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. That belonged to a cattleman.” She jerked her thumb at the animal, swept the tools and the chain together into a pile before her as if she already owned them. “All right, what you want?”
“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?”
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 brain of the animal…
His finger found the trigger and trembled there. The wolf-dog paid no attention. His nose was pushed into the unbuttoned opening at the top of the jacket, sniffing. Abruptly he withdrew his head and looked squarely into Jeebee’s eyes.
In that moment Jeebee knew that he could not do it. Not like this. He could not even kill this creature to save himself. It had done him no harm. It was now even acting almost friendly. His buck fever was back on him… and what did it matter? Even if he killed it, the men outside would kill him, eventually. What kind of an idiot guard animal was it, that would let him put a gun directly to its head and pull the trigger?
The questing nose had now changed its attention and was working d
own his right sleeve. It reached the end of the sleeve, the long jaws gaped, revealing teeth twice the size of those Jeebee had seen on any dog, and these teeth closed gently on the cuff of the jacket and tugged. It shifted the grip of its jaws on the cuff to further back in its mouth, so that the wide carnasials now closed on the leather. It chewed for a moment; then let go and tilted its head back, looking up at Jeebee with golden eyes.
Jeebee’s mind suddenly made sense of the situation. It was the jacket, of course, his mind told him. The jacket, and the dog alike, must have come from the ruined house where he had found the chain and taken shelter that night. The jacket must still smell of the cattleman the woman had mentioned, who had no doubt been killed by the woman and her friends. A man who had owned this wolf-dog originally. Now, several days of wearing the leather garment had mingled its original owner’s scent with Jeebee’s; until they were one scent only. Also, above all, the jacket and Jeebee both would not smell of sheep and sheep handling, of which all this station, its people and buildings, must reek to the creature’s sensitive nose.
However else the wolf-dog might react to him, it seemed—tentatively, at least—ready to accept him, and should not attack mindlessly. For the first time he remembered what he had noticed but paid no attention to in this room. Around the end of the counter where the two chains were stapled, around the space of the short line, particularly, everything within reach of the chain had been chewed or torn by canine teeth. The heavy wood of the counter had been pitted, a brace to one of the legs of a nearby chair had been gnawed almost in half. For the first time it occurred to Jeebee that this animal might be as alone and friendless as Jeebee himself.
On a sudden impulse he reached down and unsnapped the closure that fastened the chain around the other’s neck.
The wolf-dog shook himself, like one of his kind coming out of water, but briefly, and looked again curiously up at Jeebee.
Now, however, Jeebee felt time pressing on him. He was reminded of the danger close by, in which he still stood. Still holding the .22 in one hand, he snatched up the .30/06 from the counter in the other and ran with both rifles to the door of the room the woman had entered. The wolf-dog went with him.
Wolf and Iron Page 4