Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 19

by C. J. Cherryh

  “I mean,” Mackey said, “a village goes under, you just don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Carlo said. “You couldn’t.”

  Mackey might have spread the news around to the neighbors about Tarmin’s going. He wished he hadn’t had to tell the man anything; and it might be why they’d been left out of the information Danny had gotten, that the marshal knew he’d talked to someone and had decided they couldn’t be trusted.

  Mackey for an ally wasn’t an attractive prospect.

  Meanwhile Randy was darting glances at him—mindful of his strict order to shut up and not to talk back to the Mackeys ever, and not to talk to the Mackeys most especially if he was talking to them. Randy was doing all right so far, and held his silence on a mouthful of crackers while the wife said,

  “We’d still be pleased if you boys would move inside while we fix up the place.”

  And he said,

  “Oh, no. We’re just real comfortable out there, a lot of room, all of that.”

  “You boys have got to have some more blankets,” sweet wife Mary insisted, while Rick burned and Randy stuffed his mouth and his pockets with crackers. “Would you like the rest of the crackers, son?”

  “Sure,” Randy said.

  And on that, it seeming they’d gone about far enough, Carlo set his glass down and pocketed a fistful of crackers himself.

  “Join us for Sunday dinner,” Van Mackey said.

  “No, no,” Carlo said. “We don’t want to disturb you. You have your lives. We’re not here to intrude on your house. We’re grateful enough for a place to stay.” Then he decided to push it, about the time they stood up, taking their leave. “Could use a little extra cash for meals at the tavern, though. Growing kid there. —If we’re worth it. Sure be nice to have the seconds.”

  “Hell,” Rick said from the doorway.

  But Van Mackey said, “You just put meals on our tab over at the tavern. We’ll work it out.”

  “That’s real kind. That’s real kind, sir.” He meant to make it fair-sized tabs and hide away things like crackers and other stuff that did all right on the trail—supplies were mobility, and mobility for him and Randy might be real necessary on short notice. Feed up real well on Sundays, when they had a real good table—

  And maybe take the actual cash he got and put it with Danny Fisher, who wouldn’t rob him.

  Rick would turn his bunk inside out looking for it. He’d lay odds on it. And if Rick was a real fool—might try outright strong-arm robbery. Rick was bigger than any guy he’d seen in Evergreen, including the loggers. Rick was used to having his way—he’d seen Rick elbow his way in the tavern. And he saw the look Rick had now.

  “You sure you won’t come to dinner,” wife Mary said.

  “No,” Carlo said, thinking he’d as soon snuggle up to a nest of lorrie-lies. “We’re fine. Our papa always said, Don’t get personal on a business deal.”

  If he was right it was only going to make them twice as determined, and sure enough, they took no offense at all. He could have tossed his glass onto the floor and they’d have smiled. Except Rick.

  “Well, we understand,” the wife said. “We appreciate your attitude. But you boys won’t mind if I bring out some roast tomorrow.”

  “That’d be real kind,” Carlo said, and with Van and Mary in close attendance all the way down the sooty, worn rug of the hall, got Randy out the door before he exploded.

  “What’s that for?” Randy asked when they were in the forge and far enough from the shut door of the house.

  “Hush,” he said, and got himself and Randy across the forge to collect their coats and go out to supper.

  “Why in hell’d you turn them down?” Randy said, getting his coat on. “You crazy?”

  “Tell you later,” he said. “Let’s go to supper, all right?” He buttoned his own coat and took his brother out into the snow, by the outside door, not by the passages.

  There he could be relatively sure nobody was eavesdropping. And then he told Randy—while they were walking toward the tavern, in the trampled snow of a lot of traffic headed the same direction—as much as he was sure Randy was apt to hear, meaning the whole thing.

  “People are going down to Tarmin come spring,” he said, “and redo the whole village. We own the forge down there, and the house, and grandma’s house and maybe aunt Libby’s shop and her house, do you get it? They just figured out who we are. People from Evergreen are going to claim the houses and everything there’s nobody to speak for. And we’re all that’s left. We’re rich, kid, and we can kick ’em in the ankles and they’ll grit their teeth and smile at us.”

  “That’s why they’re being nice.”

  “First prize. The only way they’re going to get anything is if we make a deal with ’em, and I’m not ready. So you watch it. You keep your mouth shut and let me handle it.” He wished he hadn’t said that about kicking them in the ankles. “First thing, kid, we could end up dead. This is real serious.”

  Randy got a strange look. “You think they’d poison us?”

  He hadn’t thought of that. And wished he had. But it was one more reason not to take Sunday dinners at the Mackey table. “It’d be pretty obvious to everybody. But they might do about anything else. Like an accident in the forge. Like something happening to you. Or threats to you. So you stay out of dark places and stay where I know where you are. That’s an order. Hear?”

  Randy’s eyes were big as saucers as he stopped at the tavern steps and looked up at him. “Yeah,” Randy said.

  “I think we’re going to hear some deal out of them about the property down in Tarmin. Real soon.”

  “Danny say so?” Randy asked.

  “Yeah. He heard it in a meeting. He came over to tell us.”

  “You know what I think? The Mackeys are scum.”

  “I’d say so. But you don’t. Just don’t say anything. Especially anywhere the Mackeys can hear you.”

  “You should get him. Rick can’t beat you.”

  He didn’t think. He grabbed Randy’s arm and then knew he’d grabbed too hard and hurt the kid. He let go.

  “You don’t talk like that. —Kid, I’m sorry. But you be careful what you say.”

  Randy looked scared. And rubbed his arm.

  “This is a public place,” Carlo said. “And you behave. You behave, brother. Or I’ll knock you in the head when I get you home. I mean it.”

  “This isn’t our home!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s fine. This is what we’ve got, kid. Quiet. Quiet! Hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  He clapped Randy on the shoulder then and they went the rest of the way up the steps, opened the door—there was a glass pane with The Evergreen painted on it and a white tree below it, with light coming from inside, lamps and a couple of fires.

  You weren’t ever cold in The Evergreen. Overheated, maybe. The food was good.

  Real good, if you’d gone hungry.

  They walked in with not near the silence and the stares there’d been the first night they’d come. But the ducked heads and hushed comments from the gathering there did notice them—again and in a different way. News had gotten around; and now people were re-interested, in a way that warned there was something in the undercurrents, and that there were people here who’d really like a chance at exactly what the Mackeys would.

  But hell if he’d spook, or let Randy spook. The kid was picking it up, not knowing what to do with it and on the verge of showing out like a fool.

  “They’re looking at us,” Randy said, being at that age: but the fact was, everybody was looking at them.

  “Yeah,” Carlo said. “You wanted to be famous, right?”

  “Shut up! They’re staring.”

  “Fine.”

  By now they knew where things were and how they were. There was a set-fee buffet. What they’d been spending gave you one serving. But if you laid down double it was all you could eat up to three bowls, which was more than fair: the bowls were large. He and Randy went to the line, which was none by this time, found a table and sat down to stew and, at the bar help’s order, a short beer for him, a cup of tea for Randy.

  Then
a shadow fell across their table, and a big miner or logger (devil a way to tell when both were in their tavern best) loomed across the light and sat down at the table with them.

  “Hear you’re the Tarmin kids.”

  “Yeah,” Carlo said, and nudged Randy with his foot under the table, a signal for Randy to keep his mouth shut.

  “Hear you saw what happened down there.”

  “Yeah.” He refused to let the guy ruin his supper. He and Randy had had supper in the middle of the carnage, in the store which was the only safe place with food, and he didn’t intend to be spooked. “I was there. It was a mess. Lost my whole family.”

  “Hear so,” the guy said. “Real sorry. Stand you a drink?”

  “Yeah, suppose so.”

  The guy—he turned out to be the head of the miner’s union— seemed bound to talk. And after a little chatter about the oddness of the winter so far, and how spooky the Wild had been—asked the lay of the village, the size of the buildings in a jump so fast Carlo didn’t even see it coming.

  He answered, having no reason not to.

  Then other miners began to gather round. Pretty soon a good many of them were asking questions, or repeating information they’d heard, and a couple of men said they’d been there years ago but they didn’t know the place now.

  “Not many would,” Carlo said without thinking, and didn’t intend to let emotion color his statement. But it did, and he saw Randy twitch to it and he saw a shifting-back among the crowd.

  At that moment he saw Danny Fisher coming through the crowd—long fringes on his coat, gun on his hip: rider and no question of it, from the cut of the boots to the battered hat with the braided cording around the crown.

  “Dan,” he said, half-rising—Dan or Danny had gotten confused in his head down in Guil and Tara’s cabin. But either way it was, he offered Danny a seat at the table as the one this time in his element, as Danny had been elsewhere.

  There was a mild fuss made, and a beer gotten—Carlo wasn’t even sure who’d ordered it. But Danny was mildly famous, folk immediately drawing the conclusion that this was the rider who’d come up with them.

  And folk wanted to buy Danny drinks.

  “On me,” Carlo said, and with a wicked thought, got up and ordered at the bar: “What the rider drinks is on the tab.”

  By the time he got back through the crowd to the table, there was a dish of the stew, a mug of beer, and a cluster of miners and loggers.

  “You taking hire?” one was asking.

  “Not yet,” Danny said. “Lord, I just got up here.”

  “Fool,” someone said to the asker, and shoved his way in to introduce himself as Frank Remere, and head of a small mine.

  Which could be real small.

  “Excuse me,” Carlo said, and Danny pulled the chair back for him one-handed, so he could get past the guy trying to sit down. “Let the man have his supper, all right?”

  “What about the Tarmin riders?” someone asked. “Why didn’t they stop it?”

  “Because somebody ignored the rules,” Danny said. “Somebody was an exception. ’Scuse me. I came to have supper with my friends. Excuse me.”

  “Move away,” someone said, “move away, let the man be.”

  “So what did happen?” a logger asked.

  “Shut up!” another man said, and there was nearly a fight among the crowd drawing off.

  But Danny was quite calm about it, and began talking, between bites, about how he’d figured there’d be a to-do, and how he’d told Ridley, who was camp-boss, where he was going and Ridley said there wasn’t anything against his coming here.

  “Different than Shamesey,” Danny said.

  “Everybody wants to talk to you,” Randy said, clearly impressed.

  “Yeah, well, I’d just as soon not.” Danny met his eyes past the kid and had a much more sober expression. “Just kind of got worried about you guys.”

  “Doing all right,” Carlo said, and picked skin off a peeling hand.

  “No trouble from the jerk.”

  “Not as much as he’d like,” Carlo said. And caught sight of Rick Mackey over by the door. “He’s here, actually.”

  “He’s a pig,” Randy said.

  “Yeah, well, don’t say it too loud.”

  “Pig,” Randy said.

  Danny might have kicked the kid under the table. Danny moved and Randy jerked and looked sober.

  “Be smart,” Danny said.

  Amazing, Carlo thought. There was actually sobriety from the kid. And hero-worship.

  He didn’t have that on his side.

  But they made a kind of pie for dessert, and he thought if the Mackeys were buying, it might do real well for finishers. “Pie,” he said to Randy. And while Randy was gone on that errand, he filled Danny in on the essentials.

  “No offer yet, but, funny thing, Mackey wanted to be real nice to us today.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Danny, watch your back. Just watch your own back.”

  “I’m not worried,” Danny said. “But I do. I will. Do you like their offer?”

  “They haven’t made one. But they’d sure like me to be in debt.”

  “They’d sure like to have my help,” Danny said. “That’s why I came. I was going to say earlier—watch your back. Watch the kid.”

  “I tell you—”

  Said kid came back with the pie, three helpings, with his thumb in one.

  “Thanks,” Carlo said, and, “Did you wash that thumb?”

  Randy made a face, sucked the thumb clean and sat down. “Carlo thinks he’s smart.”

  “Generally he is,” Danny said.

  “So do you like it over there?”

  “In the camp? It’s all right.” Danny didn’t sound enthusiastic. “Nice people. Not too much to do. But we’ve been talking about going hunting. If the game weren’t so spooky.”

  “How—spooky?”

  “Just not out there. There’s been some village hunters clamoring to go. But nothing’s there. Horses know. And there isn’t. So we sit. Wait for the weather to get better. Everything’s likely in burrows.”

  “We could go hunting,” Randy said.

  “I don’t think so,” Carlo said.

  “Meanwhile,” Danny said, “we’re bored.”

  “Could do with a little boredom,” Carlo said.

  “Yeah,” Danny agreed.

  “So what are they like over there?” Still, things weren’t quite right—Carlo felt so, anyway. And Danny took a swig of beer and sighed.

  “Real tight, together, you know. Nice folk.”

  That might, Carlo thought, be the complaint. He wasn’t sure. But Danny had himself a second beer, and they sat and talked about Danny’s family down in Shamesey, and where he’d met Guil Stuart, and about Danny’s first trip on the road. Just idle stuff. Danny was circumspect, and didn’t drink more than the two beers.

  He had his dinner, declared he should get back because his horse didn’t like his long absence—and stuffed some of the biscuits in his pockets, to make amends, he said: Cloud wasn’t as fond of yeast bread as of biscuits.

  After that—Danny left.

  And the curious closed in, the miner who’d bought him a drink, among others. “So what was that about?” the fellow wanted to know, little that it was his business.

  “Friend of mine,” Carlo said, seeing exactly what all that idle talk had been about. “Friend of ours, got us up the mountain—”

  “Yeah, but what did he want?”

  “Just passing the time of day,” Carlo said. “Talking. Promised each other a drink when we got through.”

  “Amen,” said one. “That’s due.”

  “After which,” Carlo said, “I’d better get home.”

  “No, no,” the guy said. “Have a drink. You got it coming. The kid, too.”

  “My name’s Randy,” Randy said.

  “He drinks tea,” Carlo said. And beers arrived. “Tea,” Carlo insisted, and that was what Randy got.

  Himself, he’d just the one more. And talked to the miners and loggers about Tarmin until that ran to the bottom. Then he got up, took Randy, and said that he had to get back to the forge.


  “Give old Van Mackey hell,” one said. “The lazy clod.” Ordinarily talk like that was a joke. But he picked up that Danny was right and the Mackeys weren’t favored in the least. Rick had been there during the time Danny was; Rick had left after a quick supper, and hadn’t waited around to make a case of anything with Danny. Off to tell the household, Carlo would bet, that he’d had someone else on the tab, and to tell them who he’d had on the tab.

  He didn’t personally give a damn, not for gossip in the Mackey household and not for gossip at his back in the tavern, of which there was considerable. He didn’t have to give a damn, he said to himself.

  And he made it most of the way to the door before a drunken miner grabbed his arm, introduced himself as Earnest something-or-another Riggs and said he’d be glad to look out for—his words— “two nice kids like you” and keep away the “bad lot, real bad lot,” that would otherwise move in.

  “That’s real kind,” Carlo said, and maneuvered himself and Randy out the door minus the offered escort.

  “Damn!” Randy said. “They’re crazy!”

  “Wait till spring,” Carlo muttered as they went down the porch steps from the tavern. The Riggs encounter had persuaded him they weren’t as safe as he’d hoped. That there’d be numerous offers of that ilk, and it wasn’t going to be easy to figure out other interests. He halfway expected another offer to follow him, after the rest saw Riggs’ move.

  But no one accosted them. Snow was coming down thick, haloed in the lanterns they’d hung on poles to keep patrons from breaking their necks. It looked peaceful. He wanted to think of it that way.

  “So what are they going to do?” Randy asked as they walked home. “Those guys—they’ll strip the place for nails. That’s our stuff down there! I mean, I didn’t think we’d go back for it and it’s pretty godawful, but I don’t want those guys carrying off my stuff and getting into mama’s stuff—”

  “You know how the phone lines go down every winter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No way any other village up here can find out about what happened down there until somebody hikes there from here or Tarmin doesn’t come on-line in the spring. Evergreen, all by themselves, is going to swarm down there at first thaw, bet on it. That’s what Danny’s here for. He’s making a point—showing he’s our friend. Because otherwise we’re in real sincere danger ourselves. You hear me?”

 

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