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the wound clean, then he disinfected his penknife and cut a strip of salt meat out of what Speck had brought, laid this on the gash, and tied it in place with five separate bands of gauze looped around the man’s head. Each time he drew a knot closed, the rouster cried out.
    The mill manager put two fingers on the bloody neck to check the pulse. “Tomorrow, pull all this off at daybreak and throw it in the river. Burn the cut out again with this alcohol and tie on another strip of salt meat, just like I tied this one. Don’t strain your face for three days or it’ll split like a tomato, you hear?”
    “I hear,” the man whispered.
    Randolph pushed the cinched chin sideways and examined his work. “If I had a suture kit I’d try to sew you up.” He wiped a clot from the man’s neck with a wad of gauze and threw it overboard. “Keep your face washed every day for ten days or they’ll wind up rolling you into the river like they did that other fellow. The waiter here will give you the meat and gauze when you need it.” At this, the rouster settled onto his side and closed his eyes.
    Speck hoisted a trunk onto his shoulder. “Got no mo’ manners than a hog.”
    The mill manager looked up at him, slipping the cork back in the bottle. “I don’t think he’s feeling very civil at the moment.”
    “No, sah.”
    “You take care of him and next time I see you, I’ll remember.”
    “I bet you will, sah.” Speck ducked his head at the rouster, then turned away, swinging the heavy trunk wide.
    At six Randolph climbed onto a sun-peeled wooden coach tacked to the end of an eastbound line of freight cars. Across the aisle sat two men wearing long boots and holding taped-together shotguns between their knees, and behind them an Indian man and three hatless women in faded housedresses made of flour sacks swayed with the motion of the coach. The men stank, but so did he, a fact of life, he realized, in a place where a man could break a sweat by walking to the privy. He put a hand out of the window and hefted the air. The train rattled past the edge of town, its five-chime whistle scolding road crossings until there were no more and the little locomotive entered a sun-killing forest of virgin cypress, the rails running into a slot capped by a gray ribbon of sky. Drifting back from the engine a sooty mist coated the cars, and the mill manager considered Minos’s predictions regarding the decline of steam machinery. He wondered what smokeless boxlike machine, easy on the ears and clothes, might pull the trains in fifteen or twenty years.
    At a quarter to seven, the brakes came on with a jerk, and the train stopped at the dozen houses that made up Poachum. The baggage handler cast Randolph’s fine trunks onto the platform of the little plank station as if they were boxes of trash. The train whistled off, and after the last coach passed, he looked across the tracks at the swamped, axle-bending road that led back to Tiger Island. Eight trapper’s shacks built up on cypress stumps and four shotgun houses of raw wood were arranged with the logic of an armload of tossed kindling. A siding west of the station was loaded with flatcars of pale aromatic cypress planks waiting to be shipped, and a spur track plunged south from the main line, into the swamp toward Nimbus.
    The mill manager entered the station where a dark-haired boy was sitting under a clock, wearing a green visor. The agent told him the mill had just phoned, and that the lumber train would arrive soon. Randolph watched him struggle to fill out waybills for a minute, then asked if he knew the lawman down there.
    “I don’t see him much,” the boy said without looking up, his thin arms moving over his forms.
    “He doesn’t send messages out?”
    “He keeps his business back in the woods.” The agent began to sort invoices, frowning at each in turn.
    Randolph walked out and looked down the kinked railroad to Nimbus that led into a tunnel of bearded cypress trees,