“Your own grandfather said I was. He and other good folks like him. Love-apples, said they. A horrid poison to taint the very blood. I say now that there is life in tomatoes—strange, powerful infections of life that folks will know well enough, some day when I am gone … I wasn’t intending to talk about tomatoes. It was young Ike, and how I saw him … You left here in ’fifty-six, you and Isaac.”

Dan said, “Yes, ’fifty-six.”

“All right.” Duffey opened his eyes, and the damp, gleaming knobs of blue were suddenly mystic, fanatical. “It was the night of the eighth of March, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-seven, and that day I had delivered a woman of twins. The babes were slow to come, and I was that tired, and old Gus Luckenbill had fractured a femur by falling from his hay-loft. It was a terrible busy day. And Mrs. Culp down with digestive fever … Well, I fell into my bed beside Eva, more dead than alive.”

He aimed his two thumbs at Dan’s face. “And maybe it was two o’clock in the morning, when ghosts walk abroad if any time, and I heard someone a-calling me. ‘Doctor,’ said that Somebody, ‘Doctor.’ Up I sat in bed, and ready to go to the door. And then I realized that I had seen him, tussling with Indians. They was dressed mainly like civilized people, all but one—and he had feathers—but I knew them for Indians. And I had seen him die, with his cerebrum spilled out like sweetbreads in the snow.”

He stood up, breathing heavily. “Well.”

Dan growled, “I don’t believe you ever saw anything of the kind. Doubtless you made all that up from my letters. We never knew whether the massacre took place on the eighth—it was near the eighth, sometime. I was at Fort Dodge, and went back to the lake with the relief expedition. He did have his brains out, when we saw him—if that’s any satisfaction to you. He was frozen stiff, of course; it was cold that year. He was carrying a Sharp’s rifle, and it was broken in two at the breech. There may have been a hand-to-hand struggle. Probably there was. But you’re the same infernal liar as ever. I wouldn’t trust you with a wildcat dime.”

Duffey went over to the window and stood looking down at the leafy road, grinning softly. “Oh, Dan, I looked forward to your coming back, and now you’ve not the sense you left with. I doubt not that next thing you’ll be in this terrible war, bursting people with bombshells, like the devil you are.”