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manager shifted his weight when the message stopped. “Yes?”
    “Nimbus train gets into Poachum tomorrow around eight. You’ll make the turnaround for the mill, mister.”
    Randolph headed for the door, then stopped and looked back. “What do you know about that lawman down at Nimbus?”
    The agent unwrapped a plug of dark tobacco and opened his clasp knife, which he’d sharpened down to a talon. “I hear he don’t like garlic.”

CHAPTER THREE
     
    A short man, his hair like cotton in an aspirin bottle, walked through the station door carrying a double-barreled shotgun, a marshal’s badge dangling from his sagging coat. Behind him was a big, balding priest, smoking a briar pipe with a bent stem. “Sid,” the marshal said, “what’d that man want?”
    “Ticket to Poachum. He was asking about your friend at Nimbus.”
    The lawman looked after the mill manager, who was walking north along River Street. “His clothes fit too right.”
    “Sounds like he’s from up North,” the agent explained.
    “What’s he want with Byron?”
    Sid Laney shrugged. “At least he don’t look Italian.”
    The priest slapped his forehead like an idiot, chuckled, then followed the old marshal out into the sun. They walked down River Street among the musky trappers and wormy dogs to the office, a high-ceilinged box with a rusty jail cell at its rear. “Ah,” the priest said, stepping into the shade.
    On the main desk sat a pail full of murky ice holding two crockery bottles, their stoppers wired down tight. The men sat in a pair of squawking steamer chairs and slopped beer into a pair of mugs. The priest took a long draw, and the marshal came up for air with his white mustache sopping. They both blinked and for a long time said nothing. Across the street, a tugboat whistle gave a long hoot and a pilot cursed a deckhand in a rising harangue. The priest cleared his throat and Merville looked at him.
    “I’m giving a good homily this Sunday. It’s about Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple.”
    “Methodists can’t go to no Catholic church.”
    The priest took another drink. “You’re not a Methodist.”
    “I was baptized one, me.”
    The priest leaned a black elbow on the desk. “You never darkened the door of any Methodist church. Your father was Catholic.”
    “Religion comes from the mamma.” The marshal waved his hand as though brushing away a fly. “You can give me the short side of your sermon right now.”
    The priest folded his hands. “It’s something you can relate to. It’s about how even though anger is natural, and sometimes to a purpose, it always has to be controlled.”
    The old man sucked his mustache. “Why you telling me that? You still mad I knocked down that trapper?”
    The priest shook his head. “The Walton man took thirty-six stitches and was unconscious for two days. You can’t tell me you weren’t excessively angry.”
    “Mais, non,” Merville said. “He was full of radiator-made and trying to kill little Nellie the whore with a beer bottle over at Buzetti’s. I wasn’t mad. I just did what I had to do, me.”
    The priest looked at him with expressionless eyes, a trick he used to make his parishioners form their own notions about how things really are. “Somehow I can’t believe that.”
    Merville took another drink. The beer had warmed and the mug formed no ring on the desk. “Father, if a nun had to face two drunk deckhands swinging razors on each other in a alley, she’d at least lasso one of ’em with her rosary.”
    The priest stood and drew off his mug, then wiped a finger over his long upper lip. “I’ll come by tomorrow, maybe.”
    “If she had a shotgun,” the marshal grumbled, “she might of used it. You can’t let people kill each other.”
    “Goodbye,” the priest said.
    “If you see that Yankee, let me know what he does. I don’t want him messing with Byron. Poor bastard’s got enough on his back as it is.”
    The priest’s face