He kept the .30/06 free, and ready to use, however, until he was safely on the ground, and even then changed his mind about putting it back into the rope of the sling on his back and instead carried it as he went cautiously toward the front of the woods and looked up and down the road with the opera glasses to see if the group of riders was still in view.
They were, at the very limits of identification by the cheap binoculars he was using.
Slowly he put the opera glasses away. It was time to be heading back to camp soon, anyway. He might as well go now. As he turned about and struck back through the woods, he wondered if she had been the only woman in the group, one of several—or whether, perhaps, the group might consist all of women, which was also a possibility.
He concluded there was no way of telling. If she was the only woman, the reason the rest had probably chosen her to search was probably because either she was the most likely to find any watcher in the woods, or possibly she was the one who could most easily be spared, in case there was an ambush waiting.
He would never know, just as he would never know the composition of their group. The next few following days had little to offer. One was completely void of travelers. On another the only passersby were a family with a father and mother and three children about half-grown, two girls and one boy. Jeebee considered approaching them, for they were leading packhorses that seemed to have a fair amount of possessions upon them and therefore might be willing to enter into some kind of a trade.
But there was a wild gaunt look about them and an impoverished air to both them and the horses. They were not exactly what he was looking for, and now he had food from the root cellar to supply him. He could wait.
The next day it rained and there was no movement until late afternoon, when the rain let up and then an old man went by on a bicycle, alone and wearing short pants, dressed rather like a Boy Scout, but with untidy gray hair flowing halfway down his back. His hair mixed with the gray beard that fell almost as far down his chest in front. He seemed to have no other possessions except what might be in his pockets, or concealed about the red-and-black lumberjack shirt, tan shorts, and tennis shoes he wore.
Even though he had nothing worth taking, except the bicycle, anyone wanting to along the road could have killed or taken him prisoner simply for the sport of it.
Just before Jeebee was about to stop and the sun was on the horizon, a line of five well-made, heavily laden, horse-drawn wagons went by, each with its own driver and accompanied by somewhere between fifteen and twenty armed riders, male and female, as well as a number of fit-looking horses for remounts and wagon pullers, herded along behind by some of the riders.
For a moment Jeebee was tempted. They did not quite have the appearance of a raiding group, though their weapons and discipline made them look formidable enough. Rather, they seemed more like a group of people who had decided to travel in convoy, like the wagon trains of the nineteenth century during the settlement of the west. Such a group should be the least likely to be spooked by a single man coming toward them making peaceful intentions clear with his hands holding his rifle over his head.
Then as they got close, his binoculars picked up something very interesting. The man driving the front wagon had a chain attached to his ankle and to the footboard of the wagon seat. Jeebee checked as he got a better look at the rest of the wagons and saw that all the drivers were chained.
Instantly his understanding of the whole picture changed. Plainly, the drivers were people who had been enslaved, leaving the others, who must be a sort of modern version of the Comancheros of north Texas in the mid- nineteenth century, all free to use their guns or pursue anything interesting, if necessary. After they were gone, he got up, somewhat stiffly after his long hours in a prone position. There was a chill in him from what he had just seen. He had come close to driving one of those wagons with a chain around his ankle—or worse.
Soberly, he returned to his camp and busied himself starting a fire. Later in the evening he piled several larger logs on the fire, slung the .30/06 across his back, and moved off, away from the flames. He counted off fifty paces, then, relying on the luminous dial of his compass, made a full circuit about his campsite. If slavers were in the neighborhood he wanted to be trebly certain that the light of his fire could not be seen.
He had just returned to the campsite and settled down in front of the fire—now a small, comfortable blaze —when Wolf returned. Jeebee barely nodded his acknowledgment of the other’s arrival. The rush of pleasure he ordinarily felt when his companion appeared was blunted by the haunting memory of the slaver procession. He stared unblinkingly through the wisps of smoke, through Wolf and the trees beyond, unable to shake the vision of chains.
The sound of deep, throaty vocalizations mixed with whimpers brought him sharply back to the present.
Wolf was approaching him in a strange, half-sitting crouch with his back hunched and tail tucked between his legs. His head was low and the corners of his mouth were drawn back in the mockery of a smile that exposed the ivory expanse of his back teeth. Jeebee’s first thought was that he’d been injured, perhaps shot by one of the armed travelers he’d seen today. He reached out an exploratory hand, and the moment he did, Wolf folded onto his side and rolled over on his back, whimpering abjectly. Jeebee ran his fingers through the coarse hair of Wolf’s exposed chest and belly looking for wounds and his heart sank as his hand encountered warm, sticky wetness he first thought to be blood.
Wolf was urinating copiously, his half-closed eyes and fixed grin signaling an absolute relaxation and utter contentment.
CHAPTER 6
During the next week a number of travelers passed Jeebee’s lookout point. But they all fell into one of two categories. Those who were too dangerous to approach because they were possible aggressors, and those whom it was not safe to approach because they might be too fearful.
However, he had food from the root cellar; and in another old abandoned farm he had found a length of canvas that he made into a rough bag and hung up in the tree, so that now he could have quite a store of food by him without making too many trips to its source. Wolf made no attempt to attack the root cellar on his own. Clearly there were no scratch or dig marks around it other than there had been at the first moment of Jeebee’s discovery, and Wolf had not followed him to the root cellar on any of his trips to it, or surprised him when he was there.
Also, Jeebee was aware of a subtle change in Wolf’s behavior toward him. Some sort of watershed had been passed with the moment of Wolf’s peculiar and abjectly solicitous behavior that night—the urgent, but hesitant approach, for the first time rolling over on his back and exposing his belly to be scratched.
Jeebee had pondered this without being able to define the full significance of it. He could only feel that their relationship had changed. They were now closer and their respective positions were more sharply defined.
They had become partners in a more important sense, rather than just traveling companions, and Wolf had apparently accepted a junior role in that partnership. He still went about his own business during the day. But he had not, since that night, left before Jeebee awoke, and not until Jeebee had shown an agreement with his leaving—almost a “permission” to leave, with at least a few reassuring words and a perfunctory scratch behind Wolf’s muttonchops.
In spite of recognizing this change, Jeebee put aside any temptation to take for granted whatever new authority the other might have acknowledged in him.
He was no more ready than before to try to take food away from Wolf or to impose his will upon him in other ways. Indeed, he felt instinctively that this might now be even riskier than before, when Wolf’s most likely response was, simply, to leave.
At a deeper level, he felt that any such behavior on his part would be a betrayal of trust. But his life since Stoketon had taught him much about the economics of trust. Whatever the nature of Wolf’s allegiance to him, anything that could be eaten, pilfered, broken, or ripped would be something Jeebee would keep, as before, securely stowed out of the other’s reach. For the moment, Jeebee’s “trust” extended only so far as the luxury of no longer worrying that Wolf might leave one morning for no apparent reason, and never return. But the fact that he was able to have even that much faith, he realized, in itself was a major milestone.
In other areas, however, he began to be concerned, particularly as he went into the second week at his observation point. He still had an ample food supply. But the traffic on the road had varied widely in character, day after day, and as yet he had seen no one he trusted to approach.
