“That’s the truth, too,” Hinton said cheerfully. “And it could take them days to clear that locomotive off the track. It was dug in brutally deep.”

“So it wasn’t a failure,” the Colonel said.

“Far from it!” Captain Hinton was resolutely optimistic.

“And it was a good piece of training for our cavalry scouts,” the Colonel said.

“Indeed it was.” Hinton grinned at Starbuck, trying to include him in the friendlier atmosphere, but the Colonel just frowned.

Now, as the night inched by, Starbuck was plunged deep down into a young man’s despair. It was not just his alienation from Washington Faulconer that oppressed him, but the knowledge that his life had gone so utterly wrong. There were excuses, good excuses maybe, but at heart he knew he was the one who had gone astray. He had left his family and his church, even his own country, to live among strangers, and the ties of their affection did not run deeply enough or strongly enough to offer him any hope. Washington Faulconer was a man whose bitter disappointment was as sour as the reek of the smelter’s furnace. Truslow was an ally, but for how long? And what did Starbuck have in common with Truslow? Truslow and his followers would thieve and kill, but Starbuck could not see himself behaving so, and as for the others, like Medlicott, they hated Starbuck for being an intrusive Yankee, an outsider, a stranger, a favorite of the Colonel’s who had become the Colonel’s scapegoat.

Starbuck shivered in the rain, his knees drawn up to his chest. He felt utterly alone. So what should he do? The rain dripped monotonously, while behind him a picketed horse stamped the wet ground. The wind was cold, coming up from the settlement with its grim furnace house and rows of dull houses. The furnace illuminated the buildings with a sullen glow against which the tangled trees of the intervening slope were intricately and smokily silhouetted to form an impenetrable tangle of twisted black limbs and splintered trunks. It was a wilderness, Starbuck thought, and at its far side lay nothing but hellfire, and the dark horror of the intervening downward slope seemed a prophecy of all his future life.