Finally he got up and went over to a three-cornered closet which had been built across a corner of the room, and drew aside the curtain and looked in. The clothes which he had left hanging there must have been put away in a trunk. Now there was nothing inside but a fishing rod, a broken shotgun and an old umbrella. On the shelf were a stack of cigar boxes, a paper-wrapped bundle, two bottles. He opened a cigar box. Marbles. Those came from long ago, when he was a little boy. He remembered that big gray-blue “cloudy” with a red eye on its side, one which he had taken from Elijah Huddles ton. Another box: penholders and lead pencils and crumbs of dry tobacco, and a daguerreotype of his mother and father, and a shriveled horse-chestnut. Why had he kept that buckeye? Some significance, forgotten … These were tender, stupid ectoplasm of a childhood and youth long gone.

He didn’t open any more boxes. “This stuff should be up in the garret,” he thought. He shook one of the dusty bottles, and a black syrup roiled oozily about. Liniment. The other was one-third full of bourbon. He lifted the mouth of the bottle to his lips and tasted the liquor; there was dust all over the neck, he could feel it gritting on his tongue … Put it away, put it away.

A mahogany table which he called his desk, stood between the two front windows. There was a copy of the New York Tribune spread over it, to protect books and other objects from dust. August 16, 1860. Someone had placed that paper there nearly three years before. There were his books—he’d taken only a few with him. Because, when he went west, it was just to look around. He went out with Ike Herriott, but Ike was intending to settle there. Dan Bale wasn’t going to settle; he was just going to look around. He had looked around … Ike Herriott was dead, and not a lot older than Dan. Only twenty-five—twenty-seven years old, somewhere around there, when the west got him. Settled down …

Rollo At Work. He looked at the brown ink on the flyleaf: Daniel Bale from Pentland Bale, Esq. A presentation for good behavior. 20 of Nov 1848. And he could remember much of Rollo. Most of the time Rollo was picking up chips, and he and his Cousin James both had wheelbarrows. There was a colt named Elky. They went to the Squire’s … Dan thought, “Grandfather, in your black coffin and with that wet napkin over your slow-rotting face, do you remember why you made that presentation for good behavior? I don’t.”

A loose step shuffled in the hall outside. “Water I thought you would have,” said Mrs. Wurke.