When he came back up for air, his skin felt cleaner and he combed his hair back from his face with his hands. He washed his beard, his eyes, and the desert sand from between his toes. He scrubbed the remnants of the last few weeks from his body and watched them settle on the bottom of the tub like coffee grinds.

Through the window he saw three men drag The Starman’s dead horse’s body across the square. After they’d pulled it off the main street, they maneuvered it up a ramp onto a wagon, and the wagon master whipped his two living horses and the wagon pulled away. “Fresh Meat” was scrawled onto its side.

The slight black-haired boy whom Fenimore had seen in the hotel lobby ran across the square, between Rafael Rodriguez’s legs. He looked up at Fenimore’s hotel room window, smiled, and ran off. Even still he gave the impression of being in perpetual motion. The whole world was in perpetual motion. The water in the tub was comforting. Fenimore drifted between thoughts, fantasies and sleep, and as the water cooled, the sun rose from morning to midday, burning away the fog and bringing Hope Springs into ever sharper focus.

By ten o’clock, people started to gather in the square.

By eleven, the water in the tub was so cold that Fenimore started shivering. He stepped out, dried himself with a cloth and threw his clothes into the water to finally rinse and squeeze the dead Pedro out of them.

By noon, the laundry was done and drying, and the square teemed with bodies. Fenimore took the cigar that The Starman had given him, lit it with an old match and leaned against the wall next to the window, smoking and watching. He needed to find work. Down there was the person who’d give it to him. The trick was to find that person.

At least judging by the activity in the square, most of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs were women and children. Regular inhabitants were of little interest. They lived their lives honestly, with their heads hung down, and their joy held close to their chests. They barely had enough money for themselves, so could offer little to anyone else. Whatever happened, they just went on with it. There was a sad purpose to their movements: buying food, selling wares, hoping their latest disease wouldn’t be their last. But that this was so in Hope Springs didn’t strike Fenimore as strange. It was so in every town he’d ever visited.

The lack of men was, on its own, also not unusual. Men often worked during the day. This wasn’t unique to Hope Springs. What was unusual was that the men who did appear, weaving between the women and children like slavers, held their chins high and their hands close to their revolvers and were distinguishable into two groups. The men belonging to the first had darker skin and wore more colourful clothing than those in the second. The men in the second were pale-skinned by comparison, often lighter-haired, and dressed in identical long grey coats. That one group suspected the other was as apparent as the disdain with which both treated everyone else.

Fenimore took a long puff of his cigar. He had no doubt that Ezekiel Picasso fit squatly into the first group, which meant he more easily pictured himself doing work for the second.

He held the cigar out the window and let a few centimetres of ash fall below, where the street was stained with horse blood. The Starman’s suggestion of honest work in Gulliver’s Participle flickered briefly through Fenimore’s mind, but he’d never been good at digging ditches. Even when Ulrich had made him dig his own grave, he’d been so piss poor at it that Butcher Bellicose got impatient and grabbed a second shovel to dig it with him. All while she watched them dig—watched him dig. If only he’d found himself a woman who lived with her head down. If only he’d…

His daydreams were interrupted by a commotion and the stomping of hooves.

Three grey-coated riders rode into the square.

Fenimore reached instinctively for a revolver that wasn’t in his holster.

The people in the square parted to make way for the riders, whose horses reared and stopped in unison. On the back of one of them sat a man with bound hands whose skin was covered by so much black soot that he looked like a shadow. The grey-coated riders dismounted and pulled the shadow to the ground behind them. He landed with a groan that could have come from the square itself.

They marched him onto the ten metre by ten metre raised platform.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”

The crowd cheered.

The shadow crawled forward.

“This man,” the rider continued, “was caught last week stealing mining rations. Caught, I remind you, stealing them from you, from your husbands and your sons. This man”—The shadow got momentarily to his knees, then dropped back to his chest, still crawling.—“considered his luxury to be more important than your needs. Because of his thievery, others went hungry. Because of his selfishness, others risked injury and death.”

The crowd hissed—

With the exception of one plain woman, who rushed forward, clambered onto the platform and fell upon the shadow, hugging him with as much love and affection as she could muster, sobbing, “Joseph, my beautiful, beautiful Joseph…”

The crowd drowned out her sobs with curses and spit.

“He has a name,” the rider said, “but does that make him innocent?”

“No!” the crowd erupted.

“You know the law. This man has already been judged guilty. The punishment for theft is amputation of all four limbs.”

“Cut ‘em off!” someone yelled from the anonymity of the crowd.

“And his pecker too!”

Fenimore let another column of cigar ash tumble to the ground below. He watched with special interest the reactions of the few dark skinned, colourfully-clothed men who were watching the spectacle unfold from beyond the mass of the crowd. There were three of them, and all three were disinterested and neutral.

The rider was saying, “But mercy can still be showed this man, because mercy is good and the law, being better than any man, is merciful.”

The slight dark-haired boy was there, too.

“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”

All eyes converged on the woman who was sobbing into the shadow’s sooty chest. When she returned their gaze, half of her face was shadow, too. “He’s my husband,” she cried “I will take his punishment.”

Fenimore pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall. Once, someone had taken a punishment in his name, too. The circumstances were different, but the sacrifice had been the same. His jaws tightened. He felt as powerless now as he’d felt that day.

“Very well. The woman has made her choice. She has chosen to pay with her own pain for mercy to be showed to this man, Joseph, her husband.”

The crowd whistled and hissed.

“Do we accept her choice?”

The crowd clamoured.

“Do we accept her pain?”

“Strip ‘er down!”

Two of the riders grabbed the woman by the arms and lifted her to her feet. The shadow clutched at her legs. “Don’t,” he was repeating, “Don’t, don’t…”

One of the two riders kicked him in the face.

He crumpled.

The rider who’d been orating strode toward the woman—the crowd tightened around them—retrieved a dagger from somewhere inside his coat, and sliced open the woman’s clothes: the top of her dress, exposing her sagging breasts, followed by the bottom, exposing her trembling legs, crotch and belly.

“Kill me,” the shadow wheezed.

Although the woman wasn’t ugly, there was nothing sexual about her to Fenimore. The riders and her own brave desperation had stripped her of that along with her clothes, which lay like detritus about her feet. To see her as an object of arousal felt to Fenimore a betrayal of his own history. Her nudity was tremendously moving, but except for her shaking and her sobs the woman didn’t move, nailed to the spot by her love of the body of the shadow beside her. As tears streamed down her cheeks, one clean, one sooty, not once did she look weak—not when the first belts were unbuckled, not when the first lashes arched her tender back, and not even when the full fury of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs, Rhodes, women and children, fell upon her with the full goodness and approval of the law.

Fenimore backed away from the window and shut it. He drew closed the curtains. His hand was slightly unsteady, but he convinced himself that it was due to a lack of sleep.

His urge to fuck, which had been so strong in the morning with Lola, was gone, and somewhere along the way he had also lost his intention of visiting the whorehouse. At least for today.

The redeemed woman screamed.

Fenimore finished smoking his cigar and threw the stub into the tub. Although he’d satisfied his need for a bath and even washed his clothes, he didn’t feel cleansed. So much for hot water. Perhaps only boiling water would reach those places that still felt soiled.

He sat on the bed and let his fingers feel the chainmail that The Starman had sewn to the underside of his poncho. Ring by ring his fingers travelled, like on a rosary. But if The Starman thought this would ever stop a bullet, Fenimore wondered how the hootin’ gun managed to function. The chainmail wouldn’t even stop a stiff stab. The tip of any decent dagger would slip between the rings and penetrate the wearer’s flesh. If it penetrated in the right place, it would leave him bleeding out to die. The only type of attack the chainmail would be effective against would be a slice, and the days of sword fights were over.

Yet the poncho had value, even in its weakness. An illusion could buy a lapse in judgment, which could lead to a moment of indecision. And for a man who knows another’s weakness, a moment could be plenty.

By late afternoon, the redemption was over and the crowd in the square had cleared. Fenimore didn’t know what became of the woman or her beloved shadow.

In evening, the square was empty save for a few stray dogs and men—ones in colourful clothes or long grey coats, with heads held high and hands always hovering just above their guns. A feuding town was apparently no place for the arthritic.

As evening became night, shots rang out occasionally, sometimes further and sometimes closer to the hotel, but Fenimore didn’t pay much attention to them. His mind wasn’t presently interested in bullets. Behind drawn curtains, to the leisurely hiss of a lantern, he was manufacturing an idea.