Doolin settled in his chair and his eyes blazed at the woman. “See there? You must be mistaken.”

Down the block was Madame Mary Pierce’s whorehouse-hotel, so her chippies walked in, shaking snow from their coats, and stood at the bar reading catalogues and taking sweet gum out of their mouths. Bill sidled up to a girl with green eyes and henna-dyed hair who looked just about sixteen.

“Do you know who Tom King is?”

“Does he come here?” she asked.

“Tonight he did. He’s a gunslinger from away back. Put many a mean desperado under flowers. That’s him at the rear table.”

The girl looked and saw what she thought was a man in wing chaps with one leg over the arm of a chair, a red woolen scarf lumped up on his face, turning an empty shot glass.

“The feller with the scarf?”

“He’s fairly swooned over you since you walked in.”

“You mean he wants me?”

Bill stripped a two-dollar bill from his clip. “Asked me to give you this.”

The chippy dragged her wool purse off the bar top and swung it as she walked over to Miss Moore. There were words and then the woman in the greased chaps glared at Bill and out of spite squealed a chair away with her boot and hauled herself up on the girl’s arm.

Doolin scowled and turned away in his chair. Newcomb and Broadwell folded over with their sniggering. My brother shouted, “You two love birds snuggle up in this cold, y’hear?”

They slogged through snow and Eugenia heeled off her boots on the newspaper that was spread on the carpet; then they climbed the stairs to an upper room.

Later, Eugenia sat top-naked on the bed pulling boots back on over her wool socks and jeans and the girl lay flat on her back with the sheet drawn up to her neck, staring at the yellow gas lamp next to the door. “Some of the others, they said I’d get around to this someday. They said it would be a relief.”

When Eugenia returned to Guthrie the next night, Mr. Mundy was in the dark at the dining-room table with knife and fork in his hands. She was wearing a collared white cotton dress over which she tied on a yellow flowered apron. She carried a candlestick out from the kitchen cupboard.

“It gets dark so early these days. Don’t you want light in here? Your supper smells delicious. You get along without me very well.”

Mr. Mundy carefully cut up two lamb chops, crossed his silverware on his plate, and sat very still with his fists on the tablecloth. He could hear Mrs. Mundy pumping water into a percolator and lifting the black lids on the stove. She called, “Do you want your coffee now?”

He didn’t answer. The candlelight fluttered.