“I say,” McComas rumbled, “don’t send your inc; don’t have him do the mural at all; get a Complete. He’ll roll along on that cow-cart for a hundred or so miles and then he’ll come to a place where there’s no road, and he’ll go into a ditch and that’ll be that. It’s no favor to him, Handy. It just means you’re killing some poor limbless fart who admittedly paints well—”

“Paints,” Father Handy said, “better than any artist that SOW knows of.” He pronounced the initials as a word, as “sow”—the female pig—so as to plague McComas, who insisted it always be spoken as three initials or at least as “sow” to rhyme with “mow.”

McComas’s short-circuited red eyes focused malignly on him, and he searched for a cutting, tearing, oral return remark; while he did so, Ely said all at once, “Here comes Miss Rae.”

“Oh,” Father Handy said, and blinked. Because it was Lurine Rae who made into fact the dots, jots, and tittles of Servants of Wrath dogma; at least as far as he personally was concerned.

Here she came now, red-haired and so small-boned that he always imagined that she could fly… the idea of witches entered his mind when he saw Lurine Rae unexpectedly, because of this lightness. She rode horseback constantly, and this was the “real” reason for her springiness—but it was not merely the lithe motion of an athletic woman; nor was it ethereal either. Hollow-boned, he had decided, like a bird. And that connected once more in his mind women and birds; hence once more Papagano, the birdcatcher’s, song: He would make a net for birds and then he would make, someday, a net for a little wife or a little lady who would sleep by his side, and Father Handy, seeing Lurine, felt the wicked old ram-animal within him awake; the evil of substantiality itself manifested its insidious being at the heart of his nature.