'I want to stay,' Arthur Stuart insisted. 'It can't be no worse than the time you left me with that schoolmaster.' (Which is another story, not to be told right here.)
Alvin looked at Arthur Stuart real steady. He was no Torch, like his wife. He couldn't look into Arthur's heartfire and see a blame thing. But somehow he saw something that let him make up his mind the way Arthur Stuart wanted him to. 'I'll go for now. I'll be back, though, in six days, and I'll have an accounting with you. You don't raise a hand or a stick against this boy, and you feed him and treat him proper.'
'What do you think I am?' asked Rack.
'A man who gets what he wants,' said Alvin.
'I'm glad you recognize that about me,' said Rack.
'Everybody knows that about you,' said Alvin. 'It's just that you aren't too good at picking what you ought to be wanting.' With another grin, Alvin tipped his hat and left Arthur Stuart.
Well, Rack was as good as his word. He worked Arthur Stuart hard, getting ready for the harvest. A late summer rain delayed the corn in the field, but they put the time to good account, and Arthur was given plenty to eat and a good night's rest, though it was the millhouse loft he slept in now, and not the house; he had only been allowed inside as Alvin's personal servant, and with Alvin gone, there was no excuse for a half-Black boy sleeping in the house.
What Arthur noticed was that all the customers were in good cheer when they came to the millhouse for whatever business they had, especially during the rain when there wasn't no field work to be done. The story of the goslings had spread far and wide, and folks pretty much believed that it really had been Rack's idea, and not Alvin's doing at all. So instead of being polite but distant, the way folks usually was with a miller, they gave him hail-fellow-well-met and he heard the kind of jokes and gossip that folks shared with their friends. It was a new experience for Rack, and Arthur Stuart could see that this change was one Rack Miller didn't mind.
Then, the last day before Alvin was due to return, the harvest started up, and farmers from miles around began to bring in their corn wagons. They'd line up in the morning, and the first would pull his wagon on to the scale. The farmer would unhitch the horses and Rack would weigh the whole wagon. Then they'd hitch up the horses, pull the wagon to the dock, the waiting farmers would help unload the corn sacks - of course they helped, it meant they'd be home all the sooner themselves - and then back the wagon on to the scale and weigh it again, empty. Rack would figure the difference between the two weighings, and that difference was how many pounds of corn the farmer got credit for.
Arthur Stuart went over the figures in his head, and Rack wasn't cheating them with his arithmetic. He looked carefully to see if Rack was doing something like standing on the scale when the empty wagon was being weighed, but no such thing.
Then, in the dark of that night, he remembered something one of the farmers grumbled as they were backing an empty wagon on to the scale.
'Why didn't he build this scale right at the loading dock, so we could unload the wagon and re-weigh it without having to move the durn thing?' Arthur Stuart didn't know the mechanism of it, but he thought back over the day and remembered that another time a farmer had asked if he could get his full wagon weighed while the previous farmer's wagon was being unloaded. Rack glared at the man. 'You want to do things your way, go build your own mill.'
Yes sir, the only thing Rack cared about was that every wagon get two weighings, right in a row. And the same system would work just as well in reverse when the buyers came with their empty wagons to haul corn east for the big cities. Weigh the empty, load it, and weigh it again. When Alvin got back, Arthur Stuart would be ready with the mystery mostly solved.
Meanwhile, Alvin was off in the woods, looking for Davy Crockett, that grinning man who was singlehandedly responsible for getting two separate guns pointed at Alvin's heart. But it wasn't vengeance that was on Alvin's mind. It was rescue.
For he knew what he'd done to Davy and the bear, and kept track of their heartfires. He couldn't see into heartfires the way Margaret could, but he could see the heartfires themselves, and keep track of who was who. In fact, knowing that no gun could shoot him and no jail could hold him, Alvin had deliberately come to the town of Westville because he knew Davy Crockett had come through that town, the bear not far behind him, though Davy wouldn't know that, not at the time.
He knew it now, though. What Alvin saw back in Rack's millhouse was that Davy and the bear had met again, and this time it might come out a little different. For Alvin had found the place deep in the particles of the body where knacks were given, and he had taken the bear's best knack and given as much to Davy, and Davy's best knack and given the same to the bear. They were evenly matched now, and Alvin figured he had some responsibility to see to it that nobody got hurt. After all, it was partly Alvin's fault that Davy didn't have a gun to defend himself. Mostly it was Davy's fault for pointing it at him, but Alvin hadn't had to wreck the gun the way he did, making the barrel blow apart.
Running lightly through the woods, leaping a stream or two, and stopping to eat from a fine patch of wild strawberries on a riverbank, Alvin got to the place well before nightfall, so he had plenty of time to reconnoitre. There they were in the clearing, just as Alvin expected, Davy and the bear, not five feet apart, both of them agrinning, staring each other down, neither one budging. That bear was all spiky, but he couldn't get past Davy's grin; and Davy matched the bear's single-minded tenacity, oblivious to pain, so even though his butt was already sore and he was about out of his mind with sleepiness, he didn't break his grin.
just as the sun set, Alvin stepped out into the clearing behind the bear. 'Met your match, Davy?' he asked.
Davy didn't have an ounce of attention to spare for chat. He just kept grinning.
'I think this bear don't mean to be your winter coat this year,' said Alvin.
Davy just grinned.
'In fact,' said Alvin, 'I reckon the first one of you to fall asleep, that's who the loser is. And bears store up so much sleep in the winter, they just flat out don't need as much come summertime.'
Grin.
'So there you are barely keeping your eyelids up, and there's the bear just happy as can be, grinning at you out of sincere love and devotion.'
Grin. With maybe a little more desperation around the eyes.
'But here's the thing, Davy/ said Alvin. 'Bears is better than people, mostly. You got your bad bears, sometimes, and your good people, but on average, I'd trust a bear to do what he thinks is right before I'd trust a human. So now what you got to wonder is, what does that bear think will be the right thing to do with you, once he's grinned you down?'
Grin grin grin.
'Bears don't need no coats of human skin. They do need to pile on the fat for winter, but they don't generally eat meat for that. Lots of fish, but you ain't a swimmer and the bear knows that. Besides, that bear don't think of you as meat, or he wouldn't be grinning you. He thinks of you as a rival. He thinks of you as his equal. What will he do? Don't you kind of wonder? Don't you have some speck of curiosity that just wants to know the answer to that question?'
The light was dimming now, so it was hard to see much more of either Davy or the bear than their white, white teeth. And their eyes.
'You've already stayed up one whole night,' said Alvin. 'Can you do it again? I don't think so. I think pretty soon you're going to understand the mercy of bears.'
Only now, in his last desperate moments before succumbing to sleep, did Davy dare to speak. 'Help me,' he said.
'And how would I do that?' asked Alvin.
'Kill that bear.'
Alvin walked up quietly behind the bear and gently rested his hand on the bear's shoulder. 'Why would I do that? This bear never pointed no gun at me.'
'I'm a dead man,' Davy whispered. The grin faded from his face. He bowed his head, then toppled forward, curled up on the ground, and waited to be killed.
But it didn't happen. The bear came up, nosed him, snuffled him all over, rolled him back and forth a little, all the time ignoring the little whimpering sounds Davy was making. Then the bear lay down beside the man, flung one arm over him, and dozed right off to sleep.
Unbelieving, Davy lay there, terrified yet hopeful again. If he could just stay awake a little longer.
Either the bear was a light sleeper in the summertime, or Davy made his move too soon, but no sooner did his hand slide towards the knife at his waist than the bear was wide awake, slapping more or less playfully at Davy's hand.
'Time for sleep,' said Alvin. 'You've earned it, the bear's earned it, and come morning you'll find things look a lot better.'
'What's going to happen to me?' asked Davy.
'Don't you think that's kind of up to the bear?'
'You're controlling him somehow,' said Davy. 'This is all your doing.'
'He's controlling himself,' said Alvin, careful not to deny the second charge, seeing how it was true. 'And he's controlling you. Because that's what grinning is all about - deciding who is master. Well, that bear is master here, and I reckon tomorrow we'll find out what bears do with domesticated humans.'
Davy started to murmur a prayer.
The bear laid a heavy paw on Davy's mouth.
'Prayers are done,' intoned Alvin. 'Gone the sun. Shadows creep. Go to sleep.'
That's how it came about that when Alvin returned to Westville, he did it with two friends along - Davy Crockett and a big old grizzly bear. Oh, folks was alarmed when that bear come into town, and ran for their guns, but the bear just grinned at them and they didn't shoot. And when the bear gave Davy a little poke, why, he'd step forward and say a few words. 'My friend here doesn't have much command of the American language,' said Davy, 'but he'd just as soon you put that gun away and didn't go pointing it at him. Also, he'd be glad of a bowl of corn mush or a plate of corn bread, if you've got any to spare.'
Why, that bear plumb ate his way through Westville, setting down to banquets without raising a paw except to poke at Davy Crockett, and folks didn't even mind it, it was such a sight to see a man serve gruel and corn bread to a bear. And that wasn't all, either. Davy Crockett spent a good little while picking burrs out of the bear's fur, especially in the rumpal area, and singing to the bear whenever it crooned in a high-pitched tone. Davy sang pert near every song that he ever heard, even if he only heard it once, or didn't hear the whole thing, for there's nothing to bring back the memory of tunes and lyrics like having an eleven-foot bear poking you and whining to get you to sing, and when he flat out couldn't remember, why, he made it something up, and since the bear wasn't altogether particular, the song was almost always good enough.
As for Alvin, he'd every now and then pipe up and ask Davy to mention whether it was true that Alvin was a burglar and a plough-stealing prentice, and each time Davy said no, it wasn't true, that was just a made-up lie because Davy was mad at Alvin and wanted to get even. And whenever Davy told the truth like that, the bear rumbled its approval and stroked Davy's back with his big old paw, which Davy was just barely brave enough to endure without wetting himself much.