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.

The men gathered around McFarlane. Huge bronchial trees arched over the little clearing and the roar of the water seemed very close, though it was an eighty-foot drop to the Missouri. Otto, who was behind McFarlane, suddenly kicked him in the back of his head, sending him sprawling in the dirt. At this Magnus let out a strange, almost sensual cry. He was still breathing hard and looked half crazed.

Siggy, holstering his gun, squatted down to the man. With one hand he pulled the man’s arm away from his face, peering into it as if he were looking under a rock. Then he flung his fist against the side of McFarlane’s head. It was a glancing blow.

“Shit,” Siggy said, as if he had missed a nail with a hammer.

They all watched as he tried again. This time his fist hit directly against McFarlane’s temple, knocking his head against the ground. Again, Magnus made that wavering, high-pitched, almost ecstatic sound.