“No,” Nathan said. “They’re printing plates.”
“What are you totin’ them around for?”
Lies were like habits to Nathan. They came easy and without conscious thought. “I’m an editor,” he said. “I’m looking for someplace to set up shop.”
The kid’s brow furrowed. “You mean to do a newspaper?”
“That’s right.”
“I wish I could read,” the kid said. “But I never had the time to learn. Worked in my pappy’s fields since damn near the time I could follow a mule and swing a hoe.”
So why didn’t you stick to farming?” Nathan asked, curious.
“I hated farmin’!” The gun shook in the kid’s hand. “Farmin’ killed Ma when I was six. Killed Pappy ten years later and ruined my brothers and sisters. Not one of us stayed on the homestead. All of us run off.”
“You chose to run with real bad company,” Nathan said, beginning to realize that the kid probably didn’t want to murder him.
“Well,” the kid said, gazing down at the two dead men. “They kept us in bacon and beans and the work wasn’t hard.”
“What was the work?”
“Nothin’ big. We just ‘borrowed’ a lot of things.”
“They were going to kill me for my horses,” Nathan said, “And that would have made you a partner in murder.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to stop ‘em,” the kid said. “if I’d said anything against what they had in mind, they’d as soon as not killed me too.”
Nathan drew a deep breath. “All right, so what happens now?”
“I want to see if that’s really printin’ stuff, or maybe it’s gold.”
“And if it were gold, would you kill me for it?” Nathan asked point-blank.
“I dunno,” the kid said, shrugging his thin shoulders. “But I’ll bet you’d kill me given half a chance.”
“You’re wrong,” Nathan said. “Let me ride on and we both live to see tomorrow’s sunrise.”
The kid thought about this for almost a minute before he said, “I got no job, nothin’ much I care to do either. Maybe we could work together.”
“No.”
The kid lowered his gun and he looked hurt. “Well … well, why not?”
“You can’t read, what good would you do for me?”
“I can shoot and you might come across a couple more like you just killed and not be so lucky a second time.”
“You think I was lucky?”
“Some,” the kid said. “Some lucky, some just damned good with weapons. And as for helpin’ you, I know horses. I could help take care of ‘em and also back you in a fight.”
“Maybe.”
“Watch,” the kid said, lifting the barrel of his Six-gun. “You see that pine cone yonder?”
“Which one?” Nathan said, twisting around in his saddle.
“The one that I’m just about to blast to smithereens,” the kid said, firing a shot that caused one of the low- hanging pine cones to explode. “Not bad, huh?”
“It was damn good,” Nathan agreed, knowing now that it was a wise decision that he had not gone for his gun, because the farmer boy would have drilled him squarely through the heart. “Do you know this country?”
“Like the back of my hand. I was raised over the mountains in the Utah Territory, but we’d come up here for timber and to hunt in the fall.”
“Then you’d know a pass over the Wasatch into the Great Basin?”
“I know lots of passes, but they’ll be closin’ up soon on account of the snow.”
“I want to get over these mountains,” Nathan said. “If you can guide me, I’ll pay you well.”
The kid’s eyes tightened at the corners. “I could just take everything.”
“Then why haven’t you already shot me?” Nathan asked.
The kid surprised him with a grin. “You’re not only dangerous, you’re smart, makin’ you even more dangerous. All right, I believe you when you say there ain’t no gold on that pack mule. And I ain’t the killin’ kind unless I have to be.”
“You ever killed anyone?”
“Nope.”
“Holster your gun,” Nathan said, “and let’s get out of here.”
“Wouldn’t we want to take their guns and such?”
