Asia learns what has happened from the newspaper. She opens it and the first things she sees are the paper’s black borders and a sketch of her brother’s face. Sleeper, rushing to her side, tries through her incoherent cries to understand what’s wrong. He can’t. Asia is screaming.

Soon enough she’s in control again, all ice and iron. Yet the hysteria returns and returns, never triumphant, never vanquished. She wishes she were dead.

At the first opportunity, she goes alone to retrieve John’s packet. One letter she burns. One name she feels she must protect. She does this in the cold fireplace, blowing the ashes apart, so no scrap remains to be read. The other letters she takes to Sleeper, who’d never known they were in the house. During her continual breakdowns, he’s been solicitous. The appearance of the letters makes him angry.

A US marshal arrives, forbidding them to go outside. Asia thinks they’re being imprisoned, which they are, but also protected. An angry crowd is gathered in the street. In an excess of innocence, Sleeper gives the letters to the marshal, including the one addressed to Mother. He stresses that only his wife had known of their existence. The house is searched, even the nursery with its crying children, in case John is hiding in a wardrobe or under a bed.

A guard is placed at every door.

—

June is on tour in Cincinnati. He gives the desk clerk a cheerful wave as he sets off for a morning walk. “So you haven’t heard,” the desk clerk says and then wishes he could bite the words back. He doesn’t want to be the one to tell.

June turns around. “What do you mean by that?”

One of the housekeepers comes into the lobby on the run. “Upstairs,” she says, seizing him by the arm. “Quick. Quick!” A mob of some five hundred people is right behind her. They’ve stripped the lampposts of June’s playbills and come to hang him. June is still on the stairs when he hears them cramming into the lobby, shouting his name. If this were California, he’d be swinging from a lamppost before day’s end.

But the clerk manages to convince them that June left in the night. June spends the day hidden in a stuffy attic room, saved by the hotel staff, every one of whom holds his life in their hands, not one of whom gives him away.

—

Joe is on the Moses Taylor, headed for Panama. After Australia, he’d worked in San Francisco, in a job June got for him at Wells Fargo & Company. He’s been away three years. The authorities find it suspicious that he chose the date of April 13th to start home.