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care of the postmaster in Austin and saying that he would be attending church in the morning, knowing it would bring a slow creeping smile to his wife’s face.
    When it was his turn, Nate paid for a half bath, the price of the full bath being too steep. The bathhouse was a large tent behind the main house with a tub, a washstand, and a small mirror nailed to a support post. He washed standing up and then combed his hair and shaved at the mirror. He observed that his hair was too long for ranger service and would soon need cutting. Since the war, he had worn it full, in pride of the Confederacy, but also because cropping it, he felt, would make him appear too young and inexperienced.
    He scraped the razor over his cheek, breathing in the mustiness of the canvas sides, and realized that the tent had most likely been used in the field. He turned to observe the spray of darkened stains on the lower half of the far wall; it told him the tent had been in hospital service. When he turned back to the mirror, he saw reflected on the mottled glass what his naked eye had missed: one rust-colored blot on the canvas, vaguely the shape of a man’s palm. He stared at the reflection for a good while, the razor poised in his hand, and thought of the field hospital in Arkansas in which he had spent some time, and of the men lying in it, suffering typhoid and dysentery and pneumonia, men and boys who had yet to see battle or even fire a gun but who were dying just the same.
    Finished shaving, he quickly dressed, giving his work shirt to the boardinghouse lady to be washed. When he returned to the room, the two rangers looked awkward, as though their conversation had been cut off abruptly upon his entering.
    Dr. Tom stood up from the bed. “Well, Nate. We thought you’d run off with the woman of the house.”
    The three of them walked the short distance to the public house to eat dinner, a meal composed of pot squash and steaks of indeterminate origin. They ordered three whiskeys and all stared for a long moment in appreciation of the warm oaky color and burned-barrel scent before draining their glasses.
    They looked around at the empty hall and watched the barkeep cleaning used whiskey glasses with his tongue. The barkeep pointed to a sign over his head, which read Dances, Two Bits, and told them that the dancing would commence at eight o’clock, along with music the likes of which, he was certain, they had seldom heard. The girls, he assured them, were genuine hurdy-gurdy girls from Europe, and no common whores.
    He added, “These foreign-born like dancing more than you’ve ever seen. You’ll see. It gets rigorous.”
    As the barkeep had promised, within the hour, a small group of men and women quietly entered the public house and seated themselves on benches set against the far wall. One man unpacked a fiddle and another a squeezebox, and they began to play a song. Three young women, the hurdies, dressed in full skirts hemmed just above the ankle, nodded to the music, their old-fashioned sausage curls coiling and uncoiling in time with their bobbing heads.
    Soon more men and women began to enter the public house, Irish, Mexicans, and Rhinelanders among them, each in his own dress, all speaking incomprehensible languages. Most of the men, and a fair share of their women, bought small glasses of beer and crowded the open area to hear the music that was played in ever-increasing tempos. Eventually, a couple of men bought their dance tickets from the barkeep and shyly approached the hurdy girls. Like the men were draft horses, Nate thought, too long at pasture.
    The seated girls chosen to dance smiled and led their callers onto the floor, where they guided the men through a near approximation of reels, polkas, and galops, their partners changing after every song. Swiping his mustache, Dr. Tom walked to the bar and bought two tickets. He chose his partner and commenced an admirable waltz.
    Nate turned to Deerling. “You gonna