Pike looked at her, frowning and wrinkling his big hooked nose, as if he was trying to figure out whether he’d been sent a mad person. When he didn’t make any reply to what she’d said, Patience settled herself in the chair opposite him and took out her knitting and for half an hour neither she nor Galen Pike spoke a word, until Pike, irritated perhaps by the prolonged quiet or the rapid clickety-clack of her wooden needles, leaned across the table with the top half of his scrawny body and twisted his face up close to hers like before and asked, what was a dried-up old lady like her doing knitting a baby’s bootie?

Patience coloured at the insult but ignored it and told Pike that she and the other women from the Franklin Street Friends’ Meeting House were preparing a supply of clothing for Piper City’s new hostel for unwed mothers. A lot of girls, she said, ended up coming this way, dragging themselves along the Boulder Road, looking for somewhere to lay their head.

Pike slouched against the back of his chair. He twisted his grimy-fingered hands which were fastened together in a complicated knot and roped tightly, one on top of the other, across his lap.

‘Unwed mothers?’ he said in a leering unpleasant way. ‘Where all is that then?’

‘Nowhere at present,’ Patience replied, looking up from her work, ‘but when it opens it will be here on North Street. The application is with the mayor.’

When Patience Haig wasn’t visiting the occasional residents of the Piper City jail, she was fighting the town’s Republican mayor, Byron Lym.

Over the years, she and her brother Walter and the other Friends from the Franklin Street Meeting House had joined forces with the pastor and congregation of the Episcopalian church and a number of other Piper City residents to press for certain improvements in the town: a new roof for the dilapidated schoolhouse; a road out to Piet Larsen’s so they could get a cart out there from time to time and bring the old man into town so he could feel a bit of life about him; a library; a small fever hospital; a hostel on North Street for unwed mothers.

So far, Lym had blocked or sabotaged each and every one of the projects. He’d said no to the new roof for the school, no to Piet Larsen’s road, no to the library, no to the hospital and a few days from now, they would find out if he was going to say no to the hostel too.