And so they did, making do with what they had left, eating wild game they caught along the way, and pushing hard to get through the hill country.

Easter found them in Cincinnati, or Porkopolis, as it was being called-a booming new metropolis of 150,000 energetic souls, many of them German immigrants, Irish, Scots, and Poles. The family was able to find temporary lodging and employment with a man named Schloss, who made knockwurst and sculpted pigs’ heads of offal and jellied marrow. Lloyd’s grasp of German came in handy, and he was assigned the task of taking orders and assisting with deliveries. Rapture did laundry and cooking, while Hephaestus got work with the Cincinnati Steamship Company repairing machinery. At night they snuggled amid the pork fat and candle smoke and pored over Micah’s letter, which Lloyd kept hidden in his precious bag along with his notebook.

For three weeks they lived above Schloss’s meaty-smelling slop kitchen in a frame-house-and-vegetable-plot district running up from the river, where the smell of kettles full of boiling shirts mingled with the fumes of schnapps. The sounds of polka music (which was relatively new then) alternated with the lieder and the occasional hatchet fight. During that time they sold Pegasus and what was left of the humdinger to an Irish-Shawnee giant named Mulligan Hawk. Despite his fearsome appearance, he gave the impression of knowing horses and appreciating animals. Their goodbye to this, their last living friend from the farm, was less moody as a result. Old Pegasus would be looked after-perhaps much better than they would be.

The combined sale, along with a good word from the giant, yielded enough money for rough-deck keelboat passage in the company of a cable-armed Serb named Holava, who carried a bowie knife strapped to his belt that he called a “genuine Arkansas toothpick,” and made his living hauling coal, nails, timber shake, and sacks of milled corn to Louisville.