“Thanks.” Jason patted his pocket. “Got my own.”
Well, he’d been thinking it, and now Abe had said it. He supposed he should just do it and get it over with. He cleared his throat, then said, “Rafe, how’d you like a job?”
Rafe puffed on his smoke for a moment, then said, “Ain’t like I need the money, but what you got in mind?”
“I’m needing a deputy, now that Ward’s . . . now that he’s gone. What’d you think?”
“Ain’t comin’ in in the mornings.”
“I want you for night deputy.”
Rafe stared at the cigarette twisting in his fingers, then looked up. “Sure. ’Bout time I spent some time on the right side of the law, don’t’cha think?”
Jason nodded. “I do, indeed.” He still had his doubts, but he figured he was pretty well stuck with it. And he was stubborn. Once committed, he’d hold his ground until hell froze over.
Rafe was shaking his head and grinning. “Boy, this is a heck of a turnaround, ain’t it?” He turned toward Jason. “You realize I can’t go to California, right? At least, not in an official what-ya-call.”
“Capacity.”
“Yeah, that.”
“I realize it.”
“Well then, yeah. I’d admire to, and thanks for askin’!”
Jason began to roll himself a smoke. “No problem,” he lied, then paused and leaned forward. “I’m trustin’ you, Rafe. Don’t let me down.”
Rafe just grinned at him.
Father Micah was back making his adobe bricks, and had been since breakfast. He had help from inside the walls, as yesterday, and today they were not only making new bricks, but transporting the dried and finished ones inside, as well. Father Micah had already staked out where he wanted the walls and doors to go, so the Morelli and Donovan kids knew where to pile the bricks once they were hauled inside.
In all, the Father had most of five families doing duty this morning, packing brick molds with the mud mixture, turning them out to bake in the Arizona sun, or loading cured bricks onto handcarts for the children to take inside the walls.
He pretty much had a handle on it, he thought to himself, always visualizing what the building would look like when it was finished, and praising God for this opportunity to serve.
And he wasn’t alone in working. There was an entire crew at work in town, erecting the water tower, and Salmon Kendall was their foreman. Or he would be, once he got the type set for his headline story. He’d said he figured that young Sammy could crank the presses as well as anybody else, and he was needed across the street.
The men working on the water tower made so much noise, in fact, that they finally drove Jason from his office and over to the saloon.
“Beer,” he said to Sam, the barkeep, once he arrived. He turned toward the doors and made a face. He could still hear them clear over here, hammering and yammering, but at least it wasn’t so cotton-picking . . . immediate!
Sam slid the beer in front of him, and he gratefully took a long gulp. “How do you stand the noise?”
Sam shrugged. “A body can get used to ’bout anythin’, I reckon. And well,” he added, grinning and tugging a plug of cotton from one ear, “these help.”
Jason cocked his head. “How’d you hear me when I ordered, then?”
“Read your lips,” Sam replied. “You’d be surprised what a feller learns, tendin’ bar.”
Jason tipped his hat, then carried his beer to a table in the front corner of the place. Business was slow, it still being the forenoon, but he noticed a few other fellows coming through the doors and holding their ears, including two that had been working on the job site.
Jason waved one of them over to his table. It was Steve Jeffries, one of the newcomers from the wagon train several months back.
“Mornin’,” Jason said.
“Mornin’ yourself,” Steve echoed. “We makin’ enough noise for you?”
“More than enough. Say, when you fellers plan to finish up, anyhow?”
“Today? Mr. Kendall says we’re workin’ till dark.”
Jason waved his hands. “No, no. I mean the whole job.”
“Oh. Well then, I don’t know. When it’s finished, I reckon.” He snorted out a laugh. “Guess you’d have to ask Mr. Kendall. He’s runnin’ the show.”
Jason sighed. “Okay, thanks, Steve. I’ll do that.”
But in his mind, he thought only one word:
Solomon Cohen finally finished up the letter he was going to send to California, to Sampson Davis’s family. He had labored over it long and hard—a wastebasket filled with crumpled paper bore witness to that—but it was finally finished, and he set it aside more forcefully than one would normally lay down a piece of paper.
“Finished?” asked Rachael from the kitchen, where she was hard-boiling eggs.
Solomon sat back and sighed. “I suppose.” He almost asked her if she’d heard the bell jingle before he
