Eli goes for a walk through the town with Mayfield’s bookkeeper. They discuss his current assignment—kill Warm for allegedly stealing something—and Eli admits that “it would not surprise me in the least if he was perfectly innocent” (139).

Eli tells the woman that he would like to move out of the small drafty house in Oregon City that he shares with Charlie. The woman would like to see Eli again, and Eli promises that he will return. She ties a piece of blue silk around his arm as a symbol and reminder of this pledge.

The woman returns to the hotel, but Eli wanders around the town by himself a little longer. Beside the yard of a freshly painted house, he finds a crying young girl, who tells Eli that “she had had a bad dream” and that he was in it (142). In the dream, she came to this house to kill a three-legged dog—a dog that is sitting nearby in reality—but in her dream, she and dog became trapped in an ever-growing dark cloud. After the girl walks away, Eli notices that the dog is now dead, having been poisoned (presumably by the girl).