A saloon girl learns a few things too well while working on her back. She comes to know men in overabundance. She hears the siren song of suicide repeated till she knows all the words.

Yule swore. He must’ve figured Misty wouldn’t catch it above the horse's hooves, but he was wrong. She heard him loud and clear.

He said, “Goddamn you, Sherwin. You are the very fucking worst.”

Misty was too sapped to soothe him. Plum tuckered didn’t begin to describe it. She could only listen.

“Why Lord? Why do you put in with me? Why? When you know I am not up to snuff? How can you keep hurting these women?”

Just trying to lift her head could put Misty's lights out. She had too little blood and too much pain. Riding upright was downright impossible. She was forced to travel draped over the rear of the paint as if she were already dead. Yule had covered her with the blanket from head to toe and loosely roped her to his saddle – like a horse-thief who’d been caught in the act and gunned. She reckoned Yule must strike the eye as a most miserable bounty-hunter. Even his dog was remorseful and unwagging, slinking alongside the paint.

She heard Yule weep. “Couldn’t you take me, instead? Get her back to town. Let the Doc make her well. I don't give a damn what else waits in Red Junction – do your worst. Deliver me unto Rex Westman and stretch my neckbones! I don't give a good goddamn but please, just this once – let the girl survive me.”

Coming down the mountain, the horse couldn't help but jostle and the throb would put Misty to sleep against her will. Then the paint would lurch the other way and she'd come back awake. It was worse than no rest and nightmares haunted her. Fleeting reunions with faded kin; Momma, Poppa, Baby Jules, Sister Lily and even old Moon Bear. She'd wake up knowing they were all dead and that, for a spell she had been, too.

If she rustled, Yule would say, “We're almost there. Hold on just a little while longer.”

Then she'd hear him sniffling as she receded into fitful sleep.

She dreamed, this time of her own wedding. That fancy gown Madame had teased her with; Yule waiting at the altar in his tuxedo. She spoke the vows and kissed him. She could taste the wax in his moustache. He carried her across the threshold and through his workshop. Cradled in his arms, she went up the twisting staircase to his loft. There he laid her upon his bed. A second man came out of the shadows. Yule rolled her onto her stomach and raised her bridal train so the other feller could have easy access to her nethers. Well, that weren't right. Nothing in her admittedly limited know-how had prepared her for company on her wedding night—

The wound on her hind-thigh was exposed to the open air's exquisite chill. Yule’s field-dressing had been removed. The dream had ended without her permission.

There was a man speaking, but it wasn't Yule.

“God forgive me,” he said. “And you too, Sherwin – do please fucking forgive me that I lied about her Indians. With a little more care this would have been preventable.”

She recognized his voice. It was the doctor, and Yule had evidently been met with denials when he went to verify her story.

“Make her well and we'll forget your malpractice,” Yule replied.

Turning her head, Misty could make out Yule's loft. On one wall she saw his incomplete mural, and on the floor she saw sideways whiskey bottles. The old gray doctor was kneeling at her bedside and Yule stood behind him.

“I thank ye for your mercy, Yule,” she heard the doctor say.

“Sanders, do not thank me for a single thing. Just ensure she does not perish.”

“I do not doubt these wounds are painful, but their nature ain't mortal.” He paused. “And for pain, there is ether.”

Misty was relieved to hear she might make it, after all. She craned best she could to watch Doc Sanders in action. He flung open his hard-cornered traveling case there on the loft's floor. He rifled through envelopes and secret compartments, each bearing a different powder, ointment or rumor. Slathering her gashes with noxious jelly, he began wrapping her under layers of sterile linen. When the operation was complete he held a rag over her mouth and nose.

“Inhale to your deepest extent,” the doctor ordered.

Ether was the stuff characters in dreams did dream of themselves. It was Heaven pinned beneath a cork. One whiff turned Misty's agonies into opportunities for ecstasy. The insidious pock on her hind-thigh had an orgasm. The whole loft swelled and swirled. Misty giggled, wondering if there were anything funnier than having been et alive.

She heard the doctor say, “You did well at cleansing her wounds.”

“I made do with the whiskey I had.”

Misty stretched out on the bed, and then beyond the scope of the bed – and then further even than the walls of the loft. One by one her limbs became driftwood, bobbing in a warm ocean. It was tough to suss if her eyes were still open. All that definitely remained of her were huge ears. She could ascertain every tiny sound, from the dog's breathing, to other folks conversing on the thoroughfare. She heard amplified flies making nests in the manure outside.

“I took a slug out of Westman's shoulder last night.” What Doc intended to say as a whisper between Yule and himself alone; Misty heard loud as a locomotive. “Couldn't help but notice the hole in yer window there. Bullet-round, it is.”

She heard Yule exhale hard, but otherwise he did not respond.

“All I'm gonna say is… nice shot. That's all I'm sayin' about it to anyone, ye hear?”

“I reckon you can be trusted to keep a secret,” Yule dead-panned.

“I deserve that – but don't you understand? I don't have a choice. Rumors of plague might turn out to be more deadly than the sick itself. How many murderers you estimate we've got in Red Junction? Rapists? Larcenists? You reckon there'd be more or less if the men around here started believing tomorrow ain't never gonna come?”

“I'm not arguing,” Yule said. “You know better than I.”

“You ain't ought be guilty. Neither of us should, Yule. Ain’t much we could have done without knowing the source.”

Misty heard Yule laugh, but it weren’t a humorous laugh. Then she heard whiskey draining into him.

He stopped drinking and said, “The source? You mean the place where Westman stashed the poison parcel?”

“Aye, where he did the deed precisely. If we could suss the spot and remove the....infectious agent – then we might limit the casualties to them who have already been exposed.” The doctor finished by asking, “Mind sharing that bottle?”

There was a break in their conversation. Misty heard the bottle going back and forth.

Finally, Yule said, “I know. I know the source.”

“No lie?”

“Wish I could say it was,” Yule admitted. “But I’ve a woeful familiarity with the whole fucking caper…”

Misty listened. Nothing could illustrate a yarn quite like ether. While Yule told Doc the story he’d teased out of Sam the cyclops, it played out in Misty’s mind like a narrated dream. She traveled across the prairie with the men Yule described: Sam, Geoff, Mr Oliver and Tom Savage. She witnessed the exhumation of the genuine Sterling Penrose. Then Yule spilled the Sheriff’s secret, describing how the true Sterling Penrose had been afflicted, and Misty’s visions incorporated the lawman’s sick loins.

She heard for the first time how it had all gone down. Rex had poisoned the fat shambler, whom Yule had called Angus, by feeding him the remains of the putrid marshal. This in turn caused Angus to become the damned; had caused him to become like the crone.

The crone!

Suddenly, Misty was traveling backward in time. She arrived at a vision of her old Indians. Rex Westman was poisoning them with a long-rotten corpse. She saw Rex Westman, hunkering over the Indians’ earthen stove, shoveling in handfuls of moldy flesh. Then, she saw the Indians having supper. Maggots fell from the corners of their mouths but they did not notice. They laughed together and et the poison.

The Fathers weren’t angry. She had never been the white germ. It was Rex, all along. He had killed her Indians. The vision faded to black.

“We ought ride like the wind,” she heard the doctor say.

“We?” Yule began. “You'd be better off solo. Do you not see what comes of my shepherding?”

“Right now,” said the Doc, “there ain't nobody better suited than you. Don't you see your own unique qualifications? Yule, you're the most informed feller in Red Junction!”

“That's a heap of nonsense. I am the town drunk and you know it.”

“But fate don't know it! And fate has thrust the duty of protecting this camp directly upon you – drunk or fuckin’ not!”

“Well that bodes none too well for Red Junction. None too well, at all.”

But he'd already given in, and before Misty knew what, the men were gone. She heard the lock tumble over downstairs. The horse-flies outside droned on. She was too tired to be afraid of being left alone. The dog panted fast, anxious enough for them both, and she fell asleep to his rhythm.

Suddenly: dusk. The dog whined. She heard its nails tapping. The loft was reddened by the sun's nightly demise. She had lost hours, precisely just how many was unclear.

Dude stood upright on his hind-legs. He had his front-paws against the wall where the half-finished mural was painted. Peering out of the porthole, he squealed. Even discombobulated, Misty knew that the dog wanted to go outside and make water. Then she heard the murmur coming from the road, and in delirium there is no concept of self-restraint – so she rolled out of bed, onto her hands and knees. Dude barked at something on the other side of the porthole, and Misty wanted to see, too. What was the fuss out there? It sounded something like a lynch mob. She crawled alongside Dude. She pulled herself to her feet and tried to look out the window. At first, she could see only her own reflection, and she wondered if that's all she was any more – a girl wholly encapsulated in that shattered pane through which Yule had shot Rex Westman.

Then a man passed directly outside the porthole, waving as he went by. It was the stilted, sandwich-board-clad performer she'd seen the night prior.

“Hear ye! The Menagerie commences in no time! Come ye to the Sleeping Bare and witness wonders a-plenty and un-alike any ever known by man before!” And as he went along, Misty heard him further implore, “The cider is this night free-of-charge! Compliments of Mr Rex Westman!”

The traveling show, of course! The gypsies and the freakish performers. Having come out from under their rocks to take a gander, strange fellers jam-packed the thoroughfare. The bordello ate them up like quicksand.

As Misty watched, the crowd parted, regressing like a biblical sea.

That ain't Moses coming along though, she reckoned.

It was the Devil. Rex Westman himself. He was the hot iron by which the crowd was stirred. The road-goers were repelled by his animal anti-magnetism, but they cheered as he passed. He paused at the Bare's entrance to address the people.

“Drinkin'? I'm buyin'!” The mob rippled with approval, and Westman ducked inside with them hot on his heels.

Revenge is the utmost ether of the heart. It can lend a girl more blood than her heart can handle. It stokes a girl without regard for her well-being. Misty gazed down upon the dog and his image was swimming from the wet in her eyes. She bit down and gulped.

“I'm gonna stick that motherfucker,” she said.