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house, and since his father was on the road with his samples he was on his own. While the doctor was away delivering a baby, Abraham got his clothes from a cupboard, found cash in a tin behind a row of medical journals on a shelf, and crawled into an empty cattle car in the railroad yards, where he fell asleep. When he woke, the world swayed beneath him. He had no idea which way he was headed until the train slowed down approaching the station in Wilmington, Delaware.
    Years later, when Abraham had made his way in the world, he traveled back a thousand miles looking for his father with a Stevens shotgun, only to find a granite-and-marble bank sprung up where the house had stood. None of the neighbors remembered anyone of that name. He placed an advertisement in several newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Noah Cripplehorn, with a description. He received nothing but the odd rambling answer from people patently hoping to collect on vagary alone. He gave it up when his money ran out, but he refused to abandon its purpose. As many cities as he visited throughout the years, and as often as he crisscrossed the continent, he never stopped asking after the man, and he kept the scattergun clean and lubricated.
    Abraham Cripplehorn never forgot an insult or an injury no matter how slight, and had the patience to wait months or years to even a score.
    Stopping in St. Louis in 1872, he got into a scrap with a store clerk over the coloring of a twenty-dollar banknote and cut the man’s arm to the bone with a clasp-knife, his preferred weapon of self-defense; he was saving the Stevens for his father. A policeman happened to be present. Cripplehorn came to in a cell with a crusty bump on his head from the officer’s nightstick, pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of aggravated assault, and spent six months in the state penitentiary in Jefferson City. His cellmate, an elderly confidence man named Mike Hurly, told him he was wasting his time unloading gold bricks on the gullible and trying to pass counterfeit currency. A young man of his obvious intelligence ought to try his hand at selling trust.
    Cripplehorn smiled. “Trust, what’s that?”
    â€œOnly the difference between going to the customer instead of having him come to you.”
    â€œI don’t just have the capital right now to rent a storefront.”
    â€œI’m talking about personal transactions, not real estate. You can sell pomade to a bald man if you know what you’re about.”
    â€œThat the sound policy that put you in here?”
    Hurly’s smile was beaming; as opposite to his cell mate’s as blue sky to overcast. He was a redheaded Irishman with a nose full of shot veins and ruddy skin pulled all out of shape by a lifetime of beaming. He was thirty-two at the time of their meeting.
    â€œI got drunk celebrating a score and stole a horse and buggy that happened to belong to the mayor of Springfield. It don’t count against what I’m telling you.”
    â€œTelling or selling?”
    â€œJust now I’m fresh out of merchandise, so you can believe what I’m saying. Under other circumstances I’d be fleecing you out of that Dutch eye. I don’t like to see a young man squandering his potential on store clerks without a pot to piss in. How much time you got left?”
    â€œFive months, sixteen days, eleven hours, and change.”
    â€œI got another four beyond, on account of I bust that mayor’s yellow-wheeled wagon against a telegraph pole misjudging a turn. That’s plenty of time to turn you out from Hurly University.”
    â€œDoes it come with a key I can hang from my watch chain?”
    Hurly tapped the other man’s chest. “You wear it in there, and it’ll open every door this side of St. Peter. Where you go from there depends on what you learn after you leave here.”
    *   *   *
    It was in that cell that Cripplehorn