognizing the question and its tone as his own. "Oh...!" He stopped and looked back at Biddie, who now appeared to him a courageous figure. "Poor little mite."

"Is she?"

"She's bound to lose."

"Is she?"

Jericho stared at her. Seattle seemed to be full of women he had difficulty making out. "It sure don't look like winning."

"You're famous for your keen appreciation of women." She was guessing at his estimate of himself, based on the little she had heard him say; her perceptivity amazed him. "Which of those three would you soonest take up with, given your choice?"

"You joking? Your friend is the only one of 'em I would take up with."

"You see?" She vouchsafed a homily. "Things gotten in certain ways aren't worth the having." Then she hazarded another guess. "But perhaps you've found that out for yourself." She smiled at him.

"Whoa!" he said, with a gesture to suit. "That feline look again."

"Feline?"

"Whenever a woman wants a man to think she knows more than she's saying, she fixes him with that cat's-eye stare." He imitated it accurately but with some artistic license.

"And when a man wants to shun a topic, he makes a declaration that sounds like he's settled things, but he hasn't. He's only ended the discussion—temporarily."

After a second Jericho broke into a laugh, of the kind Joshua found suspect; it was certainly nothing his expression just before had seemed to presage. Candy left him to it as she returned to the procession, pausing along the way to dispatch the groom and his best man to the altar.

Most of the guests had gone in, too. Now the few remaining joined them. These included Biddie, Maddie, and their mother. They sat on the left with the brides (the town brides, that is, not the real one), who filled up the whole side as they did at every wedding, leaving the other spectators to find seats where they could on the right.

Outdoors the line was taking proper shape at last. "Double file!" Candy shouted, clapping her hands smartly. "Ushers in front, shortest first."

All eyes turned to Corky. He shuffled into place at the head, next to Candy's kid brother. "Just once," he muttered, "I'd like to bring up the rear. Just once!"

Once the ushers were assembled, and Candy had herded in a few stray bridesmaids, she realized for the first time that the matron of honor was missing. She searched the crowd outside and in. "Where's Lottie?" she whispered to Biddie.

The press of coping with her family had forced the news to the back of her mind. "Oh, dear, I forgot to tell you. She sent word she wouldn't be coming."

"Not coming? But she's matron of honor!" Candy recalled their conversation of the day before, and a pang of remorse clutched at her. Biddie was watching her with concern, but Candy knew she could not help; nobody could. And there was a wedding to see to. She hurried back outside to find Molly assuming her place and Jason his in back of her, with the bride on his arm. It was a measure of the fascination Jericho exerted on most people at first encounter that for once no one was paying his eldest brother any notice.

The notes of Wagner flowed out from the church like thick blackberry jam. At Candy's sign the procession started forward. First the ushers went, then the bridesmaids. Kate's turn was approaching fast. Those doors, through which she had passed each Sunday without remarking them, now frightened her terribly. They led in to a new life—in, not out. Her thoughts echoed, without her knowledge, the words of Mrs. Owsley: once I enter, there's no turning back. She took a deep breath, as if it were her last. Wedding day jitters...

A motion glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, or perhaps only an intuition, drew her gaze to the old oak between the church and the rectory. In its shade stood a figure—or was she imagining again?

The man stepped into the light. He was still wearing his long coat but was holding his hat in his hands. His face was brown and red and strikingly handsome.

Kate fought for breath. The procession had gotten ahead of her. She heard, as from the other side of a door—the door to the church—Jason's voice informing her they were all waiting. The man was walking toward her, walking in time with the wedding march, till it stopped abruptly. Kate slipped out of Jason's arm and went to him, moving as in a dream. They stopped a yard apart, close enough for her to be sure he was not a vision. "Alvaro," she said, her voice choked, "Alvaro."

"I had your promise." His voice was low and surging and richly accented. "Your promise," he repeated severely.

"You promised you would come for me." She could scarcely bear to recall the sorrow of her long wait and her final surrender to what had seemed the inescapable truth that he had forgotten her. "You never came."

He explained straightforwardly and without apology. His father had been infirm for many years; now he had died, and his estate had come to Alvaro. "I desire"—he searched for the words—"I desire that it shall be at your pleasure. But it is for you to choose." He deliberated like a judge about to pass sentence. "Three weeks I will anchor here, and three weeks only. Twenty-one days—you understand me? This is the first. On the twenty-first my man will wait until nightfall. If you do not come"—he stopped and then continued as if against his will—"we will not meet another time." He gave a brusque nod, turned on his heel, and marched off. Kate stared after him, feeling helpless.

Now Andrew was at her side, and Candy and some others. The church doors were bridged by a double row of heads peering out to see what had happened. "Let's get on with the weddin'," said Andrew.

Kate regarded him with sympathy. "I can't marry you," she said, and then added, in an effort to be completely fair, "Not today."

"If not today, then what day?"

This was more than she could allow him just now. "I don't know. I'm sorry." She looked around at the others and repeated the apology. Wanting to cry, but not wanting Andrew to see her lest he think he was to blame, she ran off toward the dormitory.

Jason asked Candy who the Spaniard had been. "She met him on the voyage. When we docked in Concepción."

"Ah, yes. Didn't recall his looks."

"I did." And she recalled more than that, which she now forced Jason to recall with her: that Kate had begged him to let her stay, but that he had refused to release her from her contract till her year was up, which to her must have seemed a lifetime.

"Only looking out for her interests," Jason insisted.

"Lucky their coinciding so well with yours," Candy said coldly, and before he could answer, she had left to follow Kate.

The rebuke stung, but he had no time to do more than acknowledge its justness before someone at his side was saying, in a tone so piteous he could not ignore it, "Knowed it was too good to last. Knowed it all along. Knowed I could never land a fine woman like her," and more of the same.

"Don't flog yourself," said Jason. "You're a good man."

"No shortage of good jacks."

"Didn't say a good jack, I said a good man. There's a difference. Kate knows it, too."

"Then why'd she change her mind all of a sudden? That ain't like her."

Why indeed? Jason asked himself.

When he asked Kate, having allowed her a suitable crying space before calling, and also having worked up an apology (which in the event went unsaid) for his meanness to her in Chile, she said only, "I was younger then."

"She's the youngest," Candy chimed in.

"Not by much."

"By half a world," said Kate. "I'd never been away from home. Never been romanced—not seriously. You can't imagine what it is to be swept off your feet like that."

"I've felt the slap of the broom on occasion."

"And did you resist?" Candy asked him.

"None too hard."

"I had no reason to," said Kate. "I loved Alvaro. I still love him."

"You barely know him. Are you sure—?"

She half-smiled. "There's no mistaking it."

"And Andrew?"

"Yes," she said slowly, "I love him, too."

"Which do you love better?"

She looked him in the eye. "Which do you love better—Joshua or Jeremy?"

Jason saw they were at a stalemate.

Molly had heard whispers about Alvaro among the brides, but every time one of them mentioned his name one of the others shushed her, especially if she had noticed Molly listening. That afternoon Molly asked Biddie the reason. "Well," said Biddie, "he is a Spaniard."

Molly silently corrected her: a Chilean was not a Spaniard. But aloud she said, "Does that make him a bad lot?"

"Not a bad lot, just—a lot. Although his family is very well-to-do. And as you saw, he's very handsome."

"Then why is everyone ashamed of him?"

"It's not ashamed exactly. It's—it's something one simply doesn't talk about" (as she certainly was not).

Molly stuck to her own view of it, which was this: The man had come for his beloved over wind-tossed seas, to bear her back across them to his native soil to be with him forever. She imagined a whole country full of men who looked like him, brown and proud and handsome; only in her imagination they also looked like someone else, and rather more so. "I'll bet he was her first love," she said rapturously. She had not yet had a first love herself, but most of the brides had; perhaps (the possibility had never before occurred to her) even Biddie. "Did you have one?" she asked. "Before Corky, I mean?"

It took Biddie a moment to recover from the surprise of hearing Corky mentioned in such a connection. Then she nodded. "Yes. I did." She said it with a sigh. Molly asked what had happened to him. Biddie sighed again. "Maddie took him away."

"You make her sound like a fatal disease."

"Well..." Before she could pursue the analogy to its end, there came the inevitable, inescapable summons: "Brid-get!" Now that it had re-entered her life, it was proving just as grating as she had remembered it. Molly bestowed a look of sympathy on her, for which she was grateful, as she dashed off to answer the call.

Molly's thoughts returned to Jericho. Surrounded by women at the wedding-to-have-been, he had had no time for her. But he had smiled at her once.

—and did again in her dream that night. She was in the forest, moving without walking, but not floating, for she could feel the wet earth sink under her feet and the sharp blades of grass jab at them, stinging but not penetrating. Ahead loomed the leafy entrance to the glade, which was no longer dark but yellowy bright. She did not want to go there, yet she was moving toward it; and with the motion she suddenly somehow did want to, wanted it very much. The music she had heard before, she heard again; it was this that was moving her. She passed through the portal, happily expectant—

And he was there. She had known he would be. The music was his—who else's could it have been?—but he was playing in an odd fashion, on all fours on the ground, with one knee bent in front of him and the other leg stretched out behind. The dulcimer lay under him in a line with his body, buried deep in the grass. He plucked at it without looking at it, gazing ahead of him and smiling. Then he turned his smile on her. His sweetly rounded lips pursed in what was almost a kiss—

And on the instant, before she knew it, it was a kiss. Her eyes were closed but she could see without them, she was still moving forward, her hair falling back from her back-tilted heads, back and down, down, and not only her hair but herself, falling, fast and faster— "Jericho!" she cried, calling for him to come or to go away, she did not know which—

And on the cry she woke safe in her bed. Had she cried aloud? She listened, breathless. The house was quiet. She had not, then; or no one had heard her. All was well. All well... She shut her eyes again. "Jericho..." she repeated softly.

"Jericho!" Jason boomed, and the forest (the real forest) echoed him. It was Monday, and the camp was in full swing, felling dozens of the wood giants, dismembering them, and hauling them away to be milled. Crashes, whacks, drones, creaks, shouts, and noises unspecifiable accompanied the running and climbing and sawing and pulling that proceeded all around and had had Jericho turning his head every which way each time he tried to knuckle down and get busy on the first task Jason had assigned him, which was to make a new camp sign on a set of boards nailed together crosswise to two posts. He had sketched out the letters in chalk to Jason's specifications, with the word "BOLT" four times as prominent as the rest.

That was all that had been done when Joshua showed it to Jason. "He was here." But the frame now sat untended, and the paint bucket next to it untouched.

"Jericho!" Jason called again, and again was answered only by echoes.

Since it was Monday, Molly was at school. She liked it well enough; at least liked the schoolmarm and the schoolhouse and her schoolbooks; but her desk now seemed small, and in winter the room seemed dim. Liked it well enough, and was liked well enough herself, but her only real friend was two years younger; most of the girls were older, and behaved as if they were older still. None was exactly her age, and as a consequence she kept much to herself, drawing, reading, or just sitting and thinking—and, if she had nothing to think about, just sitting and looking pretty (she hoped).

/all this day she thought about Jericho. Her mind kept drifting back to the first time she had seen him, to the look and the smile he had given her. None of them since had been so thrilling, for on that day he had discovered her for the first time, and she (though she knew this was vanity) had discovered something in herself. But enough, she was being foolish; those brides at the wedding, he had flirted with in a way he had not with her, for they were grown women, and he saw her as a child. Even when she grew up, she would never be as beautiful as they. He was an artist, and knew beauty when he saw it. Yet he had given her that look, and that smile; perhaps he liked her after all. No, it was impossible. But perhaps...

Loves me, loves me not. She had never understood the meaning of that game before. The answer was up to chance; it could as easily be one as the other. But only for the inquirer; the one who loved or loved not surely knew; she had only to ask. But a girl dared not ask. If she got the wrong answer, what a fool she would look—Little Miss Vainglory! She had to wait for the man to tell her. But what if he never did? What if he were longing to, but thought she didn't like him? She would have to show him she did. But if he didn't like her, there she was looking the fool again! The cycle of terrors was unending.

It was also eternal and universal, but if she had been told so she would not have believed. How could anyone else in the history of the world have ever felt it as deeply as she? And how could any man for whom a woman had suffered ever have been anything like him? At the end of all her travails she returned to the image of him impressed in her sketchbook, and in her head, the beautiful wild Indian about to—

"Hey, Molly!"

The voice startled her out of her reverie; not her first of the day. This one had come over her as she was walking home, gently swinging her lunch pail from one hand and cradling her books in the other. The encroacher was Brian, a boy from school, also on his way home and equipped similarly. He was what his elders would have called a nice-looking boy, but an uglier man who showed more sense would have appealed to her more. As he ran up she was blushing, but not over him, and for that reason returned his greeting in some annoyance.

"Can I walk with you?" he asked, not hiding his eagerness. Molly pointed out that he would have to, since there was only the one path. "I could walk over here," he suggested. On that side as on the other, the ground was pitted and hummocky. "Or on my head, like this." He threw aside his apparatus and advanced on his hands a few yards till he struck a hole and toppled over. "Ouch!"

"Are you all right?"

"Sure!" He jumped up. "I've fell on my head lots of times. See?" He threw himself violently to the ground and quickly got to his feet. "Want to see me do it again?"

"No!"

His eyes darted about. "I can stick my head in the hollow of a tree. Watch me!"

"Brian, don't!"

It was of no use. She turned away and walked on. Nor did she look back when she heard his voice calling after her, "Hey, I think I'm stuck! Molly?"

A little farther on she turned off into the wood—her wood—and followed her usual path to a hollow log—her log. She took her usual seat, chose a pencil from the case, opened her sketchbook, and began to draw. Normally she took her subject from among the woodlife, when she could find one that would stand or lie still long enough, but this afternoon she intended to devote to another study of Jericho.

He stole up on her so quietly she did not hear him. "So you're an artist," he said, almost in her ear. She gave a little scream. When she saw who it was she shut her book and fumbled to put the pencil away. She knew she was blushing again but did not care now; she only hoped he had not seen the picture. In fact he had not, for he had little interest in anyone's work other than his own, whatever he might profess. "So am I," he said, granting her another of the smiles he could tell she liked. "Jericho Bolt." He offered her his hand and, when she had accepted it, ran his fingers softly over hers. "You have the touch," he said. "I can tell."

She turned away shyly. He reached out, laid his fingers on her jaw, and drew it back toward him. She felt her heart hammering. He spied a leaf on her shoulder and brushed it off; his touch in that unexpected place made her start. Then he examined her face inch by inch. At long last he said, "I'd like to paint you. Might I, do you think?"

She was entranced, beyond doubt, but she was also highly intelligent (as more than one man was later to discover, sometimes to their regret). "Like the painting you showed Jason?" she asked.

Jericho smiled, and for once at least the smile was genuine. "Not exactly like. But you would be holding a flower." She reached into the grass beside her and plucked a small white blossom, of a type plentiful in the woods. She had never learned its name; perhaps it did not have one. Jericho quickly grabbed it from her, crumpled it in his hand, and tossed it down. The violence of it startled her. "Not that," he said. "It has to be the right flower." Noticing that she had pulled away a little, he smiled again, less sincerely than before. "But I'm spoiled," he said, "because I've seen you. And what flower can compare to that?"

Flattered, flustered, flushing, she searched for something, anything, to say. "There's rhododendrons."

"Hate rhododendrons."

She searched further. "Do you always paint women with flowers?"

"Before ever I had a girl, I had a garden. Girls and flowers are the only two admirable things in nature."

The speech sounded too ready-made, as if it were one he was used to trotting out for show. "Not all girls are admirable," said Molly; she knew that much.

"Nor are flowers. But when they are—ah!—they belong together. You will sit for me, won't you? Say you will or I'll be devastated." Molly felt she should not, but she desperately wanted to. She did not know why in either case; perhaps the root of each feeling lay in the other. Before she could make up her mind, he spoke again, as if she had said yes already. "Of course I'll have to speak to your sister first—Candy, is it?—and secure her approval. I want to be certain all the proprieties are observed."

She stared at him in disbelief: the emptiness of the sentiment was just too obvious. But to Jericho her expression was meaningless. He fetched out his smile again.

Lottie was of Molly's mind when she heard about his proposition. "...but he promised the proprieties would be observed," Candy concluded.

"And you said yes."

"I couldn't very well say no. Why, should I have?"

Since she had entered the saloon she had seen only Lottie's back as one job after another had kept her from meeting Candy's eyes. Now she gave a broad shrug. "If a reformed floozie like me's no fit company for your sister—"

"Lottie, please..."

Lottie stopped, collected herself, and made sure her brain was centered before turning to address the supplicant face to face. "You were right—hurt feelings aside. And neither is he, if you want the floozie's opinion."

"You mean because he paints women in their unmentionables? But he made sure I understood—"

"Made sure of you. That's the part of it I don't like."

"Am I being unusually stupid today? Because I'm not understanding you at all."

"It wouldn't disturb me a bit if ladies' unmentionables were on his mind. It's no less than I'd expect from a long-haired, blue-eyed artist."

"His eyes are grey." She was immediately sorry to have disclosed that piece of knowledge.

"Grey, blue, lavender, what-have-you. I don't believe it for a second. Even less do I believe he gives a good spit for the proprieties. He's not just romancing Molly, he's romancing you."

"But he's never—"

"Not that kind of romancing. He's not out to grab a kiss—though I wouldn't put it past him if he saw some advantage in it. He's collecting admirers. I've seen the type before. But there's only one he'll ever be true to."

"I am stupid today. Who—?"

"His biggest admirer. Himself."

"You think I should—?"

"Forbid her to see him? Go ahead, if you want her to sneak out and do it every chance she gets."

"Then what should I do?"

"Same thing you did when she had the measles. Wait it out till she recovers."

"If she recovers."

"She will. Men like Jericho are like lights in the sky on the fourth of July. They flare up for a little while in a girl's fancy, then fade away. She'll recover. But I can't promise it won't hurt." The likelihood that it made Candy so unhappy for her sister, she failed to note the happier fact that Lottie and she were now speaking to each other again.

The subject of their analysis meanwhile had found himself a makeshift studio for painting; his own work, that is, not what Jason had given him. That morning he had slipped away again to make the arrangements. The location was Ben's backroom, which Jericho had leased in exchange for a promise to do a portrait of the proprietor and his family for hanging over their mantel. Ben had dug out an easel from somewhere; Jericho had brought his pigments with him, and was fashioning a couple of canvases out of the tenting Ben kept on hand and pieces of wood from the scrap pile at Stempel's. The wood, he cut and nailed together into frames and stretched the fabric over them, working around from corner to corner.

The task took him much of the afternoon, and he was still at it (and still playing hooky from camp) when Molly paid him a visit, having spied him unexpectedly when she stopped at the store for a penny candy, and of course having asked Mr. Perkins's permission first. In her overeagerness to please she pelted the artist with questions: How long was he going to use the backroom? Did he have to pay for it? Had he started any paintings yet? When would he start painting her? She was watching him from so near that as he was tightening the canvas he jerked his elbow back and nearly struck her in the face. He quickly inspected the fabric. "Girl, must you be underfoot the whole time? I might have torn it!" The danger of injury to her, he did not mention.

He scarcely heard her quavering answer: "Sorry, I didn't realize I was bothering you. I'll leave." She stood a few seconds as if expecting him to stop her, but he took no notice. If she had she left by the door at the rear, which led to the lane that ran between the backs of the shops and the little hill behind, she would have seen a nautical man of her acquaintance peering in at the window, as best he could manage through its grimy coat. He had determined to watch out for her whenever that fella was about, and watch he did.

Molly came home in despair, but not in tears, for they would have betokened disappointed hopes and she knew she was beyond hope. Had Jericho had any feeling for her, he could not have used her so cruelly. He had made her feel more than ever like a child, though she did not put it to herself quite that way. She searched for Kate to help her bear her burden.

Kate was out. In her absence the most sympathetic face in the house hung on Biddie, whom Molly found busy in the parlor. She had never seen a woman switch a feather duster with such abandon. On asking where her relatives were, she learned they were out to tea. "Couldn't join them myself," Biddie said in jubilation. "Had to dust. Lucky me!" She allowed herself a high chortle. "Bet I know where you've been," she said coyly. "Off posing for that Jericho man."

Molly shook her head. "He hasn't found a flower he likes yet." She doubted now he ever would.

"Has he seen the rhododendrons?"

"Oh, Biddie!" Molly flung herself onto the sofa. "I wish Candy were around."

"She is."

"She is, but she isn't." That had sounded like a criticism. Molly did not want Biddie to think her impertinent. "I'm sorry. I know you're her friend, but—"

Biddie understood. "Your sister has a lot of responsibilities. With all the brides to tend to—"

"She was the same before the brides. Don't you remember? She's busy even when she hasn't anything to be busy at. It's the way she is. I would talk to Kate, only she's not here. Probably at the harbor looking out at his ship."

That had been an easy guess: Kate had seldom been anywhere else since Alvaro's arrival. Molly had gone down on Monday to have a look herself. His two-masted schooner yacht looked too delicate to have sailed all the way from Chile, but she liked to think it had, and at the end of three weeks would whisk Kate back with it, slicing into the undulant waters and churning them into foam. He would be standing at the prow, staring out to the horizon, his burnished cheeks feeling the wind's harsh caress, like a buccaneer captain with his lady at his side. The vision momentarily returned to her, only the couple in it was Jericho and herself. The distance between this and her real situation doubled the weight of her grief. "Biddie," she moaned, "please be my big sister just this once and tell me what I'm to do!" The last word elongated itself into two syllables.

"Your sister?" Biddie's face lit up. "Oh, my! How flattering that you'd have enough—of course I could never replace—but if you feel that I—your big sister—goodness!" Reaching the request at last, she repeated it slowly. "Tell you...what you're...to do." Her "do" was also longer than the average. "About Jericho, of course."

Molly's eyes went wide. "How did you know?"

"A sister knows," Biddie said owlishly. "What...should...you...do?" She repeated it once or twice more. She sounded as if her deliberations might need aiding, and Molly asked her straight out what she would do in her place. "Me? Me?" The idea made Biddie tingle. Her and Jericho; though of course it would not be Jericho. "Goodness!" She noticed Molly staring sideways at the floor, as if impatient of waiting. "Calm down, now!" she commanded herself. "What I would do...what I would do..." There erupted a giggle. Molly made to get up. Biddie hurried to conclude. "...is put him out of my mind. There!"

"But I can't!" Molly could have wailed, rent her clothes, pulled out her hair, but none of it would have availed her, and anyhow those were things silly girls did, not she. "You don't know what it's like to feel this way about someone."

"No," Biddie agreed. Her eye landed on a framed portrait of Jeremy Bolt atop an end table. She gave a little sigh. "No, I suppose I don't."

"Brid-get!" came a dreaded voice, and then, after Biddie had not answered immediately, another: "Darling, don't you hear Mama calling?" Molly saw Biddie go hollow, like a sack emptied of flour. She gave her a pat of encouragement, which became a hug. "I'm lucky in my sisters," she said. "Both of them."

The two had started off in their separate directions when she remembered why she had needed advice so urgently. A dance was coming up on Friday, and Jericho was sure to be there. "What do I do?"

"Dance!" Biddie said on her way out.

"But what if he doesn't ask me?"

The answer floated back from the hall: "Then dance with whoever does!"

The dances were held in the cookhouse of Stempel's mill, as were the town meetings, exhibitions (in principle; so far there had been none), and of course the mill hands' meals when the hall was not otherwise in use. It had been built a year before for a conference of mill owners Stempel had arranged. Having learned most of their mills had separate cookhouses, he had designed one bigger than any to show them he and Seattle (which were one in his mind when it was running in this vein) could best anybody else in the lumber game. Why, didn't they have the tallest trees, the fastest millers, the strongest loggers, the prettiest women (since the brides), and the biggest cookhouse in the Northwest, or for that matter the world?

This boastful mood seized him two or three times a year and always left him wondering how much it owed to Jason's influence, though he did not impart the suspicion to anyone else, least of all Jason.

On Friday afternoon the cookhouse was readied for the dance. Stempel's men stacked the long tables on one side, the brides' dance committee fluttered in and pinned up paper accordions cut into floral shapes (the excuse for the dance this time was to welcome the coming of spring), and a little later the victualing committee enlisted the men to cart over pans and plates of home-cooked goodies. (By the way, two of the brides were beginning to compile the group's recipes, which Seattle's first press would later publish, but that is another story.)

Soon after the workday ended, everyone flocked to the cookhouse: a stream of loggers from the mountain, a stream of girls from the dormitory, a stream of mill hands from the bunkhouse after they had changed out of their workclothes into slightly cleaner attire, and people from cabins and farms around, old as well as young, because many of those still loved to dance and the ones who could dance no longer still loved to watch the others. Everyone in Seattle was there, almost.

Two of the brides had stayed behind, each independently of the other. Both repaired to the kitchen at the same time to scrape together some supper from the scraps the victualing committee had left them (by the consensus of the dance guests, the committee had outdone themselves this month), and they met unexpectedly, provoking a mutual shriek, followed by laughter as each recognized the other. Almost in the same breath, both asked, "But why aren't you at the dance?"

"Andrew asked me," said Kate, "but I couldn't go because of Alvaro. And if Alvaro had asked I couldn't because of Andrew."

"Because my sister's there," said Biddie, "and my mother went to bed early. So I'm free, for a little while."

"Wish I were." Kate smiled sadly. "Two good men, and I have to choose between them."

Biddie thought about this. "You wouldn't care to pass the other one along, would you?"

A whoop of laughter broke from Kate unexpectedly. Biddie was good at pulling people out of their doldrums. "Let's eat," she said, and they attacked the larder with a will.

The dance was sailing along in a fine breeze. The floorboards might have been greased with neatsfoot, so fleetly did the dancers slide over them. Fiddle, concertina, harmonica, tinwhistle, and, luck of all lucks, a banjo spun out jigs, reels, waltzes, and two-steps in such unity, and each following so fast on the previous one, it seemed as if they were not making the music but only plunging into a stream of melody that made up the very air of the room.

Jericho was there, all right, and the center of attention as always. Before each dance the girls would flock to him and one or another of them would dart or wriggle in ahead of the rest to secure him for her partner, and next time it would be someone else, and the losers would select from the leavings, of whom there were plenty. "The gals all want to dance with him," complained Sam, one of the loggers.

"Can you blame 'em? I would, too," Corky said. "If I was a gal, that is," he added quickly.

"Wish I could hate him," said Sam. "Then I could fight him."

"He's the best at that, too. Didn't you hear about that donnybrook he had with the brothers?"

The two watched him enviously but without rancor.

Molly was sitting at the side, a true wallflower, and trying her best not to look at him. She had not spoken to him since the day he had brusquely dismissed her, and she was afraid he might still be mad. Well, she didn't care if he was (she told herself); he meant nothing to her. But what if he asked her to dance? Her legs might collapse under her. But it didn't matter, he wouldn't ask, he would ignore her. And how could she bear that? But (she reminded herself again) she didn't care. She kept herself from looking at him, lest her look reveal too much or too little of what she was feeling.

Eventually she could not help looking. She did her best to appear aloof, as if the turn of the head were merely fortuitous; really, she might have been looking at anybody. She found him looking back at her. She took in a rush of air, without intending to; smiled briefly, also without intending to; and looked away. But she had seen him smile back. There was no mistake.

The dance ended, and he started toward her; no mistake there, either; but his admirers interposed themselves between. As the music started again, one of them attached herself to him, and over her head he made a face of apology at Molly. She almost missed it for having to peer around someone who had stepped right in front of her, blocking the view—the fool! She became aware that he was speaking.

"I asked if you'd care to dance," he said. Looking up, she was surprised to see it was Brian. She had never before seen him with his hair plastered down. "Dance?" he repeated. After a deep sigh that made him feel uncertain of his standing with her, she accompanied him out onto the floor. She had the air of one enduring an unpleasant chore, or of one obeying advice she felt duty-bound to honor without seeing how it could possibly profit her. Also, she feared when Jericho saw her dancing with another man (if you could call Brian that) he might assume she was doing so by choice and would not rather be dancing with him.

Her secret thoughts about him, Jericho apprehended at a glance. He had seen them before many times and they always amused him, both in themselves and as playthings for his self-regard. He loved to tickle their enthusiasm for him, to tantalize and lightly torment it; he enjoyed the game and so did they; enjoyment all round.

He also enjoyed dancing. He liked to forget for a little while that he was earth-bound, and to feel a king with a roomful of subjects eager for his favor. Partner after partner he would lead in delightful dalliance through the prefigured courses, earning their admiration by the winged grace of his skipping step. He was made for dancing.

Molly loved it, too, but for different reasons. The dances were the brightest and happiest of times, when hard-working people forgot about work and neighbors forgot about their differences to throw themselves unreservedly into having fun, and she herself was allowed to spend freely of her energy, which she had to suppress at other times, and give it rein to move her as the music bade.

The dances were the only occasions when she did not mind the local boys. Their energy served them well, too, and many made robust partners. But she would as soon have danced with the other girls, or the younger men, or Miss Essie's husband the Reverend, who soon after their marriage had begun to attend the dances for the first time and surprised everyone (except his wife) by throwing off the gravity of his office to break out in the nimble thrusts and parries of heel and toe that had plied many a floor in his youth. He was young again at these dos; so were Miss Essie and those others who were not young already. And those who were leapt and pranced and whirled fearlessly, often straying from their places in the sets as the good angel of their youth inspired them.

Always the evening seemed to last forever—yet not a second too long—and left Molly wondering how she would be able to endure the weeks of waiting till the next one. Yet endure she did, from dance to dance, and so the current of Seattle's social life had carried her to this. And it was different. How she knew, she could not have said, but the awareness charged her with something like fear. But if it were not fear, what was it?

All day Jericho had dominated her thoughts, sometimes in face and form, sometimes as an insensible but impending presence. But he was not the only source of what she was feeling. Everything seemed changed. In the hour before the dance as she had stood dressing in front of her mirror, the very air seemed to stifle her. It was still (because most of the other girls had left already) but also warm and close. (And if it was like that there, how much more so it would be at the dance!) As she buttoned up her dress, the gayest and frilliest of her frocks, she realized it looked too small somehow, though she had not grown since she had last worn it. She felt a sudden urge to change, but the only two that were nicer would not do; one, her Sunday dress, was too sober and the other was too tight to dance in.

Unlike most girls, who would have spent an hour in fruitless indecision, she was practical enough to see that the one she had put on was the only possible choice and resigned herself to it. She did try to pull it up at the shoulders, down at the waist, out at the hips—something—but the dress was put together so sturdily (she had sewn it herself) it resisted all efforts at improvement. So she turned to her hair. It was already brushed, and over-brushed; perhaps if she pinned it up? Or back? Or...? No matter how she repositioned it, it flopped down about her fingers in the same lazy way. She gave up with a sigh and studied her reflection. Had she looked like this yesterday? Well, she would not let it bother her; she would have a good time. She always did, at the dances.

But tonight was different, for she was different, the hall was even warmer than she had expected, and Jericho was there. But she was not dancing with him, she was dancing with silly Brian. "Reel!" the fiddler had called out, but Molly, in her distraction, had not heard. Brian had; that was what had moved him to hurry over and beg the dance of her. He was best at reels. In fact he was a fair dancer all round, and Molly had enjoyed partnering him when they were kids (last year, that is) but she no longer remembered it. Brian did not presume to stand in her good graces on the strength of those past times; indeed he hardly remembered them himself, for Molly looked a different girl now, someone he had never known but seemed somehow to want to.

The dancers were congregating in sets of ten, with the men and the women aligned in facing columns. Those who preferred a particular place, top, bottom, or middle, rushed to claim it, and within a minute Brian and Molly found the sets full all around them. Miss Essie waved them over to the west side of the room; her set was short a couple at the tail. They ran to fill the empty places. Molly felt happier now. She was about to dance, and Miss Essie was one of her favorite people. She turned to thank her and to look up the line beyond her. The other women were three brides she was not very close to.

She looked across to the men. At the head (where he always stood if he could ) was Sam, who was small and agile, and next to him Frenchy, who was big and clumpish. She had danced with Frenchy before, and shuddered for her poor feet when his turn came to reel all the women. Next to him, grinning down at her, was—oh, no! She had not known he was part of this set! If she had...well, what would she have done differently? His turn would come, too; she blushed to think of it. At her blush his grin grew wider. She tried to smile in return, but was she smiling? His own smile changed to one of compassion and he nodded a little, as if to say: I understand, I'll protect you. Her fear began to fade.

Now the music had started up and she was forced to look across to her partner, who had been looking in the same direction as she to find out what was causing the changes in her countenance. He faced her and each linked hands with the dancers on both sides as the fiddler's bow dove into the tune. Jericho smiled to hear it, for it was a favorite of his, whose lyrics (by another roguish Scot) sang inside his head as it played: "My love she's but a lassie yet..."—how apt to the occasion! Two lines he sang aloud when their time came round: "Gae seek for pleasure where ye will, But here I never missed it yet." It had long been a motto of his.

The dance began. Hands linked, the lines of men and women tripped lightly toward each other and back. Then they let go of one another's hands and tripped out again, this time to meet their partners. Molly lifted her right hand, Brian his, the hands joined, and he led her in a circle one way and, after switching to left hands, back the other. She glanced over at Jericho. He had his eye on her, and it was an admiring eye. She became aware of her own grace, and with the awareness her step faltered, but she fast regained the beat and danced on.

She stepped out from Brian and pranced backwards around him, as he did with her. Then they and the other couples returned to their lines as Sam and his partner Olive locked elbows, turned about, and then parted, he to honor each of the women identically, she each of the men. Molly had always enjoyed being reeled by Sam, for she had always been able to match his vigor with her own, but tonight he seemed a shade too violent and left her feeling a little bruised. She rubbed her arm and looked over to find Jericho watching her again with an expression of concern, as if he wished he could reach out and heal her hurt. And she did not doubt he could.

When Sam and Olive had finished their tour they paraded back, reeled each other again, and then made their separate ways down the lines as before, but turning the opposite way, which left Molly dizzier than before. The feeling unnerved her; it was not like her to get dizzy. On ending this second tour the couple sashayed back up the middle, with a comically grave nod to each as they passed. Molly realized the lines looked just like those that formed outside the church after a wedding, and she felt a pang of regret that Kate had been deprived of that. At the head of the set the first couple parted and returned to the tail—Sam behind the men's backs, Olive behind the women's—and there joined hands with arms upraised, forming an arch.

Along with this came the part that to Molly always seemed magical somehow. One by one the other couples—Frenchy and Bella, Jericho and Elspeth, the Reverend and Miss Essie, Brian and herself—followed the first down the backs of the columns, which dissolved even with the act, and around and under the arch (the taller ones having to stoop) to re-form them, this time with Frenchy and Bella at the head. Thus the sequence began again, and "She's but a Lassie" did likewise.

By now everyone was in high spirits, pulses were racing, and Jericho's looks to Molly were nearly continuous. Whenever she looked at him he was looking back. She could not help believing she was the object of his special interest, and they began a silent dialogue. When her partner lost his place, Jericho laughed and she laughed with him. When his partner clutched his hand too tight, or turned him rather than wait for him to turn her, they laughed again. When he had to evade a kiss from Bella, as from Olive before her (both had joined the set just because he was in it), she expressed silent disapproval. When she succeeded in keeping her toes out from under Frenchy's, he expressed admiration. And with every such expression, the two of them grew closer.

Then came his turn at the head of the line. Molly no longer felt shy, but her heart still beat fast. She was hardly aware of Brian's presence any more, and he noticed it—as how could he not with her eyes returning every few seconds to that blond man he did not recognize? Elspeth noticed, too—as how could she not? The two were smiling at each other openly, expectantly; within seconds he would come down and turn her, and he was as eager for it as she was, or so his look told her. First he reeled Elspeth, whose face was set in a scowl. Then Miss Essie. And then...

He did not reel her; he took her in his arms with one hand at her back, the other squeezing hers as she closed his on his shoulder, and he swung her—swung her!—and so swiftly, he was able to do it a second time. He sang the next line of the song in her ear, bringing his lips so close they almost grazed it: "The minister kissed the fiddler's wife." Then he danced on to the next woman, leaving Molly in a state she had not language or experience to describe. The room glowed so, they must have brought more lights in. The fiddle had never sounded so keenly in tune, or the whistle so high and sweet. She was his favorite; she knew it now beyond doubt. If she could have seen his face just then, and been able to read it... But it was hidden to her in both respects.

It was, however, observed by others. Candy was manning (or womaning) the punchbowl near the doors. Clancey was standing by it, both to avail himself of the punch and to keep an eye on one certain fella. He carried a flask in his coat to add spice to the beverage on offer, which was always mixed to a recipe that was strictly temperance, but he refrained from the temptation till his duty was discharged. Jeremy was standing at the doors waiting impatiently for Candy's relief to arrive. He had watched Jericho during the first dance and felt a foolish pride in him. He wanted to jump onto one of the tables and yell out, Hey, everyone, see that fella who dances so fine? That's my brother!

Jason and Joshua had hardly been aware of him. They had been dancing at the other side of the room, and when a Bolt got to dancing, the world might go hang for all he cared. Joshua had chosen Lottie for a partner (he always did; she was his favorite), and the women's lines faced east, so that she could not see Jericho's proximity to Molly. If she had she might have kept a protective eye out herself.

Clancey would not have minded spinning Lottie about the floor for a jig or a polka, but that would have to wait for some other night. The food tables commanded a clear view of Jericho. When Molly ran over to join his set Clancey thought nothing of it: dancing was harmless enough. When the band struck up the Burns he brightened visibly, and his pleasure increased as he watched Molly, brimful of youth and grace (when she was not worrying about being graceful) spring forward and back, around and back around, as the music bore her. She was one for the dancing, to be sure. He smiled to see it.

But as he continued to watch, his smile subsided and his face puckered up in a quizzical look, which settled into a frown. Candy, standing idly and tapping to the music, happened to glance at him. The thundercloud she perceived in his features led her to follow his line of sight to its object. After a moment her brow clouded, too. Jeremy, in desultory conversation with Corky (who in Biddie's absence lacked the will to join in the dancing), happened to glance at Candy, from her to Clancey, and from him to what was passing on the floor. This, he viewed at first with incomprehension, then with concern, and at last, as his understanding of it became complete, with mounting anger.

What the three of them saw, colored for each by his own experience, was a young rooster strutting vainly, bent on captivating an easily captivated girl by the silliest of means (silly, that is, if you were not the one they were being worked on)—a look, a wink, a smile, a glancing touch—and making her the most admired, and rightly admired, girl in the world. They saw his campaign as it proceeded step by step, and saw its success—and also saw what she did not, his preening over its success. Candy was somber, Clancey contemptuous, Jeremy—was Jeremy. No sooner had the dance ended but he galloped out to Jericho, turned him roughly by the shoulder, and marched him outside. Jericho complied, out of curiosity mostly. After allowing himself to be taken a decent distance from the festivities, he wheeled about to ask what the matter was.

The huge shadow of the mill, quiet at this time of night, loomed over them. The voices from the cookhouse sounded as if they were far out on the Sound. Neither had seen whether anyone had noticed their leaving; at any rate, no one had followed them. Jeremy would not have cared if they had. "Leave her be," he said, in a tone seldom heard on his lips. "You hear? You just leave her be."

"Who?" asked Jericho, genuinely puzzled. Then he made the obvious connections. "Molly? You're joking!"

"I saw what you were doin' to her. She's too young for you to be leadin' her on like that."

"Not so young," Jericho said offhandedly. "Some places, girls get married at her age."

"Not here, and not her. And when she is, it won't be to you."

"Step down from your preacher's box, mister. I ain't got my eye on your—say, what is she to you, anyhow?"

"You were makin' sure she had hers on you. I saw you!"

Jericho bridled. "Don't meddle in what don't concern you." He started back toward the hall. Jeremy grabbed him by the shoulder. Jericho shook him off as a dog shakes off water. "I ain't gonna have to fight you again, am I? I'm tired from dancin'."

Jeremy did not want another fight, but he could not let Jericho go on as he was. "You know she likes you, and you're fannin' the fire. It's pure conceit." Jericho smiled at that, as he did at everything. This time he meant to exhibit a careless vanity, but tired as he was, he did not entirely succeed, and something else showed through, which Jeremy perceived. "Or maybe..." He thought it out slowly. "Maybe it's the opposite." His brother looked slightly uneasy. "You need somebody to admire you. But it's as much use as you have for them, so that isn't enough and you have to keep looking. Looking for somebody whose good opinion means something to you. You're not proud of yourself at all." He shook his head. "I'm not mad at you now. I just feel sorry for you."

Jericho had listened without answering because no answer had come to him and consequently he wanted it to appear to Jeremy that his accusation did not deserve an answer. "You feel sorry for me?" was the best he could muster. But that was not enough. Suddenly he found himself shouting. "Look to yourself!" He could not stop there, either. "I ain't the one who sold out my brothers for five hundred dollars!"

Jeremy was shocked. "That was a secret between us! You promised!"

"No more," said a deep voice behind them. So someone had followed them, after all. They knew whose voice it was, and they turned to face him. "What five hundred dollars?" Jason asked. His voice sounded easy, but Jeremy recognized the low throb that ran through it, like the rumble before an earthquake. He did not know how to answer. Jason asked again, more sharply.

"Best 'fess up, Jeremy," Jericho said. Jeremy stared at him, not quite understanding. "All right," he declared as if reluctantly, "if you won't tell him, I will." He turned to Jason with an air of forthrightness. "That's the money he got paid when you all went off to fetch the brides. The whole time, he was really working for Stempel."

Jason stood as if thunderstruck. "Stempel!" He turned to Jeremy. "Is that true?" Jeremy's face carried the answer. Without waiting further, Jason trudged back to the hall. Jeremy stared in disbelief at Jericho, who wore the look of one saddled with a regrettable but necessary task, tinged with a frown of disapproval. Jericho disapproved of him? Flabbergasted, outraged, Jeremy was incapable of clear speech, and foresaw that it would not matter what he said, anyway, now the trap had been sprung. Had it been sprung deliberately? He did not know, and never would. Probably Jericho did not know.

The music inside had started again. Jason called to Joshua from the doors. He called more than once. When Joshua appeared he was breathing fast. "I'm surprised at you, brother. Don't you know it's bad manners to break in on a dance?"

"It's Bolt brothers' business."

His tone and his look sobered Joshua at once. "So late?"

"Later than you or I had any notion." He returned to the others and ordered them to follow him. One of them hesitated. Jason looked back. "You, too, Jericho. You're family now." Joshua did not like that. He looked to Jeremy, but Jeremy would not meet his eye. Jason led them down to the engine room on the pier, where he had held private conferences before.

By now a few others, having seen that something was up, had left the hall to find out what it was; these included Candy and the captain. Stempel, working late, had been leaving his office just as the argument broke out and had stood in the shadow of the mill, listening. He continued listening now. The voices in the engine room, when they rose loud enough to be heard, could not be understood. After a few minutes the door flew open and Jeremy stormed out. The next words, Jason's, were plain enough to hear. "Go on!" he bellowed. "Collect what's yours and clear out!" He emerged onto the pier and cupped his hands around his mouth as he shouted a last warning. "And don't set foot on our mountain again!" A shiver ran down Candy's back.

Joshua emerged after him. Straining, the listeners could just make out their words. "Mighty harsh," Joshua said.

"He's made his own bed." Jason's voice was hard, unbending.

"Can we manage without him? There's always been three Bolt brothers."

"There's still three." Jason looked toward the door, through which the newest of their brothers stepped out, as onto a stage. Jason clasped him on the shoulder. "Jericho," he said, with all the ceremony he could summon, "welcome to the business." Jericho's face showed his gratification, which was considerable. He looked to Joshua for a confirming smile, which Joshua could not quite muster. To please Jason he lay a tentative hand on Jericho's free shoulder, but as Jericho reached up to seize it he pulled it away.

The two men stared at each other, sizing each other up. "The business," Joshua repeated.

Late that night a knock came at Candy's door, which is to say, the door of the dormitory. She and the others were in bed, but many were long in getting to sleep after the evening's excitement, and one of these was Bella, who volunteered to answer it. She quickly returned to say the caller was asking for Candy. "It's Jeremy," she added.

He was carrying a pack which Candy supposed contained all his belongings, or all that he wished to take. Without preliminaries, and before she could ask how things stood between him and Jason, he asked, "Can I sleep here tonight?"

A man pass the night in the dormitory? And not just any man; hers. How could he suggest such a thing? "Not inside!" he said, having read her face. "Here on the porch."

"I...suppose..."

"Good." He flung his pack onto the porch swing, which creaked under the weight, and flung himself after it. He looked spent, almost old.

She stood staring at him, one foot still inside. In her robe, she did not like to come farther. It would set a bad example for Molly and the others. But she did not like to leave him in this state, whatever it was. "What happened between you and Jason? We heard you shouting."

Jeremy loosened his bootlaces. God, how they bound. "Doesn't matter." He sat up and arranged his pack for a pillow.

"But he ordered you off the mountain. He must have had a reason." Jeremy shook his head. "You won't tell me?"

He turned on her fiercely. "Blame it, Candy, I said it doesn't matter! Isn't that good enough for you?"

"Of course," she said meekly.

"Then can I stay here tonight?"

"Of course."

"Thank you." But he did not sound thankful. He swung his legs up onto the seat and lay back, hands locked behind his head. He did not look at her again.

After watching him for a little she went inside. A few minutes later she came out with her cloak around her and left without speaking. He felt a misgiving about her walking out so late but put it from him with an effort. Let her please herself, he thought, or tried to; I don't care.

She paused at the totem pole to deliberate. There she met someone she would not have expected, had she been expecting anyone, but just the one she would have hoped for, had she been hoping. He was returning from the dance and a stint at Lottie's following. "Late for an evening constitutional," he said, with a hint of insinuation. He unsheathed the grin that seemed to have charmed Molly; by Heaven, it would not charm her.

She asked the same question of him she had of Jeremy. "So he didn't want to tell you? Well, I can't blame him. You'd better ask Jason." He headed on, rounding the pole.

"You can spare me the walk," she said.

He turned and met her eyes—large, liquid, too-probing. He preferred to assess others in his own terms (form, color, line) rather than be assessed. And he gathered she regarded his morals, such as she knew of them, rather severely. "Well, all right. But you won't like it."

When she returned Jeremy was still awake. He was now ready to explain, when she asked (or perhaps she had figured out herself), that he had only been protecting her sister, who some day soon would be his daughter. He was conscious of their debt to him and confident Candy would soon recognize it, if she had not already, so that she could stand with him and they could decide what to do next: demand his share of the mountain as a home for them and the kids, or show Jason they could make a go of it without him. It was time they were married, anyway. His expectancy thus buoyed, he was unprepared for what she actually had to say.

She stood between the door and the swing, not looking at him. Her voice sounded like an echo, as if it issued from a deep recess within her. "You'll have to sleep somewhere else," she said. "I can't have you here."

Jeremy started to object but changed his mind. He got up slowly. "That simple?"

"Unless you have an explanation for what Jericho told me." She waited in hope, but resisted the hope lest it weaken her. "Have you?"

So she was on Jericho's side, too. "Do I need one?"

"A man has two families—the one he was raised in and the one he raises himself. If he'll turn against one he'll turn against both. I can't trust a man like that around my child—" She had not realized she thought of them in that way. "Not around Molly and Christopher."

Molly, whose welfare he had been guarding! And she saw him as a menace to it. The split with Jason had been one thing: he had sided with Jason's enemy of the time, as it must appear to Jason. But he had looked out for Molly as if she were his own, and he had thought Candy knew it. Evidently she did not; she did not know him. His jaw hardened and his eyes changed, as though a lamp within them had blown out. He hefted the pack onto his back.

Candy felt he deserved some kindness. "You can get a room at Lottie's." She knew he was as much aware of it as she. "Or the hotel. It's just opened."

This made it worse, made it sound as if he were a passing stranger who would be leaving in the morning. Will he? she thought, and on the thought turned to him, but he was nearly at the gate already. Was this the end of their "understanding," then? But of course it was; she had told him so. Till that moment she had not looked ahead to a future apart from him; she had only done what she knew she must. And what else could she have done? In the weeks to come she would ask herself that many times.

The night felt colder to Jeremy than any he could remember. Only Lottie's lights still burned with the promise of a warm haven. As he made for it a voice hailed him, and he turned to a figure that had just climbed up from the wharf. Even at that distance there was enough of a moon to show up the satyr-like features, the angular body, the gait whose studied ease was undercut by a rigidity no amount of practice could eradicate. Jeremy wondered at his being out so late, as most of the others who knew him would have. It would have surprised them to learn he habitually visited the wharf late at night to walk off some care that kept sleep at arm's length, as one was doing tonight.

As he and Jeremy fell into step, his first words were "It appears I've caused you some difficulties."

Jeremy shook his head. "That's all in the past."

"Where it should have stayed." He offered to try to put things straight with Jason.

"He'd only say it proves him right."

"I guess he would at that." He stopped as an idea struck him. "Let's prove him right, then." Jeremy did not understand. "Come to work for me. I can always use a good man at the mill." He grinned. "Even a Bolt."

Jeremy saw this would probably be the only offer he would get in Seattle, and he knew Aaron well enough to have no doubt of being paid what he merited (though not a penny more). It was a stroke of luck—if luck were the right word. But he could not greet it with the joy Aaron might reasonably feel warranted. "Everyone will say I've turned my back on my family."

Aaron respected Jeremy's scruples even when he thought them misapplied. "Sounds to me like it was the other way round. And why do you care what they say?" The question defined the difference between the two men. By then they had come up alongside Lottie's, and before finding Jeremy a berth in the bunkhouse Aaron proposed to buy him a drink. "You could use one," he observed.

"That's what got me into this," Jeremy muttered. But he let himself be led.

Aaron stepped up to the bar and ordered two whiskeys. "One for me and one for my new foreman," he announced to the room. The other occupants, the late-night diehards, glanced up briefly. These consisted of an unsmiling old man in the corner and a quartet bent on finishing their last round of poker, which was being conducted in defiance of the town's prohibition on gambling. Stempel ignored it. Jeremy, unsure whether he had heard him correctly, tried to ask, but all he could produce, as often in moments of dismay, was a "Wh" sound stammered repeatedly.

Lottie was not pouring the drinks, or looking at them. To be exact, Jeremy realized, she was not looking at him; Jericho must have preceded them. "I told you," he said quietly.

Aaron saw how it was, but unlike Jeremy was not about to let it rest. He assumed the smile he reserved for negotiating business terms. "All right," he informed Lottie, "if you won't serve a man of mine you won't serve any. I'll set in a private saloon behind the mill and serve the drinks at cost. See how long you can compete with that."

Glaring, she moved to fill his order. Her coldness seemed to extend to her other customers, though in actuality the poker players were only studying their cards and the old man in the corner was always cold and speechless. "Don't bother," said Jeremy. It was not clear if he were speaking to her or Aaron. "The man who can't find a welcome at Lottie's..." He took up the pack he had set down. "That man has no place in Seattle. Especially if he's got no...ties to keep him here. Looks like it's time I moved on." He had never imagined he would hear himself say so. Aaron moved to accompany him to the door. Jeremy waved him back. "Stay and have that drink. It's still your town." With those words, he departed.

Lottie glanced after him. A shadow of bad conscience passed over her face, but she shook it off. "Still want your whiskey?" She had the bottle poised in her hand.

Aaron nodded absently. As he watched her pour he looked unaccustomedly pensive. "I may still put in that saloon," he said. He downed what was in the glass, tossed down a coin, and left for home.

Jeremy, carrying a few clothes and a little money (he had never needed much of either), climbed away from the valley. He paused once to look back. Except for the mountain, white and green, that stood guardian over it, he saw nothing that hinted at what the place had meant to him till a couple of hours ago; but now no longer. How quickly it had all changed! How quickly those he loved had turned against him! He dismissed them from his mind as they had dismissed him and he walked on.

His absence freed Jericho to continue his attentions to Molly, Candy having resolved in accordance with Lottie's advice that to prohibit his company would be to make it all the more desirable. But the freedom he gained thus met a brake in Clancey. Everywhere Jericho was (that Molly was), there Clancey was also. After Jericho invited her, or she invited herself, to stroll the woods in quest of a flower for her portrait, Clancey followed. And wherever Jericho looked, Clancey's face presented itself, sometimes so close at hand it gave him a start. At one point he asked helpfully whether Jericho hadn't missed the rhododendrons.

"Why are you still about?" asked Jericho. "Haven't you a ship to run?"

"She's safe harbored, t'ank ye kindly. And as for me bein' in harm's way, as ye might say, 'tis only in me capacity as chaperone, which no proper young colleen should be without while she's in the comp'ny of a dashin' young fella such as yourself."

"Ah." Jericho took the compliment at its intended worth. "And this would be her sister's idea, no doubt?"

"Oh, aye, aye. Told me to stick close by her and not let her out of me sight." He slipped a wink to Molly, whose eyes bulged at the barefaced shamelessness of the lie. "So's to make certain," Clancey went on, rather enjoying himself, "this posin' business is on the up and up. Which it appears to be and which I shall report accordin'ly." He tipped his hat as a signature.

"Happy of your good opinion." This was of course meant ironically.

"Jericho, look!" Molly's eyes were gleaming. She ran to a bush and picked something off it, which she brought back and held out to him. It was a dainty purple sprig. "Heather!"

Jericho sniffed. "Hardly a flower at all." He picked it up, snapped it in two, and threw it aside. "Let's go. Nothing to see here." Molly had just glimpsed a fox among the bushes. It had its head lifted and was sniffing, like Jericho, but for its own purposes. A moment later it had darted away. Molly wished she could follow it, but at Jericho's call she ran after him instead.

Clancey was confessing his inability to grasp Jericho's dilemma. "Simple sailor that I am, I'm t'inkin' ye could just paint the girl without the flower and put the flower in later."

Jericho laughed unkindly. "You would think that."

"Haven't I just said it?"

"I must have the flower first. I have to see the two together—the flower in her and her in the flower."

"Ah, ye've the artistic natur'."

"Not at all. Painting is only my science. Life is my art." He glanced at Molly to make sure she was suitably impressed. He did not care about Clancey's opinion.

This was as well, for Clancey's judgment, which he expressed freely as he walked Molly home, was that the lubber was full of blither-blather—"Life is his art, indeed!"—and would profit by a year or two at sea. "That'd wash the French scent off him," he opined.

Jericho had returned to camp or to his studio—or to Lottie's. But he remained in Molly's mind. She barely heard what Clancey was saying (to which she would have paid little attention, anyway) because a question had presented itself to her mind, rather like a question on a school examination. She decided to solicit Clancey's view of it. "If two sisters married two brothers—"

"Eh? Marry their brothers?"

"Not their own brothers. Two different brothers. Brothers to each other, I mean. If two sisters married them, what would they be to each other?"

"Who?"

"The sisters."

"Sisters. Ye've just said so."

"Yes, but what else would they be? They'd be more than sisters, wouldn't they? If they married the two brothers?"

"Now, how could bot' of 'em marry the same two brothers? It don't make sense, darlin'."

"No! One of them would marry one brother, and one would marry the other. The other brother. The other sister would."

"I still don't follow ye."

"Oh...! For example, if Candy married Jeremy, and I married...one of Jeremy's brothers." Molly knew vaguely that Jeremy was gone, but that was all she knew about it.

"Ah, I see," said Clancey, and then, more percipiently, "I do indeed." He pondered for a moment. "What was the question again?"

"Never mind!" She left it at that, for they were at the dormitory, anyway.

Their separate but related concerns were still on their minds next evening, when Jericho had asked permission to take Molly to the opera house. A visiting pianist was offering Schubert (the Wanderer Fantasy) as well as other pieces, but it was the Schubert she was longing to hear, if she would be able to keep her attention on it. She got out her prettiest dress, on which she had sewn an extra ruffle, and brushed her hair till her scalp hurt. She practiced standing tall, pinched her cheeks till they stung, and tried biting on a gooseberry to redden her lips, but the result looked bloody, and she wiped them clean till only a trace of the sweet redness remained.

After all this, the only comment Jericho had to make on her appearance was "Girl, why do you walk that way?"

"What way?" She must be a horrible sight, but how? He showed her, holding his head down and his shoulders in, eyes to the ground. An awareness that he was right made her blush ferociously. She did not always walk like this (she hoped) but she was doing so tonight. Why did it have to be in front of him? "Lift your head and walk proud," he ordered. She did so. The movement was a little stiff, but he did not mind; it entertained him. He placed her hand in the cusp of his elbow and told her that now she looked the fine young lady she was. She glowed. Together they promenaded by the other couples collecting outside, waiting for the house to open.

Jericho left her and went to buy the tickets, perhaps to be spared her conversation for a few minutes, since he could easily have obtained them as they entered. While she was standing alone, someone all but leapt out in front of her: Brian again! "Hey, Molly!" he greeted her.

"Good evening, Brian," she said as politely as she could. She did not want Jericho to suppose she had invited him to converse with her, but also she did not want to be unkind. If she appeared haughty to a degree, it was only in holding her head high, like the fine young lady she was. Then the house opened and Jericho returned to lead her away into the crowd pooled up at the entrance. Brian stayed back. He was not dressed for an evening out; he had happened to see her in passing and come over on purpose to talk to her.

One other also was present on her behalf. He had followed her and her escort from the dormitory, though at a distance, for Jericho had deliberately outpaced him. At present he could freely ignore him, Clancey having decided his charge ended at the opera house doors. An old sea dog like him could not sit still long for that brand of piano playing; anyhow, inside she would have half the town as chaperones. But he would be waiting for her when she came out. As the tide of provincial culture seekers ebbed, he and Brian were left as jetsam. They were standing near each other, and the attention of both was focused on the pair, who were just passing indoors. Jericho was doing all the talking; Molly turned to him in delight at some remark. That was their last sight of her.

Clancey saw the effect it had had on the boy and offered him a consoling pat on the shoulder. "Well, that's as may be," he said obscurely.

Brian looked at him in surprise. Unaware of his interest in the case, and wrapped up in his own new-minted, unanticipated adoration, he had supposed himself the only one to have been watching. "What does she see in him?"

"Same t'ing as you. Only she's a female, so it strikes her different." He found himself a section of wall to lean against for the next hour and a half.

"I could never get her to look at me that way."

"No, lad, ye couldn't."

"Because I'm not that handsome?"

Clancey shook his head. "Because he's a—how d'ye say it?—a mythioloco creatur'. Somethin' that don't exist at all save in her own mind. And there ain't a blessed t'ing ye can do about it but wait till she sees it for herself. But you're young yet, and she's a girl worth waitin' for."

"She sure is," Brian said dreamily. Clancey smiled.

Inside, Molly was ascending second by second to a happiness she had never imagined. At its heart, nurturing and informing it, was the agonizing despair she had felt earlier and would feel again later, a feeling halfway between a head cold and a good cry, or like lying face down on the pebble bed of a mill race: love, in other words. In its absence, the evening and Jericho and the music, the wonderful Schubert rippling through her, could never have borne her so high, to unimaginable bliss born of unimaginable suffering: love, in other words.

Jericho was bored. The music, he could have endured if the playing had been halfway competent (Molly thought it simply wonderful). But what tedium it was to have nothing worth listening to, and no opportunity of being listened to himself! He enjoyed the moon-faced, moon-eyed, moonstruck—everything to do with the moon—looks he inspired in Molly, but while she was concentrating on the music or allowing it to concentrate in her, these had ceased. So deprived of amusements, he turned his thoughts to himself.

He understood love, he believed, its frenzy and its wormwood aftertaste, but he had ever known it himself that he could recall. He liked to look at women, however, and his need to capture his perceptions of them in concrete shapes and colors sometimes possessed him to the exclusion of all else. At those times he was perhaps in love with the image in his head, and on his canvas as he transferred it little by little. If its original happened to mistake herself for the object of his passion, that was no concern of his.

One time the girl's fragility, which had drawn him to her in the first place and which he had labored long and hard to render in its exact contours, free of the satire to which his careless nature disposed him when he did not fight it; that fragility, buffeted and finally wrecked by his indifference and occasional outright cruelty, had driven her to seek eternal peace in an overdose of laudanum. A friend had snatched the glass from her lips just in time and denounced Jericho to his face as a brute and despoiler, but what had he to do with it? The girl should have been happy. He had made more of her than she had ever made of herself, and memorialized her for the generations. She should have knelt down and kissed his hand; no, too popish. But gratitude she owed him, by God.

And so, he reasoned now, would Molly—if ever he found the right flower for her. As he sat, he ran through the possibilities and actually saw them in his mind. The anemone, symbol of fleeting love; that would be apt, if he could keep her infatuation with him, and his own interest (of a different type) in her, kindled till the purple-topped stems overspread the fields. But if they had to wait, why not the rose? A pink rose probably, with a fiery red center. Or the lily, exalted, unapproachable; no, not quite right. The violet, token of innocent love, would have done but he had used it in another painting already. The only flower he had painted twice was the camellia; it had fit both women perfectly, and it was his favorite, elegant and delicate, with a texture that caught the light like parchment. His favorite, but not his flower: that was the poppy, the Janus-flower, symbol of light and dark, of life and death.

These and other musings occupied him till the end of the recital, when prolonged applause on all sides recalled him to the moment. And high time, too; he felt like a drink. The girl was all agush with praise for the playing; he pretended agreement, but how simple her tastes were! As they emerged onto the street he saw Clancey slumped against the wall asleep. Good, he thought; one less nuisance to deal with.

As he walked her back to the dormitory the music was still coursing through her head. She felt as if it were bearing her along with it toward a crescendo. When they arrived at the gate, he opened it for her and he accompanied her up the path to the porch. They halted at the foot of the steps. They had hardly spoken on the long walk and did not speak now. Jericho looked down at her gravely. He lifted one of his long, delicately veined hands to brush the hair from her forehead as if he were about to kiss it. She held her breath; she held any number of breaths. He lowered his head.

"Time to come inside," said Candy. She was standing at the screen door. Jericho bade her a good evening, and Molly resumed her breathing. Candy expressed her thanks to him for seeing her little sister safely home. Conscious of the "little," and of her lost chance (but unsure whether it were not another product of her imagination), Molly nodded a quick good night to Jericho and hurried in. Not till she was in bed did the music return to her, and the memory of his courtliness (when he had known she was looking), and the mystery of the glade; his glade, as she thought of it now. At last she was ready to enter it. Tomorrow she would.

As she drifted asleep her erstwhile escort remained awake, dividing his attention between his own choice of sleeping draught (taken in successive doses, in a shot glass) and the aged, pretty, buxom woman who was just serving up his second bottle. He considered painting her; that mixture of sweetness and sandpaper, whose exact proportions he had yet to ascertain, intrigued him. But her advanced years put him off.

He had once painted an old woman (old, that is, by his standards) with a fading myrtle as her emblem and had made a good job of it, within the limits, which he sensed in himself, of an inadequate appreciation of all the stages of life past green youth. Vice, he did not mind contemplating, but age he chose to ignore, especially as it applied to himself. Even buildings, he would not paint unless they were new; the events they had witnessed, the years and weathers that had worn them to their present states depressed him.

Better he should devote his attention to someone like Molly, till she was no longer new in his eyes, and by then his work with her would be done. What he saw in her face, he no longer saw in his mirror. Yet he was still young; people were always saying so. Lottie said so now. "For so young a man," she said, "you put them away with a will."

He poured himself another. "Had a deal of practice," he said. "Don't even feel it now." The bar under his hand seemed to slide sideways an inch or two. "Or not mudge—much."

Having seen him drunk, Lottie took his boast with a grain of salt. But she had to allow he had taken a prodigious amount of alcohol over his bows (four times as much as his brother) before reaching that state. "Any special regret you're eager to wash away?"

His grey eyes appeared greyer than usual. "Not as I recall. Should there be?" She shrugged. "No," he continued, explaining, "in the circles I frequent, people drink pretty free. That's how I acquired the habit. Can't say I mind much, though." He treated himself to another swig, savoring the taste before swallowing. "Nope, don't mind at all."

Lottie was wiping dry the counter in front of him and taking her time at it, working in circles that largely overlapped each other. "Did you acquire any other bad habits over there?" she asked casually. "Such as—oh—leading innocents astray?"

It took him a moment to absorb her meaning. When he did, he smacked the glass down on the counter. "Not the same song from you now! The girl's a baby."

"She's around the corner from being a woman, as you know better than anyone. She's blossoming, and you're her shining sun, or so she thinks. Wouldn't it be kindest to put her off? I'm sure you've had your share of companions—"

"Share!" He was yelling now; perhaps he was more drunk than he showed. "People ain't wages! You ain't allowed only so many!"

"I know a girl whose sights are set on one. And I won't see her hurt. Before long she'll be opening the door to a bright, beautiful world. She'll meet with sorrows along the way, and I wouldn't keep her from them even if I could. But they'll be the kind that happen naturally, not what comes of running after what isn't so."

"Ain't it? You know that for a fact?" His face was ruddy. He was drunk, she decided.

"What phrase is that our schoolmarm is so fond of?" Lottie pretended to search her memory. "Oh, yes. She'd call it...a contradiction in terms."

Jericho wagged a finger at her. "Aha! That feline stare again."

Lottie did not know what that meant and did not ask. "Feline, canine, ox, or ostrich—all the animals boarded the ark two by two." For the first time Jericho suspected he had had too much: the words made no sense to him at all. Lottie continued in a more friendly tone. "No creature made is one of a kind. Best find yours and leave the rest alone."

He looked at her uncertainly, as if seeking significance in her expression, but if he were it did not reveal itself. He changed the subject. "Thing I have to find is a flower to paint. But none are in bloom."

"Rhododendrons?" He ignored the question. "There's one I'll bet you haven't seen. Snow-flower, the Indians call it." The name pleased him. "It only grows in the mountains and it's easy to overlook. It's small but it's pretty. "

"What's its color? Tell me it's red!"

"Red it is."

Till then he had been leaning languidly, in an affectation of sloth; all at once his limbs took life, and his eyes gleamed. "That's the one! I know it is! Where can I find it?"

"You'll have to ask your brother."

No shortage of those! "Which one?"

"Joshua."

He had expected a different answer. "Didn't realize he had an interest in botany."

"There are few things he hasn't had an interest in, one time or another." Again he suspected the words of having an underlying meaning, but concluded from her manner there was none. As she spoke she was sweeping cobwebs from the bottles arrayed behind the bar. He would ask Joshua, then.

Joshua knew the flower, or knew of it, and where the tales said it was to be found: somewhere in the high reaches of Bridal Veil Mountain. But he rejected the idea of going to look for it at once, reminding Jericho that Jason had teamed them together and assigned them a pile of work that had to be got on with. Jericho was no longer only their sign painter (in which capacity he had yet to finish one sign) but a partner in full standing and was expected to learn every element of the business. Joshua did not doubt he had the intelligence ("It doesn't take brains to be a logger," he had heard it said, and had said himself), but he did not expect Jericho to stick longer than the next wind that blew him in some other direction, family or no—and he had not fully made up his mind about that.

"After work," Jericho urged.

"No! Not after." Then he added, in a quieter voice, "Not ever."

"But why?" Honestly, he was just like a kid.

"Because Jason forbade it. Back when I was a boy."

"You're not a boy now."

Joshua saw he would have to tell it all. He did not want to; did not want to think of it and did not want Jericho to know. But it was his responsibility; Jason had teamed them. "It's a healing plant. The Indians use it to treat fever." His mind still held back but he flogged it on. "When our—our mother fell ill, our father went searching for it up in the high reaches. He nearly died searching. If he'd found it"—again he forced himself on—"it might have saved her. But it didn't. So it doesn't exist. You understand? Not for Jason, not for me—and not for you. Not if you want to be part of this family."

He waited for some acknowledgment. "All right," Jericho said, and then said it a second time, sounding pettish. But another brainstorm followed the first. "Then take me to the cabin. If it's still there. You know I've never seen it."

"I told you, there's work to do!"

"It won't take that long, will it?"

Forever after, Jericho would ascribe Joshua's change of heart and flight from duty to his own powers of persuasion. But Joshua had simply wanted to see the old place again, and had been putting in a few too many late nights, anyway. The work could wait half a day. He fetched his heavy lined coat and borrowed one of Jason's, which now fit tightly at the middle, for Jericho. He had left his own elsewhere; at Lottie's maybe. With Joshua in the lead, the two climbed up from camp into the mountain heights. Ever chillier and whiter their surroundings grew, till within an amazingly brief time (since both were young and climbed like mountain goats) they were standing before the original Bolt homestead, the oldest, the highest, and the farthest from civilization of their abode.

The Bolts' mountain, it had been called then. Before them only Indians and trappers had roamed its forests, but only as a remote hunting ground, and Jonathan Bolt had been wise enough not to interfere with them. Years later, when his sons started their timber operation, most of the original visitors dropped away, presumably to blaze new territory, and the few that did not disappear altogether seldom let themselves be seen.

The cabin did not look much different from any other whose dwellers had deserted it. Jericho asked if it were the same as it had been. "About the same. You'll have been born there." He pointed out one of two bed frames with their patchwork ticks still on them.

When Jericho had looked around once, he shrugged. "Nothing to see here." Joshua began to disagree and then remembered that the memories he had of the place were not Jericho's. "I thought it would be more picturesque," the latter said, in a tone that bordered on contempt. "Let's go back." And he walked out.

Joshua did not follow him at once. In the dust and the shadows, he stood pondering. "Come on!" Jericho yelled. "You're the one who said we had to get to work." As he paced, bits of his shadow fell through one and another of the chinks between the logs onto the opposite wall, like a half-shape made of spiders, now seen and now hidden as they scrambled over it, a menace whose advance was apprehended only in flashes, piecemeal. It was familiar to Joshua's senses, as if he had known it before, but the knowledge seemed to lie just outside his grasp. He suddenly wished Jericho had never come to Seattle.

Far below, Molly was approaching the glade of her dream. The entrance on the near side, the side she knew, hid the round in the middle. But she could guess its shape from the maples that bordered it, venerable guardians of its unyielded secrets, and that reminded her for some reason of Captain Clancey. The entrance was a narrow space between two trees that clasped hands overhead. Tall shrubs lined the curving path within. She set a foot on it.

The place was still. Perhaps Jericho was not there today. Her heart pounding, she followed the path around a bend and stopped as the glade opened before her. It was not quite as she had imagined, neither as dim as it had looked from the outside nor as bright as she had dreamed it, and smaller, hemmed in by shrubs. Most of it was taken up with a fallen tree trunk, dead for generations. She glimpsed an edge of something inside the hollow and walked ahead, stepping softly, as if someone might otherwise overhear, to where she could see the rest of it, cached away from all prying eyes but hers. It was the dulcimer she had heard, now sitting silent. How clever of him to hide it so! She must tell him.

Before leaving she looked around her and up at the grove's protectors. Why had she feared this place? She and Jericho could visit it together, and he could play for her; she would suggest it to him. The idea reminded her of what Miss Essie had said that morning: the pianist they had heard on Sunday had been asked by the Ladies' League if he would consent to a second recital on some day other than the Lord's. He had consented, and the performance had been set for the following Saturday evening. She would ask Jericho. No, she would drop the fact in passing and allow him to ask her, which he was sure to do. She could not wait to talk to him.

Rather than take the main trail, where Clancey might see her, guess whom she was going to see, and insist on accompanying her, she took a longer path she knew, which would not only enable her to evade his oversight but also spare him the long climb. She was not sure if, at his age, he could finish it. It was a kindness to him really. She did not spare herself, however, and after she had emerged from the forest into an outlying flat of the base camp and taken her last strides (which were remarkably long for her size) up onto the level ground, holding her skirts as she went, she had to stop to catch her breath. She was hot, sweaty, and tired, but felt the exhilaration of victory. Only once before had she made the climb, and then it had been with Christopher, who had blazed the way. This time she had done it alone.

She looked about for Jericho. It had not occurred to her till now what a job it would be finding him in all those acres. There were men working in pairs or clusters at every point of the compass, some nearby, some at a distance, like ants on an anthill. She did not recognize any of the faces and was too shy to ask a stranger what she had to ask. She tried to look as if she knew where she was going and succeeded well enough for them to leave her alone, having their own business to attend to, anyhow.

For many the sight of a woman's dress was itself sufficient to excite the attention, but once they saw who its occupant was (and they all knew her, even when she did not know them) their hopes collapsed immediately. She was pretty, all right, and was nearing the age when a man could consider courting her in earnest, but her blood ties would rule it out even if she was a hundred. No man alive would dare to brave that sister of hers: one step amiss and she'd be after him with a broom, or a loaded weapon.

Of all the males who had had occasion to notice her, Brian alone did not fear Candy's wrath, or not inordinately. The watchfulness she exercised seemed to him no different from the encroachments of grown-up women everywhere, including many of the brides who acted older than they were (while some of the older ones acted younger). They watched out for Molly, too. That was one reason he had never visited her at home, though the principal one was that she had never invited him. He was afraid he bored her. Sometimes in talking to her he would catch her yawning behind her hand. He would bet she never did that with Jericho Bolt.

For her part she did not dislike Brian; it was only that he was always Brian, always the same. She could not foresee the day when she would wish a man to be always the same. He was like Seattle, lacking in anything (except Jericho) that stimulated more than a mild interest in her. She would give him this: he was as interesting a boy as the town could boast. Those with more spirit were big and oafish, given to horseplay; those with less were hardly noticeable. Some of the younger men at the mill, hardly more than boys themselves, looked as if they might have something to offer but never did; she was too young for them to pay her any heed.

—except for one. He had worked at the mill a short while and then moved on, she had never learned whither. He was small and dark-haired, with a dark look to match; Bloch was his name. From time to time she caught him regarding her with a speculative look, the meaning of which she could not guess. After he left Seattle she dreamed about him; dreamed of a storm and a cabin and a rescuer who was he. At least he had the same face to start with, but when it lost its speculative look it changed to that of someone else whom she did not know. Eventually she decided it was not Mr. Bloch she was dreaming about, after all, and that cured her of the dream.

Today, hunting Jericho, she had no thought for Mr. Bloch or any other man she had ever fancied, or fancied she had fancied. Jericho, she now knew, was the one she had been looking for all along.

It was he who found her. On reaching the center of the camp, where the press of men was thickest—men hastening to and fro, toting, hauling, chaining down logs—she was so intent on their faces, her eyes darting eagerly like hornets from each to the next, she did not mind what they were doing. A few were hoisting a log onto one of the skid roads. Unaware of them and unheeding of their cries of warning, she stepped into its path. The giant brown cylinder swung back at her.

An arm clutched her shoulder and forced her aside. She spun to face Jericho, whom she only half-recognized. She angrily struggled to free herself. He turned her back around to behold the sure death or crippling from which he had saved her. "You want to watch out for those," he chided. "What in blazes you doing here, anyhow?"

She had not thought: he had to work. "I'm in the way again, aren't I?"

Her crestfallen face stirred a little sympathy in him. "It's not that. But I—" He glanced across the clearing, whence Joshua had been called to settle a dispute over how a big cedar was to be sectioned. Cut it any damned way, Jericho thought, what's it matter? But the distraction had freed him for a few minutes from the indignity of being Joshua's chattel. He could be free longer than that if he made his escape now. His heart jumped. "On second thought, follow me. I got me an idea."

He led her away down a little hill to the mouth of the big flume that wove down the hillsides into Stempel's mill race. It carried their timber and, via boats, any other articles (if they were sturdy enough) that someone wanted delivered faster than he could carry them. Other flumes dotted the camp, but this was the central one, the biggest and by far the most often used. Its boats with their V-shaped keels, which exactly matched the flume bed, sat alongside.

Molly, having encouraged herself to believe she was not out of favor, after all, mentioned the second recital that was forthcoming. "I wondered—" she began, and then stopped. She had decided he must do the asking. "I mean, I thought you might—" No, she could not say that, either. Oh, this was hopeless!

"All right, I'll take you," he said offhandedly. They were now at the flume. He pointed below, to where a log no larger than a cane to their eyes shot round a bend, ricocheted off the walls, and threw up great shocks of water on both sides, rumbling and thumping proudly as it sped toward its end. "Like a ride?" he asked her, nodding at the boats.

A ride! Down that? "Jason wouldn't allow it."

Jericho grinned slyly. "He don't have to know."

She tried to imagine it, and for a few seconds it almost seemed possible. But no! How could they? "It would kill us!"

He laughed out loud. "You thought I meant this one?" It had certainly sounded as though he had. "No, there's one gentler. Just right for you." He took her hand in his. Feeling too weak to resist, and not really wanting to, she allowed herself to be led down to a smaller sluice on an easier slope, where the water ran less furiously, still fast enough to frighten her, but not so much.

"My shoes will get wet." It was not a convincing excuse, but perhaps she had not been looking for one.

"They won't."

"I'll get wet."

"A little, maybe. Nothing to be scared of." She continued to hesitate. "Come on. I'll hold you the whole way down."

If she had not been blushing before, she knew she was now. Her heart was racing faster than the flume. And suddenly all seemed to be decided; he seemed to have taken it that he had consented without her saying a word—as she had, but how did he know? From a pile of small logs beside them, he picked one and lodged it between the walls of the flume, which it exactly fit, having been cut to that purpose.

The boats here were shorter and narrower than those at the main flume, but otherwise identical in design. Jericho lifted one of them onto the flume bed behind the log, which served as a brake. Then he climbed in, outstretching his legs into the tapering stem. He beckoned to Molly to climb in after him.

She was still afraid, but now it was a fear of something that was going to happen, and which she wanted to happen, and she did not care a fig if it did (or at least was trying not to). He held her hand as she stepped over the rim and lowered herself onto his lap, inserting her legs into the same hollow as his. She could feel the vibration of the water racing beneath, conducted through the keel and through his body into her own.

"Don't touch the wood," he warned her. "It splinters." She lifted her hand from the rim. "Lean forward now." She did so. Gripping the walls, Jericho slid the boat forward. It lifted a little as it rode over the log, balanced on it for a moment, then tilted downward, and nosed into the stream with a splash. The current picked it up, and before Molly had time for regret they were shooting downhill.

The men at the camp sometimes amused themselves this way; now she was sharing in one of their masculine pleasures, which before she had disdained. Jericho had her gripped tight, one arm around her front, the other hand at her forearm. The boat coursed down and around, gathering speed as it went. Came a bend, and it bounced and rocked from side to side, threatening to overturn. Jericho pressed her harder to him. Then came a sharper turn. The boat hit it, they bounced and swayed, he leaned left and took her with him (minus her stomach, which had deserted her), and on they raced. The boat continued to gather speed. This was like nothing she had ever known. Her heart was straining against her chest, but her delight was infinite, and it seemed as if she would ride forever.

And he was responsible. With the renewed realization, pleasure of a different kind poured through her, pleasure mixed with vanity; surely Candy would say it was vanity. But here she was, with him, flying on and on in an infinity and an eternity of bliss. At the peak of her joy and her fear, which were one, she laughed and screamed, and cried, all together...

And suddenly it ended. The course leveled off; the boat slid to a stop. She sat breathless, with beads of sweat and water mingled on her face. The man moved his arm away, brushing hers, and gently—oh, so gently—touched her dew-sprayed hair, whether on purpose she did not know. She knew she ought to move but did not know how, and she was afraid to face him.

"Lordy," he said, "that was one hellacious ride!" The sentiment was less than she had hoped for. "Never had a better but once." This made Molly unreasonably jealous: why couldn't his best have been with her? "Stand up," he said, "if you can."

She was unsure if her feet would support her but did as commanded. She stumbled as she stepped over into the dirt. She felt wobbly, as if she had taken a balloon flight and a sea voyage and a coach trip all at once. He jumped down alongside her. She looked up at him shyly. He grinned back, and his grin, like his summing up, was disappointing, unworthy of the unique (for her) rapture they had shared.

And where had it brought them? She looked about. It was a part of the woods she did not know. She was far from home, not as far as she had feared he would bring her but farther than she had ever been before in her youthful and, on the whole, happy life. "You needn't tell your sister about this," he said. "Unless you care to."

"No!" she said, blushing again, and then, more calmly, "No, I don't think I do." The two of them smiled at each other. They now had a secret, which none of the others would ever understand. "Saturday?" Molly said tentatively.

"What?" Jericho was lost for a second. "Oh, the music. Fine, we'll...meet outside the opera house. Unless you'd rather I called."

"No," she agreed, without fully knowing why. "We'd better meet there."

It was time for her to get back; past time. She made to go, but he stopped her with a touch on the wrist. "I forgot to tell you, I've found the flower for your portrait. Only I've not seen it yet. The snow-flower." She had not seen it, either, though she had heard of it. "The last thing a man would expect to find blooming in the wild," he continued, "and if he wasn't careful, he could miss it altogether. A beauty that's not known— yet—but soon will be." He meant it would be after he painted it but his wording was purposely ambiguous. He reached out and ran the flat of his hand along her cheek.

Molly lifted her eyes to the tips of the mountains behind him, which were reddish brown with streaks of white. Lower, the slopes were a mottled white and brown, and lower still, a dark greyish green. The redness and the darkness were growing; she would be very late home. She thought the view the most gorgeous she had ever seen. To Jericho it looked as if he had painted it himself, only he would have done it better.

When he got back to camp Joshua was cross, as Jericho had expected him to be. The sun was out of sight, and that load of work would have to wait yet another day. "Where were you this time?"

Jericho explained about Molly's visit, omitting the flume ride. "I had to see her home, didn't I?"

Joshua observed the patches of wetness on his (that is, Jason's) coat and trouser legs. "How? By canoe?" His mind flashed onto the truth. "You didn't—?" He looked down at the flume. "You did!"

Jericho shrugged. "Fastest way down." He started for the chow tables; it had to be just about suppertime.

Joshua stood for a moment and then trudged after him. "You're purely irresponsible, you know that?"

"Been told so before."

"It doesn't appear to have worked any great change in your character."

Jericho gave another long shrug. Shrugging came easily to him, like smiling and laughing. "People never change. Not really. Every man just adapts his form to the landscape he finds himself in."

Joshua had not expected him to reveal so much about himself. "As you've done here?" This fetched another shrug. "Well," Joshua said with finality, "you better start adapting to the logging business. If you want to be a Bolt, I expect you to work like a Bolt."

"Tomorrow. It's suppertime now. And there's a poker game after."

That took the biscuit. "No more poker for you." Jericho asked why. "Because you're a Bolt. We reward our men for their work. And we don't take away what we give." Jericho was beginning to think that being a Bolt wasn't hardly profitable.

In any case, he disregarded the edict. The games were played next to the stove where the men dried their socks after the Sunday washing. Onto the same line Jericho had pinned a post card (French) which revealed quite a bit—yet still too little for the other men's taste—of a girl toward whose inclinations he dropped hints intimating great familiarity, but of whom he refused to say more. For this and his other enviable attributes, the men had accorded him so exalted a status that they allowed him one of the two deacon seats at the ends of the bunk rows. These were the nearest thing to proper chairs, though all they were was half logs with the flat sides up. The other players were relegated to empty kegs and upturned crates. Two more crates shoved together made a table. Of cards they had no lack; for chips they used (naturally) wood chips.

None of the other loggers would ever have suspected Jericho of cheating, but after he took the first three hands Corky accused him of having the devil's own luck. "Not luck," Jericho corrected, "art. And I am an artist." He stood up far enough to reach under the tick in his bunk and pulled out a bottle, which he uncorked and extended politely. "Any of you gentlemen care to partake?"

They stared at one another in almost superstitious dread. Corky glanced nervously at the door. "Put that away! Jason don't allow no forty-rod in camp."

Jericho took a long swallow and wiped his mouth. "Jason don't have to know." But he set the bottle behind his foot, out of plain view. "This game's stale," he pronounced. "What say we play for more than quarters?"

"None of us got more than quarters," said Sam.

"Then Jason's underpaying you."

Corky felt called on to explain. "No, see, we all git part of our wages kept back. For the brides' fund. Really oughta be called the husbands' fund, I reckon. Any time one of us gits married, he gits to collect his share."

"But supposing you don't get married?"

They all looked so sorrowful at the prospect, he did not pursue it, and Corky resumed the explanation. "Whole thing was Josh's idea. Got a head on him, he has. Figgered without the fund we'd spend all we had and leave us and our wives with nothin' to start on."

Jericho shook his head. Brides' fund, hell! And here were Joshua and his brothers making themselves out to be such saints. "That much more for them," he muttered.

"Huh?"

"Skip it. My deal, I believe."

Next morning Joshua seized on him before he had had a chance to steal off. Jericho expected to be put to hard labor at once, but instead they set out on a walk that took them away from the base camp past the farthest cuttings. Jericho half-suspected he was being led out to execution (he did not know what these backwoodsmen might get up to), but Joshua showed no sign of remembering his exasperation of yesterday. His mind was clearly bent on something else.

What that was, Jericho discovered when they reached their destination, a bluff overlooking a valley at the edge of the Bolt property. The noises of timber cutting barely disturbed the peacefulness there, and by the same token any sound they might make would be little heard in camp. Jericho was yawning, as he did every morning on which he was required to rise early after staying up late the previous night (which was every morning). His back leg muscles were afflicted with cramps, from the walking and climbing his new habitat imposed. But he forgot his aches, and his dislike of being there, as soon as he laid eyes on what stood at the edge of the precipice.

At first he took it for a collection of junk he would have to help break apart and consign to the valley below. But as he got nearer he saw that all the pieces were connected with rods, ropes, and chains. He briefly entertained the notion that it might have been intended as a work of art, though an unusually ugly one. Then he realized it was only a machine, and as he got nearer still, he could see what it was made up of.

The tallest component was a wrought-iron steam engine of portable size (relative to full-scale engines, that is), ten feet high, fifteen feet long, with wheels, a fire door, and a smokestack. Over the door bulged an iron skeleton of rods, balls, and screws. Linked to the engine by its crankshaft was a capstan which Jason had salvaged from the harbor and Joshua had modified to their purpose, fitting it with a throttle like a steam locomotive's and a makeshift foot brake. A thick rope wound round the capstan and ran down into the valley through a block and tackle that terminated in a pair of chains. In short, the ungainly assemblage was a prefigurement, in remarkably close detail, of the invention which in a few years was to revolutionize logging, the donkey engine.

Joshua called it a steam winch and confided to Jericho that it had taken him the better part of a month to set it up. Jericho was circling it, observing how the pieces connected. He allowed that he had never seen its like before. The comment was partly a sidewise sneer, but Joshua took it straight. "First of its kind. It was Jason's idea. Of course he left it up to me to get the darned thing to work. This'll be its first test." He smiled at his brother. "We're making history, Jericho."

"Just the two of us?"

Joshua assured him it would take no more than two. He did not want the other men to know till he had tried out the machine, had plans drawn up, and obtained a patent. Once word of it got out, every lumberman from Vancouver to Bangor would be wanting his own. It could earn the Bolts a tidy bit of money.

"If it works," Jericho qualified.

"It'll work," Joshua said confidently. "Come with me." He stepped over the side and descended into the valley. The hill was steep and shingly, and they half-stepped, half-slid down. Jericho fell once, and his underside got a primer coat of dirt, which he dusted off when he got to the bottom. "You sure this is a good idea?"

"Soiling your delicate hands for a change, you mean?" Joshua grinned. "Oh, I think so."

Jericho raised no further objections and did as Joshua directed. The valley had been cleared of timber, perhaps at some time far in the past. The floor was littered with cut logs. The two men tied one of these to the pulleys at the end of the line that ran from the hilltop. The pulley ropes, they tied round the log lengthwise; the chains, they wrapped round its circumference at both ends and hooked onto the pulleys. When it was done they climbed back to the overlook. Jericho was sweating with the unaccustomed toil, but the novelty of the experiment had captivated him and he found himself eager to see how it turned out; eager, in fact, to see Joshua make good, and himself, too.

When they had got a fire going in the firebox, laid and fed from a woodpile alongside, Joshua turned a handle above the fire door and waited. In a few minutes the engine began to burble and hiss. Smoke appeared from its stack and the crank shaft began to turn, pulling the capstan after it, groaning and grinding. By moving the throttle Joshua was able to control the speed of rotation. He demonstrated to Jericho: forward to go faster, back to slow down, and when you wanted to stop, you pressed the brake, but not too quickly. He let Jericho try it for a few yards in both directions, and when he was satisfied his pupil understood the principles (they were not difficult) asked if he could manage without Joshua at his side. "Child's play," said Jericho.

Joshua returned below, where he could watch the progress of the log as it was dragged up the hill and could also clear away any hindrances that might present themselves. Before leaving he told Jericho, "Don't do anything till I say the word." His brother nodded, but only barely; he was intent on absorbing the thrill of this new-found power. "I mean it," Joshua warned.

"All right, all right" was the answer he got, and had to be satisfied with.

As soon as he was out of sight Jericho reached over and turned the handle he had seen Joshua turn, but a little farther, to deliver more steam to the engine: no sense doing a thing by halves. He smiled at his cleverness. He had been keeping the brake down, following Joshua's instruction. Now he heard a cry from below to release it and he lifted his foot. The rope reeled in a turn or two. Came another cry to open the throttle a bit. Jericho pushed the rod forward. The capstan began to pull in earnest. He could feel the strength of it throbbing through the lever into his hand. "Hold it there!" Joshua shouted. Jericho, in the flush of success, kept going.

Below, the log lurched upwards unexpectedly. "I said, hold it!" Jericho paid no attention. The engine was hissing and popping, straining at the chains that held it. "Ease off!" Joshua yelled. Jericho forced the throttle forward as far as it would go. The log took a jump in the air. One of its chains slid off, and it swung wildly. "She's loose!" cried Joshua. The log rammed into the hillside. "Brake!" he screamed. "Brake!" Jericho tried to pull the throttle toward him, but the counter-pull of the capstan was too strong. The engine engaged in a tug of war with the moving weight at the other end. Jericho stepped on the treadle with all his force. The brake screeched against its fitting and jarred the whole machine. One of the chains that held it slipped the stump it had engirdled. The engine tipped forward.

Joshua saw it from below. "Holy mother," he said. "Un-der!"

He scrambled out of the way as the log plummeted towards him. Bound to it, the machine toppled from its perch and was dragged downhill headfirst till it rattled to a halt at the bottom. Joshua ran to inspect the damage. Jericho picked his way down to him. "You hurt?" he asked innocently.

"You fool!" Joshua was almost ready to pound him senseless. "Didn't I warn you?"

"All right, all right, never mind that now. What do we do about it?"

The question brought an unwelcome realization. "Tell Jason." But the ordeal would have its satisfying aspect. "No more fatted calf for the prodigal, I'm afraid."

"He don't have to know, does he?" His voice had a new urgency in it. "The two of us could fix it ourselves, and him none the wiser."

Joshua shook his head. "The rods are bent. They want an ironworker. Jason'll have to okay the payment."

"Thought you were the bookkeeper."

"But he's the boss."

Jericho's mind scrambled about seeking a means of escape. He had been in town little more than a week and knew few of the ins and outs available. But he did know one. "Here's a way to keep it off the books. Pay it out of the brides' fund." No, Joshua said, they never touched that. It was a point of honor, and of honesty toward the men. "It'd only be temporary," Jericho reasoned. "You'd be sparing Jason the extra worry." Joshua admitted that might be so, but... "With one brother gone"—Jericho's voice trembled with brotherly concern—"he has to feel he can count on those of us who are left."

Joshua recognized the self-serving nature of the argument, but it made sense to him—which perhaps only meant he thought they could get away with it. But Jason was proud of the winch, the news of its failure would disappoint him, and if he never learned of it, he would be able to rejoice unreservedly in its success, which was certain, after it got fixed. This would truly be kinder, as well as make Joshua look better (for Jason's sake, not his own). Jericho was right, after all.

But once in the tent, staring down at the powder tin he had just lifted from under the cot (his own), he found himself unable to go through with it. "It's stealing," he said. How could he have seen it as anything else for even a second?

"It's borrowing. You're going to pay it back."

Joshua stared at him. "I'm going to?"

"You won't have to shoulder it alone. I'll put in a share." He spoke more rapidly as he went. "It's only right. Us being brothers and all." He sounded as happy as an infant.

Joshua had never met such brazenness. "A share! You should be paying it all!" Was Jericho so vain, or so daft, he really did not know it?

"Hold on now! That machine was your responsibility. I was only helping you."

It sounded so fair and so reasonable that it half-convinced Joshua in spite of himself. "I gave you a job to do," he said, "and clear instructions! The first work of any kind you've done here, and you turned it into a train wreck."

Jericho suddenly turned sulky and his eyes went wide, like a helpless deer's. "You got no call to treat me like this. It's because you're jealous, ain't it?"

"What?" Joshua found himself suddenly in a side alley he had not seen was there.

"You know Jason likes me better than you. So you're blaming me for your mistakes!"

It was a good performance, and might have persuaded the performer, but not his audience. Joshua saw him clearly now, more clearly indeed than he wanted to. "Why, you little—"

A hand jerked aside one of the flaps. It was Jason's. "What's the matter? I could hear you all the way to the creek."

Joshua answered. "Matter of taking responsibility." He stared coldly at Jericho as he said it.

"Well, you've no call to yell at your brother. He doesn't know the ways of the camp. That's why I put him with you, so you could show him, not go criticizing him and making him feel unworthy."

"You don't know what he's done." He kept his eyes on Jericho as he added, "There's a lot about him we don't know, I think."

For some reason this provoked Jericho out of his silence. "I'm not the one swiping from the brides' fund!" Joshua's hands involuntarily clenched the object they were holding, thereby drawing Jason's attention to it. "I am sorry," said Jericho. "Didn't mean to let that slip."

"You didn't have to," said Jason. "It's plain to be seen." He ordered Joshua to hand it over. Joshua was torn between outrage and anxiety, outrage at the betrayal and anxiety that Jason should know he had abandoned the plan for which he had been betrayed. In his confusion, what rose to the surface was the guilt he felt for having considered it at all, and that was what Jason saw. By contrast, the remorse he read in Jericho's face appeared forthright and manly. "You were taking from the fund?" he said to Joshua. It was a question only technically, and Joshua was too honest to say no.

"He woulda put it back. Wouldn't you, Josh?"

"You're new," said Jason, "so you wouldn't know." But he did, Joshua protested silently; knew down to the ground.

Jason could not remember his brother's ever having let the camp down so badly. But perhaps he had a good excuse, and if so he must be allowed to present it; there was only one allowable. "Tell me it was to save a man's life." Even now he hoped this was the way of it. But he saw from Joshua's face it was not.

"You deserve to know the truth, Jason," Jericho blurted out. Joshua looked at him sharply. "Your new winch got broke. The money was to fix it."

"Broke! On its first run? What kind of damn fool carelessness was that?"

Jericho quickly intervened. "I can't let him take the whole blame. I was there, too."

Jason raised a hand. "No. Noble of you, but it's misplaced loyalty." Joshua's jaw fell. Jason had it turned clear around! The fund was one thing, he had let himself be led into that, but the fall of the engine was entirely the other's doing. "Well, boy?" Jason demanded. Joshua hated to be called that. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

This time Joshua took the chance offered. "Why assume it was my fault? Why not his?"

"You're trying to put it off on your brother?" Jason said it as if that were the one act more unforgivable than wrecking the machine in the first place. "If it were so, it'd make no matter. He was in your charge. If it was his mistake, it was yours."

"But—"

"Sorry, Josh," Jericho said again. "I shoulda stopped you but I thought you knew your business. I said it was a bad idea."

And he had said as much. Joshua saw, more coolly than Jeremy had, that his position was hopeless; he even saw to a degree how it had been managed. But he was not prepared for the next step the caller sounded. "And you were right. Jericho, you take over the job from here on."

Joshua would have protested even if he had not been the wronged party, simply as a good lumberman. "He's not able! He doesn't know the first thing about it!"

"And if you do better than your brother has," Jason continued, as if he had not heard, "you'll take over more than that."

"You'd replace me with him?"

To Jason the choice was self-evident. "He was ready to take on a burden that was yours. You were ready to let him do it. He stood taller than you today. I'm disappointed in you, brother."

That was more than Joshua was willing to tolerate in the circumstances. Behind Jericho's mask of solemn concern he was sure he detected a smirk. He knew there must exist some sufficient epithet for him, perhaps a French one, but he did not know it. "You've made your choice," he said to Jason. "See how much help he is to you." He took up his coat and one or two other items. The rest of what he would need was at the cabin: the new one, not the old. He gave Jason a last long look. "I'm disappointed in you, too..." His final word was etched in acid. "...brother." Then he left.

This was more than Jason had expected. "Didn't mean to drive a wedge between you," Jericho said. His obvious sincerity, when held up alongside Joshua's backhandedness, dispelled any worry of Jason's that he might have been too severe.

"He's a hothead. He'll cool down." Jason hoped that was so. "Meantime, you show me to that winch. Between us we'll get her kicking." He put his arm around Jericho, and the two of them went off together.

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."

The doctor doubted it was the croup; probably a passing cold, but for safety's sake he advised the couple to stop in town a couple of days and keep a watch on her. Stempel agreed to put them up in a two-room house he had to let. They took turns sitting up with Miranda, and never slept in the same room together. But Candy could not have been expected to guess that when word of the living arrangement traveled to her, as it did via the brides' gossip at church.

But that was to be on Sunday. Today, Saturday, she had only seen and not heard, Molly was on her way to tea with Biddie and Biddie's awful sister, and Jericho was grappling with the pains of conscience Clancey's ruse had awakened in him. On seeing Molly and Maddie together for what might prove the only time in the experience of either, he knew at once what he should and would do. It would be easy for him, so easy it might not count as a good deed if ever the balance of his life were toted up before the pearly gates (in which he personally did not believe). But it would be the salvation of one whom he had been responsible for bringing to the brink of ruin; his new tendency toward reform notwithstanding, he still overestimated his own moral capacities. And besides, it would be fun.

He left his baggage at the corner of the nearest building, which happened to be the cafe (in most places he had lived, he could not have done so with any confidence of seeing it again) and hurried across to Maddie's party. None of them saw him coming, naturally, since each had been exerting a fixed effort not to look at him, but they could not help it when he intruded directly onto their path. They tried to walk round, but whichever way they veered he sidestepped to meet them and at last they were forced to stop. He grinned at each in turn and wished them all a good afternoon. Molly was staring intently at the ground where a weed was breaking through.

"I owe you an apology," he said. Molly's heart began to beat faster, in spite of what her head tried to tell her. "Miss Cloom"—he was addressing the younger of the two—"I apologize for my rudeness of the other evening." Molly's cheeks reddened, partly out of anger with herself. How could she have been so stupid as to suppose—to suppose anything? "I hardly knew what I was saying. You see"—Molly felt his eyes on her—"I've been spending too much of my time nursemaiding callow young girls." Molly's face was coming to resemble a tomato. "The sort of girls who smell of lavender soap." Molly did use lavender soap, but vowed to stop forthwith. "Sort of girls who go teary at the sight of a dead hummingbird." And he had acted sad at that himself! This was worse than at the widow's; there at least he had called to her to come back.

"Girl like that," he continued heartlessly, "don't know anything about what a grown man feels. Or what a grown woman ought to feel. How could she?" Molly's lower lip began to quiver. No! she checked herself. You cannot, you will not, cry. "Purely a bore spending time with her, knowing she's wanting me to kiss her." Ah! This was more like what he had said at the widow's, and it almost heartened her. "Me kiss her!" He gave a great guffaw. "The notion! Be like kissing a runt calf!" At the shock of this she did release a tear, but quickly wiped it from her cheek. She must control herself. What would the others think of her?

"Now, a woman like you," he informed Maddie, "you're a different proposition. You know just what a man wants." He grabbed her and planted a kiss on her lips. She was taken too much by surprise to prevent it, and she quite enjoyed the sensation, one she had known too little of lately, till she remembered what an outrageous liberty it was and broke away to administer a slap on the face.

"I would have if you hadn't," her sister said.

Jericho sauntered away, tossing a sneer in Molly's direction for good measure. Maddie was too busy making sure her hair was not mussed to have a care for anyone else's feelings, but Biddie felt a profound sympathy. She knew the kind of mortification Molly had just undergone, knew how it felt to wish oneself a million miles down into the earth or a million miles up into the firmament, absolutely any place other than the site of one's humiliation. Seeing that the tears were about to break, she enclosed Molly in an all-solacing embrace. Within its protection, Molly was able for the first time since the onset of the ordeal to look out on the world again and on the one who had caused her such torment.

He was picking up his things from the corner where he had left them, arranging them on his shoulder and under his arm, when he chanced to look back at her and so undid all his effort, which had been practically the only good deed of his life so far. He was wearing a look such as she had never seen on him, a look of remorse for what he had just done to her. When he saw her looking back he quickly turned away and strode in the other direction, opposite from the way he had to go, which would have taken him past her again. Her heart lifted. She had been right; there was good in him, after all. But no one else had seen that look.

She could no longer have romantic hopes of him; even if she had been older, it would have been impossible. Yet they had made a special connection; he understood things about her no one else ever had, as she did about him. If only she could talk to him now, so they could sort it out, not as prospective lovers but as good friends. Yet what she thought of as being friends still contained something of the admiration he had visited on her, the flirting and the flattery her vainer self was loath to surrender, and need not now that she understood him. Through friendship, so defined, she could retain the casual delights of love and avoid its miseries. She was too young to recognize that this was what Lottie, quoting Miss Essie, would have called another contradiction in terms.

But Jericho's spell on her had lifted, and in the absence of that preoccupation her other interests came tumbling back into her consciousness. One was Little Women, which she must finish reading. Another was Mrs. Owsley, whom she had shamefully neglected for days. She vowed to visit that evening and hoped the old lady would forgive her.

The cabin looked the same as ever, but there seemed to be a stillness surrounding it she had never noticed before. The voice that answered her knock was not Mrs. Owsley's. After a moment she realized it belonged to Lottie. She entered slowly, with a sense of foreboding. Lottie was sitting by the bed. She turned and lifted a finger to her lips. Molly crept forward on tiptoe.

Mrs. Owsley was very pale and seemed to be asleep, but when Molly reached the edge of the bed the old woman opened her eyes. Perhaps she had heard Molly's approach, or perhaps only sensed her presence. When she saw her, a beatific joy such as Molly had never seen spread across her face like a pool of sweet syrup. "You're here!" she cried. Her trembling hand sought Molly's, clasped it and clung to it. "You've come at last! Dear sister! I was afraid we'd never see each other again. Now we can do all we've talked about. I'm so glad." Molly was unsure what to say and so said nothing. After a minute the hand gave up its hold and fell away. The old woman's eyelids dropped shut and her body lost all motion, even the tiniest quiver of breath.

Molly did not have to ask, but she did. Lottie answered with a nod. Tears welled in Molly's eyes. "I should have come before. I forgot. If only I'd known!"

Lottie took her onto her lap and placed an arm around her. Her shoulder made a cradle for Molly's head. "No way you could have. It came on her very suddenly. And you had your own cares to attend to. Nothing wrong in that." She held her for a little.

"She thought I was her sister," Molly said in a hushed voice.

"You made her happy at the end. We can't any of us wish for better than that."

"But..." Molly strained with the paradox of it.

"But what?"

"It wasn't true." She lifted her head and looked at Lottie beseechingly. "What she thought...it wasn't so."

Lottie took her hand. "Honey, it doesn't matter. True or not, sensible or not. Any time one human being can fill another one's need, even if it's only for a little while, the happiness that's given is real and right. Don't ever doubt it, no matter what any of them say." She realized she had moved beyond Molly's experience to her own. "Whatever happens afterwards doesn't erase that." Molly knew that now she was not speaking only of Mrs. Owsley. In her interpretation Lottie was just putting into different words the recognition that there was good in him, after all. She was happy Lottie had finally seen it.

They said little more but sat there a long while, so that when Molly got back home it was nearly time for bed. She fell asleep quickly. When she woke, it was not yet morning; not even midnight, she guessed, though since the second story lacked a clock she could not verify it.

Midnight! She sat upright. What day was it? Her mind was methodical, or a part of it had been till lately, and given to religious precision in the observing of mealtimes, schooltimes, and the like. This part knew, without the aid of a reminder book, the birthdays of all the brides and the dates of anniversaries for those who had been married. And today (if it were not tomorrow yet) had been Kate's last day to decide. Molly had expected her to be gone before this. But there was Andrew; perhaps she had been unable to bring herself to hurt Andrew. Yet she could not give up Alvaro, and this was her last chance, unless it had passed. Molly had to know what time it was.

This, she could discover soonest from the clock in the hall downstairs. She jumped out of bed and ran, or came as near as she could tiptoeing, through the main bedroom. Like many minds when they are fixed on timetables, hers had forgotten the one question of fact that mattered, which a quick look settled, a look she took without thinking as she hastened up the aisle between the rows of beds. Kate's was empty; Kate was gone. The shock of the discovery brought her fully awake. But was she gone completely? Molly raced downstairs, more noisily than she had planned, glanced at the clock in passing—it was not quite midnight,.after all—and ran out of the house, across the yard, out to the street, and down toward the pier. The cold air and the cold dirt reminded her she was still in her nightgown and stockings, but she did not care.

She was in time, after all. Kate must have left the house only minutes before (and perhaps her leaving had woken Molly), for she was still standing on the pier, about to step into the waiting boat. A single carpetbag sat beside her. The dark figure of the sailor stood in the bows waiting. Molly ran up to her. "Kate!"

She turned in astonishment. "Molly! You oughtn't to be here."

Molly believed she ought. "You're not going in the middle of the night? Without a farewell party?"

"I must. Or Alvaro will leave without me." She looked toward the lights of the schooner.

"But..." She could not be going so soon! Their friendship had been so brief. Molly searched for arguments to keep her there. "It's spring. You were going to show me where the eagles nest. We were going to see them together."

"Julianna knows. She can show you."

"But—"

Kate lowered herself almost to kneeling and laid her hands on Molly's shoulders. "Darling, this is my only chance. It's different for most of the brides. They want sturdy, steady men. But if I had to stay here, married to Andrew, I'd be in mourning for the rest of my life. It's nothing against him. But it would be like your marrying someone who told you you couldn't draw any more. Do you see?"

Molly had seen: seen it happen to other women, and not only on the frontier. "Will you be happy, then?"

Kate laughed at the question. "Of course! I'll be with Alvaro. We'll live in a...a kind of a palace. And walk on the beach in the warm sun. When you think of me, imagine me under palm trees, strolling barefoot on the sand."

"Barefoot? Kate, how wicked!" It seemed to her the most daring thing she had ever heard. She did not reflect how close she was to being barefoot herself.

And now she had a new idea. "Wait here!" she commanded.

Kate stood. "I can't. I have to go."

"No, I'll bring you the picture you liked, the one of the raccoon. So you'll remember me."

"I'll always remember you," Kate said fondly. She spread her arms wide. Molly saw that there could be no more delay, that this must be their last leave-taking. She ran into her arms, and they hugged tightly.

"Will she go, too?"

Molly looked down. The man in sailor's garb had stepped out of the boat onto the landing. The moonlight revealed his face as that of Alvaro himself. Molly gasped, and so did Kate. She hurried down the steps to him and wrapped herself in his arms. Molly thought it the most romantic picture she had ever seen outside a frame; she heard Schubert playing somewhere above, or on that sun-soaked beach whither Kate was bound.

"No, she's not going." Kate was unsure whether his question had been serious; with him, she often could not tell. She looked up at Molly. "If you don't get back, you'll catch your death."

"And so will you." Each had meant, and knew the other had meant, goodbye.

"¡Adios, señorita!" the dark man bade her. "¡Que enamorese de un bruto grande y que ustedes paralos muchos niños vigorosos!"

"Alvaro!" Kate cried, as if shocked. She hit him lightly.

"¡Adios!" he repeated, blowing Molly a kiss. He hefted down Kate's bag and stowed it in the bows, helped her to board and to seat herself, and took his position at the oars. Molly watched as he rowed out over the rippling Sound. She was a little disappointed when Kate did not look back, and did not wait to watch her onto the ship. She could hardly see it at that distance, anyway.

As she started up the hill she glanced toward the boathouse on the adjoining pier, under whose peaked roof a figure was standing. A moment later he stepped out into the moonlight, but she had guessed who he was already. He passed in front of her without seeing her, or seeing anything, and turned onto the hill ahead of her. She wanted to run and comfort him, to tell him he would not feel Kate's loss forever, but she was needing to be told that herself just then. So she left him to himself and went home.

Returning through the yard, she saw her sister waiting in the doorway. What must she think to find Molly out late again, and this time in her nightgown? Not—oh, no! She must not think that! Molly's idea of "that" was incomplete but sufficiently disgraceful to compel her to explain as she stepped onto the porch. "I was just—"

"I know," Candy said softly. She swung the screen door open. "Come to bed."

She seemed unlike herself: so tired, so listless. But instead of pitying her for it as might have been expected, Molly felt resentful. What right had Candy to be weak? It was her job to look out for them, her fault Kate had left. "Why didn't you stop her?" Molly demanded.

"We came here to get married." The words seemed directed at herself, as though she had been the one who put the question. "That's what she's doing." As she shut the door she added, in a whisper, "I hope."

"She could have gotten married here. You could have told her—"

"Tell?" Candy faced her across the hall with eyes bereft of confidence. "Who am I to tell anybody anything?"

Molly did not know how to answer. If there were an answer, she was not the one to give it. Her own sense of grievance subsided as she realized that Candy, even more than she, was encased in her own individual sorrow for the present, and that neither could relieve the other's. Together but separate, they betook themselves to bed.

Early before church next morning, Corky was taking the trail to town (though not, in his case, to church) when he spied someone he had not expected to see so high up, so early. She was sitting on a footbridge just off the path, legs dangling, feet almost in the water. His first inclination was to leave her be, but she presented so odd and so sad a picture, equal measures of curiosity and sympathy drew him to engage her in conversation, which she seemed not to mind. She seemed beyond minding anything, or welcoming it, either. "Whatcha doin' out here by yourself?" he asked companionably.

"This was the first place Jeremy kissed me." She said it without evident feeling. "In Seattle at least."

"Is that so?" He had not really cared to know that. "So, whatcha doin' out here by yourself?"

"It was the nicest kiss we ever had. After the first one. But that was much shorter."

"Huh! You don't say?" Now he was feeling outright uncomfortable. "So, whatcha doin' out here by yourself?"

Candy stared emptily into the empty water, where not a fish was stirring. "Feeling miserable."

Corky left her to it. You ain't the only one, he thought as he continued down the trail.

His appearance at the doorstep of the dormitory and his request for Biddie to be sent out occasioned some grumpiness (the house having barely woken up) and some hasty dressing, first by the bride who had volunteered to answer the door and then by Biddie herself, who wondered what it was all about. "Lydia said you wanted to see me out here?"

Corky was wringing his hat with both hands. "That's right."

"Would you care for some breakfast?" It was a tad early yet, but he could wait in the parlor and further wring his hat till it was time.

"Had breakfast."

"Would you care for...a cup of coffee?" It was a tad early for that, too.

"Don't need coffee!" Biddie was entirely at a loss. She waited and the hat had a hard time of it for a minute or two while Corky worked himself up to say what he had to. "Don't guess I'll be coming around no more. I don't guess."

After the impositions of the last weeks, this was more than she could bear stoically. "Corky! Why ever not?" She had a sudden suspicion. "Is it because of my sister?"

"I don't know. You tell me!"

"Corky, what—?"

Now he let fly, pacing and gesticulating with his hat. "Ever since them two came to town you ain't been all gabby and fool-headed like you used to. You're soft-spoke and sensible like other gals. I hate it! And if that's the way you're gonna be, you can—you can—" He shook as he struggled to force past his shyness. "You can get yourself another fella!" He plumped the much-creased hat onto his head and stamped off down the steps.

Biddie was too much astonished by his speech to call or run after him. She recognized that he was exactly right, though he had seen her only a couple of times in these weeks. This was a consequence she had not foreseen, and she would not abide it: Corky was just about the most important person in the world to her. She had let the situation go on longer than she had meant to anyhow. With a gleam of renewed spirit in her eye, she marched inside and up the stairs.

She found the two of them still in bed, as she knew she would. All the brides were up and most of them were dressed, but not they, oh, no. Last to rise, longest to wash, loudest to demand their breakfast, they were a drain on the resources, the energies, and the morale of the household. Selfishly, for her own purposes, she had let them ensconce themselves to the disadvantage of all.

"There you are," her mother grumbled, "and not before time. You can draw our bath" (it was only a washtub) and lay out our clothes, there's a good girl. The grey for me, I think, and as for Madeline..." Maddie, who enjoyed her repose, was rolling her shoulders and purring like a cat. "...well, you can ask her yourself. Look lively, girl!" Biddie did not move. "And didn't I tell you, didn't I plainly tell you, day before yesterday, to brush down my wrap? Really, how you'll manage when your sister's married and you're the only one left to do for me, I can't begin to imagine. It's a mercy you've no husband of your own and no hope of one, that's what I say, because if you had he'd never show you the forbearance I do. But I can't help it, I consider motherhood a sacred trust—"

At that Biddie broke into a loud peal of laughter. Maddie Mrs. Cloom stared at Biddie uncertainly. "What are you laughing at?"

"You," said Biddie, "are the most absurd person."

Mrs. Cloom's mouth fell open. "I beg your pardon?"

Maddie propped herself up on her pillow with a yawn. "Darling, is it kind to speak to poor dear—?"

Biddie turned on her. "And you! You're funnier than she is!" She gave forth another peal of laughter. Her voice had drawn the other brides into the room and onto the stair, where they stood listening with growing pleasure. Her relatives stared aghast at her as she continued: "As far back as I can remember, the two of you have been nesting inside my head like a pair of crows, cawing at me every blessed minute. For the longest time I tried to get you to love me, until I realized that was impossible. Then—"

"Bridget, dear—"

"Be still!" Biddie snapped.

"Darling—"

"You, too! It'll only be another piece of nonsense, so hush! But where was I? Oh, yes—then I tried to get you to respect me, but I realized that was impossible, too. So I decided the best I could do was try to understand you. And I did—try, I mean. Then I got tired of it, so I did the only thing that was left and...and left. And you were both glad enough when it happened—goodbye, Biddie, and good riddance, as far as you were concerned. But now you've come all this way to see me. Why is that?"

Her small dark eyes peered intently at them, and so did the eyes of the others, to the point of making them uneasy. "Well," Maddie stammered, "your last letter—"

"Letter?" Biddie could not remember sending one.

"At Christmas," said Mrs. Cloom. "You didn't sound at all like yourself, dear."

"Who else would I be? And how would you know, either of you? You've never had the slightest notion who I was, or the slightest interest in finding out. I do understand you now. The only reason I put up with you this long was to make sure. You want someone you can humble, so you can feel like grand ladies. That's all I've ever been to you." Her voice cut like a cold knife. "You never were my family, except on the census rolls." She looked around. "This is my family. And it's my house, and I'll thank you to leave it and scoot back to your own. And I wish you well." She paused. "You know something? That isn't true." With that judgment, she left the room.

The assembled audience felt like applauding. The two Clooms remaining found two dozen pairs of hostile eyes trained on them. "Well, if we're not wanted..." Mrs. Cloom said in a theatrical voice. No one contradicted her. She and her younger daughter were gone the next day, and it was a very long time before Biddie saw them again.

Molly, who had heard the send-off from her chamber, congratulated Biddie as she was washing the breakfast plates and passing them to Molly for drying. "That was brave of you."

"Pooh. I should have done it as soon as they showed their faces. But I thought...I don't know. Strange its being my letter that brought them. It was hardly a letter at all. Just a note to advise them that any misunderstandings we might have had in the past, I hoped they'd forgive me as I forgave them. That was all it was."

Molly felt an indescribable elation. "Oh, Biddie, don't you see? It showed them you'd changed, and that made them afraid. They came here to try to make things the way they were before. But I'm glad you settled it. You're right, people can live inside your head your whole life—all sorts of people." She thought of Kate and Mrs. Owsley. "You can run away with them, or say goodbye to them. But you have to do something if you're given the chance. You have to!" She laid down the towel. "Thank you, Biddie!" She gave her a big hug and ran off upstairs.

"Well, you're welcome as can be!" To herself she added, What ever can the girl have in mind? A few minutes later she heard her patter back down and out the door.

Her first stop was the mercantile. "Oh, he's long gone," said Ben. "But you might ask Lottie."

"Gone," Lottie confirmed. "Haven't seen him since that night." He certainly was not there now; nobody was, this early. "It's my guess he went off looking for that flower."

"The snow-flower? That was for my picture!"

Lottie spoke knowingly. "Honey, if one girl isn't at hand, he'll settle on another. Makes no difference, far as he's concerned." She took Molly's frown as a sign of wounded pride, which it was in part. "But he'll probably go ahead with yours," she said kindly.

"Where would he look?" Lottie referred her to the same person she had the last inquirer, but he was now residing back at camp.

"It's up there," he said, with a jerk of the thumb, "if it exists at all." Molly gazed up the mountain with an air of indecision. Joshua looked up from the little book on steam engines he had spent the morning studying. "He won't be there. That was just another whim of his. He's like a jackrabbit—a second later he's hopped off somewhere else." He gave her a hard look. "I hope you're not getting sweet on him?" She shook her head innocently. "Good," he declared. "Not worth your while." His eyes went back to the book, and hers back to the mountain.

Had Candy been exercising her usual vigilance the next morning she would have noticed Molly leaving the house ahead of breakfast and questioned her closely about everything to do with it; questioned her announcement that she had to get to school early to help a fellow pupil complete Friday's assignment, questioned her having left her books at home (though she had taken her sketchbook with her), questioned the warm coat she had chosen. The coat must have been exceedingly warm, for her cheek was flushed and fiery, as Candy would have noticed but the others had not. Indeed, it was her recession from Molly's life that had emboldened her sister to so try her chance and follow her impulse where it led her.

Today that would be up the mountain. Anticipation of the adventure had her pulse racing like the flume she had lately traveled. The sun, which shone askance on her as soon as she left the shadow of the house, appeared brighter than usual, so bright in fact she had to shield her eyes. She put that down to her own heightened state, which made everything seem more brilliant and more thrilling. Her head was whirling with it.

The object of her search had done as Lottie had guessed and gone up to the high places in quest of the snow-flower. He had lodged himself in the Bolts' old cabin (he was a Bolt, after all) for as long as might be needed. Hither he had brought his easels (counting the one he had not returned, which was one more than he needed), his canvases, his brushes and paints, his clothes (including the coat Jason had unknowingly bequeathed him, which he was glad of now), everything he had had with him, including the little bit of money he had not spent.

Hunger made him cross. He had finished off the little he had managed to pilfer from Clancey's galley, the pond nearby had been frozen over the night before (and he had never fished successfully in his life, anyway), he had no gun and no traps, and his palette knife would hardly serve for hunting. As a boy he had learned to use a slingshot; perhaps he could make himself another.

He had passed a chilly and wakeful night, and on looking out after rising he found himself amid a new-risen ocean of white. That alarmed him unexpectedly, for he had supposed the big snowfalls to be ended. He had better start looking for the flower at once. His only clue to its whereabouts was the legend that it bloomed somewhere on the mountain; in the high reaches, Joshua had said, which might be here, or higher, or lower. His father had failed to find it, almost perishing in the attempt. None of this was in the least encouraging.

Yet it would be worth the effort, if it existed, and if it were anything like his idea of it. He would fetch it away to some other place where he could find a model to match it to; not Molly now, but another girl of the same age and disposition, whom he must take care to treat rather less lightly (while of course still observing all the proprieties). He would paint her, and the result, he felt sure, would be his greatest accomplishment so far. Then he would somehow work his way back across country or through Canada, and across the ocean home. The thought comforted him.

But first he must find the flower, if it were to be found. Without a map, without a plan, and without provisions (of which he had none), he set out from the cabin for the nearest hills. He found what might have been a trail and took it, found another and took that, and so continued, looking round as he went, but saw only brush, trees, and snow, with stands of earth between; no flower.

Inevitably, since he did not blaze the way or mind the position of the sun, and had no compass with him, he got lost. He might have remained so forever if his nostrils had not grabbed at a smell in the air—of all smells, the one they craved most, and the most delectable to them, the fleshy, woody tang of meat roasting—and followed it with the infallible accuracy of instinct to a pair of skinned animals, somewhat but not quite like squirrels, that hung impaled on an iron rod stuck in the ground, amidst a fire whose smoke enveloped and browned the carcasses as if they had been midget saints burning at the stake. Beside the fire stood a pine with a sledge leaning against it and an animal trap clamped to it by the jaws. From this hung other traps, and pelts of various shades. Whoever their owner was, he was not in sight.

As Jericho began to peel off a piece of game for himself he heard a sharp click behind him and turned to face the barrel of a rifle the length of a man, couched in arms big enough to wield it without strain. The deerskins, the long hair smeared with bear grease, the Hawken the giant was leveling, and above all the exhibits dangling from the tree beside him betrayed his calling. "Who are you?" he challenged. Jericho told him, and asked for the same courtesy in return. The man gave his name as Thibideau. "Maybe you are after my skins, eh?"

Now that Jericho recognized the accent, he grinned as if he had found another brother. "Mais non, mon ami. Moi, je chasse le fleur des neiges."

"Le fleur des neiges!" The trapper was impressed. "Ah, oui, c'est une merveille, vraiment." He lowered his Hawken and leaned it against the thick trunk, which had hidden him from Jericho at first. "Mais vous etes canadien?"

"Non, non, je suis americain. J'habite ici." Jericho gestured vaguely.

Thibideau looked about, scratching his head. "Ici?"

"Plus ou moins."

Thibideau shrugged. "So, we are neighbors. Come warm yourself at my fire. Soon these fellows will be done." He did not say what species they were, and Jericho did not ask, lest the knowledge spoil his appetite.

He crouched before the fire. "Isn't this Bolt brothers land?"

"Ah, oui. But the Bolts, they are down there, and I am up here." He laughed at his slyness. Jericho judged it wise not to mention his connection to the family. "This flower," Thibideau said presently. "If I could show you where it is"—Jericho's spirits rose—"what would you give me for it?"

"I bet you've never had your picture painted." Jericho did not disclose that few holders of that promise (and none locally except the widow Duvet's girls) had seen its dividend. But Thibideau seemed pleased. First he shared his food with Jericho, who gobbled down his half ravenously, and then he led him to the flower. If it was a marvel, Jericho reflected, their meeting was a greater one. To have found the one man who could show him to the one thing he was seeking was much more than he had had reason to expect, as if it had been meant to happen.

The flower lay among what could truly be called the high reaches, only two tiers below the summit. The narrow porch from which it sprouted was hidden between jutting rock faces. Without Thibideau, he probably would not have seen it. The stem was ugly (yet would be good to paint), a long black stalk without leaves, which would appear later (though the flower was showing now, in a seeming reversal of the natural order). From its end sprang a cluster of tiny deep red blossoms. They were beautiful, if one troubled to examine them, but one might well never trouble. That was fitting for Molly, or would have been.

He regretted how things had gone with her. He was not sure which he regretted the more, his careless treatment of her or its correction, which had deprived the world of what might have been his masterpiece. The idea that this might have been the greater sin gratified his vanity so much he let it flutter through his head a while.

He carefully removed the root from the ground and swathed it in one of the soft cloths in which he customarily packed his paintings for transit. The petals were so small he doubted whether they would survive the journey. But he had so doubted before and the flowers had always manifested more strength than he had credited them with.

Half the mischief he had worked among his brothers had yet to be undone. Two of them had spent most of the past three days in the valley to which the steam engine had fallen, laboring to revive it, but though now it stood upright and the rods were unbent, the firebox stubbornly refused to stay alight. Neither brother had heard of Jeremy's return. Joshua had moved back to camp before the intelligence spread and he had not been back since. On the third afternoon he came down to ask Ben if he knew where a small bolt was to be found, and received the obvious joke in reply (whose wit tickled its originator no end). Forgetting the bolt, he hared back to the valley, where he was amazed to find the engine chugging and fizzing away. "Got it back in harness while you were gone," Jason boasted.

"You did?"

Jason took some offense at his tone. "I did. Is that such cause for dismay?"

Rather than engage that large topic in the time available to them, Joshua repeated the news gotten from Ben. Jason's answer was immediate. "Then we'll fetch him home."

"Take some tall talking. Not sure even you can do it."

Chastened by his recent mistakes, Jason responded with something less than his usual cockiness. "The two of us can. Like the old days. Remember? You prime 'em, I finish 'em." This had been their motto.

Joshua shook his head. "Not any more. I gave up the game a long time ago." That had been just after they brought the brides to Seattle. "Especially where Jeremy's concerned."

"Ah, now it comes back to me. You got morality." His tone was derisive.

"Wasn't that." But he would not say more.

"Then you won't help? Not even for your brother's sake?"

"You drove him out. You fetch him back." He started up the hill.

"I will," Jason declared, "or I'll die trying." Another of his brainstorms struck him. "By Ned! If that ain't just what I'll do!" He arrested Joshua by the shoulder. "What we'll do."

He kept at him for the next two hours, extemporizing on the proposition that the new plan was not at all like the old days but a different breed of animal altogether, and besides that, the importance of its object overrode any caviling about what one would and would not do, and besides that, he was only asking Joshua to do one simple thing. A simpleton, a small child, a babe in arms could do it. In the end Joshua agreed, mainly to spare himself further harassment. And in only a little more time than it took for his trip to town and back, the extra having been taken up in delivering the message Jason had dictated to him, Jeremy tore into camp. His features were drawn, his movements barely controlled. Joshua ambled in a good way behind him.

"Where is he?" Jeremy shouted into the first face he met. "Where's Jason?" The puzzled logger pointed him to the brothers' tent.

Jason was leaning back in a chair (a lot cruder than any of Isaac's), legs crossed, feet propped up on a short, squat log. He was flipping lazily through the latest number of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. The pose fit him so ill, it would have disconcerted Jeremy in any case, but he had expected something very different. He endeavored to make sense of what his eyes told him. "Jason...?"

His brother barely looked up. "Been quite a spell since we saw you," he observed, without particular interest. "Help yourself to coffee if you like."

"But Josh—" Jeremy saw him just walking up. His face was bland and unrevealing. "Josh told me you were—"

"On death's black verge? Yes, that's what I told him to say." He continued perusing the paper.

Jeremy felt as if his world were turned topsy-turvy, or he were. "But you don't look like you're dying," he persisted.

"Mm? Oh, no. Wasn't true."

"Not true! What do you mean, not true?" He wished Jason would look him in the eye.

Jason granted the wish, folding the paper into his lap. "I mean," he said, blinking as if the question surprised him, "it was a prevarication. A stretcher. A tall story. Or, in plain words, a bare-faced lie." He called over to Joshua. "You see, I was right." Joshua smiled. "Bet him you were gullible enough to believe it. Gave us both a fine laugh." He rose, tossing the paper onto the chair behind him.

Jeremy was as much bewildered as outraged. The tears that had stood waiting to grieve Jason now crowded forward, his frustration pushing them almost to the brink. "Soon as Josh told me, I dropped everything, ran here as fast as I could, just prayin' I'd be in time."

"Expected you to." Jason shook his head scornfully. "You always were a sentimental mama's boy."

The blow that threw him back onto the chair, crumpling Frank Leslie under him, seemed to have exploded out of empty air. It had taken Jeremy himself by surprise. Jason rubbed his jaw. "I had that comin'," he said, dropping the pose and speaking straightforwardly. "Now will you come home?"

Jeremy at last understood that this had been his purpose all along; his and Joshua's. For a long spell he looked from one to the other, considering. "I owe him one, too," he said at last.

"You'll have to work that out between yourselves," Jason replied. But he knew it was all right now; they all knew. Odd how a punch in the face had a way of setting things straight.

"I'm not letting you sock me!" Joshua warned. Jeremy insisted he had it coming, which was the last straw. Jason might be content to go easy on him, but Joshua saw no reason why he should. "And you don't? Betraying us like you did?" A quiet fell. This was the first time the reason for their separation had been mentioned. The others stood awkwardly.

"I had my reasons."

"Yeah," Joshua said without thinking, "so'd Benedict Arnold." Before he knew it a fist soared out at his chin—unlike Jason, he saw it coming—and made him stagger back. His jaw wanted nursing, too. As he rubbed it he asked, rather resentfully, "Did that ease your conscience?"

So the battle of weeks past had not ended. "You're so ready to point the finger—all of you," he added, including Candy in that. "But none of you will listen. Deaf and blind, like Isaac said." He could have laughed if he had not felt too much like crying. "It wasn't Jason I betrayed. It was—" He stopped, shaking his head. "What's the use? Tell me, what? You'll believe what you please, anyway."

The discouragement he had felt when he left had settled on him again. His limbs drooped like a weeping willow's. Moving them with an effort, he walked away down the hill.

"Who was it?" Joshua yelled after him. Jeremy continued without looking back. "See?" Joshua complained, somewhat self-justifyingly. "He wants us to listen, but he won't talk."

"That's where he's going now," said Jason. He had observed which path Jeremy had turned onto outside the base camp. "Where he always goes, times like this. To the one person he knows will understand."

Had the graves been in their original places by the old cabin, the brothers might have met their unlamented relation. But the remains had been moved to a hillock off the loggers' yard, and the makeshift crosses replaced with a carved headstone. Jeremy knelt before it. He spoke as naturally and easily as he would have to Lizzie. His brothers, who had followed him, stopped at the edge of the graveyard. They could not hear what he said, and would never have tried. Jason realized with a stab of remorse that when he had banished Jeremy from the mountain he had banished him from this, too.

They were still waiting when he came down. That surprised him only a little. When a Bolt had unfinished business, he finished it, usually sooner rather than later (Jericho excepted). "Yeah?" he said indefinitely.

"You've told her," Jason said. "Now tell us. I promise we'll listen this time."

Jeremy took a deep breath. It took him a minute to subdue all the feelings contending within him. When he believed he had done so, he began. "You thought I betrayed you on the voyage. But, Jason, I didn't. Sure, it's what Stempel wanted me to do, what he thought he'd got me to do. Before we left, he took me aside and offered me money—"

"Five hundred dollars," Joshua interjected.

"Five hundred dollars. If I could convince you to approach the brides in a...in an upright sort of—"

"Talkin' honest," Jason recalled.

"Talkin' honest, that's right. He said he was lookin' out for the town's interests. And I believed him. You know me, I believe everybody." His brothers smiled. "Till once I got to thinkin' about it. Then I saw he'd fast-talked me. He was hopin' to make things go haywire. He didn't think talkin' honest would work any more than you did. The two of you think just alike." Joshua smiled at this; Jason did not.

"But here's the thing," Jeremy went on. "He wasted his money. What he was askin' me to do was what I woulda done anyhow. Except the two of you were right—it didn't work. And I went ahead and gave you the nod to...to razzle-dazzle 'em." Now his brothers understood, and knew they had done him an injustice. "So, you see, I didn't betray you. I betrayed Stempel. After we got back I tried to refuse the money but he forced it on me. Said much as he'd like to keep it, I'd done my part, and he'd never in his life gone back on a contract and wouldn't start now. I didn't know what to do with that much cash, so I sneaked it into the brides' fund a little at a time." He did feel guilty about one thing. "I never told you about it. I...I didn't want you to know."

The three of them stood silent for a minute between the field of grey stones and the tall evergreens that looked out over them. "You were in the right," Jason said. "Except for when you gave me the nod. I shoulda talked honest to those girls, or give up the enterprise. I didn't realize how much I was askin' of 'em, how much I was takin' from 'em. Only knew later, when it was too late. You were the only one who saw it clear."

Jeremy shook his head. "You're givin' me credit I can't claim. You were bein' honest, in your way. Honest with yourself. But I wasn't. Not then, not ever. Don't you see? I woulda done the same as you—led 'em on, sweet-talked 'em. Only I couldn't because I—because I—" His jaws and lips continued to work, but the only sound that came forth was almost a croak. His brothers stared in shock. They had seen these attacks before, but not for years. "—because I c-c-can't!" he finally burst out.

Jason hurried to him and clenched his shoulder. "Jeremy...easy."

"You n-n-never—" Jeremy halted, breathing deeply, and continued, forcing himself to stay calm, carefully uttering each word. "—n-never n-knew. What it was like for m-me, bein' the only one who c-couldn't t-talk in a f-family of fast-talkers." Jason glanced at Joshua, who seemed unsurprised.

"Before, we'd all talk together. Then I turned into your problem—the one that wasn't right." He could tell by the change in Jason's eyes this had hit home. "Yeah, I saw it." He felt in charge of himself again for the moment. "And when we got older and the two of you would team up for the razzle-dazzle—just the two of you—and I'd sit quiet, people would say, that Jason, he's a spellbinder, and that Joshua, he can charm the birds out of the trees. But that Jeremy c-c—" The old torment gripped him again: so he had not outgrown it, after all. It clamped his throat, his jaw, his tongue, and would not let them go; it jabbered in his ear the same mockeries it had in his childhood; his invisible friend, his imp. He had to fight it, as he had had to then. "—c-c-can't p-put two words t-t-together!"

The revelation stunned Jason. "Mama's dyin'," he continued softly, as his imp stole away, "that was just the start. Afterwards, it was knowin' I c-couldn't make do. Knowin' people were always thinkin', what's wrong with him? You, too."

"No, Jeremy—"

Jeremy's eyes contradicted him. "To you talkin' is a birthright. Well, mine got stole. And I never got it back. Not like before. Because I do still stutter—down deep—and it won't ever go away. Because the only one who could make it go away is..." He looked up the hill. Then he quickly ran a sleeve across his eyes.

"I never knew," said Jason. "I should have but I didn't."

"I did." They turned to Joshua. "Not at first, when we were kids. But on the voyage. One day the brides were cutting' didoes on deck and you and me came out to talk 'em into behavin' like we wanted, like sweet little misses. And we did it up brown, too, a regular sermon. Jeremy was out there, hangin' around Candy. And he didn't say a word. But she marched up to us and commenced calling us names. You frauds, she said, you razzle-dazzlers, you oughta be ashamed of yourselves, perpetrating your confidence tricks on these girls when you're supposed to be taking care of them. She pointed over at Jeremy and said, look at him, he's ashamed of the pair of you!

"I looked, and I saw she was wrong. Oh, he had that pinched-up, churchgoing look on his face, all right. But it wasn't us he was ashamed of, no, sir. Much as he disapproved of what we were doing, he envied us for it. Like a man with no hands envying a pickpocket. Didn't have to hear him say it, I knew it. That's when I made up my mind to give up the razzle-dazzle. Vowed I'd never again give him reason to feel he wasn't as good as us, that he didn't measure up. I couldn't do that to him, once I knew."

Jason looked like a newborn exposed to the world for the first time. "You never said. Not a whisper."

"Wasn't my place. It was Jeremy's to tell, if he chose."

"All these years, and I find I don't know my own family." He had not only been mistaken about them this once; he had always been mistaken. He looked at Jeremy. "There's nothing I can say to make it right. 'Sorry" doesn't seem nearly enough."

Jeremy had listened to Joshua's account with gratitude, but in some embarrassment for Jason as well as himself. The same care that had moved Joshua on his behalf now moved him. Jason must not feel he had failed to measure up, either; he was still the greatest man Jeremy knew. "But you got 'em here! You and your sweet talk. You've done more for the town than anyone."

"My talk wasn't always so sweet," Jason said. "Oh, there was plenty of it—I'd talk at the drop of a hat, talk till the cows came home, the seas would run dry before I ran out of words to say or breath to say 'em with. But back then it wasn't to outfox people, make 'em see cheese where there were only stones, or wine for tar-water. That came after—after Ma and Pa passed." His brothers listened quietly, and with a feeling of privilege. Jason almost never spoke of the old days, of his young manhood, or of their parents' passing. Now he was "talking honest" indeed, telling things he had never told, as they had done. They wondered where it would lead.

"Wasn't by intention," he continued. "Just came about. Expect I fancied if I talked fast enough and fine enough, I could keep other sorrows from the door. Keep you two from going the way of Jurgen and Judson and Jeroboam." He paused, remembering, and then spoke suddenly. "Everyone saw how Jeremy grieved for her. How it'd never be the same for him without her there to..." His throat tightened; he waited a second before proceeding. "Everyone saw how it was with him."

His brothers had not known, had not guessed. He had never said; not a whisper. "And I hated you," Joshua confessed (but Jason had known it). "Because you never wept for her."

"I wept." He stared down the rows of the dead. "While you two lay asleep. I stood outside in the cold and the tears froze on my cheeks. But you never saw them. I couldn't let you. Because now I wasn't only your brother, I was your father, too. It was my job to stand tall like the evergreens and teach you to do the same, so you'd survive—survive many winters." He looked at Joshua. "Instead I taught you never to weep. Didn't I?"

"Out in the cold," Joshua said quietly, "with the tears freezing on my face."

"We're all carrying the scars from those times," Jeremy reflected. "Looks like we'll carry them forever."

Now Jason recalled his purpose in having lured him home. The afternoon's disclosures, which would thenceforth introduce a new charity into their dealings with one another, did not change that. "Here's where they'll hurt least," he said, "whatever wrongs we've done you notwithstanding. The best medicine for you is...Bolt brothers' business." He shouted it to the hills, and they shouted it back. "Josh?"

"Bolt brothers' business!"

"Jeremy?"

"Bolt brothers' business!"

"Together now!"

"Bolt brothers' business!"

They did not stop there, but continued shouting, competing to see who could do it the loudest. In the end, Jeremy won. It might have been foolish but it had felt good. The three of them laughed together as they had not for a long time. Jeremy asked, "Shouldn't we hug?" So they did. The air seemed freer and the sun warmer than they had before.

"Come home," said Jason. "It's time."

Jeremy surprised him. "Don't know that I can." He quickly explained, "I'd like to—I don't mean that—but I've got someone with me." They did not know about Lizzie yet. "I was going to go back with her. Now I guess I'll ask her to stay."

While he told them of her and Isaac and the settlement, Jericho made his way back to the cabin with Thibideau, whom he had invited to share it (bear grease and all) on condition that Thibideau capture their meals, which Jericho had claimed he would not mind cooking. The arrangement had satisfied the trapper. He dragged his sledge behind him piled with the pelts, the traps, and a leather carryall on top. He rested it outside the door before going in. The house was small, but that was nothing to him; he had passed nights in dugouts, of both kinds. "You can sleep here as long as you like," Jericho promised.

Thibideau turned to the nearer bed. "What about the girl?"

"Girl?" Jericho recognized her at once, though her face was turned away. He ran and knelt at her side.

The voices had roused her. She turned over and squinted at him; the light still hurt her eyes. "Jason?" she said tentatively, and then, hardly believing it, "Jericho?" Her voice sounded thin and frail, like Mrs. Owsley's. Her cheek was hot to the touch. Jericho told the other man so. "Am I dying?" she whispered. "Like Beth?"

He did not recognize the reference. "I won't let you die," he promised. He looked over at Thibideau, to whom for some reason he ascribed a wide store of woodsman's knowledge. "Is there anything we can do for her?"

Thibideau nodded. He picked up the snow-flower, still in its wrappings. "This will cool the fever." Jericho remembered that Joshua had told him the same thing. "I boil it." He started to remove the cloth.

"Wait!" Jericho cried. "Not the flowers, too?"

Thibideau stared at him oddly. "No, I can cut them. I only need the stalk." He went out for a few seconds and returned with a small cookpot. Then he saw that Jericho had neglected to lay a fire or, evidently, to do anything else since moving in. Sighing, he left to gather wood.

Molly was asleep again. Jericho noticed her sketchbook on the floor. He picked it up and raised the cover to peer inside, for no reason more worthy than curiosity. The first drawing arrested his attention. It showed a doe, on the verge of running off; he knew that but he could not say how. He flipped to the next page. This one showed a kingfisher in the moment before taking flight. He continued leafing through from drawing to drawing, including one of himself as a red Indian that made him laugh. He looked as if he were about to run off, too.

There were some drawings of plants as well, and these were well rendered, but the animal studies were the remarkable ones. They succeeded in showing their subjects as still for only a few seconds, between one movement and the next; one had no doubt that in the next second they would leap or soar out of the scene. That their portraitist was obviously self-trained, using techniques of line and shade she had contrived on her own, made her achievement the more impressive. For all of Jericho's skill in delineating the human figure, every one of his subjects looked to be in eternal repose. He now strove for that effect more or less consciously, to disguise the absence of a life exterior to the canvas. Molly had done what he could not; she must be very clever.

No, to describe her so would be to dismiss her, and he must not do that. One day, with training and luck (neither of which might be forthcoming in her circumstances), she could become something very fine. She already was. He studied her face and her body as she slept. Seeing them through the prism of her work, he saw them clearly for the first time. And, seeing her, he saw himself; the moral difference between them defined what he was not but might have been, and been the better artist for it.

"Maybe some day you will marry her, eh?" Thibideau said as he passed with an armload of firewood.

Jericho continued to gaze at her. "If only I might," he murmured. Thibideau did not hear him. Then he was struck with an idea. He ran to his carrying bag and uncased the canvases in it. He had only two with him; he had left a blank one in Ben's backroom and tenting for one more, but had had no space for them in his bag. He removed the cotton wrapping from one of the two and stared at it a long time. Then he crouched over his smaller bag and dug in it for the palette knife.

How much of Molly's experience had been real and how much imagined, she was not sure for a long time afterward, so fantastic did it all seem in retrospect. The early part, her long climb through the hills into the snowfields, she knew to have been genuine, despite the timber wolf she had met. He fled before she could think of drawing him, and made her feel like Red Riding Hood in earnest.

Her head had been burning since she left Seattle. Soon it began to hurt, and with it the back of her neck, which felt as if hot needles were pricking at it. She could hardly bear to look ahead, so fiercely did the white snow glare in the white sun. Hotter, achier, and dizzier she grew till she did not know which way she was going, if she had known to start with. She stumbled onto a huge grey block—a cabin—and once inside, collapsed onto the first flat surface that appeared, after the floor. She fainted, or slept.

Then two men came in: Jericho (if she were not imagining him) and a huge man, like a giant out of a fairy tale. She and Jericho talked, then she slept again, then he forced her to drink of a bitter, blackish tea that burned as it went down (she did not imagine that), and then followed more sleep, interspersed with glimpses, actual or not, of Jericho standing over her with a brush and palette; the room all black except for the red fire, with two bodies, like hibernating bears', huddled beside it; herself in a boat off Alki Point and Jericho towing her in to shore (this, she knew to have been a product of her fancy), and then herself outdoors, flying over the snow—no, supported in a giant's arms.

When she next woke she was in her own bed. Candy—not Jericho?—was sitting by her. Christopher was there, too, but asleep; just like him! At first she thought she had merely dreamed a long dream; as she had, but that had not been all. The dream had ended, the fever had passed, and with it something indefinable, like the shadow of a bird's wing fluttering in the rafters, on a flight that had been happy but careless, like Jericho's. With the advent of caring—real, grown-up caring for another person as a distinct being, rather than a servant of one's own cravings—the flight had ceased.

Candy told her how she had been found: how Jason's search party (which it happened, and which Candy happened to mention, had included Brian) met a trapper who had found her on the mountain and was carrying her back. Their relief on seeing her was so great, Jason chose to overlook the reason for the trapper's presence.

"Was Jericho there?"

Candy put the question down to the fever recently abated. She did not know how to answer without sounding unkind. "I'm afraid he's left for good. I know you ran off hoping to find him, hoping he'd take you with him, like Kate. But, sweetie—" She had stitched together this conclusion from the various reports she had collected of Molly's last conversations before leaving. She could not know it was almost the opposite of the truth, and Molly was too weak to contradict her. She had gone to say goodbye to Jericho, and to give him the portrait she had done of him as a keepsake.

All this was too much for her to say; the most she could manage was to correct Candy's other misapprehension. "He's in the cabin," she said. "He nursed me."

"They didn't see him. Jason would have told me."

"Hiding from him," Molly whispered.

Candy recognized that this was not impossible. "We'll go see. When you're better. And if he is there you can thank him." She bent and kissed her forehead. "Now sleep." Molly did not resist the command. She felt very, very tired.

Resorting to the porch for a dose of cool air, Candy found Jeremy waiting at the foot of the steps. She fought down the impulse to run back inside. He was there to inquire after Molly, whose rescue everyone in town was talking about. But he had found that his feelings recoiled from the prospect of treading the porch, the scene of their divorce and his disillusionment. They stared at each other across a canyon Candy knew to be of her own making. Eventually he asked the question he had come to ask.

"She's weak," Candy said, "but the doctor thinks she'll be all right." She did not mention, as she had not mentioned upstairs, how near a thing he had intimated it had been; he was of the opinion that some recent excitement of the blood had left her unduly susceptible. Nor did Candy disclose the worry that had racked her till Molly was returned, though Jeremy could guess that for himself.

"I'd have come before," he said, "but I had someone else to see to. She's all right, too."

There was an interval. "I'm sorry," Candy said, suddenly and awkwardly. "For what I said. What I did."

Jeremy mulled this over. "Guess I would be, too." He started to go.

"Jeremy!" She did not want to ask, hardly dared to hear the answer, but if he would not say then she must. At worst, she had nothing more to lose. "Our understanding?" He did not answer, and his expression did not change. Couldn't he help her just a little? "Do we still have one?" She wished her voice had not been shaking.

He mulled this over, too. "I'm not sure we ever did." This pierced to the heart, though she had tried to prepare herself for it. "To have an understanding, you have to understand. And you didn't. I gave you the chance, but you didn't."

"Did Jason? Did Joshua?"

"We're brothers." He could not explain the difference beyond that.

"And you can forgive them, but not me," she said bitterly.

"I could. It wouldn't..." He sighed. This was something else she would never understand. "Everything in my life—my family, the mountain, you—always just came to me. I never chose it, never thought about it."

Her worst fear all those weeks he had been gone was realized. "And now you have."

He nodded. "I found out things weren't as perfect as I thought."

By that she took him to mean her. "And that woman who came with you? Is she part of your choice?"

"No," said a voice from the path. "She isn't."

They turned to see Lizzie standing a little inside the gate with Miranda in her arms. Candy had been standing in almost the same spot when the three of them had entered town. Lizzie had noticed her at once and made a point, while she was watching, of demonstrating her own claim on Jeremy, in case there were any doubt. This evening she had guessed where he was going and followed him to make sure. And now she was. "Time Miranda and I started home."

Jeremy approached her. "Lizzie, I've been meaning to ask you—"

She put her fingers to his lips. "No. If that was what you wanted, you'd have said so long before now." His face, which could not conceal any feeling that ever visited him, however briefly (it was one of the things both women loved about him), unwillingly acknowledged that she was right. She looked beyond him to the porch and Candy. "I thought I'd run across an abandoned claim. But I see it wasn't abandoned, after all." Her eyes returned to Jeremy's. "If ever things change—and they do, sometimes—you know where to find me."

He nodded. "The next valley over."

She took his hands one last time. "Tell you one thing. Next time the settlement sees a man like you, I'll tie him to a tree before I let him go."

He smiled. "You wouldn't!"

Her face grew serious. "I would, though." He bent to kiss her. She held him at bay. "I'll take the wagon back."

"You know how to drive it?"

"I ought to. It was mine till I gave it up." She looked toward the porch again. "For the common good." Watching her go, Candy could not help admiring her. Nor could she keep herself from hoping, after what that woman had said and Jeremy had agreed to, that he would run to her, clasp her in his arms, and say to her, We've been too long apart, I can't live without you. But he said no such thing. Indeed he said nothing, only nodded formally and left.

"...and he didn't say anything," she concluded the account she unreeled to Jason when he paid a call late the next evening. He had had a little of it from Jeremy, guessed most of the rest, and stopped by to console her, as well as to look in on Molly, whom he found unexpectedly bright-eyed. The same could not be said of her sister.

"Expect he had nothing else to say," he told her. "Not just then. First he'll have to work it out in his mind, and in his heart. He will." He was standing on the porch, gazing out at what he could see of the street, only a few feet from the swing where she was sitting.

"He was never like this before," she said.

"He was never turned out of doors before. First by his brother, then by his sweetheart."

"We should have known better."

Jason shrugged. "Perhaps."

"Why didn't we?"

He was still turned away from her, facing the night. "We're too much the same, you and I, Candy Pruitt. Too full of our own righteous convictions. But it's unavoidable really. We live beleaguered by voices we're called on to answer—me for the men, you for the women. I do it with the razzle-dazzle—your word, and a fair one it was—you by talkin' honest."

"You showed me there's a place for the razzle-dazzle."

"As you taught me there's a time for honesty. You and Jeremy. And for that I banished him. What fools we mortals be!"

"Oh, don't fling your Shakespeare at me!" The outburst was so violent, it brought him about to face her. "It never applies and it never helps. You only do it because it makes you sound cleverer than everybody else. I hope I never hear another line of Shakespeare as long as I live!"

Jason did not seriously believe anyone could ever dislike hearing Shakespeare. "The lady doth prot—" He stopped at the look she gave him. "Or, in other words..."

She looked away. "What shall I do if he chooses her, Jason? What can I do?"

"Thought you said she left town."

"He may follow her."

"Not if I know my brother. He made it up with me, he'll make it up with you."

"But it won't be the same as before. He's changed."

Jason knew she was right. He had seen it himself but not realized it till now. "He's become a man. You wouldn't have him stay a boy all his days?"

She thought it over. "Why not?"

The wish was still with her when she stopped in to hug Molly good night. "Never grow up," she said. "Never ever ever."

Molly answered with a smile of sympathy that made her appear the older of the two. Then Candy knew.

"Oh," she said, trying not to look disappointed. "When?" It could not have been long before. Her sister merely shrugged. "Would you like to...talk?" Molly told her she had; with Biddie. "Oh," Candy said again. And she learned of the role Biddie had played in her own all-but-absence.

She thanked Biddie for it the next morning, while they were making the beds. "You're her big sister," Biddie assured her, "not me."

"Not any more. I've been her mother for a long time now. I know that. I had to be, you see. Our own mother was too frail, God rest her. By the time I was Molly's age I knew how to do, oh, so many things. But I was still frightened."

"Frightened? Why?"

"Because I didn't have a big sister to talk to." She smiled, and a moment later Biddie did the same. "My father would have fainted if I'd asked him. And my mother assumed I knew—though where she imagined I'd have found out..."

"I always thought you knew everything. Since we were girls. Goodness, you always behaved as if you did."

"I suppose so." She smiled again, this time ruefully. "Nothing but a razzler-dazzler."

"Beg your pardon?" Candy shook her head. "But if you didn't learn from your parents, how did you?"

"How do any of us? How did you?"

"From Maddie. And she had most of it wrong. But it didn't matter. You know, nearly everything people tell you is wrong, but it makes you feel almost as good as if it was true."

Candy decided to put off that question to another day. "I found out from books. My father had a very...eclectic library. And I got a lot wrong, too. But once we came here, sharing a house with ninety-nine other girls—"

"I know! And I once thought I wanted to be a nurse!" She shuddered. Then a thought struck her. "Do you suppose young men know any more about themselves than we did?"

"Men! I doubt it. They certainly don't know much about us."

"Isn't it strange," Biddie mused, "that as long as people have been on this earth, they grow up so ignorant?"

"I know one who won't. Thanks to her big sister."

"Oh, there wasn't much I could tell her. She shares the house, too. And she's often observed the woodland creatures at their frolics." Her face took on a sly cast. "Such as Jericho."

"Biddie!" Candy was shocked, a little; but she laughed. That showed her progress: a week previous, she would not have found the subject funny at all.

The day of her sister's departure arrived sooner than she expected, though none too soon for her sister. The headmistress of the young ladies' academy in Boston, one of the first of its type, wrote to inform Candy that circumstances (which had included Lottie's promise of a modest endowment) allowed of their admitting Molly right away, in mid-term, or as promptly as ships' and coaches' and railroads' timetables made practicable, for a period of three years or longer, depending. Three years! When she returned she would be a woman.

The girl she was, however, looked forward to the journey as a prodigious adventure. It would take the better part of a month, and this time her brother would not be with her. Now trains spanned the continent; half her days would be spent on them. Aaron Stempel, acting on Lottie's behalf, had worked it all out with startling efficiency. He had arranged the reservations in advance as far as he could and given Molly the addresses of agents on both coasts whom he could trust to manage the rest. He had also arranged a schedule of payments to the school. A cousin of Candy's had wired back that she and her husband were agreeable to taking Molly on the holidays. Candy sadly envisioned Christmases without her.

Shortly before her ship was due to put out, her two erstwhile protectors were taking turns praising her from opposite sides of the bar. "When she comes back she'll be a lady of quality," Lottie predicted. "Her life will be different. Won't be much room in it for a pair of old wharf rats like us. But it'll be better—better for her."

"Aye," the captain sighed, "but she was sich a pretty little t'ing." And by all the saints, who should run in just then but herself? She was dressed for traveling, and appeared by her deportment to have left behind already the skid town's tarry, salty, sawdusty side. She stretched across the counter to grant Lottie a hug, a kiss, and a goodbye and then did her perennial customer the same honors. After a last look round (which might be her last for all time, if Lottie's forecast were accurate) she ran out again.

Lottie noticed Clancey was blinking more than usual. "'tis the smuts," he said. "Town's been troubled with 'em a good deal."

"Smuts," she agreed, tossing him her bar rag. He lifted it to his nose and blew loudly.

As Molly made her way back to the landing where she had left her bags sitting, she met Brian, not accidentally. He had spent half the morning searching for her, and had played truant to do it. He asked if he might write to her at school. Since the details of the routine she would soon take up were wholly mysterious to her, she was able to answer in all honesty, "I don't know if I'll have time to write back." This engendered in him a disappointment so devastating, she regretted at once having said it and amended it with a moral sureness new to her. "Of course you may write. I'll look forward to it." His smile of gratitude made her glad she had done so. She would miss Brian.

Her farewells on the dock were sweet but remote, as if she had already consigned them to memory. Candy and Christopher were there, and Jason and Joshua (Jeremy had stopped by the dormitory earlier), and Biddie and the other brides. And Ben, who spoke the last words she heard from any of Seattle's residents: "Too bad that Jericho up and leavin' like that. He never did paint my picture!"

Minutes later she was sailing westward across the Sound, watching her former home dwindle till it looked like a toy town she had seen once in a dime museum. Now it appeared in its correct proportion to the great forests that framed it on three sides, the great mountains that lofted above them, the great clouds that lofted above all, and the great ocean that lay yet so far out of view but which they were slowly approaching. Her days in Seattle now seemed more than anything else like a vast collection of drawings she had made herself. Some of them were still unfinished.

The two things she would have liked to draw but could not, because they were too new, too private, and too full of meaning to her, were discoveries she had made almost at the end. One of them, she had made that very morning.

She had gone to the wood a last time to bid it goodbye, and to the glade that held no terror for her now. Music rippled forth from it: the same tune as before, "Blind Mary." It was not Jericho's music, she knew now, for he was gone. Whose was it, then? She entered the glade to see.

The player was bowed over the dulcimer with her eyes shut. When her tune was done she opened them and lifted her head. She showed little surprise at seeing Molly; much less than Molly felt seeing her. She realized for the first time how close in age they were. She had not noticed it that night in the woods, or the day the girl had returned her bracelet. She felt an unexpected and joyful unity with her here, in this secret place the two of them shared, which the music bottled like wine.

It was not Jericho's music, but she heard it in her head every time she thought of her other discovery, as she did now at the rail, with the salt in her nostrils and the wind making free with her hair. She had gone back to the cabin as Candy had promised she might, to see whether he were there. Candy waited outside, but comfortably, for the air was warmer than it had been before and the snows about the cabin had melted. The interior lay in a golden light, filtered through the dust that clung to the windows. Molly stepped lightly, for every step seemed like an assault on the pervading stillness.

Just after entering she saw them next to the hearth, one on each side: the canvases resting on the easels; the only ones he had had with him. He had left them there for her. Yet he could not have known she would return; he must have acted on faith. The canvases had been painted over, with a passion so immediate and so careless of niceties that bits of the originals showed at the edges. Seeing them, she understood the music of the glade. Having heard it, she understood the paintings. Both spoke of the same thing: youth, spring, innocence, earthly paradise, but for the artist, alas! a paradise lost too soon.

The painting on the right was the job he had delayed doing so long, the portrait of her. In it she was holding the snow-flower. She gazed in wonder at herself. She could never have been so beautiful. Like the creatures in her own drawings, she was a breath away from escaping, poised to run, to leap, to fly away. What he had never been able to catch before, he had caught in her. The light of life streamed through her and out ahead of her, to bear her along with it on an infinitely expanding course.

But it was the companion painting that made her soul lament and rejoice. It was a self-portrait of the artist, not as he was but as he had been, or in another life might have been, at the same age as she and with a countenance free of shadow, young and fair and immaculate of spirit. In that vision he had left for her, the same shining path that opened to her opened to him, a promise of happiness and of spring eternal, paradise regained.

And he was holding the same flower.