Edwin works hard to perform well. He has moments of particular triumph. In Grass Valley, his Iago is so persuasive that one drunken miner draws a gun and shoots, shouting at Edwin, “You’re a sneaking no-account cur and you’ll get what’s coming to you!” Edwin dives to the stage along with the rest of the cast, and the play only continues when everyone in the audience has voluntarily disarmed.

His father left in October. In November Edwin turned nineteen, and now it’s late December. The company arrives in Downieville, a town of fifteen hotels and twice as many saloons. Downieville sits at the fork of the Downie and Yuba Rivers, the mountains cupped like hands around it. The trail in is too steep for carts or wagons. Only the horses can manage it.

In the spring, the sound of rushing water would have been deafening. In December, ice has narrowed and muted the rivers. Edwin shakes the horseback out of his legs by walking down to the banks with Old Spudge. The air is icy, the sky low. Edwin pulls his hands into his sleeves to warm them.

Old Spudge is telling him a story, something he’d read in the newspapers back when they were still in San Francisco, long before he ever thought to find himself in Downieville. “There was a woman lynched here, the first woman ever to be lynched in California. It stuck with me,” Old Spudge says. “Terrible story.

“Juanita Something or Other. Twenty-six years old. And little. Slip of a girl. Stabbed a miner, popular fellow. Lots of friends. So they dragged her from the courthouse by her hair all the way to the river here. Rigged a scaffold. That’s when Juanita really showed her sand. Put the noose around her own neck, shouted, ‘Adios, señors,’ and jumped into eternity. That’s the reason I remember it so well. Because of the sand.” Old Spudge’s eyes, barely visible beneath his hat and above his scarf, are red and watery. He loves a woman with sand.

By all reports, Joe Cannon had tried to break Juanita’s door down the night before she killed him. He went back the next day, either to apologize or to finish what he’d started; here reports vary.

The press had mostly taken the woman’s side. She had every right to defend herself, they said. Mob action (and against a woman!) was a stain on the whole state. She would still be alive today if she’d been white, they said. It was the newspapers that gave her that operatic ending. They also changed her name. She was never Juanita. She was Josefa.

What Old Spudge is trying to tell Edwin is that they’ll soon be performing Othello for a lynch mob. Edwin might want to calibrate his Iago accordingly.