Jonathan’s dentist wore a mustache waxed into tusks that wobbled when he spoke. ‘Real teeth? They come very high and they rot, dear boy. Ivory rots, too, of course, but it’s quite reasonable. Porcelain’s best, but expensive. I wear porcelain myself. See?’ The dentist slid his own teeth out into his palm. ‘Springs may be old-fashioned, but the father of our country wore them. How about ivory teeth in a vulcanite base? With springs? Wonderful stuff, vulcanite. What do you say to forty-five dollars?’

Jonathan agreed at once.

‘Oh, dear boy, you haven’t been off the farm long, have you? We’ll make it forty.’

Two weeks later the dentures were in Jonathan’s mouth. ‘There,’ the dentist said, adjusting them. He swung the chair around so that it faced the mirror.

Once, years ago, I caught sight of my own face in a mirror and for a split second I saw in myself somebody that – well, it wasn’t me at all. It was somebody wholly alien, fine-featured, laughing – somebody who knew nothing of the sewage that runs through my veins instead of blood. I fell in love at once. It was the same for Jonathan. I’m sure of it.

4

There is a random, episodic feel to most young lives – the childhood pattern dispensed with, the adult pattern not yet established – which has a peculiar charm all its own. But not to Jonathan. As soon as he sensed it, he hated and feared it. With no childhood and no family, with his roots ripped out of him much as his teeth had been, there was no foundation to anchor him, nothing except rage and bitterness to give meaning to a youthful floating-free. Replacing the teeth was easy and from the evidence of photographs, wholly successful. The roots of a life, though: these are a different matter. Despite himself he hungered after the uncompromising ferocity, the raw passions of slavery, and found only vagaries, uncertainties, passing fancies. He worked in the Denver yards. In an exacting trade he got the reputation – which was the ultimate accolade – of a kid with the makings of a good railroadman. Two years passed. During all this time, no picture of him appeared on a Wanted poster in the Home Rule Bar or anywhere else around Denver. Of course it didn’t, but how was he to know why not?

He toyed with the idea that George had never existed, that he – Jonathan – had simply invented George. ‘From now on, it’s Georges that got to be made up’: he’d said it himself over the prostrate figure that had seemed to him to be George’s dead body. Perhaps there had never been a prostrate figure. Perhaps there had never been a battle. Perhaps he had been born on the railways and had dreamed his terrible past. Or perhaps he was dreaming now. If there were anything at all to any of this, however little, then his claim to murder, and to victory, too, was as empty as his grasp of why College’s chicken crossed the road. Maybe Mr Finster had covered for him. It was possible. Maybe they thought he’d died himself, of exposure perhaps, and been savaged by animals.