“Got a letter from him today. Well, it’s from her, but she pretends—”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “Right.”

Neither man could find anything wrong with the puppy, so Lee put him down, where he commenced to limp again, his right forepaw bothering him.

“He wasn’t injured a minute ago,” Lee said.

“Are you sure?” Thomas rubbed his chin. “Yesterday I came by and he was limping.”

“Really? When?”

“Around this time.”

Lee wondered where he’d been. Yes, he’d tied Boy to the fence and taken Nanette to the other side of the metal shop, to test her ability to stay with the noise and sizzle of the welding torches.

“Here you go, Boy,” Thomas said, and he dangled a finger-sized piece of ham fat over the puppy’s nose. In a second, it had been snapped up, and a pink tongue had explored the feeding hand, just in case there was more.

Lee put Boy down just as Thomas started walking away. Something occurred to him. “Hey-ya, Thomas.”

Thomas stopped.

“When he was limping yesterday, did you give him anything?”

“A little gristle, yeah. Is that all right?”

Lee nodded. A moment later, Thomas was gone. Lee kept his eye on Boy, who casually walked the full length of his lead, about ten feet, back to the fence. He was no longer limping. If anything, he seemed to have a little swagger.

“Son of a bitch,” Lee whispered. Which is when he remembered. “Nanette. Come!” She sprang from her place on the ground and rocketed toward him as if she were going to leap over barbed wire. Instead, she halted, and looked up expectantly. Lee gave her a piece of hardtack, which she accepted. He gave her a second piece because he’d made her “stay” for an unconscionable amount of time, and this she held in her mouth before laying it down in the mud. Her eyes indicated that the contract she’d signed had stipulated just one piece of hardtack.

“It’s okay,” Lee said. He fed it to her directly. He felt, with every movement of her jaw, that his standing was diminishing in her eyes. He stared at her brother, who was licking his lips and closing his eyes as if ready to dream about ham fat. Lee wondered: had Boy just lied?

“Corporal Leland Duncan,” said an unfamiliar and annoyed voice. The man, a corporal, wore a blue campaign hat with an insignia of Mercury on it. He carried an overflowing leather satchel. It was the postman. “Here you go.”

“What?”

“What?” The corporal rolled his eyes, shoving a postcard into Lee’s hand, muttering, “Should have just thrown it away,” and then he was gone.

It was a sepia-toned image of a man dressed in olden-times gear, Stetson, fringed leather jacket, goatee—or Vandyke, Lee wasn’t sure. He held a rifle. Until he read the name Wild Duncan Cody, Lee thought the mail was meant for someone else.