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“One of the resorts on Dock Street. I just happened by on my way to—”

“He’s in one piece, I take it?” Maxwell lacks the somber cast of the bearer of truly bad tidings. This is some new embarrassment.

“Presently, yes. But imprecations have been forwarded, ultimatums delivered — it involves a sum of money.”

“He’s been playing cards.”

“Unfortunately. And imbibing, Your Honor, or else I’m sure his judgment would have—”

“Niles hasn’t any more judgment than a cat in a fish shack. How much has he lost?”

“Thirty-five dollars. Beyond what he carried to the table.”

“These card sharps don’t believe I’m good for thirty-five dollars?”

Maxwell looks down at his shoes, which seem to have had something spilled on them. “They don’t believe your son is good for his word. Apparently he’s mentioned your name in association with gaming debts in the past, and — and failed to inform you—”

“They could have come to me directly.”

“Given the nature of some of the debts, of the loci in which they were incurred, the gentlemen involved were reticent to bring — to bring an officer of the Court into the conversation.”

“There are no ‘gentlemen’ involved in this business. They are a group of ruffians, holding my son for ransom—”

“They’ve convinced Niles it would be unwise to depart before matters are settled.”

It is a cold morning. The Judge turns back into the parlor. “Thirty-five dollars.”

“Cash would be appreciated. Under the circumstances.”

He turns back to glare at Maxwell. The man looks as if he has slept in his clothing. There is a stain on his bowler and he is shaking slightly, frightened perhaps of his employer, or merely chilled without an overcoat at this hour.

“I would not have become involved,” he says apologetically, “but for the fear of scandal.”

“Everybody in Wilmington knows he’s a damned fool, Maxwell. Wait while I go up to the safe.”

In his dream Harry is sitting by Mae Dupree, holding her hand as they watch the operetta. It is a moving-view of the performance, projected on her parlor wall, the image thrown by a device that Harry operates by cranking it with his free hand. Somehow, and even in the dream he wishes he could stop the presentation to study the workings of it, the device is ganged through a bicycle sprocket and chain to a phonograph machine, the needle riding a wax cylinder to play the duet of the Ensign and the lovely Aura Lee, their words perfectly synchronized with the movement of their lips—

He understands that he has invented this device, understands it without being told, as one does in dreams, and can feel how proud Mae is of him. The show continues on the parlor wall, only now Niles is the Ensign and Mae the soubrette, embracing as they sing.

But the most amazing thing, the Harry in the dream shaking his head in wonder as he sits and cranks, is how someone has perfectly hand-colored every single one of the diapositive frames, and how they’ve captured the exact reddish-gold of Mae Dupree’s beautiful hair.

The Judge sits at breakfast trying to avoid the sight of the new girl’s deformity when Niles steps in, treading softly.

“I am so very sorry,” he says, gesturing with his hat. Beulah, for that is her name, retreats to the kitchen after a quick glance at the boy’s blackened eye and bloodstained shirt front.

“You are sorry you lost,” says the Judge, spreading quince jam on his toast, “and you are sorry you couldn’t skulk away without settling your losses. Beyond that, you are incorrigible.”

The Judge’s wife, young and beautiful, almost died giving birth to this boy. Niles was always impervious to instruction, beating him a waste of belt leather, and so far the vagaries of life in the world outside have in no way clipped his wings.

The Judge fixes Niles with a look. “You know my opinion of our governor.”

Niles ventures a tiny grin. “Something about a fat, treacherous, nigger-coddling son of a whore, I believe—”

“Then you understand what it will cost me in pride, not to mention political favor, to petition him in your behalf.”

“Petition?”

“They’re making up the regiment for Cuba. Commissions are being handed out—”

“I’m in the Light Infantry here already.”

“We’re not discussing a club membership. There is going to be a war. I doubt it will amount to much, as wars go, but there are reputations to be made, mettle to be tested. By God, if a dose of combat won’t make a man of you, I don’t know what will.”

“They’ll never leave the state,” says Niles. “You know that. It’s all a show, a bowl of plums for our corpulent governor to pass out to his cronies.”

“You won’t serve your country?”

“Half the men in that poker game are set to be in the Regiment. Is that the sort you want me associating with?”

He has an answer for everything, Niles. With a minimum of study he’d make a passable lawyer, of the type who waste the Judge’s courtroom hours with showy but ultimately pointless objections and points of order. The Judge pushes his plate away and looks his son in the eye.

“You told me you very nearly struck it rich in the Yukon.”

“I found the ore,” says Niles, making one of his aggrieved, I-am-but-a-victim faces, “but they jumped my claim.”

“Perhaps it’s time you gave it another go.”

“Prospecting?”

“Yes.”

“That field is almost used up. The word coming into San Francisco when I left—”

“Somewhere else, then.” The Judge stands, wiping his hands on a napkin. “I’m willing to stake you to the amount it would take to get started, on a modest scale, provided you’re willing to commit yourself to the endeavor for some time. Let us say three years.”

Niles smiles. His voice, when he speaks, lacks all force, as if he knows that no matter how he plays the hand, whether he passes or calls the bluff, he has lost. “But where?” he asks.

“Anywhere but North Carolina,” says the Judge, and leaves his son in the breakfast room, dented hat in hand.

TRAMPS

Hod hacks at the chalky ground as tow-headed Mormon boys crawl beside him. Big Ten is over two rows, backing up as he stabs his shovel down, leaving a jagged rut behind. The older Mormon boys have long-handled hoes, crouching to block out plants from the tangled mat of sugar beet, making them into separate islands of green, while the smaller ones crawl after them, rags wound around their bony knees, chopping each cluster back till only the thickest stem remains. The air is dry heat and flies and fine dust coughing up from the mat like a rug beaten on a line and flies, always flies this time of year, worrying your eyes and nose, frantic in your ear as you hack baked soil into yet more dust. Sweat runs off Hod’s face, cutting salty rivulets down his mask of dust and crisping away in the dry oven heat before it can reach the thirsty ground. Other young men, Saints, scrape out irrigation rows off to the right, joking and calling out to each other, keeping a cautious distance from him and the big Indian. Big Ten wears a bowler mashed down on his head and barely sweats, chopping his shovel down as if killing snakes.

Hod’s ditch is uneven but the first run of water will smooth it out. Saints got just enough sense to plant their stand near the American Fork, he thinks, and have jiggered all kinds of canals and gates, reservoirs and tanks to bring it close. There is no water at the moment, though, the little boys charged with running buckets making a wide arc around Hod and Big Ten to serve their own people, Hod’s tongue a dusty hank of wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands have blistered and cracked and blistered again, the gloves he bought in Reno worn through and tossed away two states ago, and there is sticky blood beneath his palms on the wood of the hoe.