It was night when the preacher swung out of his saddle and knelt by the stream to clean his hands and feel the cool water on his face. The stream was cold and clear in the moonlight, probably spring-fed, and it felt good on his face and in his hair. Refreshed, he drank, and after drinking, tried once more to clean his hands, even going so far as to fish a coarse stone out of the stream bed and scour his palms and knuckles with it. He tried to pick at his fingernails, but he knew that the soot and blood beneath them wouldn’t wash away. He’d picked and scraped and scrubbed for eight days now, ever since he rode out of Creek Hill, but still the stains remained.
He didn’t mount up, preferring to give his horse a rest. Instead, the preacher took the animal by the reins and carried on at a slow march, fording the little stream, and drifting once more out of the woods toward the Missouri riverbank. It wasn’t too much farther on that he came to a sudden clearing in the woods and found a house waiting for him in the dark.