Denis Johnson

Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.

Mr. Sears, of Spokane International’s management

his wife, Gladys, and their infant daughter, Kate

Arn Peeples, an old man now, formerly a jim-crack sawyer,

As he watched them, it occurred to him that he’d lived almost eighty years and had seen the world turn and turn

he’d been born sometime in 1886

“I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”

young Harold himself took a dizzy spell and fell over onto his work, and the horses shied and nearly overturned the load, trying to keep from trampling him. The boy was saved from a mutilated death by the lucky presence of Grainier himself, who happened to be standing aside waiting to cross the skid road and hauled the boy out of the way by the leg of his pants.

Arn Peeples had said a standing tree might be a friend, but it was from just such a tree that his death had descended.