“Could be better,” Fanning spat upon the floor, and smudged the place with the toe of his glistening boot. “We heard once that you had been scalped by the Indians.”

Bale felt awkward. He began to wish that there had been a vacant seat beside someone other than Fanning. “No,” he said, “they didn’t get me, that time. They came near it. A lot of bad Wahpakootas—those are Sioux—burned everybody out, in our neighborhood.”

“Rebels or Indians, they’re all the same. We’d be better off if they were all dead.”

Bale said nothing. He realized that he was not looking at Ty Fanning, but was frowning intently at a varnished knot-hole in the seat ahead of him. He wrenched his gaze away. Across the aisle a fat, red-faced farmer was snoring with mechanical regularity, a blue handkerchief spread over his bald head. All around, people dozed or snored or whispered or clacked; the air smelled of stables and soot and coal-oil and fried chicken; but sometimes a puff of wind twisted down the aisle, and then you could think of chilly green woods and dark fields where the hay was ripening.

… They were neighbors, boys who lived in the same town, and only a field apart. Two years in childhood are a generation. There is apt, Bale remembered, to be a holy clique of twelve-year-olds deeply scornful of the ten-year-olds who worshipfully trail them. In a smaller town, they would have been pushed together by the narrowness of circumstance. As it was, they met on common ground only at the Willows, and in the pasture between their homes, and at fires.

The Willows were three in number, growing from a common stump that lifted on oozy roots at a bend in the meanderings of Willoughby Run. Bale shut his eyes: he saw Tyler Fanning standing on the roots, warm and muddy water sloshing two inches below his toes, pressing his hands together in front of his ribs for an awkward dive that was more of a fall. Tyler Fanning lived in the second largest house in town, and he wore a blue velvet jacket, and his mother went to drive in a carriage driven by a freedman. But nevertheless he was thin and whining and querulous when you got him naked down at the Willows. He had knobs on his knees … Captain. The Seventy-second … piece of shell at Antietam Creek. Ho! the wars …

Dan felt his jaw stiffen. He tugged nervously at his thick beard.

“Where’d you get the growth?” asked Fanning.

“I left my razors at home when I went to Minnesota.”

“That’s how long?”

“Nearly seven years.”

Fanning grinned, not pleasantly. “Look out someone doesn’t take you for that son of a bitch Stuart.”

“Who?”

“For the moment,” Ty whined, lazily, “I forgot that you’ve been in the backwoods and aren’t conversant with present-day affairs.”