Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  “Where are the rest?” Jeebee asked.

  “They’re posted,” Nick answered. “Out beyond the horses and around us.”

  “Why do you think we have them?” said Paul. “If anyone comes close, they’ll sound the alarm. So will the horses for that matter, but they’re not as quick to pick up someone moving in on us as the dogs are.”

  “All except Greta,” Jeebee said. “Is she posted?”

  “Greta,” said Paul, looking at his daughter. “Greta’s Merry’s special pet. She found us and took to Merry right from the start.”

  Jeebee sat down on his chair, holding his cup, and looked almost directly through the flames at Merry. She looked back at him. For such a cheerful face it was not an unfriendly stare, but there was nothing warming about it either. She had hardly said a kind, or even a semikind word, to him since they had met, he thought. Then he relented, within. Times were different now. It was natural to suspect a stranger and he was still that to those here—as they were to him.

  His mind wandered as he sipped the hot black coffee. He wondered how Wolf was doing. The sudden awareness of a shape beside him brought him abruptly out of his thoughts. He turned his head to find his nose almost inches from the muzzle of Greta. She was standing beside him, leaning toward him, wagging her tail and with her ears laid back and a smile on her face. When he looked at her, she fawned upon him and sniffed eagerly over his pants legs and on up to examine his jacket. Eventually, she completed her survey and came back to manage a brief but successful lick at his face before he could dodge her tongue. Wiping his face, he fended off another tongue swipe. He petted her and she crouched down beside him. In fact, she curled up beside him, almost, but not quite, with her head on his boots as she had on Merry’s.

  The thought of Merry made Jeebee look across through the flames at her once more. There was an expression on her face now. And he thought it was an even less friendly expression than before. For the first time it struck Jeebee that she might resent her dog paying this much attention so soon to Jeebee. She would have good cause to, with a dog that was particularly her own taking up like this with a stranger. Almost ashamed to admit it himself, Jeebee identified his guess of a possible resentment in her with a sneaky feeling of triumph inside himself. He might not be able to ride a horse like her, or do half a dozen other things, he thought, but dogs liked him—or at least this dog seemed to.

  It was only then that it occurred to him that what might have attracted Greta was not him, but the smell of Wolf on his clothes.

  They continued to sit around the fire for some little time, drinking coffee. Very little was said. It seemed to Jeebee that the other three did not talk much simply because they knew each other so well that there was very little to say. In his own case he had nothing to say to them and it could be they said nothing to him because they knew so little about him.

  Eventually Paul threw the dregs of his cup into the fire, stood up, and stretched.

  “We’ll need to get going with daylight,” he said. “If we want to reach the Borgstrom place by late midmorning, tomorrow.”

  Merry had risen at almost the same moment. She whistled sharply and Greta jerked her head up from Jeebee’s legs, got to her feet, and trotted over to Merry.

  “Guard,” Merry said to the dog, and turned toward the wagon. Greta walked off a few steps with her back to the rest of them and dropped down on the grass, her paws crossed in front of her, her gaze outward into the darkness. Paul, followed by Merry, disappeared into the wagon.

  “Well,” said Nick after they had been gone a few moments. “Guess we’d better turn in, too. You’re going to take that hammock on the south side, Jeebee.”

  Jeebee felt a strange reluctance to go inside. He had been sleeping so many nights under the stars that the thought of trying to rest in the wagon struck him almost like entering a prison cell.

  “I can bed down out here,” he said.

  “No,” Nick answered, calmly, “you sleep inside where I can keep an eye on you until we get to know you better. You’ll like that hammock, once you get used to it.”

  He dumped his own cup’s small amount of remaining liquid on the fire.

  Looking past Jeebee, he said, almost conversationally, “You got any idea how strong you stink?” Jeebee started.

  He had not thought. Of course, that would be one reason Merry would take the attitude toward him she had. How long had it been since he had taken off the clothes he was wearing? How long since he had been ordinarily clean? He could not remember. It was a matter of months, anyway. At least since he had run away from Stoketon. These people here probably could smell him ten yards off.

  “I’d forgotten… ” he said.

  Nick’s eyes came back to meet Jeebee’s.

  “We’ve got a large metal tub inside,” Nick said. “Big enough to get into. You can fill it and the water in the pipe’s just about right for a bath now. Also, I can let you have some soap, scissors, and razor, if you want them. Might be I could even find you some fresh clothes.”

  Gratitude warmed Jeebee.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I could use all of that. You don’t know what it means—”

  “Yes, I do,” said Nick. “I’ve been there myself. Besides I’ve got to share the Quiet Room with you as well as the guns, tonight.”

  Nick went into the wagon and came out again with the washtub. As he had predicted, it was a big one—almost three feet across on the bottom and a foot and a half high on the sides, made of galvanized iron. With Jeebee’s help he half filled it with hot water from the tank on the wagon’s side and brought it around to set near the fire. Then he went back inside to come out again with a heavy bar of yellow soap that looked homemade. The clothes were jeans and a shirt, the scissors were large, and the razor was a straight-edged one. Nick had also brought a towel. He threw them all down beside Jeebee.

  “You’re going to have to wash out your own shirt, socks, and underwear,” he said. “Use the bathwater after you’ve cleaned yourself. Wring the clothes out afterward and bring them in the wagon. You’ll find some hooks by your hammock. Hang them on those to dry. Sleep in the fresh shirt. It and the jeans are new. Paul’ll be charging you for those, later on.”

  “Thanks,” said Jeebee. “I mean that. It’ll be good to be in clean clothes—new clothes at that.”

  Reflexively, he felt his beard and hair.

  “I’ll shave the beard,” he said, “but the hair, I think I’ll just cut—some.”

  Nick turned to the wagon.

  “Good night,” he said. “I’ll turn down the lantern in the Quiet Room. You turn it all the way off after you’ve slung the hammock. By the way, the safe way to get into a hammock is sit down first in the middle of it. I mean, not just in the middle between the two ends, but in the middle of it, crosswise too. Then lay down and swing your legs up, holding on to the hammock edges. If you do it right, it won’t turn over and dump you on the ground. The mosquito netting’s pinned up; and you might as well leave it that way. No mosquitoes this early in the year.”

  He went into the wagon and this time did not come out.

  Jeebee cut his beard down as close as he could with the scissors; then wet the stubble down thoroughly with bathwater and soap, and gingerly shaved with the straightedge—blind. He had not thought to ask Nick for some kind of mirror.

  Done at last, with only five small nicks, he cleaned the razor, peeled off his old clothes, and settled himself slowly into the still-hot water. He sighed, leaning back against the curved metal edge of the big tub. The heat soaked slowly through him.

  He thought of Wolf and of the people in the wagon. It was foolish of him, he knew, but he could not help feeling a bit bothered by Merry’s attitude toward him. He told himself that it was simply a weakness in him that wanted everyone to like him. It was also, of course, the fact she was a woman, and he had not seen a woman—barring the monstrous lady in the long black dress at the railroad whistle stop where he had acquired Wolf—for a long tim
e. There had been nothing sexually attractive about the store woman. But Merry was different.

  It was not that he lusted strongly after her. It was simply that she was female. He was male, and conscious of her accordingly—he told himself. It seemed to him, now, watching the stars, that she could have at least smiled once at him. It would not have been too much for her to do, and it would have meant a great deal to him.

  He shoved the thought from his mind. He was dangerously close to self-pity again. He made himself think once more of Wolf.

  Wolf was a free person. Perhaps he was already gone for good. Even if he was not, something that had been between him and Jeebee would be destroyed if Jeebee should ever try to trap him or bring him to someplace like this wagon by force.

  But, otherwise, how was he ever going to get Wolf to join them? Well, at least he could keep going from the wagon out into whatever woods were close at twilight, howling and waiting. Perhaps he should have howled from the woods, this evening. But he had been afraid, he faced it now, of getting no answer.

  Possibly, somehow, eventually, Wolf might show up and be enticed to come closer to the wagon.

  Possibly…

  The water was cooling. He washed himself and stepped out. The night breeze was almost instantly at him, robbing him of the water’s warmth, encasing him into a chill that felt as if he was being buried in ice. He toweled himself dry and quickly put on his new pants and shirt. Then he washed the socks and underwear he had been wearing in the bathwater—carefully. He also washed the extra, long-dirty shorts and T-shirt he had carried in his pockets against the day he could clean them. Somehow, the day had never come. Both sets of underwear threatened to come apart in his hands.

  After washing his outer clothes, he emptied and rinsed out the washtub.

  Picking up the tub with his wet clothing inside it, he went, the night air cool on his naked face. He climbed up and into the wagon, going back past the goods into the weapons room. Nick was in the right-hand hammock and evidently already asleep. He slept silently, without snoring. Jeebee found some empty floor space to put the tub until morning, draping his wet things on hooks and over the tub to dry. He then slung his hammock and found it was not as difficult as Nick had given him to think. It was merely a matter of finding a balance point. Once in, he stretched out, carefully. It was surprisingly comfortable. There had been a blanket rolled with the hammock, and he pulled this over himself now.

  He felt the walls and roof and floor close about him, and thought once more of Wolf.

  “I’ll never sleep,” he told himself.

  But even as he thought this he was falling into a dreamless slumber.

  CHAPTER 10

  Three nights later at twilight in a little patch of woods near where the wagon had stopped, Wolf came to greet him.

  Wolf put his paws on his shoulders, licked his face with an undodgeable tongue, and frisked around Jeebee before stopping to sniff Jeebee carefully all over. He concluded by going back into greeting behavior, ending by rolling on his back and inviting a stomach scratching. Jeebee obliged.

  Jeebee had been all but sure within himself that Wolf had left him for good. The return of his partner filled him with warmth and gratitude. He wrestled exuberantly with Wolf and scratched the furry belly with satisfaction. Finally, things calmed down for both of them. The sun had set but there was still light in the sky. Jeebee got up and moved back out of the woods and toward the wagon, some fifty feet away, in the open grassland of the old superhighway.

  Wolf followed him to the edge of the trees, but stopped there. Jeebee tried to play with him to entice him further. But Wolf refused to be drawn. He stood watching Jeebee, but not advancing any further into the open, and gradually the dark came upon them.

  At last, it was clear that nothing was going to bring Wolf out beyond the trees.

  “Good night, Wolf,” Jeebee said softly at last. “Tomorrow night at this same time, maybe?”

  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 r
eins 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.