I was still trying to picture the wineglasses—the two aged servants, or more probably four: I expect the crones got in on it too—and the beautiful young woman grinding one up each day. Did they have a special grindstone, such as the Indians use for grinding corn? Macabre though it was, I wanted to know the mechanics. So I ignored the part about marrying and killing and asked for details.

“No, we use a chemist’s pestle,” Cecily said, spreading strawberry jam on a second bun. “It used to be such fun, but the results have been so disappointing that we’ve all grown rather tired of it—you could do the one for tonight, if you’d care to, Ben.”

It was the first time coming West that anyone had called me by my given name.

7.

“My father was quite a good friend of Mr. Darwin’s,” Cecily told me a night or two later, sitting on my bed. “Mr. Darwin took a great interest in mollusks, as you probably know—barnacles particularly. But he was never quite satisfied with his work on their reproductive systems, which are rather complicated. He wanted my father to carry on with it, but my father liked mammals better. Mr. Darwin quite fancied me when I was a young child—he perceived that I had a brain—so he tried to get me to go on with the barnacles, and I did for a while, to please him. But it then turned out that I was far more gifted as a botanist. At first it seemed I was better at the botany than at the drawing, but now quite the reverse is the case. I’m a competent botanist, but it’s the drawing I really care about.”

Then she got off the bed and walked out on my balcony, readjusting her gown as she went. The wind was low, for once, the prairie almost silent. There was no light in the long bunkhouse where Isinglass and the cowboys slept.

“I expect he knows we’re coupling,” Cecily said. “He’s a quick old brute.”

At that point I had no idea what Isinglass knew, or what he thought. He tramped in each day at dusk, ate a beefsteak and a large bowl of chili with a powdered wineglass in it, washed that down with about a quart of whiskey, heard my colorful chapters, and tramped off without comment to bed. Or, if he did comment, it was only to make brief criticisms of my hero’s ineptitudes.

Then, at dawn, he rode off with his cowboys as Cecily left with her greyhounds and her easel.

Once or twice, on days when I was several chapters ahead, I was invited to accompany Cecily on her botanical expeditions, but my total ignorance of botany, coupled with a feeble interest in weeds or grasses which she found passionately absorbing, soon proved an irritant to her.