All the while Galloway remained on the porch, allowing no trespass, taking inside himself what food or medicine or well wishes were brought. Come evening, he made a pallet in front of the door. One night Pemberton looked out the window and saw Galloway asleep on the pallet, wearing the same clothes he'd worn since the day Serena had come home. Galloway's knees were tucked tight to his stomach, head bowed inward, the nubbed wrist pressed childlike to his mouth while his hand gripped the handle of a sprung switchblade knife.

As she strengthened, Serena talked about Brazil, about going there as soon as they finished in Jackson County. Obsessed with it, Pemberton believed, especially after Pemberton had found potential investors in Asheville. Men who would be interested only in local investments, Pemberton told her, but Serena believed otherwise. I can convince them, she said. As Pemberton sat in the darkened bedroom, his chair pulled close to the bed, Serena spoke of Brazil's untapped resources, its laissez-faire attitude toward businesses, how she and Pemberton should go there and scout tracts as soon as the Jackson County camp was up and running. Not even an empire, Pemberton, a world, she told him, and spoke with such fervor Pemberton at first feared an infection might have set in and raised her temperature. What reservations Pemberton had, he kept to himself. They did not speak of the dead child.

By the second week Serena was out of bed and sitting in a chair, sending Vaughn out on horseback to monitor the work crews' progress and relay messages back and forth from the foremen. Documents and statistics and reports about Brazil, which Pemberton had not even known existed, were exhumed from Serena's Saratoga trunk. Also, a wax-engraved map of South America, which, once unfolded, consumed half the front room. The map covered the floor for days, a cane back chair set upon it so Serena could peruse its expanse more diligently, the chair occasionally lifted like a chess piece and set back down on a different square of the map.

Something planned for years, Pemberton now realized. Serena sent telegrams and letters to sources and contacts in Washington and South America. Possible investors as far away as Chicago and Quebec were contacted as well. Serena did all this with a frenetic alacrity, as if her mind had to make up for her body's inactivity. Minutes and hours seemed to move quicker, as if Serena had wrenched time itself into a higher gear. At the end of the second week, Serena insisted Pemberton return to the office where, as efficient as Campbell was, invoices and work orders and payrolls piled up.

With the help of the mild spring, they were on schedule to finish in Cove Creek Valley by October, so an increasing number of workers were being sent east to Jackson County to set down rail lines and raise buildings for the new camp. Harris had his men in Jackson County as well, teams led by geologists making exploratory sorties into cliffs and creek banks. Harris was tight-lipped about what these men searched for, but he'd also bought an adjacent hundred acres that enclosed the upper watershed. These mountains are like the finest ladies, Harris told Pemberton. They won't give you want you want until you spend a lot of time and money on them.

On Pemberton's first Saturday back in the office, a foreman drove over from the saw mill with his payroll ledger. Pemberton set a fountain pen and box of envelopes on his desk, opened the safe and pulled out a tray of one-and five-dollar bills, a cloth bag holding rolls of quarters and dimes and nickels. When Pemberton opened the ledger, he saw a new name printed on the last line. Jacob Ballard Age fifteen. After a few moments, Pemberton raised his eyes to the top of the ledger. He wrote a name on an envelope, placed two fives and two ones inside. But even as he sealed the envelope, Pemberton's eyes drifted to the bottom of the page, unable to shake the sensation of seeing the child's first name in print. He studied the five letters, the way the raised J and b shaped the word to look like a bowl waiting to be filled. Minutes passed until, for the first time since Serena's miscarriage, Pemberton took the photograph album from the bottom drawer. He set it beside the ledger and opened it to the last two pages. The photograph of himself as a two-year-old was on the left, but it was the photograph on the opposite page that held his attention. Pemberton eased the ledger closer so Jacob and the child's photograph lay side by side.

THAT afternoon Snipes' crew was cutting on Big Fork Ridge when the main cable's tail block broke free from a stump. Snipes believed that if the skidder crew got a break his men should as well, so they sat on the logs they'd just cut. A large woodpecker glided low overhead, a white lining on the black underwings, its round head tufted a brilliant red. The bird flapped its wide wings once and vanished into the uncut trees.

Henryson looked wistfully toward the woods where the bird had disappeared.

"Wish he'd have dropped off one of them head feathers," he said.

Snipes' crew was a bright-spangled assemblage now, for after Dunbar's death all to varying degrees had adopted the heraldry of their foreman. Henryson stuffed his hatband with goldfinch and jay and cardinal feathers to create a variegated winged halo around his head while Stewart wore green patches on his shoulders like chevrons and a white handkerchief sewn onto his bib, crayoned in its center a smudgy red cross. Ross bore a single patch of orange across his crotch, though an act of derision or belief no one but he knew. Snipes himself had further brightened his wardrobe by replacing his leather bootlaces with orange dynamite wire.

Most of the men rolled cigarettes and smoked while they waited. Snipes took his pipe and glasses from his bib before pulling a section of the Asheville Citizen from his overalls' back pocket. Snipes set the newspaper on his lap and took off his glasses, wiped the inner rims carefully with his handkerchief before perusing the page.

"Says here they still ain't got no suspects in the recent demise of Doctor Cheney," Snipes said. "The high sheriff in Asheville argues that some hobo hanging around the train station done it and then hopped the next freight out of town. He figures they'll likely never catch the perpetrator."

"Didn't the high sheriff find it kindly curious that hobo didn't take the train ticket to Kansas City they found in Doctor Cheney's pocket, nor his billfold for that matter?" Henryson asked. "Or why a hobo would sit the good doctor in a bathroom stall with his tongue cut out and a peppermint in each hand."

"Or figure the fellow who's driving the very car the late doctor used to drive might be the least bit involved?" Ross added.

"No sir," Snipes said. "That's what the law calls immaterial evidence."

Ross raised his head and looked upward at the blue sky, let a slow drift of smoke rise from his pursed mouth before speaking.

"I doubt they'll be looking for any other kind of evidence since the sheriff's on the Pemberton Lumber Company payroll."

"You mean the high sheriff in Asheville, not Sheriff McDowell?" Stewart asked.

"That's right," Ross said.

"I don't think Sheriff McDowell can be bought," Stewart said.

"We'll find out soon enough," Ross replied. "These folks seem to be picking up steam far as their killings. Didn't bother to make this one look like no accident neither, the way they done with Buchanan. They'll be needing every lawman in this state on their payroll at the rate they're going."

"They ain't never got to McDowell before, and we all know they've tried. I don't think they will now," Henryson said with uncharacteristic optimism.

The men paused to listen to a staccato tapping coming from the deeper woods. Henryson cocked his head slightly to better gauge the bird's location, but the tapping ceased and the woods grew silent.