“She was just destroyed over the Pangborns’ puppies,” says Josephina to her mother. “Remember that? They were ‘wee.’ Everything was wee, wee, wee.”

Doris is caught flatfooted with this astonishing rudeness and is silent. The driver glances down at her and shakes his head. She busies herself folding up her kit and putting it away. They never laugh, she thinks. They do not understand jokes and joy to them is as foreign as the bottom of the sea. She looks down at her hands. Patience. Quail skitter up in short flights, fall to earth, explode into the sky again trailing their cries behind them and Doris’s face is red with the humiliation of the child’s words, to which she cannot reply.

And alongside rides the sergeant with his little round eyeglasses and blond hair, a spare man with his band collar undone in the heat. He lifts his cap to her with a smile.

“This country amazes me too, Miss Dillon,” the young sergeant says. “I am from Connecticut, with a village every ten miles and a great deal of stony ground.”

“Are you then?” She manages a polite smile. “And there is no danger?”

“No. Not so far. We have scouts out. Be reassured.”

“I will indeed.”

She thinks of the fiddler; her thoughts go back to him repeatedly, as if he too were part of this landscape, with his dusty red hair and his worn clothes all the color of earth, but he stood in them with careless ease and so he outshone them. It was a private place to go with her thoughts, with her mind. His taut, poised body and the fine lines of his face, it was “Death and the Sinner,” his bow to her. He was ragged, a man of a defeated army and at the dinner he had played his heart out in a borrowed shirt. In short, very like the Irish. She tried to ask about him discreetly, got a few answers. He had taken on a man twice his size to get his stolen fiddle back again, they said, knocked him flat with a stone and he had got away with it, standing there asking what song she would like to hear and not a mark on him. A ginger man. A man for this new world and its wild animals that run ceaselessly through her dreams. She had asked for “The Minstrel Boy,” an Irish song of rebellion and surrender so that he might know from whence she came.

There at Fort Brown they had set up tents for the women behind the earthen walls with a separate tent for herself and Josephine and Mercedes. Doris was delighted with the tent, the light glowing through the fabric walls, but she knew better than to say so. She was safely away from the colonel. Jo and Mercedes complained of the hard army cots, but she stood holding back the flaps until late, listening to the music of his fiddle as it tore through fast reels and jigs and it made her move her slippers in a quick step. Here I am dancing in my nightgown, Doris Dillon get hold of yourself. Then he played softer music and she listened until the candle burnt to a pool of tallow guttering in the dish. The night settled in; silence.

The maid leans forward to tap her on the shoulder. In the rear of the wagon Mrs. Webb and the girl Josephine are sleeping.

“The fiddler,” whispers Mercedes. “You bewitched him.”

“Oh tish,” she says, and laughs and puts one hand to her mouth. “Away with you.”

“I have two eyes in my head,” says Mercedes. “And a man of my own and I know when they get bewitched.”

Mrs. Webb calls up, “Doris, you are giggling again. Must it go on all day long?” She lies back, faint with the heat. “Do leave off.”

Doris almost says Oh ha ha but stops herself in time. Mercedes rolls her eyes and they both suddenly bow their heads and clap hands over their mouths.

Mercedes was from San Antonio. She had been down in Brownsville visiting relatives and now hired on with the Webbs to return. She had taken on the care of Doris Dillon with the instincts of someone who adopts the abandoned of the world to be their guide and their loyal if somewhat insistent shadow.

They go on; Doris knows she will be in this New World a long time, perhaps for all her life, and she must be mindful of every step she takes. She does not yet know how to judge these Americans. All she has known of America has been its military, its ranks and rules. But the people outside the military do not seem to have social classes or an aristocracy either, and in Ohio people wearing dusty, worn clothing could be masters of a hundred acres. She must take care every second it seems but then she falls into remembering the fiddler’s spare body, his upright stance. His lean, refined face and his low-spoken courtesy stay with her across the sea of grass. His music. He had called to her. The blond sergeant was attentive to her and kind, made sure the ladies were as comfortable as possible, but she could tell one thing about him: he disliked his own horse.

There was much to come to grips with. Maybe endure was the word. Not the least were Colonel Webb’s footsteps at her closed door once in the silent late hours, in the attic there at the house in Ohio. Slow steps, a pause, a waiting. She with a chair against the door and her mouth dry as a threshing floor and her heart pounding, also waiting. Go away, please dear Lord make him go away.

She shut her eyes. She must take great care. Trust in God, her mother said, but never dance in a small boat.

A heavy storm came in after days of scudding clouds and soaked the piecework shack in which they lived, cleared the air and refreshed the sand-blasted buildings. They made good money at the Wanderer’s Rest. They were asked to play discreet background music at the dining room in the Hendley Hotel, a first for them. They once again borrowed coats, scoured and skillet-ironed their shirts, and came back with twenty-five dollars in silver and banknotes.

“We will be ruined by wealth and pleasures if this keeps up,” said Damon. “We will throw away our bread crusts, buy special cakes of perfumed soap for shaving.”

“Dear God save us,” said Simon.

“An awful fate,” said the boy. He lay on his back on the splintered flooring with his legs up in the air. He was trying to juggle his rucksack on the soles of his feet. It landed on their rickety table and knocked over the fragment of mirror. Doro barely saved it.

“Stop, Patrick,” said Doro. “Quit it.”

“I’m trying to juggle with my feet!”

“Mi hijo, do it outside!”

In early October the postmaster in the Customs House handed Simon the letter. It was a hot day even that late in the year, even at nine in the morning. Simon held the letter in his hand in a fixed, silent way, as if he were afflicted with lockjaw. It was addressed to Patrick Matthew O’Hehir in care of Simon Boudlin and it was from San Antonio.

Simon said thank you sir and turned to walk back in long strides through the heat like an engine, and then as he began to enter the world of shacks and sagging houses he slowed down. They were all asleep inside their little house, where hemp sacks over the windows kept the sun out and flies sailed in and out without hindrance. Doroteo, Patrick, and Damon were in a comalike sleep in their drawers. Like everybody in this hot climate they had sawed them off above the knee. They had been playing last night at the Little Bermuda until they had heard the bells of St. Mary’s ring out two in the morning. Even though they had entered the month of September, there were still mosquitoes and still they heard of the death toll of the yellow fever.

“Patrick,” said Simon. “Patrick, wake up.”

The boy sat up, ran his hands through his spiky hair, and looked around.

“What? What’s happened?” He heard the urgency in Simon’s voice.

“A letter came for you.” Simon held it out and then saw it trembling in the early light and so moved it back and forth, from hand to hand, to conceal the nervous shaking. “It’s from Miss Dillon.”

“Oh then!” The boy smiled with his great wide mouth. “You open it, Simon. You go on and read it. It’s for you. Read it to me later.”

Simon settled his Kentucky hat on his head and took off at a fast walk for the sea. By the time he was out the door the other two had sat up, looked at each other, and then lay back down without saying a word.

Simon walked among the rows of shacks. He was alone at last under a hot and cloudy sky. He touched his hat to women at their housework, flying clean sheets in the wind, roosters calling one to another, dodged a running piglet, and then the beach stretched out before him. It was astonishing to have a private life and it lay in this letter; maybe a rejection, maybe a request that he not write her again, but whatever it might be it was his business, his alone. He was weary of spending his every moment with three other men and their incessant talk, but that’s the way it always was. Simon had come to know that he was the odd one, not them. He was the only person on the beach and his lone dark figure walked on beside the roar and receding draw of the waves.