The prisoners had been brought in for the hanging.

“Those must boil,” he said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp.

His family were enormously wealthy⁠—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach⁠—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.