thought it necessary for Nick to wash and store the dinner dishes that the smaller man appeared back out at the fire, carrying something wrapped in cloth and looking a little like a board close to two feet long and four or five inches wide.
He sat down and laid it on Jeebee’s knees. Paul produced a small similarly cloth-wrapped package from his pocket and Merry produced apparently from nowhere a fairly bulky object about eight to ten inches by six, also cloth-wrapped and neatly tied with ribbon.
“Gift time,” said Merry.
Jeebee stared at the three packages.
“
“A bit larger maybe than little,” said Paul, complacently puffing smoke.
The three packages had been laid out, apparently for him to pick up himself. Now it became a question of who he might offend if he picked them up in the wrong order.
After a moment’s thought he came to the conclusion that the only safe thing was to open Merry’s package first.
“Merry,” he said as he started to carefully try to untie the ribbon, “I don’t know what I can say—”
He interrupted himself. The ribbon that he had tried to untie had slid itself down into a knot.
“Oh, just break it,” said Merry.
It seemed like a brutal way to handle a package so carefully wrapped, but he pulled on the ribbon and it snapped. After that, the cloth came off, revealing a pair of Bausch and Lomb Elite eight-by-forty binoculars, under an inner wrapping of cardboard that had disguised their shape. The packaging had been deliberately deceptive.
Paul frowned a little.
“Those are your binoculars, Merry,” he said. She looked at him.
“And I’m giving them to Jeebee,” she replied evenly.
Paul puffed on his pipe and said nothing.
Wonderingly, Jeebee picked up the binoculars and put them to his eyes, looking off at the horizon where the moon had just risen. They were, indeed, a perfect match for the binoculars Paul had lent him and taken back again. A magnificent gift.
“You shouldn’t give me these,” he said to Merry.
“Well, I have,” Merry said. “Open the other gifts.”
Jeebee reached for the small package that Paul had laid on the table. In this case the cloth wrapping had not disguised it and merely snapping the string about it and unfolding the cloth revealed to Jeebee what his finger had told him he might—which was a very small revolver.
“It’s a Smith and Wesson .38 Bodyguard Airweight,” said Paul. “I’ll fit you out with ammunition for it before you leave.”
It was a revolver that would fit into the palm of his hand. Jeebee had heard of very small automatics, but never of revolvers, this size. It had a shroud over the hammer to keep it from catching on clothing. It looked, in fact, almost like a toy. But very plainly, it was not.
“It’s a boot gun. Stick it down inside the top of your boot and it ought to be out of sight, as well as easy to get at,” Paul said around his pipe stem. “It’s good for up to about twenty feet. You’d better practice a bit with it—as I say, I’ll give you the shells—so that you can get some idea of how it throws. We can do that tomorrow morning before you leave.”
Jeebee had been trying not to think that it was tomorrow Paul turned the wagon southward. It was as if a corner of emptiness entered him. As if the wagon was taking everything he knew away from him. He had never thought he would feel like this when the time came.
“And now,” said Merry, “Nick’s going to pop if you don’t get around to opening his gift.” Jeebee came to with a start.
Something about the size and overall shape of Nick’s gift had made him feel hesitant—he did not know exactly why. That was at least one of the reasons he had left it until the last, although opening Merry’s gift first, because she was the woman, and Paul’s second because he was the leader, was only natural.
But now he picked up the small man’s gift, which his knees had told him was a little heavier than he would have expected. As heavy in proportion to its large size as the handgun Paul had given him had been light for its smallness.
He opened the last package and found it was two packages inside, one large and one smaller. He opened the smaller and found three items. An ordinary carpenter’s hammer, a large pair of pliers, and what looked like a small, iron chisel, but with only a short, thick handle; the whole thing less than five inches in length.
“A hardy!” he said, recognizing the chisellike object from seeing the one like it, stuck chisel-edge-up through a hole in one end of Nick’s anvil.
“Right,” said Nick, “that, and the hammer are what you can use to start blacksmithing from scratch. Any good solid piece of steel will do for an anvil. You can find that yourself; and you can build your own forge and bellows. But you need the hammer to beat the metal with, the hardy to cut it with when it’s heated enough, and the pliers to hold it until you can forge yourself a regular pair of tongs. Also, the pliers can be used as pliers. Lots of times a pair of pliers can come in handy—open the other package.”
The last words came out abruptly, cutting off Jeebee’s attempt to thank the smaller man. Jeebee took the hint and opened the larger package.
What tumbled out onto the tabletop, inside a newly sewn leather sheath, was a knife almost large enough to be a small sword. It had the general shape of a bowie knife; and when he pulled it from its scabbard, it was indeed a bowie.
It had a five-inch handle made from disks of leather impregnated with some sort of glue that left them as hard as the plastic he remembered from the world, now lost behind them all in time, and tightly compressed between the cross guard and a heavy brass pommel that screwed to the end of the tang and counterbalanced the massive, twelve-inch steel blade. It had been carefully and evenly honed from the hilt to the upswept tip and then back along the recurved top edge to a thick strip of brass that had been silver-soldered to the back of the blade. It caught the firelight and flashed in his eyes as he turned it over, feeling the weight of it. It was a precious and lethal gift intended for only one purpose, and that was to do damage to any living thing at which it was directed, just like the pistol Paul had given him.
It was curious, he thought, how natural these warlike gifts seemed, and this strangely different scene, from his surroundings even a year ago. He now sat by an open fire in the open air surrounded by darkness with two deadly weapons and a pair of binoculars. These were not the sort of things anyone would have gifted him with before, except perhaps the binoculars, and even these were far more powerful and expensive than any pair even his closest friend might have given him in that earlier time.
“Feel the edge,” said Nick, directing Jeebee’s attention back to the knife. “No, use the ball of your thumb, very lightly, and just stroke it over the edge, away from you.”
Jeebee did so. The edge had been feathered to a razor sharpness.
“You want to keep it like that,” said Nick. “You’ll probably never use it, but just in case. Meanwhile, go right on carrying that other knife you’ve got hanging at your belt, and use that for any ordinary need you’ve got. Except for practicing with it—and I’ll show you how to practice before you leave tomorrow—this new knife of yours, you’ll hope it’ll never leave its sheath. I’ll tell you about that, too, tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Nick. Thank you all,” Jeebee said, looking around at them. “I don’t know how to thank you. But Nick—”
He turned back to the little man.
“Where did you get this?”
“I traded for it quite a time back,” Nick said. “It wasn’t in the shape you see it now when I got it. It had been made as part of a collection set. It’s supposed to be a pretty fair replica of the knife Jim Bowie gave his name to, but near as I could ever find out, nobody knows exactly what the ‘original’ Bowie knife really looked like. For that matter he probably had half a dozen knives like this of different sizes and each one made some different from the others.
“Anyway, it was a collection piece, but it had been used for everything under the sun, including to chop kindling. It’ll do that, too, but I don’t want you to use it for that. I’ve put a fighting edge on it, instead of the chisel edge it had when I got it. So it may look sturdy as hell, but don’t cut branches with it, don’t sharpen sticks with it,
