Will Isinglass and Cecily Snow went back to Winds’ Hill to resume their strenuous but I suppose not entirely unsweetened contest of wills. Cecily finished the drawings for her great book, but not before Isinglass got her with child a third time. This time, not to be thwarted, he found and took away the useful herbs recommended by the old Comanche woman; more than that, he nailed Cecily into her spacious third-floor rooms—for several months her food was sent up to her on a little elevator that Lord Snow had devised some twenty years before.

In the end, though, Cecily beat even Old Whiskey. She had had the forethought to hide the rope that Lord Snow had used in his great days as an alpinist. Just before the child was due she slid down the rope during a blizzard and escaped on her thoroughbred, making her way over a route cowboys call the Dim Trail into the Blue Mounds of Kansas. Of course, an expedition was raised at once; half the cowboys on the plains were sent after her, but only her sidesaddle was ever found. Most people now believe she died in the blizzard, but Tully—it was the last time I spoke to him, just before his own death—did claim that he had talked with a Whiskey Glass cowboy, a member of the posse, who claimed to have come across a coyote dragging a human afterbirth through the snow.

A few of the more radical fellows argue that Cecily Snow survived the blizzard and made it back to England—terribly disfigured and heavily veiled, some claim, though that sounds like Monk Lewis to me—and lived to direct the long legal battle mounted by Lord Snow’s nephews, which eventually destroyed the Whiskey Glass ranch.

As to Cecily, I can’t say—I’ve not bothered to tour the Cavendish or the Montstuart demesnes in search of her—but it’s certain that Will Isinglass, the scourge of Kiowas and Comanches, suffered a long dismemberment at the torture stake of the law—until, in the end, the three million acres he once ruled had shrunk to fifty thousand. In his heyday fifty thousand acres would not have pastured his remuda.

I read of his death in a rooming house in Trenton, New Jersey, where I was conducting a pallid romance with a quarrelsome and affected parlormaid not half so appealing as Kate Molloy.