The men split up. A short while later, as Bennet, Sal, and Magnus approached the bluffs along the deer path, they heard a shot and began to run. When they got to the small plateau, the hobo was squatting beside his campfire, his arms wrapped over his head. Siggy had his pistol out, Goldwin beside him, his hair flopping loose from his bald crown. At this moment, with a rustling of bushes from the west side, Otto and Finn appeared.

“God damn, it’s steep that way,” Otto complained, out of breath.

Finn was laughing, as if they had all been playing King of the Hill. “Almost ended up in the drink, the two of us.”

“What the fuck you shooting at?” Bennet said to Siggy.

Siggy pointed vaguely toward the woods. “His dog came at us.”

“You get it?” Sal said.

“Almost got me.” Goldwin smoothed his hair. “Put that thing away, you’re drunk.”

“Said the showgirl to the vicar,” Finn put in, winking.

“Clyde’s farm’s less than half a mile that way,” Bennet warned. “No more shooting.”

Magnus, who had fallen behind, appeared now, utterly out of breath and grimacing as if he were going to have a heart attack.

The hobo, McFarlane, was peering up through his arms, terrified. He was still pretty clean from his court appearance. His shining patent-leather shoes sat on a sheet of newspaper beneath his new jacket, which hung from a low branch—the young lawyer had bought him these. McFarlane was a short scrawny man, his mouth crowded with large yellowish-brown teeth. These he kept trying to cover with his hopelessly inadequate lips, which would instantly slide back away. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, also provided by the lawyer. These had made him look like a librarian in court. A librarian doesn’t sneak up behind a woman with his face in a nylon mask, put a knife to her cheek, and cover her head with a sack. A librarian doesn’t tie her wrists and rape her over a feed bin, holding the sack so tight around her neck she blacks out.

Hadley, the prosecuting attorney, on cross-examination had asked McFarlane to take his jacket and glasses off and roll up the sleeves of his shirt. The defense lawyer immediately objected, but Judge Cowper, who played poker with Hadley every Friday and didn’t like this twenty-three-year-old straight out of Yale, agreed. Hadley then asked McFarlane if he had ever done hard labor. McFarlane replied that he had done a sight of farm work here and there. “So you’re pretty strong?” Hadley asked, placing himself in the line of sight between McFarlane and his lawyer, whose loud objections were being overruled. Grinning with shy pride, his lips sliding back over his grim teeth, McFarlane answered, “I reckon so.” Hadley was trying to dispense with the librarian persona and show that this man had the strength to have done what he was accused of doing to a woman six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than he. Instead, McFarlane, without his jacket, looked like a soaked cat. Hadley’s plan completely backfired. The jury took ten minutes to acquit him.