Her need conquering her uncertainty, she called to him hoarsely, “You got any liquor?”

“What?” He cupped a hand over one ear and tilted that side of his head in her direction.

“I say: you got any drinking whiskey with you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Oh.” One of her hands made a fist and kneaded her stomach. “I got this ache in my gut and thought a little liquor might ease it some.”

“Oh,” he said and thought about that. “I don’t have any with me, but I can get you some.”

“Well—” She sounded doubtful but vaguely, politely hopeful. “I had some myself but seem like I don’t know where it got to.”

“It wouldn’t take me long to go and come back,” he said.

“I don’t want to trouble you—”

“No trouble. I’m not doing anything. You wait. I’ll be back in half an hour’s time.” He slapped the reins lightly on the horse’s neck and turned.

“Hey!” she called. “Wait a minute—”

He paused, standing in the stirrups and craning his head around to her.

“I don’t want everybody knowing my business. Don’t come back here. You see that little copse yonder twixt your fields and mine?” He nodded. “I’ll be there.”

He rode away, first at a trot, then abandoning the road and galloping over the fields toward Beulah Land.

She was in the copse when he returned twenty minutes later. She wore a man’s coat, one of Alonzo’s, for warmth, but she still shook a little. She got up from the log where she had sat when he rode up, but she sat down again when he got off the horse and unstoppered the jug he had brought. She reached for the jug and drank directly from it, he helping her to hold it steady. When she raised her head and took a breath, he set the jug down on the ground beside her and stepped a little way apart, from courtesy.

When the whiskey had warmed her, she looked up at him. She examined his face critically, and finding no scorn or pious reproval in it, nor gawking pity either, only an open, calm look, she relaxed. “Seem like my guts bubble and thresh about, less they got liquor to hold onto.”

He nodded. “It’s happened to me like that.”

She seized on this as a pleasantry. “Has it now!”

“Oh, yes,” Leon said.

She touched the jug with the toe of her shoe. “You want some, you go ahead. Only I got no glass with me. You can wipe off the lip good.”

“Not right now,” he said, his tone suggesting politely that he might want and take a swallow a minute later.