The girl on the steps

A bundle of rags and mud drags itself up the Trask steps at night. Adam carries her in over Charles's objection that two men alone with a girl will have the county talking. The doctor counts a broken arm, three ribs, a cracked jaw and skull, and says plainly that somebody tried to kill her. Asked her name, she writes "I don't know" and wins the sheriff to her side; only Charles refuses her, giving her a week and bluffing that she talked under the opium. To Adam she admits she never lost her memory, hints that she is shielding a man she reveres, and lets him invent the rest. He proposes. Meanwhile Alex Platt finds a suitcase of unlabelled clothes and four thousand dollars out by the cedars. Adam marries Cathy at the county seat; Charles calls her a whore and Adam announces he is leaving for California. That night Cathy doses Adam's tea and goes to Charles's bed.

The brothers meet the same woman and each gets the recognition he is capable of: Adam needs her helpless, so she is helpless, while Charles knows his own kind on sight without being able to explain it. Alex Platt turning up the suitcase is the chapter's joke — the evidence is loose in the county and nobody joins it up.