After a passage of thirty-two days, the riverboat Yankton made Fort Benton. When the mountain steamer hove round the bend, the whole town, warned by the smoke she had shown on the horizon, was turned out to greet her, to celebrate the breaking of the winter’s siege. For three weeks there had been no tobacco, no flour, no dried fruit, no molasses, no bacon to be had. Minnie Rifle Whisky, watered, and then revived with cayenne pepper, was selling a dollar a glass at the only saloon with stock. For two weeks the whole country, Indians, independent traders, trappers, mule-skinners, bullwhackers, had foregathered in Benton to await the arrival of supplies.
Now the cannon in the old adobe fort boomed a welcome which clapped and echoed in the river valley as young bloods whooped lathered horses up and down the riverbank, firing pistols in the air. On the levee, merchant dignitaries waited in a knot of sombre black coats and high-collared white shirts, Old Glory at their side, the flag doleful for want of a breeze. A French priest or two, a Methodist preacher, clerks, the better tradesmen, dowdy ravens flocked together in black. Ranged behind them, trappers and whisky-traders, bear-greased hair to their shoulders, bristling with guns, dressed in stinking linsey-woolsey shirts and buckskin trousers, boots and parfleche-soled moccasins, kit-fox caps and store-bought felt hats. Faro dealers and freighters, bar-keeps and crib girls, sin and civilization all met on a riverbank. And Frenchies, Métis from Canada, Creoles from the mouth of the Mississippi, interpreters, oarsmen, cordeliers in hooded capotes and beaded moccasins, wide sashes cinched tight at their waists. And their wives, women of every Plains tribe, a few in the white woman’s calico dress with blanket leggings peeking out from under the hem, the rest in soft ivory buckskin, Boston shawls around their shoulders, gimcrack brooches pinned to their bosoms, moon faces shining. A little further to the rear stood Peigans from the big encampment which had gathered outside of Benton to trade winter buffalo robes, one hundred and fifty lodges sprawled out on the flats, ringed by vast herds of grazing horses, the cook-fires hazing the air with thin blue smoke and scenting it with the aroma of fat meat cooking, the nights throbbing with the firefly light of hundreds of lodge fires, pulsing with drumming and the piping of elk effigy whistles as young men paid court to girls of marrying age. To salute the Yankton, these bachelors had dandified themselves with their best weasel-fur fringed shirts and daubed their faces with ochre, white clay, bright Chinese vermilion. As the captain strode down the gangplank to shake hands with functionaries of the I.G. Baker Company and the passengers spilled off the boat in unseemly haste, wading through the river mud for the town, the Peigans watched the ceremonies of the white man with a dispassion bordering on contempt.
The last passenger to disembark was John Trevelyan Dawe, carried off on a blanket by three crew members and his boy. They slung him into the wagon bed of a teamster, packed his luggage tightly about him, and spread a coat over his face to keep the sun out of his eyes.
“What’s ailing your friend?” the driver suspiciously asked the boy. He didn’t like the way the Englishman’s teeth chattered and clicked.
“Ague,” said the boy.
“Sure ’tain’t mountain fever?”
“I said her once,” the boy said, putting his foot to the wheel and boosting himself up on to the seat beside the teamster. “You got your trip money. Move them skinny mules.”
Soon they were rumbling down Front Street, the Englishman rattling and groaning on the wagon bed. Front Street wasn’t much, white dust and a ramshackle collection of log, frame, and adobe buildings, a thoroughfare littered with horse droppings, torn playing cards, and chamber-pot slops that Fort Benton’s sporting women tossed out their bedroom windows. Wild-eyed men wandered in and out among the wagons and horsemen, on the verge of being ridden down or driven over. Bursts of cheering and the energetic thumping of bar-room pianos by saloon “professors” announced the broaching of the first whisky barrels, which had been galloped posthaste up from the Yankton by buckboard. Merriment was epic and general. In a situation of robust supply, the price of whisky had plummeted to two bits a shot.
The proprietor of the Overland Hotel was loath to let a sick man on the premises, saying it was bad for custom. For a time the Englishman’s boy stood silent. Then he said, “Nothing worse than fire for business.”
The owner wanted to know what he meant.
“Never know about fire,” said the boy. “Comes out of nowhere sometimes, like a thief in the night.”
He got his room. For three days the Englishman alternately shook with a bone chill or swam in a greasy sweat slick as melted butter, the fever frying him like pork in a skillet. The boy never left his side, God’s rightful angel of mercy. His own Pap had died of a like complaint, fire and ice, his spleen swelling like the Englishman’s, rising below the ribs hard as a piece of oak, bulging out in what was dubbed the “ague cake.”
In snatches the Englishman’s boy would doze on the floor, waking when Dawe commenced raving and thrashing on his straw tick, hollering for some woman called Nanny Hooper. The Englishman’s boy had seen his share die, and it was frequent they called on their mamma in the testing time, the hour of travail, travelling back to the years of the milk-titty. But the Englishman just bellered for his Nanny Hooper, whosoever she might be when to home.
The second night came the convulsions. Straddling Dawe’s chest he rode the bucking pony, grabbing fistfuls of hair to pin the flailing head to the pillow while the Englishman’s face slowly turned black, his eyes rolling back in their sockets, his heels beating a frantic tattoo on the hard mattress.
The third night there was nothing left to do but sit on a hard chair and listen to the sound of the ragged, hoarse breathing wind down. Towards two in the morning Dawe suddenly cried, “Nanny! Nanny! Nanny!” in the high voice of a little child, then he curled himself up on his pallet and died. The boy straightened the limbs, washed the body, tied the jaw shut with a hanky, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what a dead Englishman required in the way of a leave-taking so he sat back down on the hard chair with his hands on his knees and sang “Amazing Grace” to the naked white body, the aubergine face and yellow eyelids.
Going through the deceased’s effects he was surprised to find so little real money, only forty-five dollars in gold coin. He had heard Dawe say a line of credit was arranged for him at LG. Baker Company, but a dead man couldn’t draw cash nor goods and the Englishman’s boy was owed two months’ wages.
He appropriated Dawe’s tweed jacket and bowler. Both were sizes too big for him, but he could wear the hat by stuffing the sweatband with the old newspapers which the Englishman had refused to throw away because he said they spoke to him in the soft accents of home. The boy pulled on the jacket and examined himself in a yellowed mirror. With the cuffs turned back it would serve. Warm and a hard-wearer. He slipped a box of revolver cartridges in his left-hand pocket and a box of cartridges for the carbine in his right. Last of all, he crossed two bandoliers on his chest, buckled on the holstered Colt, and slung the Winchester over his shoulder in its saddle-scabbard. As close as he could calculate, with some generosity allowed for the risks he had taken nursing the Englishman, this was what he was entitled to. The rest of the Englishman’s worldly goods and possessions he left behind.
The owner was not on duty, a night clerk nodded in a chair. The boy tapped the counter with his knuckles and asked to settle up. The bill came to fifteen dollars for three nights’ lodging, six dollars for meals delivered cold to the room, five dollars for a bottle of whisky he’d dosed Dawe with when he was taken with the chills. Twenty-six dollars. Computing the inconvenience of a corpse, he handed the desk clerk forty, and kept back the last five of the Englishman’s ready money for himself.
The clerk asked if the fourteen dollars extra was on account for his friend, was he staying on?
“Until you bury him,” said the boy. “I took what’s owed me. The rest of his guns, his personals – they’re yours now.”
“You ain’t leaving a dead man on premises!” the clerk shouted after him as he went through the door. “Here, you! Stop!”
The boy walked on. He figured they’d do all right burying Dawe, it had to be purely profit. There were silver-backed hairbrushes and a gold watch up in that room. There were shirt-studs and rings in a jewellery case, fancy guns, drummer’s clothes. He could’ve taken his pick of it all and gone out a window, but creeping and crawling wasn’t his line. He remembered what the Englishman had said about him down the Missouri, that he’d stand and fight. If it wasn’t for the sake of those few words he wouldn’t have stopped a minute with the dying man – the truth be known, he hadn’t liked him much. His Pap had taught him his lessons about rich men. The soft words of a whore and a whore’s hard heart, hand in your pocket. Still, the Englishman had spoken him his due, allowed he had spunk, and was owed his due in return.
The Englishman’s boy went out into false dawn, presentiment of morning, the big coat and big hat and the expensive guns rendering him ridiculous and a shade sinister at the same time. The night clerk came to the door of the Overland Hotel, ready to press his point, but seeing him there lit by the light spilling from the doorway, dwarfed by another man’s clothes, dwarfed by the long shadow rooted to his heels and stretched in tortured protraction across the pale dust of the street, he felt a sudden unease and hurriedly turned back inside.
The door slammed and the boy sniffed the cold air, looked deliberately up and down the street. A few horses were still standing saddled and tethered to hitching posts outside the saloons, looming in the pearl-grey light like the strange horses that galloped through the last days of the world, the horses his mother had read to him out of the Bible. The boy walked on as the horses snuffled and nickered and tossed their heads in apprehension, walked on past the silent, shuttered hurdy-gurdy houses and saloons, past I.G. Baker’s and T.C. Power’s big trading concerns, past a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse for bullwhackers, walked on with the numbness induced by three days of sleeplessness, propelling one boot mechanically in front of the other. It was a short street in a short town and soon he had walked himself out of it and into a wilderness of space, the forlorn sweep of sky and land offering the final proof he was trapped in this town. There was nowhere to go. He had no horse. The Yankton had left town as soon as she unloaded and headed back downriver. In any case, five dollars wouldn’t have bought him a ticket in steerage, wouldn’t buy him much of anything in a boom-town of sky-high prices.
He sat down on a rock, back to the rising sun, and wrapped himself tighter in the tweed jacket. One thing for certain, he couldn’t stomach sweeping out no more saloons, nor sloshing out no more cuspidors, nor being at the beck and call of bar-keeps, piano players with two left hands, frail sisters, and soiled doves. He was done with all that. Sooner starve like a dog in a ditch than be whistled up by the likes of them. And he knew ditches, had more than a winking acquaintance with them in the two years since his brother put the run on him.
It might be one thing to swallow a whipping at the hands of your Pap, but he didn’t figure that whipping rights had passed along to Dan with the farm when the old man died. Seeing as his brother was four years older and forty pounds heavier, he’d took it for a while, but then one day when he’d had enough, he’d done Dan with a shovel, whacked his head good and sound, same as a nail. One swing to pound him onto his knees, two more to peg him flat and level with the dust. That shovel blade had rung sweet as any church bell to his ears, whanging away on Dan’s poll.
So there his brother had laid swooning in the yard for nigh on an hour, the chickens clucking and cocking their heads at him, eyeing the blood leaking from his scalp and puddling on the ground. But at last Dan gave himself a shake, climbed to his feet like the risen Lazarus, and reeled for the cabin, muddy gore caked to his face. When he sallied back out with the flintlock, raising the stakes like that, gun against a shovel, what was he to do but fold his hand, cut and run? Now that he owned guns of his own, one at his belt, one at his back, God help any poxy bastard who snicked a bullet past his ear the way Dan had. He was done with showing his heels to any man.
The Englishman’s boy turned his eyes over his shoulder and to the river bluffs across the Missouri. There the strong glow of the rising sun lit a mass of shelving cloud so that it appeared a bank of molten lava squeezed from the guts of the earth, each striation distinct and gleaming with a different fire. The topmost layer the rich ruddy purple of cooling slag; then the dim cherry of a horseshoe heated for shaping; then layers of orange and yellow which smelted down to where swollen, bulging hills met the sky in pure white fire. He faced west again where the sun over his shoulder was painting the valley hills with a tenderer light. On the crest of these hills the Englishman’s boy could make out three tiny black dots, moving.
They were still so distant he could not make them out, but he presumed they were horsemen. The sun came nudging up behind him, soaring above the folds of the river bluffs. On they came, figures swimming in the waxing light. The Englishman’s boy shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the three might be afoot. White men didn’t go abroad without horses. He took the Winchester off his back and laid it across his knees. The Colt he put no real stock in as yet, having never owned or even fired a short gun before. It was the carbine he trusted because he had been a hunter since the age of seven and a crack shot with a rifle. He sat and waited, hands relaxed on the gun-stock.
By the time the great yellow yolk of the sun was completely clear of the earth, he knew the men descending the slopes to the river flats were not mounted; but it was only God’s guess whether they were white or red. At six hundred yards the heads became dots and the bodies tapered. At four hundred yards they still lacked faces. At three hundred yards the heads were blurred, but now he knew they were white men. At two hundred yards they began to resolve into individuals.
Without more delay they were upon him, three men in stinking clothes stiff with grease and blackened with old blood, one of them in a slouch hat with eagle plumes stuck in its beaded band, another who called to mind a flour barrel with legs, the third, a redhead with a wispy beard the colour of a fox’s brush and the burned red face and white cracked lips of a man cursed with a complexion unsuited to constant sun and wind. They halted at the rock and leaned on the muzzles of their rifles.
“Morning,” said the redhead.
The Englishman’s boy nodded warily.
“What’s this?” said the stocky one. “Welcoming committee?” He was evidently in an ugly mood.
“Don’t pay no mind to Vogle,” the redhead told the boy. “He’s out of sorts from riding shank’s mare. He ain’t too light on his feet so’s it’s a chore.”
“Lost your horses?”
“Had twenty head lifted,” said the redhead. “Camp’s five mile from here up on the Teton. Didn’t think there was any need to ride night-herd so close to Benton, but we was wrong. Goddamn Indians would steal horses stabled in your front parlour.”
“Ten thousand wolf pelts sitting out there in six wagons and no horses to move them,” said the one the redhead called Vogle.
“We can borry teams from I.G.,” said the man in the slouch hat. “We’ll get them pelts in. I didn’t freeze my ass all winter skinning carcasses to get my carcass skinned come spring.”
“Not to worry,” said the redhead. “We’ll get them pelts in right smart and we’ll get on the trace of them horses right smart, and we’ll spank them red scamps right smart, won’t we, boys?”
“Hardwick,” remarked Vogle, “I swear to Christ you’re happy as a pig in soft shit that them Indians lifted our horses. You’re just looking for an excuse to take a crack at them.”
Hardwick flashed an uncanny smile. “Happy is the man doing the Lord’s work,” he said.
“Happy, happy, happy,” said the one in the slouch hat. He didn’t smile but he spat.
As Hardwick had said, with the loan of six teams and a couple of saddle horses to haze them out to the Teton, the wolfers ran their pelts into Fort Benton right smart. Bumping up Front Street in wagons, they cut a sorry sight, the grim set of their jaws testifying that they knew they were laughing stocks for getting carelessly relieved of their horses on the very doorstep of civilization. In the saloons to which they dispersed, there were sly remarks and winks about infantry and church parades and having to visit a cobbler to get your boots half-soled. That is unless the redhead, Tom Hardwick, happened to be present. He and John Evans were standing drinks all around in an endeavour to recruit a posse to recover the horses and punish the Indians. Both men were well-known in Benton. Most considered Evans an easygoing, affable sort, but Hardwick was held to be a dicey proposition and nobody to mock to his face.
As the day wore on the wolfers got drunker, touchier, and blood-thirstier. There was no stampede of volunteers to help retrieve the horses, and a reluctance to sign on often occasioned charges of cowardice and name-calling, a scuffle or two. Among the wolfers themselves there was resentment against Hardwick for threatening to turn them out of Benton so soon to pursue the horse-rustlers, nipping their fun in the bud after a solitary, cold winter. Philander Vogle, for one, was trying to cram as much amusement as he could into an afternoon at a crib on the line. The crib girls were the cheapest a jump, but they didn’t allow you to take your boots off, so Vogle stood at the end of the bed with a bottle in his fist, his pants down around his ankles, waiting for Nature to reassert herself with the wherewithal for a repeat poke. However, the lazy whore kept dozing off in between times – which wasn’t much encouragement to Nature.
Throughout the course of the day the Englishman’s boy kept moving, drifting up and down the town. He had nowhere to stop, nothing to do, nothing to eat but a box of crackers bought at a general store for an exorbitant price. Left high and dry by the Englishman’s untimely death, starvation seemed a probable fate. When he tired of tramping, he perched himself on a wagon tongue or a barrel, the flies and dust from Front Street settling on him as he gnawed his dry crackers and cogitated plans. Maybe he should try to swap his fancy pistol for a double-barrel and shells to keep himself in meat, potting grouse or rabbit or duck. The truth was, no matter how much sense such a scheme might make, no matter how hungry he might get, he knew he was not going to part with the pistol. The pistol made him, for the first time in his life, any man’s equal.
When night drew down, Fort Benton grew a good deal livelier even than it was during the day. The saloons poured light and music and drunken patrons into the street where they pissed and fought in the roadway. These fights, noisy affairs with much loud cursing and bellowing of threats, riled the horses tied to the hitching posts to a terrible pitch. They thrashed about, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads until their terror and tension became unbearable. Then they flew at one another, like the men in the street, kicking and biting and rearing until a tether broke and one went careering off helter-skelter down the dark street.
Meanwhile, the Englishman’s boy kept on the prowl, sidling out of the way when any particularly dangerous-looking drunk came lurching and muttering out of the gloom. A clear sky spelled that a chilly night was a certainty and staying on the tramp was the only way to keep the cold out of his bones until the livery-stable office closed and he could sneak into the barn and burrow in the hay.
By and by he found himself procrastinating outside the Star Saloon, debating whether or not to invest two bits in a drink. A tot in the belly and a warm place to stop would ease him through the cold hours until it was safe to scare up a place to sleep. It was a thorny, troublesome calculation, money weighed against comfort, but then, through the smeared saloon window, he spied the redheaded Hardwick seated at a poker table. A face he recognized somehow decided him. He went in.
The bar was packed. A fug of dense smoke, animal heat, stale sweat, and rancid grease greeted him as he stepped through the door. The smell of unwashed hide-hunters, mule-skinners, prospectors, and bullwhackers came as a shock after the crisp, clean night air, even to him, who couldn’t remember the last time a scrub cloth had touched him. At the far end of the room, behind a low fence with a swinging gate in it, he could see roughnecks galloping hurdy-gurdy girls in dizzy circles to a breakneck air battered out of an untuned piano. Picking his way amid the gambling tables to the bar, he bumped into a man who shot him a drunken, hostile stare. For a moment, the boy couldn’t place the stranger and then he recognized the headgear, a collapsible black silk top hat which Dawe had kept stowed in his steamer trunk. Its wearer was none other than the owner of the Overland Hotel, the same man the Englishman’s boy had blackmailed into renting them a room.
The boy carried on to the bar, ordered his drink, hooked the heel of his boot on the rail and turned to face the room, glass in hand. The man in Dawe’s top hat had his eyes fixed on him. As the boy lifted the tumbler to his lips, a tremor disturbed the surface of the whisky. He held off drinking until it steadied and went smooth as glass, rewarding his coolness with a sip, aware the hotel-keeper had moved in on him, was hovering almost at his elbow.
“You’re the son of a bitch who don’t pick up after himself, ain’t you?” said the hotel man. “Left a corpse in my best bed.”
The boy didn’t answer. He took another sip of whisky and surveyed the occupants of the saloon.
The hotelier was crowding in, thrusting his face at him. “Left a bill behind, too. Unpaid bill and an Englishman gone high in the heat.”
“I settled with your man,” the boy said. “You got all was owed – and more.”
“You filched the Limey’s gear,” said the hotel man. “By rights it’s mine. I got claim on his chattels. You got movables belong to me.” He pointed to the boy’s holster. “That fine ivory-handled pistol for one.”
“I got nothing belongs to you. The gun is for wages he owed me.”
The hotel man smiled. “Wages of sin is death, boy.” He brushed back the skirts of his coat and tucked them behind the butt of his pistol. The bravado of a drunken man.
“No wages is starvation and that’s death, too,” said the boy.
“You goddamn little scut,” the top hat said angrily. “Threatening to fire my hotel. You and your Mr. Biggity Big Englishman.”
“He couldn’t been too big,” said the boy. “His hat fits you just fine.”
The men nearby were beginning to follow these interesting proceedings. One of them laughed loudly.
Spurred by the laughter, the hotel-keeper cried, “You little son of a bitch! I’ll have that gun or I’ll have your hide! Depend on it!”
To those looking on, the Englishman’s boy raised his voice and said, “This man here is aiming to rob me. You heard him say it. You’re witnesses.”
The loud announcement attracted attention. Several nearby tables of faro and poker suspended gaming to see how this was going to play out. A portly man in a good coat and good hat shouted, “What you doing, Stevenson? Stealing this sprat’s sugar tit?” Everyone around the table guffawed appreciatively at his sally.
“I’m a stranger here,” said the boy in a voice which rose above the slackening din. “Whatever falls out here ain’t my doing.”
Suddenly Stevenson seized him by the wrist of his gun hand. There was no use in struggling. He could sense the power of the man’s grip, knew he was not strong enough to break it. He remained very still. Stevenson grinned in his face. “Hello,” he said, and suddenly struck him a savage blow to the ear with his fist. The Englishman’s boy staggered with the force of it, was jerked up short by the wrist.
Dizzied, the boy said to the room, “I ain’t got nothing of this man’s. I ain’t asking for no trouble.” The ringing in his ear made his own voice sound as if it were coming from somewhere distant and deep, the words from his very throat rising out of some unplumbable well.
Stevenson dealt him another blow to the ear. The ear caught fire, the fire sank into his jaw, coursed burning down the side of his neck, running hot in its cords. Stevenson smiled and said “Hello” again. The Englishman’s boy could not hear him this time, could only read his lips mouthing the word. The fist cocked again, and the boy dropped his free hand to his boot-top. The hand jumped up with a metallic glitter.
Stevenson’s face was all bewildered surprise. He stared down at the knife embedded in his armpit. Then the first shock passed; the steel bit bone like a desperate dog, warping and knotting his face beyond all recognition.
“Leave go my hand,” said the boy as he jammed Stevenson up on his toes with the point of the knife. Blood was pouring down the blade like rainwater down a drain spout, soaking the cuff of his jacket sodden and heavy, turning his fingers hot and sticky and reeking.
Stevenson seemed beyond comprehending. Agony was clamping the fingers of his good hand even tighter to the thin wrist.
“Leave go my hand,” the boy repeated, twisting the knife hard where it lodged. The knife grating in the joint tore a hoarse screech out of Stevenson and he loosed the wrist.
The pounding piano at the far end of the saloon went silent; the dancers stood still, arms draped around one another; the gamblers sat frozen with cards in their hands.
As Stevenson stood spitted on the knife, the boy pulled the Colt, jammed the muzzle to his head. “Hello,” he said between his teeth. The hotel man’s eyes bulged. Someone entered the saloon and scurried back out again when he saw what was happening. The hinges of the flapping bat-wing doors wheezed in the silence.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t kill me,” Stevenson whispered hoarsely. “I got a sick wife in Missouri.”
Hardwick rose from the table next to the window. The boy swung the pistol on him, Stevenson flinching with the sudden movement. Hardwick spread his hands before him, demonstrating he had no weapon. “Word of friendly advice, son,” he said. “You kill him where he stands – they’ll hang you.”
The truth of this statement contorted the boy’s face. He jerked the knife out of Stevenson and drove it, twice, with blinding rapidity into the man’s buttocks. The hotel-keeper gave a great hollow groan as his knees gave way under him, capsizing him to the floor in a dead faint.
The boy stepped over the body to where the black silk hat had rolled and trampled it savagely under his dirty boots. No one moved as this was accomplished. “None of this was my doing,” he told the room, brandishing the pistol above his head for all to see. “I’m walking now. If this bastard has any kin or friends setting here making plans – you’ve seen my gun. It’s cocked.” He took a step toward the door, then pivoted on his heel and kicked the senseless body in the head. “Hello,” he said to it one last time.
Now he was moving for the door, the hushed crowd falling back out of his path, falling back from the pistol he carried flush against his right leg, falling back from the strange little figure in the scavenged clothes. He thrust open the swinging doors and strode quickly down the darkened street ten paces, whirled around in his tracks to catch anyone pursuing. He did. Throwing up the pistol he called out, “Stand or I’ll fire!”
The figure stopped in the street. “It’s Tom Hardwick. Lower your gun.” He did. Hardwick advanced. “If you’d been anyplace but where you was,” he said, “I’d advised you to kill that man. But there was too much public and it would have looked cold-blooded. There ain’t much law in these parts, but there’s that much.” Hardwick stopped, took a cigar from his shirt pocket, struck a match. He kept on talking around the cigar as he lit it. “You looking to kill that son of a bitch and walk, you ought to put your knife in his belly the second he hit you.”
“I give him a chance to back off,” said the Englishman’s boy.
“Bad policy,” said Hardwick. “Don’t give nobody a chance.” They resumed walking. Hardwick said, “I’d scoot if I was you. That man’s a innkeeper and a publican. I never seen a fellow who deals in whisky that was short of friends.”
“I can’t scoot. I ain’t got a horse,” said the boy.
“You want to ride with us in the morning I can scare you up a horse,” said Hardwick.
For a time the boy walked on without responding. “What would I have to do?” he said finally.
“Whatever circumstances call for,” said Hardwick.
Vogle argued against taking the boy. He made the thirteenth recruit and thirteen being the number around the table at the Last Supper, there could be no worse luck. Hardwick said since the only one who’d died on that expedition was the leader, and Vogle wasn’t leading nothing, what was he worrying about?
Vogle shook his head. “Thirteen’s bad medicine,” he said.
“That’s the Indian in you talking now,” said Hardwick.