No, it was the trio of us at the other end of the log from old Jack who fit that description up, down, and sideways. Fear gripped me so savagely I could scarcely breathe. Would my all too readable face, between Harv’s imperturbable one and Herman’s contorted one, give us away, first of all to Highpockets? He had no stake in us, and as the Big Ole, his responsibility was toward the bunch he traveled through the fields of the West with, the Johnson family compressed into that last bus. He could dust his hands of strays like us to any inquiring lawman, to everyone else’s benefit but ours. I am sure my eyes were rabbity and my freckles gone pale as I watched Highpockets read faces in the firelight.
Just before he reached ours, Peerless Peterson spat a sizzle of tobacco juice into the fire. “Why can’t the bastards let us alone? We got as much rights as anybody, but they treat us like dirt when we’re not sweating our balls off doing the work for them.”
“Shut your flytrap,” Highpockets snapped at him, “until we see what this is about. You go poking Johnny Law like that and he’s likely to poke back with a billy club, you ought to have learned that by now.”
The circle around the campfire went tensely silent as he checked from man to man. “Anybody else the bloodhounds might be after, for anything? No? Let’s make sure or we’re all in for it.” On one side of me, Harv looked on innocently, and on the other, Herman somehow was an equal picture of guiltlessness. For my part, I had to sit tight and try not to appear as guilty as I felt about landing the pair of us in this fix. Luckily, Herman’s whisper put some backbone in me. “Remember, big medicine you have. Makes you brave.” Newly conscious of the arrowhead and whatever power it carried, there next to my heart, I managed to guilelessly meet Highpockets’s eyes as his gaze swept over the three of us, lingered, then moved on.
“All right, we seem to be in the clear. We’ve lucked out, some,” he reported in a low voice as he recognized the advancing lawman in the moonlight. “It’s Mallory, the deputy sheriff over here. He’s not the worst as hick dicks go.” But he still was some kind of sheriff and Herman still was featured on a MOST WANTED poster, and I still was his accomplice or something, skating on thin ice over the bottomless depth of the orphanage. I gripped the arrowhead pouch through my shirt, my other hand clasped in Herman’s to tie our fortune together, good or bad.
? ? ?
THE DEPUTY and Highpockets acknowledged each other by name as the local lawman stepped into the circle of light cast by the campfire. They did not shake hands, which would not have set well with either of their constituencies. This officer of the law was half again bigger than Harv’s banty-size Glasgow nemesis, somewhat beefy the way people get from sitting behind a desk too much, but without that air of throwing his weight around unnecessarily. He did not look overly threatening except for the pistol riding on his hip. That six-shooting symbol of authority, however, was more than enough to draw resentment, loathing, hatred in some cases, from men harried first by railroad bulls and then the lawmen of communities that wanted them gone the minute their labor was no longer needed. The shift of mood in the encampment was like a chilly wind through a door blown open.
“Only checking to make sure you boys are comfortable.” Mallory spoke directly to Highpockets but all of us were meant to hear.
“There ain’t nothing like it, bedroom of stars and the moon for your blanket,” Skeeter contributed ever so casually, as Peerless spat into the fire again. “Care to kip with us for the thrill of it all?”
“I think I heard a feather bed call my name,” Mallory chose to joke in return with a hand cupped to his ear. No one laughed. Heaving a sigh, the deputy got down to business. “Speaking of relaxation, maybe it’d help everyone’s mood to know I’m only coming back from a hearing at the county courthouse over in Dillon, not on the lookout for anyone in particular. But”—he paused significantly—“I figured I’d stop by Highpockets’s old stomping grounds here just to keep myself up-to-date. Any new faces I ought to be acquainted with, on the odd chance they’d show up in town on Saturday night and I wouldn’t recognize them as haymakers instead of plain old drunks?”
Several of the hoboes who were already at the kip when our bus bunch arrived grudgingly owned up to being first-timers in Big Hole haying. The deputy made a mental note of each, then raised his eyebrows as he came to Harv and Herman and me. Harv merely nodded civilly to him. I was tongue-tied, and Herman did not want to sound the least bit German. In these circumstances, muteness could be construed as guilt—we certainly had a nearly overflowing accumulation of that among the three of us—and just as the silence was building too deep, Highpockets stepped in.
“Snag and his gramps there, One Eye, have been with us since we were apple-knocking, over by the Columbia. The big fella, too. They’re jake.”
“If you say so, Pockets.” The deputy apparently could not help wondering about me, though. “Say there, Moses in the bullrushes. You’re sort of young to be hitting the road like this. What brings you to hay country?”
“My s-s-summer vacation. From school.”
“Some vacation.” Mallory was growing more curious, the audience around the campfire restless with his lingering presence. Highpockets was looking concerned. “These your folks here,” the deputy persisted, “this pair of specimens?”