Jamie nodded. “I’d guess she’d be tired. You too, after that carouse the bunch of you went on last night.”

Scully looked at him then. “It was a late night.”

“I wouldn’t ask you anything you’d have to lie about. You know that.”

Scully looked away again. “I never covered up anything for anybody.”

“I know it.” He paused then, looking away also. Wanting to be gone before anyone else came out the door. He said, “I’ll get on home myself I think.”

Scully nodded. Then said, “You ought to marry her, you know.”

Jamie grinned at him. “I don’t know, Scully. I don’t know she’d have me. I thought about it but I’m not sure either of us is the marrying sort, her or me. Seems like all it might do would make bad things worse and chip off some of the good in the process. You know what I mean?”

Scully nodded again, the dome of his head pale-bald in the darkness. “I always thought of marriage as a way to death. But then it’s not such a grand thing, being alone, you get older.”

“I’ll think about that,” Jamie told him. “Like I said though, I have doubts she’d have me. Right now at least.”

Scully was kneading the fingers of one hand into the wrist of the other. Sore, wanting to play, to get away from Jamie. He said, “Right now’s probably the best time for it, you ask me.”

“Think so?”

Scully looked at him. Shook his head. “What do I know? I’m the least expert.”

She was not at the house. He lighted a lantern and carried it to the derelict barn and loosed the two driving horses from their straight stalls and followed them to the trough by the pump and pumped water until the trough was overflowing and listened to them drink, the long knotty gurgling pipes of their throats working. Once, he’d liked horses. It would not be so many years though and the motorcars would function year-round. Roads would continue to improve, the cars too. Sometimes the future lay open like a staggered deck of cards. If you were not bound to the past. The smell of horses, the sweet and sour of their coats, the dried sweat turned to dust rising off a smacked flank, links of a chain cut through and through but unbroken still in the small hidden glands working memory. He carried scoops of sweet feed from the bin to their mangers and they turned from the water and came back eager to their stalls and he fastened them to the manger-chains. Carried forkfuls of what remained of the good hay to them. He needed to buy hay for the winter. It was growing light and he went to the trough and picked up the lantern and went to the house. Other times no soul could say what the morrow carried.