Identifying himself as foreman on a ranch plentiful with those Big Hole hayfields, the new arrival glanced around the circle, right over me and past Herman, sorting faces with his quick eyes.
“I’m hoping some of you are the genuine haymaking article, unlike your pals next door.” He jerked his head in disgust toward some kip farther up the river. “They don’t want to hear about anything but tractors and power mowers. You’d think they were all mechanical geniuses.” He paused, studyng the waiting faces more intently. “What I’m saying, we’re still a horse outfit.”
Can a person jump for joy standing still? Not really. But his words set off that kind of upspring of elation in me. At last! Surely an outfit like that would need a stacker team driver, wouldn’t it? If only one of the older hoboes didn’t beat me out for the job. In an onrush of anxiety at that and wild with desire at the same time, I seesawed so nervously that Herman couldn’t help but notice my agitation and whispered, “Stand steady as a soldier, Donny.”
“We don’t have anything in particular against horses so long as they don’t have anything against us,” Highpockets was saying. “Am I right, boys?” Amid answers such as “Pretty much” and “More or less,” Peerless took care to specify, “Although we ain’t no bronco busters, either.”
“Don’t worry, that’s taken care of.” The ghost of a smile visited under the foreman’s mustache. “Here’s the setup,” he brusquely went on. “The spread I work for used to be the Hashknife—maybe some of you put in some time there?” On our side of the campfire, someone muttered, “That sure as hell fit the grub there. All knife, no hash.”
“Don’t get your feathers up,” the foreman forged on. “The spread is under new management. Fresh owner, wants things done right. I was brought in to cut loose anything that wasn’t working, which meant just about every stray sonofabitch on the place. So, but for a few riders summering the cows and calves up in the hills, my crew is out of whack.”
“Enough said,” Highpockets took over. “Try us.”
“First of all, I’m looking for a man who isn’t allergic to hay by the load and hard work.”
A number of the hoboes took a half step forward. “What’s the work?”
“Stack man.”
The Jersey Mosquito, who looked like it would be all he could do to push around an empty pitchfork let alone one shoving swads of heavy fresh hay into place, asked possibly out of pure mischief, “Do ye favor building them haystacks big as Gibraltar?”
“Sizable” was as close to that as the foreman would come, but it was admission enough.
The hoboes, even Highpockets, stepped back to where they were. “A strong back and a weak mind, is what he means,” Shakespeare expounded.
“Donny, what are they talking?” Herman whispered worriedly. “Nobody wants haymaking job?”
“Shh. Watch Harv.”
Without twitching a muscle, the fugitive from the Wolf Point stony lonesome still seemed to be studying the first pronouncement, before the strong back and weak mind wisecrack. Then, slowly he stepped forward as if to take the world on his shoulders. “I suppose that’d be me. Up top of that Gibraltar.”
The foreman sized him up as if he were too good to be true. “You’ve stacked hay before?”
“Tons of it.”
Inasmuch as any haystack held several tons, that was not as impressive as it might have been. But seeing no chance of a miraculous stack man materializing among the rest of us, the foreman made up his mind. “Well, hell, you look the part anyhow. What’s your name?”
“Harv.”
The foreman waited, then gave up. “If that’s the way you want it, I guess I can stand the suspense until your first paycheck to find out if that’s a first name or a last or what you call yourself when the moon is full.” The wisp of a smile appeared under his mustache again. “Who am I to talk? I go by Jones myself, one hundred percent.” Even to the hobo nation that mocked society by calling itself the Johnson family, going through life as just a Jones sounded like quite a dare, but the man by the fire wore the moniker with bulldog authority.
With that out of the way, Jones scanned the collection of ragtag individuals beyond Harv, his gaze passing me—did he show a flicker of interest at how I was all but falling out of my shoes with eagerness?—as he briskly ticked off on his fingers. “Now, I need two mower men and a couple of buckrakers and dump rakers each and a scatter raker. Any of you balls of fire ambitious enough some for that?”