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had not answered his question. Instead, she’d pressed her hand more firmly against his chest, let her palm stay there as she measured the beat of his blood.
    “I’d heard you had a strong heart, fearless,” she’d said, “and so it is.”
    “So you research men as well as potential logging sights?” Pemberton had asked.
    “Of course,” Serena had said.
     
    A T six, every worker in camp gathered in front of the office. Though most cutting crews consisted of three men, a crew that lost a man often attached to another, an arrangement that wasn’t always temporary. A man named Snipes acted as leader for such a crew since the other foreman, Stewart, was a diligent worker but of dubious intelligence. Stewart was relieved as anyone by this arrangement.
    Among Snipes’ crew was an illiterate lay preacher named McIntyre, who was much given to vigorous pronouncements on the imminent apocalypse. McIntyre sought any opportunity to espouse his views, especially to Reverend Bolick, a Presbyterian cleric who held services at the camp on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Reverend Bolick considered his fellow theologian not only obnoxious but demented and went out of his way to avoid McIntyre, as did most men at the camp. McIntyre had been absent all morning with a bout of the flux but had come to work at noon. When he saw Serena standing on the office porch in pants, he choked on the peppermint he sucked to ease his stomach.
    “There she is,” McIntyre sputtered, “the whore of Babylon in the very flesh.”
    Dunbar, the youngest member of the crew at nineteen, looked toward the porch incomprehensively. He turned to McIntyre, who was dressed in his black preacher’s hat and frayed black dress coat he wore even on the hottest days as a sign of his true calling.
    “Where?” Dunbar asked.
    “Right there on that porch, standing there brazen as Jezebel.”
    Stewart, who along with McIntyre’s wife and sister comprised the whole of the lay preacher’s congregation, turned to his minister and spoke.
    “Why are you of a mind to say such a thing as that, Preacher?”
    “Them pants,” McIntyre proclaimed. “It’s in the Revelations. Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants.”
    Ross, a dour man not kindly disposed to McIntyre’s rants, stared at the lay preacher as he might a chimpanzee that had wandered into camp and begun chattering.
    “I’ve read Revelation many a time, McIntyre,” Ross said, “and somehow missed that verse.”
    “It ain’t in the King James,” McIntyre said. “It’s in the original Greek.”
    “Read Greek, do you?” Ross said. “That’s ever amazing for a man who can’t even read English.”
    “Well, no,” McIntyre said slowly. “I don’t read Greek, but I’ve heard from them what does.”
    “Them what does,” Ross said, and shook his head.
    The crew foreman, Snipes, removed a briar pipe from his mouth to speak. His overalls were so worn and patched that the original denim seemed an afterthought, but there’d been no attempt to blend new colors with old. Instead, the crew foreman’s overalls were mended with a conflagration of yellow, green, red, and orange cloth. Snipes considered himself a learned man and argued that, since colors bright and various were known in nature to warn other creatures of danger, such patches would deter not only varmints both large and small but might in the same manner also deter falling limbs and lightning strikes. Snipes held the pipe out before him, contemplated it a moment, then raised his head and spoke.
    “They’s differences in every language in the world,” Snipes said sagely, and appeared ready to expound on this point when Ross raised an open palm.
    “Here comes the tally,” Ross said. “Get ready to have your pockets lightened, Dunbar.”
    Campbell stood on the ash tree’s stump and took a pad from his coat pocket. The men grew silent. Campbell looked at neither the men nor the owners. His gaze