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at me from last time, and foolishly dressed for the warmth of a spring day. When I reached Golden at 4:20 I was sorry for that, as there was still snow on the ground atthat elevation, and the air on the drive up had chilled my face to what I imagined was a deep, salmon pink. I drove to a neat, two-story brick building among a row of similar structures, climbed down, and tied my animal to the post outside it, ignoring the clucking of a pair of passing women as they looked back and forth between me and the house with equal measures of disapproval. One of them muttered something that sounded like “harlot,” and I turned to face them directly. In my hand I held a garland of bluebonnets I’d stopped to collect on the way up; I separated two blooms and brazenly proffered them to the horrified ladies, treating them to my most disarming and ingenuous smile.
    “ Bel après-midi, n’est-ce pas, mesdames? ” I said, and they hurried on their way, sputtering at the vile and dissolute ways of the heathen French. I strode to the door, lifted the upcurled trunk of its brass elephant knocker, and dropped it to our rhythmic signal: one, two, three, then half a rest before four and five. Priscilla opened the door and looked me up and down with mild contempt. Dressed and coiffed with her habitual demure elegance, she looked as fresh-scrubbed and wholesome as a minister’s wife on her way to teach a Sunday school class on chastity.
    “I suppose you’ve come all the way from Denver looking for a piece of ass,” she said.
    I had no answer to that question. The truth wouldn’t have been gallant and she would have seen through a lie, so I handedher the bluebonnets. She raised an eyebrow and frowned, but when I showed her the bottle of laudanum she moved aside to let me in.
    Fifteen minutes later we were in her squeaking iron bed, hammering away at it like we’d only just met. She heightened my arousal with throaty cries that crescendoed and decrescendoed slowly, though whether expressing either real passion or a simple desire to gratify my amour propre only she knew. After such a long period of chastity the physical sensation of intercourse was nearly overwhelming, and shortly I discharged with a slightly piquant sensation what felt like a pint and a half of spunk. I resolved before withdrawal never to go that length of time again without a proper ejaculation. After we’d lain there for a while she spoke.
    “You know I’ve been going to church, Bill?”
    I sat up and took pains not to laugh. “You’ve seen the light?”
    “Don’t be smart. I just go to be sociable.”
    I thought about the biddies on the street and wondered what churchgoing ladies in Golden would welcome her in their homes. “Which church is that? The Methodist or the Baptist?”
    “I take my carriage into Denver and go to the Presbyterian services and let it be known that I’m a widow. Last week some of the ladies invited me over to a tea.”
    “That’s nice,” I said.
    “Well, for a bunch of ladies taking tea after church services the talk got pretty vile, I’ll tell you that.”
    Now I did laugh. “How vile could it get?”
    “I’m getting to that. One of the ladies was talking about a fellow from Denver who abandoned his wife for a banjo player.”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “Well, this fellow apparently traveled the country as a sort of saltimbanque, he’d go into saloons and do a little tumbling, then he’d play his banjo and pass the hat.”
    “This is the fellow who left his wife?”
    “No. The one who left his wife, left her for this banjo player here. Two gents, if you see what I’m getting at? So one of the ladies at tea manifested the same misunderstanding you did just now. But the more we explained it to her politely the more confused she got. And finally Mrs. Halliwell, the lady whose house it was, explained to her that the nature of the rapport between the two men was of . . . of love. Of a physical kind.”
    I nodded again.
    “And the