The younger man leaned against the wall. “I think he’s about dried up. Can you fetch him a cup of water?”

“I brought a pail in the Ford, and there’s a dipper you can get him.” The agent pulled his switch key and removed an outsized brass padlock from the door. “You going to a hospital down the line, are you?”

“I feel terrible.” Ted wanted to say more, but felt as if a brood sow were lying across his chest.

The telegraph sounder began to clack in its box, and the agent went in to listen and to open his key and answer.

The younger man came up with a dipper of water and raised Ted’s head.

The agent came out. “Number forty-three’s on time and we’ll see engine smoke in a minute.” He bent down and tied a freight tag around Ted’s left ankle. “Sidney, what happened to him to black his eyes and mash his hand like that?”

“He tangled with some Skadlocks, he said.”

“He did? Who brought him out of their territory?”

“He was laid out when I got here.”

The agent read the note stuffed halfway in his shirt and pulled out Ted’s wallet, removing several small bills. “They want you sent north.” Half a mile away, the locomotive began blowing its out-of-tune whistle, and through the woods the men could hear the arrhythmic cough of a badly regulated engine. The agent got his flag, held it aloft, and the train pulled in, its two wooden coaches squalling to a stop on the flaking rails. An overweight clerk wearing a vest threw open the sliding door to the baggage coach, handed off six rocking chairs, two spools of barbed wire, ten sacks of feed, and a wooden box with the illustration of a clock on its side.

“You got a patient,” the agent said.

“Aw,” the clerk said, turning to pull down the coach’s stretcher, a stout wood-frame apparatus with short legs. The three men lifted Ted onto it and then into the baggage coach, laying him down in a clear area against a side wall.

The young man in the straw hat crouched next to him. “You need some more water, feller?”

Ted opened his eyes, glad to be inside anything, but said nothing.

The whistle hollered and the clerk slid the door closed. The train moved perhaps fifteen miles an hour, and he took pleasure in moving toward a better place where dogs didn’t crush and tear your fingers or men beat on you with the flat of a shovel as they would a snake. The train moved in a shuddering, unsteady motion with the sound of much loose metal in rattling distress. The baggage clerk got down on his knees and put his hand on Ted’s forehead, then gave him a drink of ice water, which went down like a blessing.

“Oh, thank you,” he rasped.

“You need something, you let me know.”

“All right.”

“Eventually we’ll get up to the main line at Harriston, where we meet the northbound train. You’ll get on their baggage car.”

“All right.” The rail was unmaintained and the joints hammered his back when a wheel passed over them.

“I hate to see you down among the cinders and husks there,” the baggage clerk said. He had pulled up a deck chair and was sitting near his head. “I hear you run into some bad folks.”

“The Skadlocks.” His head cleared for a moment and he looked up at the man, who was somehow motionless in the swaying coach. “They kidnapped my little girl and won’t tell me where she is.”

The clerk stood up. “They got your kid back in there?”

“No. I don’t know where she is. They were paid to do it.”

“If you’d caught ’em with her, then you’d have something.”

“To show the law?”

The clerk ran a finger crossways through his waterfall of a mustache. “Well…”

“What would you do?”

The clerk looked blankly through a window. “If they did run off with one of my brood, I’d round up ever Salser with a trigger finger and ride out.”

Ted closed his eyes. “I don’t have folks like that.”

The big clerk’s voice grew low and mean. “We’d chase ’em in that big house and set fire to it. When they run out smokin’ we’d knock ’em down like deer before dogs.” He kept scanning the dull woods, and Ted knew he saw no longleaf pine, no honeysuckle, no swamp iris, just visions of killing, legends of hate passed down from poor, shot-up, unread forebears.

Two hours later, the undersized locomotive poked out of the woods at Harriston. The baggage clerk opened the door on the other side of the car and his counterpart from the northbound was there to help with the stretcher. They loaded him onto a larger baggage coach and set him down on a well-swept floor between a safe and an upright piano. The new baggage clerk was used to handling the poor sick as freight and gave him a shallow pan in which to urinate, then bent to check the tag on his ankle. “We telegraphed ahead for an ambulance at Memphis.” He was a slight man with wrinkles running across his forehead like threads on a pipe. “I got some aspirin. They don’t let us carry liquor no more, else I’d offer you a shot.”

The thought of aspirin made Ted smile. “You have four of them?”

The baggage man got an enamel dipper of water scooped out of a canvas bucket and handed over the pills. “You get in a real good poker game?”

“Can you check the back of my neck? It feels like hamburger.”

He got down on his knees and adjusted his glasses. “Well, I haven’t seen a bandage job like that since I fought in Cuba.” He gently examined the wound, and Ted wondered if he might have become a doctor had he been born in a more civilized part of the country. “You got a knot and a cut on top of that, but nothing they can’t fix at the hospital.”

“Thank you.”

“That hand’s busted up pretty good. Want me to look at it?”

“No. It hurts just to think about touching it.”

“When you get hurt?”

“Yesterday. Some time ago. I don’t know.” The train was taking the well-tamped high iron at seventy, and the car’s springs imparted a jouncing thrust to the world around him.

“We don’t carry many emergency cases, but there’s been times when somebody fell out a tree and waited a week to get to the hospital and have bones set.”

“That makes me feel better,” Ted told him.

The baggage clerk looked surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get some shut-eye. Can I bring you anything right now?”

Ted swallowed slowly. “I have a question.” It was hard to get the words up the elevator of his throat.

“What say?” The man bent at the waist and leaned a hairy ear close.

“You think I should go back after the man who did this to me?”

The clerk scanned him theatrically, head to toe. “Sure enough,” he said. “If you want him to finish the job.”

The train began to rock him to sleep, and ahead he heard the engine’s whistle singing up and down the scale a frantic and operatic warning. Ted imagined that some dunderhead was trying to get his loaded wagon across the tracks half a mile away, a farmer willing his mules to beat a speeding locomotive, as if his pitiful will alone were enough to accomplish anything.