Wolf looked back at him agreeably but otherwise, as usual, paid little attention to the sound of Jeebee’s voice. He was very unlike a dog in this. Body attitudes had always seemed to be the basis of his communication rather than sounds. But Jeebee was accustomed to this fact by now. He turned and went down toward the wagon, once more lit from within. Several times he stopped and looked back, but until the darkness hid Wolf completely, he could still be seen just barely inside the woods.
Jeebee went around the wagon to find the others sitting by the fire that was kindled every night. They had clearly already finished eating. Tonight, Paul and Merry were talking over the possibility of getting rid of some of their horses and buying other, younger stock to replace them. Merry wanted to hold off until they had recruited at least one more person. Jeebee had learned in these last few days that the wagon usually carried not merely four, but five people. In other words, besides himself, one more pair of feet and hands were needed.
He turned to Nick, but Nick seemed in no mood for talk. His mind was on something else. He did not reject Jeebee’s attempt to make conversation, but his answers were brief and he kept his eyes on the fire.
Left to himself, Jeebee went about the business of heating what remained in the cooking pot and filling his tray.
He sat down in his folding chair to eat, his mind still busily searching for some way to bring Wolf down to join the wagon group. But that was a search he had been at ever since he himself had joined it. Paul had not yet trusted him to have his weapons back again. But as far as Jeebee could tell, he was getting along well with all of them, except that Merry still held herself at a distance, refusing to commit to any kind of sociability.
Jeebee’s mind went off on a different tangent. He could not tell himself that he had done well, except in a few instances, but certainly he could not have done badly, for someone the three others all knew had never had any experience with this kind of work before.
One of the few times he had earned at least some approval had been from Nick. This had been in the process of the lessons that Merry—and Nick as well—had given him about the various weapons of the wagon, ranging from short-barreled revolvers small enough to fit into the top of one of Jeebee’s boots to the .30-caliber machine gun and the rocket launchers with their ammunition.
“You’re sure you never kept guns around and worked with them before?” Nick asked, after Jeebee, following several trial efforts, had successfully stripped down one of the air-cooled machine guns for cleaning and put it back together again.
“That’s right. I never did,” Jeebee answered. “But my father liked working with his hands. I picked up something of that when I was a kid. Also, I like knowing why things work. When I was young, I used to take apart clocks, and things like that, to see if I could get them back together again and working.”
“Well, you certainly got a knack for it,” said Nick.
“I wish I had the same kind of knack for riding the horses and driving the team,” Jeebee said wistfully.
“That’ll come,” said Nick. “You just have to remember that with a horse you stay in charge all the time.”
“Merry doesn’t seem to have to work at it,” Jeebee said.
“Well, she likes horses,” said Nick, “like you liked knowing how things work. Besides, she’s done so much of it the horses are ready to do what she wants the minute she slaps a saddle on their back. Most of them, that is. There’s always a few hardheads. Did you know that back when there were rodeos, there were some horses nobody could ride?”
“No,” answered Jeebee.
“Well, there were,” said Nick. “I’ve seen some myself. Some of them had prices on them for anybody who could ride them. But those horses not only wanted to get people off, they knew how to do it. If a horse really wants to get you off, he’ll get you off. That is—if he knows how, like I said.”
“I can see the sense of having to keep the team under control,” Jeebee said.
In spite of being warned both by Nick and by Paul, Jeebee’s first attempt to hold the reins of the six horses pulling the wagon had been a shock to him. To begin with, he had thought of them as automatically pulling together. They could and did do that, but the driver had to make sure that they did it.
Each horse had ideas of its own, left to itself. Almost as shocking had been the fact that the six of them were easily capable of falling completely out of control if one of them stumbled for a moment for any reason. Paul taught him to hold the reins separately between the first, second, and third fingers of each hand, while maintaining a strong grip on them with the rest of the hand. It seemed to Jeebee that there was no way he could keep a strong grip, with the thick leather straps between his fingers, that way, but Paul insisted that in time the necessary strength would come to him.
“For now,” he said, “if your hands get tired enough to loosen, pass the reins back to me. Never—even if you’re alone up here—wrap them around anything to take the strain off. You’ll end up with the team running away, or half of them breaking a leg apiece.”
He looked hard at Jeebee.
“Right,” said Jeebee.
They changed horses several times a day. Jeebee had come to learn that with its metal armor inside, its load of goods, and its oversize build, the wagon was a heavy pull, even for six fresh horses. Since Paul did not want strangers to know what kind of defenses the wagon had, he changed horses frequently so that the ones pulling were always rested.
Changing teams normally took the efforts of both the driver and at least one other person. At first, Jeebee had been more afraid of being kicked than he wanted to admit.
He gradually lost that fear as he came to understand that a horse could not kick you unless he first shifted his weight onto the nonkicking leg, opposite. If you watched how the horse stood, you could tell whether he was getting ready to try to kick or not.
Still, it took all his courage to dodge under the belly of one of the big, powerful wagon horses when hitching them, while this was something the other three people apparently did without thinking.
He also came gradually to understand that just as there could be a knack in assembling and disassembling weapons, so there could also be a knack in horse handling and driving. Once he understood this, he began to watch Paul closely as the peddler handled his team. Paul clearly preferred to do most of the driving himself. Particularly, for reasons of policy, he always made sure he was the one driving when the wagon came in sight of any inhabited place where they might do business.
Similarly Jeebee watched and studied Merry for the small things she might be doing that could pass unnoticed but that might be important in the business of handling the spare horses. But it was difficult to learn much from her, except when she deliberately set out to teach him something. Paul was much more open about explaining things than she was. Jeebee came to the conclusion, finally, that a lot of what she knew she had picked up unconsciously, by observation or by doing, so that she hardly realized she knew it herself.
The first hurdle had been his learning to ride. He finally faced the fact that he would never be able to sit easily in the saddle the way she did, moving with the horse as if the two had been welded together. Nonetheless, he did learn how to saddle a horse, to mount it, how to stay on it, and how to make it go where he wanted it to go. He also learned how to put on and take off saddle and bridle.
What had come more slowly were the tricks of rounding up the loose horses that followed the wagon. With Merry riding herd on them, they seemed to follow automatically and just as automatically stay bunched together. If the wagon stopped, they stopped; and they were apparently content just to crop the grass where they stood without straying too far. The dogs, Jeebee found, were quick to try to turn back any of them that made a serious attempt to stray.
But even with the help of the dogs, he himself had no real control over the loose horses. The minute he took his eyes off one, it seemed to drift away from the rest. Merry, on the other hand, appeared able to anticipate when a horse was going to try to move off on its own and to be in front of it when it did, blocking the way with her own riding animal.
“So. Did you get a look at that wolf of yours tonight?”
The words woke Jeebee suddenly out of his thoughts. He was once more back at the fire with his dinner tray on his knees and it was Paul speaking to him. He felt abruptly and reasonlessly guilty, as if he had been a student in a class who had not been paying attention and had been suddenly called upon by the instructor.
“Yes,” said Jeebee.
“I thought that’s what you’d been doing all these evenings,” Paul went on, “but around here we don’t ask.
