“Guard!” the woman ordered to the dog, then looked toward Jeebee herself. She spoke again in a hoarse, deep voice like the voice of a very old person: “I saw you on your way in. I just stepped out to get my watchdog, here.”
Jeebee felt the metal of the trigger guard of the .22 slippery in his right hand. The woman, he saw now that she was close, was wearing a black leather belt tight around her waist, with a small holster and the butt of what looked like a short-barreled revolver sticking out of the holster. She smelled, a dirty-clothes sort of smell. He did not doubt that she could and would use the handgun, if she thought it advantageous to do so. And, flooding all through him, was the old doubt that he could lift the .22 and fire back, even to defend his own life.
The German shepherd-like dog lay down, hind legs tucked under his body, his head erect and his weight resting lightly on his elbows and forelegs. His gaze remained on Jeebee, but that was all. The woman lifted her head, looking directly at Jeebee. Her face was tanned, masculine looking, with heavy bones and thin lips. Deep parentheses of lines cut their curves from nose to chin on each side of her mouth. She must be, Jeebee thought, at least fifty.
“All right,” said the woman. “What brings you to town?”
“I came in to trade some things,” said Jeebee.
His own voice sounded strange in his ears, like the creaky tones of an old-fashioned phonograph record where most of the low range had been lost in recording.
“What you got?”
“Different things,” said Jeebee. “How about you? Have you or somebody else here got shoes, food, and maybe some other things you can trade me?”
His voice was sounding more normal now. He had pulled his cap low over his eyes before he had come into town; and hopefully, in this interior dimness, lit only by the windows to his right, she could not see the pale innocence of his eyes and forehead.
“I can trade you what you want—prob’ly,” the woman said. “Come on. You too.”
The last words were addressed to the dog and reinforced by a tug on the leash. The dog rose silently to four feet again, and once more took the lead as she led Jeebee to the further door. They went through it into another room that looked as if it might once have been a poor excuse for a hotel lobby. A dingy brown corridor led off from a far wall, and doors could be glimpsed, spaced along either side.
The lobby-room was equipped with what had probably been a clerk’s counter. This, plus half a dozen more of the round tables, and a few plain wooden chairs, were piled with what at first glimpse appeared to be every kind of junk imaginable, from old tire casings to metal coffeepots that showed the dents and marks of long use. A closer look showed Jeebee a rough order to things in the room. Clothing filled two of the tables, and all of the cooking utensils were heaped with the coffeepots on another.
The woman led the dog to the end of the counter. There were two different lengths of chain, a long and a very short one there, with one end of each bolted to the thick wood of the countertop.
She started to snap the end of the lead chain to the shorter of the bolted-down ones, then apparently changed her mind. She connected it instead to the long chain, which Jeebee noticed would let the dog range anywhere in the room.
“Guard,” the woman said to the dog again. The dog, this time, remained standing almost as if it had not heard her. Its gaze stayed on Jeebee.
She, also, was looking at Jeebee. When he looked back at her, she nodded at the dog. “Pure wolf, he is, so don’t try taking anything.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got.” Jeebee kept his voice emotionless.
She motioned to an end of the clerk’s counter that was clear. Jeebee unbuckled his recently acquired leather jacket—the dog’s nose tested the air again—and began unloading his belt of the screwdrivers, chisels, files, and other small hand tools he had brought. When he was done, he unwrapped the metal chain from his waist and laid it on the wooden surface of the counter, where it chinked heavily.
“Maybe, you can use this, then,” said Jeebee, nodding at the dog as casually as possible.
“Maybe,” said the woman, with a perfect flatness of voice. “But he don’t need much holding. He does what I tell him.”
“You said he was a wolf?” Jeebee asked skeptically as she began to examine the tools.
She looked up squarely into his face.
“That’s right,” she said. “He’s no herder. He’s a killer.” She stared at him for a second. “What are you— cattleman?”
“Not me,” said Jeebee. “My brother is. I’m on my way to his place, now.”
“Where?” she asked bluntly.
“West,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t know him.” He met her eyes. It was a time to claim as much as he could. “But he’s got a good-sized ranch, he’s out there—and he’s waiting for me to show up.”
The last, lying part came out with what Jeebee felt sounded like conviction. Perhaps a little of the truth preceding it had carried over. The woman, however, looked at him without any change of expression whatsoever, then bent to her examination of the hand tools again.
“What made you think I was a cattleman?” Jeebee asked. Her silence was unnerving. Something in him wanted to keep her talking, as if, so long as she continued to speak, nothing much could go wrong.
“Cattleman’s jacket,” she said, not looking up.
“Ja—” He stopped himself. Of course, she was talking about the leather jacket he was wearing. He had not realized that there would be any perceptible difference in clothing between sheep- and cattle-men. Didn’t sheepmen wear leather jackets, too? Evidently not. Or at least, not in this locality.
“This is sheep country,” the woman said, still not looking up. Jeebee felt the statement like a gun hanging in the air, aimed at him and ready to go off at any minute.
“That so?” he said.
“Yes, that’s so,” she answered. “No cattlemen left here, now.
“A pair of good boots,” he said. “Some bacon, beans, or flour. A handgun—a revolver.”
She looked up at him on the last words.
“Revolver,” she said with contempt. She shoved the pile of tools and chain toward him. “You better move on.”
“All right,” he said. “Didn’t hurt to ask, did it?”
“Revolver!” she said again, deep in her throat, as if she was getting ready to spit. “I’ll give you ten pounds of corn and five pounds of mutton fat for it all. And you can look for a pair of boots on the table over there. That’s it.”
“Now, wait…” he said. The miles he had come since Stoketon had not left him completely uneducated to the times he now lived in. “Don’t talk like that. You know—I know—these things here are worth a lot more than that. You can’t get metal stuff like that anymore. You want to cheat me some, that’s all right. But let’s talk a little more sense.”
“No talk,” she said. She came around the counter and faced him. Jeebee could feel her gaze searching in under the shadow of his cap’s visor to see his weakness and his vulnerability. “Who else you going to trade with?”
She stared at him. Suddenly the great wave of loneliness, of weariness, washed through Jeebee again. The thinking front of his mind recognized that her words were only the first step in a bargaining. Now it was time for him to counter-offer, to sneer at what she had, to rave and protest. But he could not. Emotionally he was too isolated, too empty inside. Silently he began to sweep the chain and the hand tools into a pile and return them to his belt.
“What you doing?” yelled the woman, suddenly. He stopped and looked at her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take them someplace else.”
Even as he said the words, he wondered if she would call on the wolf-dog to attack him; and whether he would, indeed, make it out of this station alive.
“Someplace else?” she snarled. “Didn’t I just say there isn’t anyplace else anywhere near? What’s wrong with you? You never traded before?”
