“But I am a man, and as such, no stranger to impurity. I myself passed through the years in which you find yourself. I know the Devil, boy, I have shaken him by the hand, I have embraced him and smelled his stinking breath and thought it the finest perfume.”

He got himself exercised with these remarks and pressed his head against the buckboard floor, squashing his black hat, while the wagon lifted several inches out of the mud.

Then he eased and spoke gentle. “I heard that colloquy through my study door. I am aware that you had the knife, boy, and I can imagine only too well your motive for using it against another.… The girl’s identity is of no interest to me. I am willing to believe that although you were doing the Devil’s work you did not recognize him in his female attire. Does she have velvet cheeks, boy, and satin hair and long-lashed eyes undershot with damask? No matter, behind that mask is a skull of white bone with hollow sockets, and that soft pink mouth is the cave of death.”

I just flicked my line as if I had a bite, for whatever could I say to that? As to the girls I had been thrown with so far, they was ten years old in that school class.

“I don’t condemn you, boy,” Pendrake said. “I tell you I know the fire that rises in the loins and sweeps upward consuming all before it. I know the primitive peoples among whom you spent your boyhood make a sacred thing of this conflagration. But that is our difference, is it not? that we harness our bestial energies. That we do not defile but preserve. Woman is a vessel, and it is within man’s power to make that vessel a golden chalice or a slop bucket.”

Along about here, Lavender come down to the bank under his umbrella and toting an enormous basket covered with oilcloth. He scrooched down and peeked at us under the wagon.

When talking to the Reverend he assumed a lazy, whiny, idiotic style that I happened to know he reserved for just that purpose, for he was otherwise very sharp though illiterate as I said.

“Your Honor,” says he, “would … you all … be wantin’ … thisheer lunch?”

“Put it down, that’s a good fellow,” answers Pendrake in a clipped way that he probably figured would stimulate Lavender to move faster but seemed to have the reverse effect.

When Lavender finally trudged away, Pendrake said: “There is a case in point. Can you understand that Lavender and Lucy would have lived in common, defying the ordinances of God and man, had I not insisted on marrying them?”

I might say at this point and then we won’t mention it again, that I do not know whether Pendrake was Abolitionist or Proslavery. He had freed Lavender, if that meant anything. And if he was Abolitionist, why his reason would have been that freedom would make the colored people less lusty. Now I know you can read in history books that the slavery issue was hot in Missouri of this date, and there was private wars over it and shootings in the dead of night, a reign of terror and so on. Well that ain’t no lie, but you could be living right in the middle of it like me and never know it was going on. Remember that next time you read something. I knowed many a man who went all the way across the prairies during the Indian wars and never saw one hostile savage. That’s the way reality operates. I wasn’t ever interested in politics, so I never saw any. In them days there was always somebody getting shot or knifed, and you wouldn’t think nothing of it. And then I have an idea that Pendrake was so respectable that he might not have had to take a loudmouthed stand either way.

The Reverend broke off at that point and pulled the oilcloth from the basket. Lucy had packed us more food than all of Old Lodge Skins’s band ate during one whole winter. There was two or three cold fried chickens, a great hunk of ham, about a dozen hardboiled eggs, two loaves of bread, and a chocolate cake, just to mention the larger items.

We hadn’t done nothing so far but sit under the wagon, and I wasn’t too hungry. I was also feeling a little queasy from being damp in wool; among the Cheyenne you wear leather, which takes the rain almost like your own skin. Or maybe I might have been embarrassed at Pendrake’s jawing about matters that should be private. I guess I already knowed it at ten, before I went with the Indians, but I had forgot how the conjunction of men and women is looked upon as dirty by the whites, so they got to involve it with law. Lucy and Lavender shared the same room, but it was against the laws of God and man until Pendrake said a few words over them, after which it was O.K.

Well, it was an entertainment to see the Reverend consume that lunch. I ate a wing, an egg, and a piece each of bread and cake and felt myself uncomfortable full at that. All the rest went soon enough into Pendrake’s great belly. What was left of the contents of the basket was a pile of cleaned bones and eggshells within fifteen minutes.

Then he brushed his beard with his fingers, though I never in my acquaintance with him saw him drop a crumb into that underbrush-he was neat about food, I believed, because he wasn’t going to let a morsel escape his mouth-and picked his teeth and cleared his passages with a huge draught from a jug of water that Lucy had included.

“It has been a great satisfaction to me to have this talk with you, boy,” he says then. “And I hope and trust you will derive some value from it. We have not before had the opportunity to know each other, for while I am your father upon earth, I am much occupied with serving my own Father in heaven. But He is also yours, and in serving him I am serving you, if I do it properly. That effort leaves me little time for the delightful sport we are enjoying today, though to enjoy oneself moderately is surely no sin.”

I haven’t mentioned how I had to sit Sundays in church and listen to Pendrake’s gab. The only consolation was that Mrs. P. had to go as well, wearing her fine clothes, and it was a proud thing to sit alongside the most beautiful woman in town, with the men, including the ancient elders, stealing looks at her and their women all peevish. But them sermons! Pendrake’s trouble was he didn’t have no fire. Unlike my old man, he didn’t get no release from his religion, but rather was further bottled up by it. That might have kept him from getting killed by savages, but maybe it is worse never to open your spirit up to the wind.

Anyway, he always said a good deal about “sin,” and what I got to wondering now we was sitting there, was what in his opinion constituted such. You may remember with my Pa it was cussing, chewing, spitting, and not washing your face. It seemed likely Pendrake had another view. Anyway, we obviously wasn’t going to catch any fish, and lunch was over, and despite the Reverend’s remarks on the satisfaction afforded by our little talk, he was still uneasy-looking. I reckon a man who puts out words all the time gets to wondering whether they are ever being received.

So to oblige him, with the same motive I had called Mrs. P. “Mother,” I asked about sin. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and he had wiped off my face. I am like an Indian in that if I am treated nice I’ll try to make a return.

He had a wider-sweeping definition of sin than my Pa’s, and a longer list of specifics than my old man had give, probably because Pa was an amateur at preaching and couldn’t read. For Pendrake’s roster wasn’t properly his own but rather, as he admitted, that of the Biblical Paul.

“The works of the flesh,” answers the Reverend. “And ‘the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like.’ ”

It was a funny thing, the most important years of my rearing so far had been handled by my second father, who was Old Lodge Skins. Now you take away “envyings” from that list-for he didn’t covet much, owing to his belief he had everything of importance already-and you had a perfect description of that Indian’s character. Yet he was as big a success among the Cheyenne as a man could be.