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black trousers and a stained vest folded low on a thin scarred waist. He stood with his back baking toward the stove the color of which, a cool glow, increased minute by minute. Glancing at the lantern, “Put it out,” he said. Wade sank down and grunted.
    Cap Leech did not watch him lay his head on its side, burn his nose, blow, and blow again. With eyes bleakly commanding up and down the street as if the Indians still congregated, he continued merely to wipe, almost polish, the hammer pliers shape of metal. The duster-sized piece of waste rag fluffed up and down as he worked with thin fast fingers. Then, done looking at the town, he flung the tool backward, not turning to aim, and shoved the rag into his hip pocket. The pincers crashed behind the stove.
    “It was the Sheriff told me to come over,” said Wade and brushed at the soot streaks on his trousers.
    Cap Leech stepped into the flames and slammed the door. Wade listened to the hurried sounds, the clattering of small objects, a ransacked scuffling. After a pause he heard the whisper of iron, the shooting of grated coal, and the sudden breathing of the fire. Leech reappeared from beneath the wagon, scowled, flung up the steps and fastened a padlock through the rings.
    “Bring that lantern,” he said.
    He sank into the sheepskin and pushed the stiff, long handled brake. Wade saw that on his feet he wore only a toe curled pair of bedroom slippers.
    With the easing forward of the hickory lever and the release of the wooden grip which bound the wheels and which, on wallowing hills, was apt to lock and pitch the wagon into the limbs of a bare tree, smoke flattened from the pipe and the men leaned backward, pulled with the head down charge of a blind horse chased by fire. The driver held a loose rein, ran his other hand through the shedding yellow locks on the seat and, shaggy toes pointed restfully together, stared with eyes that never watered toward the horizon, above and beyond any obstacle that might have crossed their path. The son of a light boned suffragette, kept alive by a spirit half stimulant, half sleep, he bounced unconscious of the twisting wagon frame, the knocks of the makeshift caisson.
    “Turn around! Turn around, you’ve passed it.”
    “Whoa,” said Cap Leech, sending not a signal down the reins, and the horse stopped. An obedient, angular wrenching of the shafts, a tilt as one wheel skidded up and across the sidewalk planking, and again Wade’s damp wavy hair scratched in his eyes. The stove at their backs was fanned by speed, not wind, and occasionally, withoutnoise, chunked airy wads of ember from the funnel topped chimney, fireballs that floated in the wake of the blood letter.
    The ministerial tie strings, knotted, but no longer in a bow, the high collar flapping about the neck, the ease with which he overrode the country familiar or not, all marked a man who had been anesthetized, against whose chest villagers of fifty years had spit their brains.
    He drove with the one hand uselessly extended and peered far ahead of the low stars, dismissed without thinking Clare’s shut houses. He would travel unlighted roads to reach the distant end of the river, the last of his line. Echoing moans met him at the limits of every township.
    Cap Leech did not stop his horse—wide at the rump it tapered to the small head, jet black prehistoric animal that could run forever —before the jail, but turned it instead, with a whisper to the pinned down ears, between the stone wall and vacant wooden wall. H? discovered, without an extra movement, the still and littered end of Clare. The wheels rocked in the glassy sand, the horse exhaled.
    “You give me a ride here,” said Wade. Leech nimbly disappeared on the other side of the wagon. The silent flatlands, the lonely shrub, the plains, moved in upon the town and passed across the weeded railroad line carrying part of Clare off into the night, a few hundred yards into what was once grazing country, now shorn,