Fearing that their creditors might try to pursue them on so open a route, they opted for the more difficult but less predictable plan of making for Cincinnati overland via the Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, which had been a place of good luck for them in the past-the place where Lloyd and Lodema were conceived, back when nothing but love seemed to be in the air and hope grew like the sparrowgrass. Pegasus and the humdinger could get them that far, Hephaestus felt. After that, they were in God’s hands.

They took blankets and oilskins and the drunkard’s path quilt Rapture had made. For provisions they took a sack of cornmeal and one of flour, a small side of bacon, a bag of snow apples, one jug of wolf-mint tea, one of homemade whiskey, a bottle of taproot beer, coffee, sugar, salt, some bottled preserves, and taters. They took their old Kentucky rifle and the horse pistol that Parson Shide had used in his famous duel with the alcoholic tobacconist Daniel Christ (who later cut his own throat with a razor in his smokehouse), which Hephaestus had been paid in return for repairing a mill wheel, along with powder and shot, and what Rapture called, “de t’ings fuh mek we libbin’.”

In addition to the richness of Rapture’s phraseology, they took Hephaestus’s blacksmith tools (except for the anvil), his main woodworking tools, an ax, some rope and drag chains, a bolt of twill plus needles and thread, and matches, candles, a lantern, Rapture’s midwife bag, and Lloyd’s notebook. The rest of his dreams and inventions the boy had to leave behind-but, unlike Hephaestus, he felt that he carried them with him in his mind. All these provisions they loaded on the humdinger, but Lloyd’s mind was more loaded still.