For the forge he has his old apron as before, and though there are some, like Harold, who have chosen to take their business elsewhere, he appears to manage – he is still good, I suppose, at what he does.

It is hard to say exactly what he has become.

Underneath it all, it seems, he is still a man for they have a child now, the two of them – a little girl called May, and there is every appearance of Evangelina having another one on the way.

I have kept the china thimble I bought for her in Maryport and I would like, if I could, to give it to her, but Harold has forbidden it. He grows sweaty and uneasy if he ever finds himself within a hundred yards of Joseph Hine, coat or no coat. If he sees them in the street, Joseph and Evangelina and their little girl, he grips my arm firmly behind the elbow and marches us over to the other side.

In the evenings I watch him across the table, chewing on his dinner, the bones of his face moving and clicking at his temples, and from time to time he’ll look up at me and nod, and with his mouth full and food brimming onto his whiskers, he’ll say how good the dinner is, how tasty the meat, and afterwards, later, when we have drunk our tea and read a few pages out of our books or the newspaper and he is busy doing his thing above me in the dark, I’ll think about being high up on the fell with Evangelina in the last of the winter’s snows, her cheek against my neck, her arms across my heart.

The Redemption of Galen Pike

The Redemption of Galen Pike

THEY’D ALL SEEN Sheriff Nye bringing Pike into town: the two shapes snaking down the path off the mountain through the patches of melting snow and over the green showing beneath, each of them growing bigger as they moved across the rocky pasture and came down into North Street to the jailhouse – Nye on his horse, the tall gaunt figure of Galen Pike following behind on the rope.

The current Piper City jailhouse was a low cramped brick building containing a single square cell, Piper City being at this time, in spite of the pretensions of its name, a small and thinly populated town of a hundred and ninety-three souls in the foothills of the Colorado mountains. Aside from the cell, there was a scrubby yard behind, where the hangings took place, a front office with a table, a chair and a broom; a hook on the wall where the cell keys hung from a thick ring; a small stove where Knapp the jailer warmed his coffee and cooked his pancakes in the morning.