She was stick and bones, they'd said, weak in the legs, weak in belly. Weak in the head too, most likely, they whispered and their hands, just like her father Harmon, who while parties had been assembling in Missouri, had talked most elaborately of his ambitions for the West. Oregon might well be Eden, he'd said, but it was not the forests and the mountains that would distinguish it as a place of human triumph: It was the glorious, shining city that he intended to build there.

Idiotic talk, it was privately opined, especially from an Irishman who'd seen only Dublin and the backstreets of Liverpool and Boston. What could he know of towers and palaces?

Once the journey was underway, those who scorned Hannon among themselves became a good deal less discreet, and he soon learned to keep talk of his ambitions as a founder of cities between himself and his daughter. His fellow travelers had more modest hopes for the land that lay ahead. A stand of timber from which to build a cabin; good earth; sweet water. they were suspicious of anyone with a grander vision.

Not that the modesty of their requirements had subsequently spared them from death. Many of the men and women who'd been most voluble in their contempt for Harmon were dead now, buried far from good earth or sweet water, while the crazy man and his stick and bones daughter lived on. Sometimes, even in these last desperate days, Maeve and Hannon would whisper as they walked together beside their skeletal nag. And if the wind shifted for a moment it would carry their words away to the ears of those nearby. Exhausted though they were, father and daughter were still talking of the city they would build when this travail was over and done; a wonder that would live long after every cabin in Oregon had rotted, and the memories of those who'd built them gone to dust.