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in hand, the testimony of someone who’d actually seen his father. Danny finished reading and folded it up and slipped it back into the envelope, which he handed to Eli, along with the burning candle. He rolled over onto one side, facing away, and drew his knees up close to his chest.
    In Moorhead the lamps still burned yellow inside the ramshackle saloons, and two white steeples rose like pointing fingers through the fading dark. Eli stood in the door of the car as they passed over the Red River of the North, the silty, vegetable smell rising, two paddleboats at rest down there beside the big wooden pier. With the bridge behind them and the train slowing for its Fargo stop, he pulled the heavy door closed, worried about the yard bulls. He needn’t have been. The car barely came to rest in front of the depot before it jerked back into motion and accelerated to the pace of a horse’s trot. As they rolled through downtown, Eli cracked the door to watch the hulking shape of the Headquarters Hotel slip away behind them.
    The air on this side of the Red wasn’t the same as back home. It was drier and dustier, not as ripe or settled. He’d always had the feeling, the few times he’d come to Fargo, that anything might happen here, that the men he saw in the noisy streets with their rawboned faces and hard hands would just as soon kill you as tell you the time. Even the women looked tough, as if the prairie wind had blown the softness out of them. As they passed by the stockyards west of the city and the slaughterhouse with its sour, bloody smell, Danny said, “Aren’t we going pretty slow?”
    â€œNot for long.”
    But the train shuddered then, the engine powering down, and soon they’d come to a full stop. In the silence the boys sat, waiting. After a minute or two, men’s voices sang out from the west, and then boots crunched on gravel, the steps coming closer. The men stopped a few cars ahead, banging and knocking on something, steel on steel. Eli tried to peek out through the slit between the door and frame but couldn’t see anything—and when the big pistons started going again, building up to the pull, there was something missing. The floor beneath them was still, no pulse or tremble, not even when the long line of couplings ahead started to snap and clang.
    Eli got up and pushed the door wide and jumped down to the gravel alongside the tracks. Empty cars were all around them. He counted three ahead of their own, four behind—eight altogether in the abandoned string. Half a mile or so to the east were the lights of Fargo.
    Danny jumped down from the car. “Now what?” he asked.
    â€œWalk back to town, I guess. Figure it out.”
    â€œYou think they’ll catch us and send us home?”
    â€œNo, but I’m sending you home. There’s an eastbound coming through at ten.”
    â€œIf you’re not going back, I’m not either.”
    â€œIt’s only fifty cents, and you’ll be home in time for lunch. It’d be the best thing, Danny. What if you get sick out here?”
    â€œNo,” Danny said.
    â€œYou’ve got to think about Mother, too.”
    â€œIf you make me go back, I’ll tell her everything. I’ll tell her where you’re going. I’ll tell her about the letter.”
    Eli walked back to the car, climbed up and sat down in the doorway, legs dangling. After a minute, Danny clambered up to sit down next to him, and together they watched the morning colors, pink and orange and red, the clouds above Fargo like a range of hills where there were no hills, and the dark line of trees along the river.
    â€œI had a dream about him,” Danny said. “Night before last. His beard was grown out, it was long and gray, and he looked skinny.”
    â€œWas he all right?” Eli asked.
    â€œThere was a lot of smoke and a lot of people. And they were running around, screaming. And I heard a band