walked into the trees. He went into the trees about fifteen yards, found a little open space that was actually no more than a wide spot between the tree trunks, and sat down.
The light was fading slowly but inexorably. He remembered that when he stopped at night, he normally built a fire. Wolf might be expecting that. He tied the string to a nearby tree trunk and scraped together some twigs and fallen branches so that he would have dry wood. He used the fireplace starter that he carried, folded up like a jackknife in his pants pocket. It gave off a spark that caught on the dry leaves and other tinder he had placed under a little pyramid of twigs.
A tiny flame flickered up. Delicately and carefully, he fed it to greater life with slightly heavier pieces of dry branches, and in a matter of minutes he had a small but cheerful fire going.
He waited by it but Wolf did not show up. He waited, in fact, until it was full dark, tugging on the line every time the silent alarm of his watch sent a vibration into the skin of his wrist at the five-minute intervals for which he had set it. At last he faced the fact that Wolf would not come, tonight at least. He put out the fire, feeling a little empty inside, and made his way back out of the woods, the string taking up its slack as the reel evidently rewound.
Once again in the open he saw the wagon clearly, like a lantern lit from inside. The thick red paint of the sign was now black against the yellow-lit outer body canvas, in a night that had already seen the sun down and the moon not yet up. The sky, moonless, was thickly sprinkled with stars above him. But these did not give enough light to do more than announce their own presence.
The lantern-lit letters spelled out Paul Sanderson and Company, Peddler, almost as plainly as they had in sunshine. It was as good an advertisement and beacon at night, lit up this way, as it had been in the daytime. He went toward it.
As he got close, he saw the other three still by their fire. An L-shaped, black, metal rod had its long end vertically driven into the earth beside the fire and its short, horizontal end bent into a hook from which a coffeepot hung over the flames. The three had cups in their hands.
“Didn’t find him?” Paul said as Jeebee got close. “Help yourself to the coffee cup on your chair seat, there.”
“He didn’t come. That’s right,” Jeebee said flatly, filling his cup at the pot. He tasted the dark liquid. It was real coffee.
“Thought so.” Paul nodded. “The dogs would’ve sounded off if he had.”
Jeebee looked around for the dogs but saw only the yellow female, Greta. She lay with her head on the boots of Merry, who sat, coffee cup in hand, on the far side of the fire.
“Where are the rest?” Jeebee asked.
“They’re posted,” Nick answered. “Out beyond the horses and around us.”
“Why do you think we have them?” said Paul. “If anyone comes close, they’ll sound the alarm. So will the horses for that matter, but they’re not as quick to pick up someone moving in on us as the dogs are.”
“All except Greta,” Jeebee said. “Is she posted?”
“Greta,” said Paul, looking at his daughter. “Greta’s Merry’s special pet. She found us and took to Merry right from the start.”
Jeebee sat down on his chair, holding his cup, and looked almost directly through the flames at Merry. She looked back at him. For such a cheerful face it was not an unfriendly stare, but there was nothing warming about it either. She had hardly said a kind, or even a semikind word, to him since they had met, he thought. Then he relented, within. Times were different now. It was natural to suspect a stranger and he was still that to those here—as they were to him.
His mind wandered as he sipped the hot black coffee. He wondered how Wolf was doing. The sudden awareness of a shape beside him brought him abruptly out of his thoughts. He turned his head to find his nose almost inches from the muzzle of Greta. She was standing beside him, leaning toward him, wagging her tail and with her ears laid back and a smile on her face. When he looked at her, she fawned upon him and sniffed eagerly over his pants legs and on up to examine his jacket. Eventually, she completed her survey and came back to manage a brief but successful lick at his face before he could dodge her tongue. Wiping his face, he fended off another tongue swipe. He petted her and she crouched down beside him. In fact, she curled up beside him, almost, but not quite, with her head on his boots as she had on Merry’s.
The thought of Merry made Jeebee look across through the flames at her once more. There was an expression on her face now. And he thought it was an even less friendly expression than before. For the first time it struck Jeebee that she might resent her dog paying this much attention so soon to Jeebee. She would have good cause to, with a dog that was particularly her own taking up like this with a stranger. Almost ashamed to admit it himself, Jeebee identified his guess of a possible resentment in her with a sneaky feeling of triumph inside himself. He might not be able to ride a horse like her, or do half a dozen other things, he thought, but dogs liked him—or at least this dog seemed to.
It was only then that it occurred to him that what might have attracted Greta was not him, but the smell of Wolf on his clothes.
They continued to sit around the fire for some little time, drinking coffee. Very little was said. It seemed to Jeebee that the other three did not talk much simply because they knew each other so well that there was very little to say. In his own case he had nothing to say to them and it could be they said nothing to him because they knew so little about him.
Eventually Paul threw the dregs of his cup into the fire, stood up, and stretched.
“We’ll need to get going with daylight,” he said. “If we want to reach the Borgstrom place by late midmorning, tomorrow.”
Merry had risen at almost the same moment. She whistled sharply and Greta jerked her head up from Jeebee’s legs, got to her feet, and trotted over to Merry.
“Guard,” Merry said to the dog, and turned toward the wagon. Greta walked off a few steps with her back to the rest of them and dropped down on the grass, her paws crossed in front of her, her gaze outward into the darkness. Paul, followed by Merry, disappeared into the wagon.
“Well,” said Nick after they had been gone a few moments. “Guess we’d better turn in, too. You’re going to take that hammock on the south side, Jeebee.”
Jeebee felt a strange reluctance to go inside. He had been sleeping so many nights under the stars that the thought of trying to rest in the wagon struck him almost like entering a prison cell.
“I can bed down out here,” he said.
“No,” Nick answered, calmly, “you sleep inside where I can keep an eye on you until we get to know you better. You’ll like that hammock, once you get used to it.”
He dumped his own cup’s small amount of remaining liquid on the fire.
Looking past Jeebee, he said, almost conversationally, “You got any idea how strong you stink?” Jeebee started.
He had not thought. Of course, that would be one reason Merry would take the attitude toward him she had. How long had it been since he had taken off the clothes he was wearing? How long since he had been ordinarily clean? He could not remember. It was a matter of months, anyway. At least since he had run away from Stoketon. These people here probably could smell him ten yards off.
“I’d forgotten… ” he said.
Nick’s eyes came back to meet Jeebee’s.
“We’ve got a large metal tub inside,” Nick said. “Big enough to get into. You can fill it and the water in the pipe’s just about right for a bath now. Also, I can let you have some soap, scissors, and razor, if you want them. Might be I could even find you some fresh clothes.”
Gratitude warmed Jeebee.
“Thank you,” he said. “I could use all of that. You don’t know what it means—”
“Yes, I do,” said Nick. “I’ve been there myself. Besides I’ve got to share the Quiet Room with you as well as the guns, tonight.”
Nick went into the wagon and came out again with the washtub. As he had predicted, it was a big one— almost three feet across on the bottom and a foot and a half high on the sides, made of galvanized iron. With Jeebee’s help he half filled it with hot water from the tank on the wagon’s side and brought it around to set near the fire. Then he went back inside to come out again with a heavy bar of yellow soap that looked homemade. The
