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something he took it into his head to be mad about. He was as vain as a boastful little boy. But that didn’t excuse his going through a whole evening the way he had, smiling as if he had a knife ready to stab somebody, jumping from bald insults to compliments as suave as butter that were more insulting than the insults.
    He was a hard man to understand, she thought as she went upstairs with the lamp. You never knew how you’d find him. But why should she worry herself about the way he acted? Let him go on being moody and sardonic and insulting.
    Yet she found herself, later, asking people about him—Karl, Helm, even Jud Chain. How could a man be so many contrary things at once? How, for instance, could anyone have grown up and never even been inside a church? He said he hadn’t. Yet in a good mood he could be so very pleasant and thoughtful. There was a kind of warmth that radiated from him when he wanted to let it. And how had he come to be so good at everything he did? He was the best ball player in town. Helm assured her that he was also the best shot, the best bowler, the best pool player, and one of the two best skaters.
    â€œBut where did he come from?” Elsa asked. “What’s he doing out here?”
    â€œHe’s from Illinois,” Helm said. “Rock River. His old man wasn’t much good, I guess. Just let his family run loose. I’ve heard him talk about it once or twice, just odds and ends of things.”
    That was all Elsa got, odds and ends, scraps that could be pieced together into a skeleton biography. She did not admit to herself, did not even think about, the unusual eagerness she had to reconstruct that biography. She did not say to herself that he was the most masterful, dominating, contradictory, and unusual man she had ever met, but she picked up everything she heard, nevertheless, and she pumped Bo himself when he came over in the evening to sit on the steps and talk.
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    When Fred Mason came home to Illinois from the war in 1865 he had left an arm somewhere in a field hospital near Vicksburg, and most of his disposition in the Andersonville prison. In the ten years after his arrival he successively married a Pennsylvania Dutch girl of broad dimensions, begot seven children, and became the nucleus and chief yarn-spinner of the livery stable crowd.
    For money he depended on his pension and a few scattered odd jobs. Working for anyone else tired him; orders were more than his irascible individualism would stand. “Nobody in my family ever took orders from anybody,” he used to say. “My pap come into this state when she was nothin’ but oak and Indians, and he never took no orders from any man. Neither did his pap, or his pap’s pap. I’m the on‘y one ever did, and I on’y did in the army. And I don’t take no more.”
    He spent his days lounging at the stable talking bird dogs and battles. Once in a while he took over a job in a burst of ambition to augment his pension, because, though he was not especially a drinking man, he loved to eat, and his shapeless and rather sullen hausfrau couldn’t make the pension stretch to cover much more than sowbelly and eggs. Often, too, he sat in the sun with the fecund stable smell about him and a coach dog dozing among the flies, and generated great schemes. He invented, on paper or in drawings sketched in the dust with a twig, all sorts of gadgets: revolvers with twelve chambers, a telescopic ramrod that could be carried in the vest pocket, a folding bootjack, an artificial arm that could be moved by a complicated system of wires and pulleys, with a miniature ice tongs for a hand. He even went to work and whittled out the arm, laboriously fitted it with pulleys and strung the wires, but when he had a fellow-loafer strap it on him, and tried it out before the eyes of his crowd, he got tangled up and bit himself in the ribs with the ice tongs. In a fury he threw the whole