"I don't work for you anymore," Deuce says, "nor am I so easy to throw in the Bay. Step aside." Mr. Bartoli doesn't budge. "Step aside," Deuce repeats.
Deuce recoils at the thought of staying in San Francisco. "I told you, Uncle Joe, I got a merchant in Denver holding a job for me," he says. Deuce thinks, I spend 23 years stuck in this town and one year free as a bird on the road. Why wait for the Bartoli's to catch up with me?
Deuce nods hello to Madame Bouchet. "Grief," she says and looks away. "You bring your mother, your family." She pokes his uncle in the gut. "You listen to him!", Madame Bouchet says and pokes Joe again. "You do his bidding, he brings you trouble, you get what?" Joe feigns shock.
"So did I," Joe adds, "for nine long years."
Deuce follows his mother off the streetcar at a stop on the edge of Rincon Hill. "Get cleaned up," she tells him, "then come for dinner. Bring the Canadian with you." Alice adds over her shoulder, "Madame seems to have adopted him. Even found him a new suit of clothes. Can you imagine that?"
Cy in San Francisco, thinks Deuce. He's come a long way from that mud hole outside Waterloo. "I'll be on the morning train," he tells Alice.
Alice gives her oldest surviving son a long look. "To St. Louis," she tells Deuce. "The one in Michigan."
Deuce nods. "I guess so," he says.