I told him I was a hired hand and I lived in a bunkhouse at Riley’s but I had half a mind to enlist as a U. S. deputy marshal soon as Grat and Bill were acquitted in California.

“I think the dishes are done,” he said, and got up out of his rocker.

Julia and I strolled down to the pond where Hereford cattle chewed the sweet grass and stared, and green duckweed encroached on the water. I said, “Your dad and I hit it off real good. We see eye to eye on a lot of things. We’re just like hammer and tongs.”

She walked barefoot through the grass with her head down and I galumphed in my boots to catch up. I slung my arm around her and she said, “When my sister’s gone I lock the bedroom door and cry into my pillow, or sometimes I take my clothes off and swim in the pond so my tears don’t show. If I owned a house it would have a special room with dark blue walls and a leather fainting couch and a drawer full of hankies.”

I said, “What do you have to be sad about?”

Her eyes stayed on me for a second and then she turned to walk to the house where she sat in a swing with her cheek against one of the ropes while I leaned against the hemlock tree playing soft on my Harpoon. At nine she walked me to my horse and I gave her the stolen teakwood letter opener and the bottle of perfume still in its velvet box that I picked up at the auctioned house.

I wanted to tell her then that I loved her; that I’d get a steady job and marry her, or some real loot and sweep her away; but she touched her finger to my lips and handed me a page of diary paper folded up four times. “Don’t read it here. Read it later.”

I could see her at the screen door as I rode away; then the screen door closed and I stopped my horse in the center of a road under a white moon. I tore open the paper and held it close as my nose until I could make out her writing. It was Scripture:

“ ‘But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.’ Paul to the Thessalonians, chapter 4, verses 10 to 13.” That just about sunk it.