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whose husband had passed away the previous summer, from Noxon, Montana, over to Sandpoint, Idaho. Claire herself would pay nothing. Eddie’s motives in helping the widow were easily deduced, and he didn’t state them. “We’ll go by road number Two Hundred,” he told Grainier, as if there were any other road.
    Grainier took his mares and his wagon. Eddie had his sister’s husband’s Model T Ford. The brother-in-law had cut away the rumble seat and built onto it a flat cargo bed that would have to be loaded judiciously so as not to upend the entire apparatus. Grainier rendezvoused with Eddie early in the morning in Troy, Montana, and headed east to the Bull Lake road, which would take them south to Noxon, Grainier preceding by half a mile because his horses disliked the automobile and also seemed to dislike Eddie.
    A little German fellow named Heinz ran an automobile filling station on the hill east of Troy, but he, too, had something against Eddie, and refused to sell him gas. Grainier wasn’t aware of this problem until Eddie came roaring up behind with his horn squawking and nearly stampeded the horses. “You know, these gals have seen all kinds of commotion,” he told Eddie when they’d pulled to the side of the dusty road and he’d walked back to the Ford. “They’re used to anything, but they don’t like a horn. Don’t blast that thing around my mares.”
    “You’ll have to take the wagon back and buy up two or three jugs of fuel,” Eddie said. “That old schnitzel-kraut won’t even talk to me.”
    “What’d you do to him?”
    “I never did a thing! I swear! He just picks out a few to hate, and I’m on the list.”
    The old man had a Model T of his own out front of his place. He had its motor’s cover hoisted and was half-lost down its throat, it seemed to Grainier, who’d never had much to do with these explosive machines. Grainier asked him, “Do you really know how that motor works inside of there?”
    “I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!”
    Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.
    “Then you must know what I’m about to say.”
    “You want gas for your friend. He’s the Devil. You think I sell gas to the Devil?”
    “It’s me buying it. I’ll need fifteen gallons, and jugs for it, too.”
    “You better give me five dollars.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    “You’re a good fellow,” the German said. He was quite a small man. He dragged over a low crate to stand on so he could look straight into Grainier’s eyes. “All right. Four dollars.”
    “You’re better off having that feller hate you,” Grainier told Eddie when he pulled up next to the Ford with the gasoline in three olive military fuel cans.
    “He hates me because his daughter used to whore out of the barbershop in Troy,” Eddie said, “and I was one of her happiest customers. She’s respectable over in Seattle now,” he added, “so why does he hold a grudge?”
    They camped overnight in the woods north of Noxon. Grainier slept late, stretched out comfortably in his empty wagon, until Eddie brought him to attention with his Model T’s yodeling horn. Eddie had bathed in the creek. He was going hatless for the first time Grainier ever knew about. His hair was wild and mostly gray and a little of it blond. He’d shaved his face and fixed several nicks with plaster. He wore no collar, but he’d tied his neck with a red-and-white necktie that dangled clear down to his crotch. His shirt was the same old one from the Saturday Trade or Discard at the Lutheran church, but he’d scrubbed his ugly working boots, and his clean black pants were starched so stiffly his gait seemed to be affected. This sudden attention to terrain so long neglected constituted a disruption in the natural world, about as much as if the Almighty himself had been hit in the head, and Eddie well knew it. He behaved with a