“All right,” he said, “if you can get him to come down to us—it’s all right with me. He and the dogs will have to work things out amongst themselves. All right then, with all of us? Merry? Nick?”
“No reason why not if it doesn’t make trouble,” said Merry.
“I just told you how I felt,” said Nick.
Jeebee felt a sudden increase of warmth in all their attitudes toward him. As with Paul, when he unexpectedly invited Jeebee to join them, Jeebee could not figure out what he might have done or said just now to change their feelings toward him for the better.
The others continued to give him no clue. A little after that, the campfire part of the evening broke up. As Jeebee had come to find was usual practice, Nick lingered a little around the fire after Merry and her father had gone into the wagon.
Jeebee cleaned up his plate and was about to gather up the others and take them to wash when Nick stood up suddenly.
“Let’s take a little walk,” he said abruptly.
Wondering, Jeebee joined him as the older and smaller man led the way out of the circle of firelight into the surrounding darkness. As usual, once they got away from the lighted area and their eyes adjusted, it was not too hard to see. The moon had come up since Jeebee had come back to the wagon and it was a three-quarters moon that shed a fair amount of light.
Nick stopped about thirty paces away from the wagon and spoke in a low, but conversational tone. “Look,” he said, “maybe you’ve reached the point where you ought to begin to know some things.”
He paused.
“I’m ready to learn whatever there is to be learned,” Jeebee said, to start him up again.
“This is not exactly learning.” Nick paused again. “There’s something you ought to understand about Paul and Merry. Now, they don’t look it, but this wagon and everything about it, the route and everything, is something Paul did only for Merry.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” Jeebee said after a moment.
Nick sighed. It was almost a sigh of exasperation.
“I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “Now, Merry’s mother died about five years ago. Paul had been a salesman, but liked running a fix-it shop better than being a real-estate salesman—and he was a damn good real-estate salesman. He made a lot of money with it. But he liked fixing things, so he started the shop so that he and Merry could be together as much as possible. The shop was connected to their house, and he was home all the time.”
“My mother died when I was sixteen,” Jeebee said suddenly. He not only surprised himself by saying it; he realized he hadn’t even thought of the fact for years.
“All right,” said Nick, almost as if he hadn’t spoken, “Paul did well with the fix-it shop, too—nowhere near as much money as he could have made selling real estate, but he’d made a lot of money at that already, that he still had. So they were well off enough. But he saw this coming, everything going bust the way it has. And he worried about keeping Merry safe through what he saw was coming. So he started this route five years ago. They spend their winters in the east and south. I won’t tell you where. You don’t need to know that, anyway. But they spend their winters, as I say, east and south; and with the first sign of spring down there, they start moving north and west. They follow this route Paul made with this wagon, he built for himself and had built for him. He began the route even back when cars were whizzing along these freeways, only then the wagon traveled on back roads, off to one side.”
Nick paused again. This time Jeebee just waited.
“Paul’s a good peddler. Bound to be, being the salesman he is. People like him, when he sets out to be liked,” Nick said, “and gradually he’s built up a bunch of regular customers. There’s always danger, of course, but here with the wagon we’re safer than most. People have got to know Paul and he follows the same route, so the locals aren’t liable to be shooting at him. Otherwise—well, you’ve seen what we call the Quiet Room. We’re armed well enough to stand off a pretty good-sized bunch. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. What I wanted to tell you is, don’t be taken in by the way they talk to each other. This wagon, this route, everything about this is something Paul built for Merry. He lives for Merry. And Merry, she wouldn’t leave her father for anything, because she knows that there’d be nothing for him if she went.” Nick paused again.
“So, you should know that,” he went on after a bit. “You’re a young fellow, and Merry’s young, too. But don’t start getting any ideas, unless you want to stay with the wagon and her and her father for the rest of your life.”
“I haven’t—” Jeebee was beginning when Nick cut him short.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Nick said. “I just thought I’d tell you, that’s all, so you’d understand.”
He stopped talking. Jeebee stood, at a loss as to what to say. “Well, I’m going to bed,” said Nick.
He went off toward the fire. After a moment Jeebee followed him but Nick had already gone into the wagon by the time Jeebee reached the fire. Somberly, Jeebee washed the food trays, put out the fire with the wash water, and carried the trays into the wagon with him to put them in their usual place up in the storeroom, next to where he now knew the beef was kept in its locker. He went into the Quiet Room and saw Nick already in his hammock, turned with his face toward the side of the wagon and only his back showing. The lantern was already turned down, but not completely off. Jeebee slung his own hammock, put the blanket handy in it, got in, then reached up and turned down the little lever that extinguished the lamp completely.
He lay staring at the darkness overhead. He had not really thought much about Merry, he told himself defensively. Nick’s warning was almost an insult. At the same time, he found that he could not really take offense at it. The truth of the matter was, Merry was a woman. She was young, and he could not help but respond to her, even if that response was annoyance at the way she treated him.
Still thinking about her, he fell asleep. Sometime in the night he dreamed of Wolf coming unexpectedly into the wagon to look for him.
The next day, rather unexpectedly, Nick began initiating Jeebee into the craft of blacksmithing. Jeebee found it fascinating, in spite of the almost intolerable temperatures of the tiny metal-walled room, after the forge was going. He listened eagerly as Nick described how a blacksmithing outfit could be set up anywhere, given a few starting tools. Necessary were an anvil, a pair of tongs, and what Nick called a hardy. This was something that looked like a small but stout chisel, made all of metal with a short end that fitted into a hole at one end of the anvil so that the hardy was fixed in place and faced upward with its cutting edge. That was, Nick explained, exactly what the hardy was to be used for. Its use was to cut the hot metal, once it had been heated to the proper malleability. The heated iron or steel was held in the tongs, laid against the up-facing edge of the hardy, and the strip hammered until the hardy cut through it.
The rest of the necessary things used in blacksmithing, Nick explained, could either be found easily lying about, or made, once the smithy was in operation. A forge with a firepit could be built out of any noncombustible materials. Rocks, mortared together with anything that would serve the purpose and was non-combustible. An air intake would have to be built into it and a bellows constructed to pump air up that intake. Also charcoal would have to be made, by burning hardwood in the absence of oxygen. The old-fashioned way of doing this was simply to set the wood afire and cover it with earth so that it burned slowly.
Besides the anvil, hardy, and tongs, a hammer would be necessary. But Nick said that this could probably be found in any abandoned farmstead—ideally it would be a short-handled six-pound hammer of the kind known as a maul.
He let Jeebee try his hand at doing some simple black-smithing tasks with the equipment in the small room, and Jeebee promised himself that somewhere along the line, he would have a smithy of his own. It was, he thought, in addition to everything else, something that would make him more useful to his brother’s ranch—if he knew something about blacksmithing; and of course, the more he knew the better.
That evening, when Jeebee went looking in a nearby patch of woods, Wolf was waiting for him again. From then on they met almost steadily at twilight after the wagon had stopped for the day. But nothing Jeebee could do would persuade the other to follow him when he turned and went back down to the wagon.
The dogs around the wagon had not given tongue on any of Wolf’s appearances. It was not until the third night that Jeebee realized that he had instinctively headed downwind to find his patch of trees. And it had been downwind that Wolf had been waiting for him. So much, already, of elementary woodcraft had rubbed off on Jeebee.
