Herman stiffened at first, then caught up with my thinking and Harv’s apparent circumstances. “We are not much liking jail, either.”
“Then we have a lot in common,” Harv said, proffering a hand even larger than Herman’s outsize mitt.
After the handshakes, I had to ask. “How’d you spring yourself from Wolf Point this time?”
“Wasn’t that tough, as jailbreaking goes,” the veteran at it reflected, both of us listening keenly but Herman with real reason to. “They have a habit there of making the prisoner mop the cell, and when Baldy, that’s the deputy,” he said, as if the jailer was an old acquaintance, “had to go to the toilet, I reached the key ring off the wall peg with the mop handle. I was out and hightailing it down to the tracks by the time Baldy pulled his pants up, I guess. Caught the next freight going west and linked up with Lettie after her shift at that Le Havre.” The mention of his girlfriend brought a pining expression, which he resolutely shook off. “Had to move on from Havre, of course,” summing up in an aside to me. “You can guess how Carl is when he heard I’m out free again.” Did I ever, the half-pint sheriff on the bus suspiciously grilling me as if I were a runaway when I wasn’t—yet—still a memory I wished I didn’t have.
From Harv, this had grown to a speech of practically Bible length, and he wasn’t through yet. “I sort of wish Carl would take it easy on me for slipping jail, when it’s not even his,” he said, as if there was more than one kind of justice.
“Yeah, he’s a mean little bugger,” I said boldly, Herman’s good eye policing me not to go too far. “He sure did you dirty, back there on the bus to Wolf Point.”
“Aw, Carl maybe means well,” said Harv out of brotherly, or at least step-brotherly, loyalty. “It’s just that you put a big badge on a little guy, his head swells along with it.”
After that evident truth, he turned reflective again.
“Still and all, he had something there on the bus, that I should go haying. Taking him up on it, though he doesn’t know it,” he concluded. He shifted attention to us. “Do I savvy you’re here to make hay, too?”
“You bet I am. I mean, we are,” I hastily included Herman.
“I thought you were getting sent someplace back east.”
“That, uh, didn’t work out. See, One Eye is my closest relative from back there, and he wanted to see the West.”
“Ought to be able to get your fill of it around here.” Harv smiled a little.
“Can I ask”—I maybe shouldn’t have pressed the question but he was the one who had racily all but drawn her into the autograph album—“what about Lettie? I mean, you’re here and she’s there, all the way up in Havre.”
That cast him into silence for some seconds, evidently dealing with his longing until he could put it into words. “We’re working on that. I’m going to save my wages and she’s putting away her tips, and after haying we’ll get married and find some way where I’m not running from jail all the time.”
Herman looked as if he would have liked to add advice to that, but only nodded silently.
? ? ?
AT THAT MOMENT—I’ll never forget it, it is clocked into memory as if with a stopwatch dividing that night of my life—came an outcry from Fingy, stumbling into camp still buttoning his pants from taking a leak in the bushes. “We got company! The town whittler.”
The atmosphere around the campfire changed like a gun had gone off. Certain hoboes evaporated into the willow thicket on the riverbank, others sat up rigid in a collective stare toward the road, where a black-and-white patrol car with a big star on the door luminescent in the moonlit night was pulling up. Harv stayed as he was, as though none of this turn of events applied to him, and Herman and I were caught up in his example, whether or not we should have taken to the brush.
Right away, Highpockets was on his feet and in charge. “Anybody been yaffled lately?”
“I done a jolt a little while back,” Buttermilk Jack, the oldest of the hoboes except for Skeeter in our bunch, owned up to. “Fifteen days, vag, in Miles City.”
“Good time, or did you scoot?” Highpockets pressed what must have been the most veteran vagrant to be found anywhere.
“Served my sentence honest and true,” the old hobo swore. “Then they run me out of town. If anybody’s on the lam, it ain’t me.”