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girl — boots, dress and all — into the tub and said, “Now it’ s yer turn. Wash yerself. You stink.” She dragged off his wife’s last dress and then the boots and the wooden feet and crouched shivering in the shallow grey water with her arms across her breasts. He slugged whiskey from the upended bottle and examined his pecker, flicking off pebbles of smegma beneath the foreskin, stood and pissed a long arc into the tub and laughed and said, “That’ll warm ye up.” But he saw that she was weeping and could not evade him or escape the tub without the purchase of her feet.
    The complexity of the situation, the misfire of his drunken overtures, now self-seen as awkward, if not moronic, enraged him. His first impulse was to strike, but unwitting, the impulse transmuted to his limbs became something else. He lifted Good Luck roughly from the tainted water, wrapping her in the quilt, and fell to examining the scars of her stumps , which he rubbed dry with a sheet, disturbed by the innocence of her pudenda fully displayed for him in the act of mercy. The scars were angry, puckered, purple lines etched clumsily into the whiteness of her flesh. “Do they fret ye?” he asked. She shook her head. “Some blistered,” he said. “I will find ye better boots.” He tipped water from the boots and dried them and dried the carved feet, pulling the sheets from the bed and using them to sop up the water. Then he left the boots to air with the sheepskins hung on the back of a chair, rolled Good Luck in the quilt with a pillow under her head, and said to sleep. He blew out the lamps and sat in his new shirt in a captain’s chair by the glass window with the Henry and a box of shiny brass cartridges, felt for the brass follower with his fingers, drew it up against the spring to the top of the barrel, twisted the magazine open, and counted a dozen cartridges into the tube. Then he twisted the magazine closed and eased the follower down to the last cartridge lest the snap of the new spring accidentally set off the primers.
    He stirred ere dawn, convinced he was being watched through the glass window where he had carelessly slept. He remembered the blacksmith’s fleer as he counted out the money. He remembered the bones emerging from the snow, the burned-out wagons, the desolate campsites, the litter of corpses along the road coming up, the accumulated calculus of carnage vexing toward him, low breathing and indistinguishable motions just beyond his senses. Stop and die, he thought, slipping out of the hotel the back way to strangle the blacksmith in his sooty bed above the forge and retrieve the horses and tack. Flames from the burning smithy illuminated their backs as they rode away, long black shadows preceding them, deforming in the ruts, pursued by the slobber and shriek of horses in their panic, the thunder of guns as men shot the trapped horses through the burning stable walls. He said to the girl riding out, “I don ’t believe y’ve ever seen a body kiss before.” She shook her head. “What strange world were ye a-born in?” And then he said, “I kilt the horse-shoer because he was blabbing about us.” And then after a silence, when they had left the last of the Leesburg townsite and diggings behind and had seen nobody but a nigger with a wooden yoke and two steaming buckets of night soil, he said, “I don’t believe yer ever going to speak to me.” She shook her head. “I don’t take it personal,” he said. She wore a black full skirt hiked up to get her legs across the saddle; her boots cut into her flesh just below the knee and her thighs were bare except for the lace-hemmed lavender pantalets in the morning twilight. She had a warm wool coat, a knitted cap and a scarf and seemed, on the whole, pleased with herself.
    Epithalamium
    The weather held. They travel led fast at first, heading east from Leesburg, taking