The convict tied a small loop in the end of the rope, then doubled-over the shaft and worked it back through the loop.

"You listen-" Willie began.

The convict whirled the lariat over his head and slapped it around Willie's shoulders, hard, cinching the knot tight. Before Willie could pull the rope loose, the convict wrapped the other end around his pommel and kicked his horse in the ribs. Suddenly Willie was jerked through the air, his arms pinned at his sides, the ground rising into his face with the impact of a brick wall. Then he was skidding across the dirt, fighting to gain purchase on the rope, the trees and picket fences and flowers in the yards rushing past him.

He caromed off a lamppost and bounced across a brick walkway at the street corner. The rider turned his horse and headed back toward the cottage, jerking Willie off his feet when he tried to rise. Willie clenched both his hands on the rope, trying to lift his head above the level of the street, while dust from the horse's hooves clotted his nose and mouth and a purple haze filled his eyes.

Then the convict reined his horse and was suddenly motionless in the saddle.

A Union sergeant, with dark red hair, wearing a kepi, was walking down the middle of the street, toward the riders, a double-barrel shotgun held at port arms.

"The five-cent hand-jobs down in the bottoms must not be available this evening," he said.

"Don't mix in hit, blue-belly," Jarrette said.

"Oh, I don't plan to mix in it at all, Captain Jarrette. But my lovely ten-gauge will. By blowing your fucking head off," the sergeant said. He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer on each barrel.

Jarrette stared into the shotgun, breathing through his mouth, snuffing down in his nose, as though he had a cold. "How you know my name?" he asked.

"You were with Cole Younger at Centralia. When he lined up captured Union boys to see how many bodies a ball from his new Enfield could pass through. Haul your sorry ass out of here, you cowardly sack of shit," the sergeant said.

Jarrette flinched, the blood draining out of his cheeks. He rubbed his palms on his thighs as though he needed to relieve himself. Then his face locked into a disjointed expression, the eyes lidless, the jaw hooked open, like a barracuda thrown onto a beach.

"That was Bill Anderson's bunch. I wasn't there. I didn't have nothing to do with hit," he said.

"I can always tell when you're lying, Jarrette. Your lips are moving," the sergeant said.

"Hit's Cap'n Jarrette. Don't talk to me like that. I wasn't there."

"In three seconds you're going to be the deadest piece of white trash ever to suck on a load of double-ought buckshot," the sergeant said.

"Cap?" said a man in a butternut jacket cut off at the armpits. "Cap, it's all right. He don't know what he's talking about."

But there was no sound except the wind in the trees. The man in the butternut jacket looked at the others, then reached over and turned Jarrette's horse for him.

Willie watched the seven horsemen ride quietly down the street, the shadows and their wide-brim flop hats smudging their features, their voices lost in the wind. The sergeant released the tension in the shotgun's hammers. He wore a silver ring with a gold cross soldered to it.

"You again. Everywhere I go," Willie said, wiping the blood from his nose.

"Oh, had them surrounded, did you?" the sergeant said.

Willie touched a barked place on his forehead. "No, I allow you're obviously a much more resourceful and adept man than I. Truth is, Sergeant, I regularly make a mess of things," he said.

The sergeant's face softened. "Wasn't much to it. I know Jarrette's name and what he is. Hold up a mirror to a fellow like that and he's undone by what he sees."

"What's your name?"

"Quintinius Earp."

"It's what?"

"Ah, I should have known your true, lovable self was never far behind. The name is Quintinius Earp, lately of Ripton, Vermont, now obliged to baby-sit ex-Rebs who can't keep their tallywhackers out of the clothes roller."

"Earp? As in 'puke'?"

"Correct, as in 'puke.' Would you do me a favor?"

"I expect."

"Go home. Pretend you don't know me. Piss on my grave. Dig up my bones and feed them to your dog. Go back to Ireland and take a job in the peat bogs. But whatever it is, get out of my life!"

"Could I buy you a drink?" Willie asked.

Sergeant Earp shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat as though a nail had just been hammered into his head.

ABIGAIL Dowling had been chopping wood for her stove and loading it into a box when she glanced through the side yard and saw a Yankee soldier armed with a shotgun disperse a group of men in front of her house. He had a red goatee and mustache and short muscular arms, and his dark blue jacket was pulled tightly down inside his belt so his shoulders and chest were molded as tautly as a statue's.

She set down the woodbox and walked through the side yard into the front. Down the street she saw a man walking away in the gloaming of the day, the back of his clothes gray with dust. The Union soldier had propped his shotgun against her fence and was buying a twist of taffy from a vendor. The soldier squatted down in front of a small Negro girl and untwisted the paper from the taffy and gave it to the girl.

"What happened out here?" Abigail said.

The sergeant stood up and touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local fellow a bad time," he said.

"Was that Willie Burke?" she asked, looking down the street.

"Has a way of showing up all over the planet? Yes, I think that's his name."

"Is he all right?"

"Seems fine enough to me."

The black girl had finished her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her. "Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

Abigail and the soldier looked at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck of the woods," he said.

"On the Merrimack, in Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.

"Do you have a name?" she asked.

"Oh, excuse me. It's Sergeant Earp. Quintinius Earp."

She smiled, her head tilting slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.

"Quintinius? My, what a beautiful Roman name," she said.

When he grinned he looked like the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.