He stopped putting the tools back in his belt and looked at her.
“Look!” she said, reaching under the counter. “You wanted to trade for a revolver. Look at it!”
He reached out and picked up the nickel-plated short-barreled weapon she had dumped before him. It was speckled with rust. When he pulled the hammer back, there was a thick accumulation of dirt to be seen on its lower part. Even at its best, it had been somebody’s cheap Saturday-night special, worth fifteen or twenty dollars. Jeebee did not really know guns, but the value of what he was being offered was plain.
His head cleared, suddenly. If she really wanted to trade, there was hope after all.
“No,” he said, shoving the cheap and dirty revolver back at her. “Let’s skip the nonsense. I’ll give you all of this for a rifle. A deer rifle, a .30/06 and ammunition for it. Skip the food, the boots, and the rest.”
“Throw in that motorcycle,” she said.
He laughed. And he was as shocked to hear himself as if he had heard a corpse laugh.
“You know better than that.” He waved his hand at the pile on the counter. “All right, you can make new hand tools out of a leaf from old auto springs—if you want to sweat like hell. But there’s one thing you can’t make, and that’s chain like that. That chain’s worth a lot. Particularly to somebody like you with stuff to protect. And if this is sheep country, you’re not short of guns. Show me a .30/06 and half a dozen boxes of shells for it.”
“Two boxes!” she spat.
“Two boxes and five sticks of dynamite.” Jeebee’s head was whirling with the success of his bargaining.
“I got no dynamite. Only damn fools keep that stuff around.”
“Six boxes, then.”
“Three.”
“Five,” he said.
“Three.” She straightened up behind the counter. “That’s it. Shall I get the rifle?”
“Get it,” he said.
She turned and went down the corridor to the second door on the left. There was the grating sound of a key in a lock, and she went through the door. A moment later she reemerged, re-locked the door, and brought him a rifle with two boxes of shells, all of which she laid on the counter.
Jeebee picked up the gun eagerly and went through the motions of examining it. The truth of the matter was that he was not even sure if what he was holding was a .30/06. But he had lived with the .22 long enough to know where to look for signs of wear and dirt in a rifle. What he held seemed clean, recently oiled, and in good shape.
“You look that over, mister,” said the woman. “I got another one you might like better, but it’s not here. I’ll go get it.”
“Guard!” she said to the wolf, or whatever it was. It was a male, he saw. It did not move, and its gaze remained fixed on Jeebee. She passed through the door, closing it behind her.
Jeebee stood motionless, listening until he heard the distant slamming of the outside door reecho through the building. Then, moving slowly so as not to trigger off any reflex in the dog, he slid his hand to one of the boxes of cartridges the woman had brought, opened it with the fingers of one hand, and extracted two of the shells. He laid one on the counter and slowly fed the other into the clip slot of the rifle. He hesitated, but the dog had not moved. With one swift move, he jacked the round into firing position…
He could hear it click loosely inside the gun as he lifted it.
Slowly, he took the shell out again and laid the gun thoughtfully down on the counter. The proper-size ammunition, probably, would be in that room down the corridor, but his chances of getting there…
On the other hand, he might as well try. He took a step away from the counter toward the corridor. The wolf-dog did not move.
It stood like a statue, its tail motionless, no sound or sign of threat showing in it, but neither any sign of a relaxation in its watchfulness. It was the picture of a professional on duty. Of course, he thought, of course it would never let him reach the door of the room with the guns, let alone smash the door lock and break in. He stared at the animal. It must weigh close to a hundred and twenty pounds, and it was a flesh-and-blood engine of destruction. Some years back he had seen video film of attack dogs being trained.
The distant sound of voices, barely above the range of audibility, attracted his attention. They were coming from outside the building.
He laid down the .30/06 and took a step toward the door to the outer room. This moved him also toward the wolf-dog, and at this first step the animal did not move. But when he stepped again, it moved toward him. It did not growl or threaten, but in its furry skull its eyes shone like bits of golden china; opaque, he thought, and without feeling.
But his movement had brought him far enough out in the room so that he could squat and see at an angle through the windows and glimpse the area in front of the building where the three steps stood to the entrance door. The woman stood there, now surrounded by five men, all with rifles or shotguns. As he stood, straining his ears in the hot, silent room, the sense of their words came faintly to him through the intervening glass and distance.
“Where y’been?” the woman was raging. “He was ready to walk out on me. I want two of you to go around back—”
“Now, you wait,” one of the men interrupted her. “He’s got that little rifle. No one’s getting no .22 through him just because you want his bike.”
“Did I say I wanted it for myself?” the woman demanded. “The whole station can use it. Isn’t it worth that?”
“Not getting shot for, it ain’t,” said the man who had spoken. “Sic your wolf on him.”
“And get it shot!” the woman shouted hoarsely, deeply.
“Why not?” said one of the other men. His beard hung down to his belt. It was as black as Jeebee’s, but there was a thickness of body to him and wrinkles around his eyes that suggested he was as much as twenty years older than Jeebee.
“You’re soft on that wolf,” he went on, “always have been, ever since you bought it as a pup from that trapper and raised it for the first few days before Callahan bought it off you—”
“That’s enough!” said the woman.
“No, I mean it,” the man went on. “If you weren’t soft on it, why’d you stop us killing it when we trashed Callahan’s place? It’s no damn good, that wolf. Killed my Corduroy, and he was next to being the top dog here —”
“I said, that’s enough!” The woman seemed to grow until she towered over all the men, and her voice chilled even Jeebee, through the glass. “I’m soft on nobody, Jim Carlsen! Remember that! At Callahan’s none of you had the guts to kill his wife and baby? No, but you’d shoot his wolf! You want to find out for yourself how soft I am?”
There was a moment of absolute stillness and silence outside the building, that stretched out. Then the black-bearded man looked away from her, cleared his throat, and spat on the ground to his side.
“Hell! Have it your own way,” Jeebee barely heard him say. The man kept looking away from the woman.
“All right!” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about killing it. That’s a valuable animal! Like this’s a valuable machine!”
The woman waved at the motorcycle. “You got to take some risks to make a profit.”
“All the same, you go in and send that bastard out here!”
One man said stubbornly. “You send him out not suspecting, and give us a chance to shoot him, safe.”
“If he comes out,” said the woman, “he’s going to want to come out traded, with a loaded .30/06 instead of just that .22. You want that to face after I let him go? I did my share, facing him. Now it’s up to all you—”
The argument went on. The loneliness and emptiness mounted inside Jeebee. He closed his eyes, wanting everything in the present crazy world just to go away…
And opened them again on a feeling of instinctive urgency, to find the muzzle of the dog almost touching him and the golden eyes fixed on his own—not sixteen inches between their faces.
For a moment the animal stood there. Then it extended its neck and sniffed at him once more. Its black nose began to move over his body above the waist, sniff by sniff exploring the leather jacket. Casually, he closed both hands on the .22 still in his lap, and with his left one tilted the rifle’s muzzle toward the head of the wolf-dog above it as his right hand felt for the trigger. At this close range, even a small slug like this ought to go right through the
