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shoulders. She reached up and scratched her head.
    The preacher waited until a tentative snore escaped the woman, and then reached across the fence again. Judd, who had been greatly enjoying the show, could contain himself no longer. Giggles squeaked through his fingers, sounding more like the snort of a pig than laughter.
    The woman jerked around just as the preacher dropped the feather and let go of Judd’s shoulder.
    â€œYou must excuse me, my good lady,” the preacher said, sweeping his hat from his head and bowing to her. “I was trying to teach my young friend here the mating call of the bull moose, and I’m afraid we didn’t see you sitting there. My heartfelt apologies, madam.”
    The woman’s face was drawn in a knot of suspicion, but it eased as she spotted the preacher’s collar. She tried to smile, but the effort was lost to a bone-deep weariness.
    â€œWasn’t sleeping,” she said, finally. “Just waiting for the wind to take the moisture from one load.”
    â€œThat’s plain to see,” Mordecai said, tipping his hat again.
    â€œWe’ll leave you to your work, Mrs. Finney. Sorry we bothered you.”
    They left her staring after them as they walked up the alley, Mordecai saying loudly, “Why don’t you try the call, now, Judd?” Judd broke into muffled laughter again, the sound squeezing between his fingers.
    â€œNot bad, my boy. Not bad, at all. Call like that would certainly draw in a lovesick moose.” They both laughed then, the sound echoing between the walls lining the alley.
    And when they were a block away, the preacher stopped and turned to Judd. “No trick to being invisible. The trick is to make yourself visible. You understand that?”
    Judd nodded.
    â€œWouldn’t do now, would it, to have Mrs. Finney turn around to find out she heard a moose call, and not a moose to be seen. She’d be talking about haunts.”
    â€œBut she’ll have a story now that she can share with her neighbors about a preacher man and an Indian boy hunting moose in her alley. She’ll have a good laugh over that.”
    The preacher paused, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “She deserves another good laugh before she goes.”
    Judd stared at the preacher as they walked toward the school, but the preacher didn’t notice, his mind on other matters.

Five
    The school lay a full mile from the edge of town as though knowledge were under quarantine in Sanctuary, but Mary Dickens didn’t mind the isolation, preferring it to the company of most of the townsfolk, and Sanctuary was there when she needed it.
    She walked to town on a more or less regular schedule for city council and Women’s Christian Temperance Union meetings. When mood and weather meshed, she poked through Sanctuary stores for material for dresses and sewed evenings when she wasn’t reading by the light of a kerosene lamp.
    On free afternoons when the winter sun was more promise than fraud, she walked through frost-rimed cottonwoods lining the banks of the Milk, enjoying the quiet beauty of the river bottom. But most of her time she spent teaching or worrying about “her” children.
    She would see them in the morning walking single file, the older children up front, breaking a path through the snow, the smaller children at the end of the line, bundled as heavily as their bodies and their parents’ budgets would allow.
    Sometimes she stood on the step of the school and peered into a world turned white. It seemed then that only the school had substance, that to leave it was to step into the void. Then she’d see a vague shape through the whiteout, and one of the older children would appear, ephemeral as a ghost, then the others, hand-in-hand, a train of life trudging through a hostile world.
    The children came to school stiff and cut to the bone by the wind, their faces carved stoic and painted red—and sometimes