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tongue. He had never looked uglier. She could never let him touch her, let alone place himself inside her. Even his breathing had been coarsened by his sense of power over Zoe, and his eyes were unnaturally bright with wanting.
    Zoe reached inside her sleeve, found the paring knife, pulled it out and held it before her. Hassenplug’s face fell, then his confident smirk returned. Without taking his eyes from the blade, he felt behind him for the horsewhip in its metal socket, yanked it free and lazily unfurled the lash.
    “Better not,” he advised, flicking the tip toward her along the ground. “I can take a fly off old Beulah’s ear without she feels a thing. You put that down now and you’ll come to no harm. We made a deal. Can’t blame me for holding you to it, now can you, huh? Set it down. Set it down or by God I’ll make you sorry. She know you took her knife, the missus? She’ll skin you with it for stealing. Lay it down now and she’ll never know it was gone. You hear me!”
    Zoe turned and ran. The lash caught her around the throat.
    When bitterness had given way to resignation, Mrs. Hassenplug rose from her kitchen chair and went into the yard. Watching chickens scratch the earth around her feet, she failed to notice Zoe’s return until the girl was almost to the gate. At first Mrs. Hassenplug thought it was some old neighbor woman mysteriously arrived on foot, suffering some kind of ailment maybe, all bent over that way. Then she recognized the dress, the old too-tight dress that had caused all the trouble. She’d had no idea Zoe’s hair was that long, since Zoe tended to it herself; it hung over her face like a curtain, but the bruising beneath was not entirely hidden.
    Mrs. Hassenplug took several nervous steps toward the gate Zoe clung to, then stopped. Why should she help? The girl had put herself in harm’s way, and harm had come to her, closer to the farm than to town. That fact was welcomed; the hussy hadn’t even completed the trip’s first leg before the harm came. It would have been unbearable to know she’d seen the streets and houses and people denied Mrs. Hassenplug all these years. There was rough justice at work here, she could see that, and it cheered her up considerably. With moral satisfaction bolstering her mood, Mrs. Hassenplug felt herself capable of approaching Zoe with something like charity in her heart.
    Lips pursed, she unlatched the gate. Robbed of support, Zoe almost fell into the yard at her foster mother’s feet.
    “He went and did you, then,” said Mrs. Hassenplug. “I knew he would. You asked for trouble and got it, I reckon. He’s a mean man when the mood’s on him, I grant, but he never would’ve done you harm if you minded yourself and kept out of his way. There’s the blame. You get in the house and clean up this instant. Look at you!”
    Zoe went indoors and dabbed at her face with a cloth and water from the kitchen tub. He had punched her several times, slapped her more times than that. Her face hurt, her vagina hurt, but the sharpest pain came from a deep cut on her shin, where a nail in the thick sole of Hassenplug’s boot had penetrated as he stepped clumsily away from her after the rape. He’d staggered as his foot rolled on the narrow bone, caught himself in time and kicked her in the side of the buttock for almost tripping him up that way. She had watched from beneath tangled hair as he climbed back onto the wagon and returned to the Wister’s Landing road as if nothing of importance had taken place. He hadn’t looked at her once the wagon started rolling.
    Why she had come back to the farm instead of continuing on into town to report what had happened to her, Zoe herself could not quite understand. It was more than a question of fewer miles to cover on her sore leg, but the inner component of her choice eluded Zoe until she put down the cloth and saw Hassenplug’s rifle on the wall. It was his most valued possession, a Henry repeater kept in