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charm. Otto had seen it happen again and again in bawdy houses and honky-tonks from Abilene to Hays City. Well, he’d have to ride herd on Raleigh, that was for certain sure.
    With a frown and a sigh, Otto took one last drag on his cheroot and flipped the stub into the river. He watched it fall, spinning on the wind, tumbling, sparking, until it blinked out in the muddy waters.

PART
II

4

    T HE BONES BEGAN a mile east of town. They were piled in ricks, twice as high as a man is tall, overarching the tracks on both sides of the right-of-way. The steel rails ran straight through them, as if diving into a skeletal mineshaft that shut out the light of the prairie. High-angled hipbones, bracketed ribs, the concave graceful plates of shoulder blades, skulls gaping emptyeyed with the black sweep of horns hooking up, down, sideways, black splintered hooves, leg bones knobbed like giant clubs, the shallow, knuckled curve and recurve of spinal columns. All tumbled together in the ricks. Some were whiter than others, some tan, some moss green or the hectic pink of diseased gums. Some were a dark, sickly brown, like rotten teeth.
    And the straight lines of the steel heading West, right through them.
    The train slowed, chuffing, and clouds of steam billowed up through the bones, ghosting out through eye sockets. It was getting on toward dark now and the headlight of the locomotive reflected off the steam.
    Otto and Jenny stepped down out of the cars, knocked cinders off their shoulders, and there it was: Buffalo City, Kansas, as they used to call it, now Dodge City. They might have named it Golgotha, Jenny thought, if they’d had any imagination.
    “Pfui,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.
    “I told you so. It isn’t called the Land of the Stinkers for nothing,” Otto said. “You’ll get used to it, though. The whole West smells like this now, from the Platte and the Republican clear on down to the Cimarron.”
    They walked past the bone ricks and the new frame station-house, past the yards of the big hide dealers—Rath & Wright, Myers & Leonard—where the stacks of stiff, flint-cured hides loomed twelve feet high. Smell of hair, dead meat, arsenic. Out onto wide-open Front Street—no blue laws in Dodge.
    Otto carried the carpetbag and Jenny’s small trunk along the wooden sidewalk past the lighted saloons with their breath of stale beer cutting sharply into the buffalo smell, the quiet gaming hells, festive honky-tonks, and F. C. Zimmerman’s dry-goods store. Otto stopped to look at the new rifles in the window, a sidehammer Sharps in .44 caliber that took a bottlenecked, 2 5 / 8 -inch cartridge packing 90, 100, or 105 grains of powder, and a .44 Remington rolling-block Creedmore that fired a slightly shorter 90-grain cartridge. Both rifles would throw a heavy, 550-grain bullet with great accuracy, but the Sharps allowed more latitude in terms of powder loads, and certainly it possessed greater range. On the other hand, the Remington looked tidier, racier, more “modern,” with its small center-mounted hammer and sleek, neatly checked pistol grip.
    The weapons leaned behind the window against the glass-eyed head of a buffalo. The stub-horn bull stared out into the street. Not mournfully, Otto thought, but resignedly, almost philosophically. As if it knew its days were numbered, as were those of all its kind. Sure, he thought. Philosophically. But at least it made him feel better to think so.
    They passed a dovecote. The girls, some of them older than Frau Wieland, looked out the door and giggled as Otto and Jenny walked by. The soiled doves made little O’s of their painted mouths, and one of them flipped her skirt to display her unclad nether parts, grinning and saying, “Whoops!”
    They hurried on, Otto glaring back at the fallen women, Jenny a bit flustered by the display. No girl in Heldendorf was that brazen, not even Gretel Schlimm, who had been known to flirt in church.
    “Where are we going?” she