Ross had fists like bricks." "How did you get rid of him?" Sally asked.

Sally was about Beulah's age. She had two big moles just above her upper lip.

"Ross stepped on a nail and got blood poisoning and died," Maggie said. "It saved me. He would have broken every bone in my body if he hadn't stepped on that nail." Maggie smiled, and cackled again. She looked like a wicked old woman, but she was still alive, and she liked to talk.

"I didn't go to Ross's funeral. I didn't figure I owed Ross nothing," she said. "But a few days later, I went to the funeral of one of my girlfriends. Three days later, the preacher that preached it came up and asked me to marry him. That's how pretty I was, when I still had my looks. I never knew preachers liked women that much, until the Reverend Jonah got ahold of me." "They do--one got after me, too," Beulah said.

As Maggie and Beulah talked on, a tiredness began to come to Maria. She had kept the women going for three days, leading them, encouraging them, going back for them. She had gathered most of the frozen wood they burned, and she had made the fires. She heard Maggie talking about her preacher, and Beulah about hers, but Maria began to lose the names that went with the stories. The sound of the women's voices lulled her. It was better to hear women talk, even if she was too tired to listen, than to have only the silence and the cold.

Maria would have liked to be fresh, to tell some of her own stories too, but it would have to be another time, when they all reached the railroad and were safe.

Maria's eyes grew so heavy she could not watch the fire. She slumped over, and her serape slipped off her shoulders.

Sally, who was the closest, got up and wrapped the serape back around Maria, pulling it tight so it would not slip off again. She fed the fire a few sticks, from a pile Maria had gathered. Maria had come back for Sally when Sally was freezing, and Sally didn't want her to sleep cold.

"She's tuckered out," Maggie said. Then she went on to tell the women about some of the peculiarities of the Reverend Jonah, the preacher who had loved her in St. Louis, long ago when she still had her looks.

When Lorena got off the train in Laredo, the first thing she saw was a funeral procession, and the first person she spoke to was Tinkersley. As she stepped out of the little railroad station and stopped to watch the funeral procession--it seemed as if everyone in town was following the wagon that had the coffin in it--a tired-looking older man in a slick, brown coat looked at her, and stopped and looked again.

"Why, Lorie," he said. "Could it really be you?" Lorena supposed the mayor must have died. She had never seen such a lengthy funeral procession, in a town the size of Laredo. Even in Ogallala they would have had a hard time getting so many people to march behind a coffin. She looked again at the man who had called her by her name. He had few teeth, and bags hung halfway down his cheeks. He wore a sporty hat, but it was not new. A rat or something had chewed a piece out of the brim.

"Lorie, it's me, Tinkersley," the man said. "It's you, ain't it? Tell me it's you." "I'm Lorena, I'm married now," Lorena said. Tinkersley ran whores and gambled. No doubt he was still running whores and gambling, though not so prosperously as he had been when she knew him. Tinkersley had brought her to south Texas, when she was a young whore. In a San Antonio hotel room, during a fight, he had bitten her on the upper lip, leaving a faint scar that she still had.

Now here he was in Laredo, watching a lengthy funeral procession. She saw a familiar light come into his eyes, from looking at her. She wanted to immediately put it out.

"I've come here to look for my husband. He's with Captain Call, or at least, I hope he is," she said. "Who died?" "Her name was Doobie Plunkert. She was well liked in the town," Tinkersley said. "I liked her myself, although we only met once.

That's why I lent my whores, for the singing.

"I run the whores in this town," he went on.

"They wanted a big singing for Doobie, so I lent them six girls. I just kept back two, to take care of the customers until the funeral is over." Lorena saw the whores, in a group, well behind the coffin hearse, with some more churchly-looking women marching just ahead of them, right behind the wagon.

"I'm surprised they'd let whores sing at a proper funeral," Lorena said. "Was the woman a whore?" "No, she was the wife of a deputy sheriff.

He's gone with old Call, too, like your husband," Tinkersley said. "Sheriff Jekyll raped Doobie, and she took poison and died.

It's a pity. The man could have bought a whore, and spared poor Mrs. Plunkert." The young woman must have felt hopeless, Lorena thought. She hadn't wanted her husband to find out what happened. Lorena set down her valise, leaving it on the railroad station platform, and began to walk along with the funeral.

Tinkersley, after a moment's hesitation, fell in with her.

Lorena didn't try to stop him. What Tinkersley did didn't matter. She supposed it was even rather nice of him, to let his whores sing at the funeral. He probably charged the church a fee, or tried to, but at least he let them sing.

"What kind of poison?" Lorena asked.

"Well, rat poison. She drank most of it in water," Tinkersley said. "They found her by the river. She wasn't quite dead at the time. It was the doctor who noticed that her drawers were torn, and that somebody had hit her a lick or two. They found a little ribbon from her dress in a cell in the jail, and that's what nailed the sheriff." Lorena regretted that the train had come in when it did. She would rather not have known about the death of Mrs. Plunkert. They had never met, of course, but Lorena had been alone, in south Texas, in rooms that were no more than jails, with men who were no different from the sheriff, and who were certainly no better. She had no way out then, and only one way to survive; many times, it had seemed to her a close bargain. In even worse times, when she was taken by Blue Duck and given to the men of Ermoke's band, and then threatened with burning by Mox Mox, she had been reduced to one wish: that there was some way to be dead, and be dead quickly. Although the circumstances of Mrs.

Plunkert's travail might seem lighter, Lorena knew they had not seemed at all light to the young woman who had so promptly taken her own life. Mrs. Plunkert must have felt that her happiness and her husband's happiness were forfeit anyway. She had become hopeless. Lorena knew enough about hopelessness. She did not want to be reminded of it, not even a hopelessness experienced by a young woman she had never met.

What the death of Mrs. Plunkert meant was that hopelessness was always there. There was never a way or a time one could be safe from it. If Pea Eye died, or one of her children, she knew she would have to feel it again.