either top dog or bottom dog but there’s no such thing as in-between dog, you’re a walking risk to yourself.”
“I wish I was Wolf,” said Jeebee.
The words surprised himself. But Paul understood.
“He’s just an animal, but he knows what it’s about, better than you,” Paul said. “That’s because he listens to his instincts. Learn from him if you can, about the way life is, now. It’s exactly the same for you and me now as it is for him.”
“I have,” Jeebee said glumly, “but I don’t think I could ever see things the way he does.”
“You’ve got instincts, too,” Paul said. “Listen to them, and get this top-dog, bottom-dog idea clear in your head. You’ve got to understand that much of it. There’s a reason I run this wagon and everybody in it. There’s a reason my daughter’s one of my hired hands first and my daughter afterwards, in spite of all she means to me. It’s that way because it has to be that way if we’re all going to survive. The same for you. You learn that much, and if you ever run into Merry again, it may be a different situation.”
“No chance until next year.” Jeebee looked at Paul. “Do you think I can last out the winter if I don’t find my brother’s ranch before then?”
“Up to you,” Paul answered.
He flipped the reins.
“Get up there,” he told the team.
Jeebee, knowing he was dismissed, began to leave the wagon seat once more to go back into the wagon interior.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I want to make some plans and there’s some things about blacksmithing I want to ask Nick.”
“Go ahead,” Paul answered, without taking his attention off the team and the road, “we’ll be stopping a little early tonight, anyway. Nick wants to have a special dinner to see you off right; even if it’ll be some days before you actually go.”
Jeebee went back into the Quiet Room, found Nick, and asked him where paper and either pens or pencils were to be found.
“What do you want it for?” Nick asked. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of writing a letter?”
“Nothing like that,” said Jeebee. “I just want to write down some notes and plans.”
Nick got up and went into the forward compartment where the trade goods were kept, rummaged around, and came back with three sharpened lead pencils, a ballpoint pen, and some fairly thin typing paper.
“What notes and plans?” he asked as Jeebee sat down with the paper and pencils at the little table that hinged up against the Quiet Room wall.
“For one thing,” said Jeebee, “I want to write down some of the things you’ve told me about building my own backwoods smithy.”
“Paul told you we’re turning south, then?” Jeebee nodded.
“Well, all right then,” said Nick. “What do you want to hear from me?”
“The whole process,” said Jeebee.
“Let me tell you some other things first,” said Nick. “Might be you’ll find them more important.”
Nick sat down at his seat behind the nearest machine gun, swiveled his chair to face Jeebee at the table, and looked out the window beyond the machine gun’s muzzle, where a flap of the outer canvas shell of the wagon hid the firing slot for the weapon in the wagon’s metal armor. Then he looked back at Jeebee.
“You know much about Montana?” he asked.
“No,” Jeebee confessed. “I was there for a visit to my brother about fifteen years ago. But I don’t remember much, really. My brother’s eighteen years older than I am. In fact, I remember more about making the flight in by myself—it was my first plane trip alone—than I do about the drive up to the ranch. And most of what I remember about the ranch is just the main ranch house and the buildings around it. I know we had to drive more than an hour or so to get to it, from where I got off the plane in Billings. We went up- and down-hill a lot toward the end.”
“It’ll be cattle country. You want land below the pines,” said Nick. “You need to understand something else, too. It’s that a lot of these ranches made the switchover to the way things are now a lot easier and more natural than people closer to the cities. Particularly, easier than someone from farther east. They weren’t that far different in lots of ways from the way things were there in their great-grandfolks’ time. Like some of these farms you’ve seen us trade at, they were almost ready to operate on their own—maybe more so—even before they had to.”
“I can understand that.” Jeebee now knew Nick well enough to understand such a statement meant Nick had more than that to tell him. But Nick liked to be told that his listener was interested. “Why tell me this?”
“Just because you’re going to be traveling through a lot of other people’s country, other ranches owned by people besides your brother,” said Nick. “You’ll do best to just plain keep out of sight as much as possible. Remember, the sound of a gunshot carries a long ways. That’s the bad part. The good part is that if there’s high rock around, the echoes are going to help hide the place the sound came from to start off with. But it’ll still be smart not to use your gun if you don’t have to—and you’re going to have to live off the land. Had you thought of that?”
“I’d thought about living off the land,” said Jeebee. “But only as far as the fact that I thought that there might be more large game up there than I ran into earlier. Deer or something like that.”
“There’s going to be more game, more big game,” said Nick.
“But that’s where the sound of the gunshot comes in. Whatever you do, don’t go shooting any cattle. They all belong to somebody; and it was always rough around there on anybody who killed somebody else’s cows. It’s not like you’re a neighbor who needed meat in a hurry, or some such thing. They don’t know you, so they don’t need you, so they’re not going to let you get away with killing what belongs to them.”
“I see,” said Jeebee. “All right, I’ll watch that. Any other advice?”
“No.” Nick’s eyes went back to the canvas covering the slot outside the wagon. “Now, what was it you wanted to write down about smithing?”
Jeebee told him and got busy with his pencil, noting down the answers and making sketches.
This done, Nick returned to his own duties about the wagon, but Jeebee sat where he was, with his pencils and marked-up papers, thinking.
Paul, he knew, was being as generous as he could be. But what he was offering Jeebee, Jeebee now realized, would give him only a minimal chance of survival—let alone of finding Martin’s ranch. If only there was some way he could justify getting more of what he needed from Paul…
Baffled, his mind went off on a tangent, in spite of himself. He thought of Wolf and wondered if Wolf would really continue to come with him when he went. It might be, seeing Wolf’s occasional warmth toward Merry, plus his attachment to the dog Greta, that he would rather stay with the wagon than travel further, alone with Jeebee.
It would not be at all surprising, Jeebee thought bleakly, if Wolf decided to stay with them. His mind slipped back to a memory of the days before he had met the wagon and those on it, the period in which he and Wolf had been traveling together, isolated from the rest of the world. The emptiness of the land then, seemed to move in on him now. He would be stepping back into that emptiness when he left these others and the wagon.
That thought brought him back to his earlier problem. There must be some way he could justify getting more of what the wagon had to supply; in particular, a second horse for packing so he could ride the first one. Without a horse under him he would be at a serious disadvantage in a country where everyone rode. If there was only some way he could produce something of more value so as to get a second animal…
His mind roamed loosely over a field of wildly different possibilities. If it could only turn out that something he had been carrying all along was worth a great deal to Paul. If he could only think of something that he could point out to Paul, something from which the other man could make an immediate profit—on the rest of this trip—
An idea suddenly jolted him more profoundly than any of the highway’s potholes, in and out of which their wheels would periodically bounce, shaking all the wagon. He went up front and sat down by Paul again.
“You sell mostly to farmers, don’t you?” Jeebee asked.
“Pretty much so.” Paul glanced sideways at him for a moment. “A few other people. But nearly everyone farms some, now. What about it?”
