Seeing me down there on all fours looking stricken, Herman caught on immediately. Jumping to his feet from his bunk, he shook the bunkhouse rafters with the outcry “Someone is thief! Scotty’s moccasins is gone. I thought Johnson family does not take from its own.”
Everything stopped. Skeeter and Pooch and Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare and Fingy and Harv halted in mid-motion at whatever they were doing, their eyes cutting to one another for some kind of answer to Herman’s charge. It was bad luck that Highpockets had gone out to make sure with Jones that the crew would have a goodly amount of time to carouse in town, leaving Peerless to niggle at the moccasin matter as Herman stood there with clenched fists. “Now, now, don’t get carried away, One Eye. Maybe them slippers just got misplaced. What makes you think any of us—”
“WAHHOO!” resounded from the crapper, and as we all jerked around in that direction, Smiley came prancing out, wearing only his shorts with a towel tucked in like an Indian loincloth, and my moccasins.
The spectacle was as grotesque as it was unexpected, his big belly jiggling over the scanty loincloth and his stark bony bad leg stuck out stiff, as if he were half tub of lard and half stick figure. Poking two fingers up behind his head like feathers, he cavorted around in a crazy lopsided dance, the beautiful beadwork fancy-dancers captive on his big feet with him warhooping and bellowing, “Wampum night! Hot time in town! Big chief Geronimo hitting the warpath!”
At first too stunned to do anything, the next thing I knew I had let out a howl of my own and launched into Smiley, grabbing him at the knees. Herman was right behind me, jamming him against the wall as I tried to wrest the moccasins off.
“Hey, don’t you know entertainment?” Smiley croaked out, struggling against Herman’s grasp. He was a large and fleshy man, almost too much for the two of us, but we heard Peerless warn the others of the crew, “Better stay out of it, this isn’t any of our business.”
“I’m making it mine,” Harv’s voice reverberated, or at least I felt it so. In no time the bigger, better-muscled man had Smiley squashed so tight against the wall he couldn’t even squirm, as Herman lifted one of his feet like the hoof of a horse and I stripped the moccasin off, and we did the same on the other foot.
Right then coming through the bunkhouse doorway to be met by the three of us grappling with the various parts of the nearly naked Smiley, Highpockets let out, “What in tunket is going on?”
“High jinks of the wrong kind,” drawled Harv.
“Joke not funny one least little bit,” Herman attested.
“The dickhead swiped my moccasins,” I made the matter clear.
“You’re the crappiest audience I ever been around,” Smiley complained, yanking the towel out from the vicinity of his private parts. “Hell, I was only trying to draw a laugh, get everybody in the mood for town.”
“Ye dumb damn piece of maggot bait,” Skeeter piped up. “Don’tcha know better than to put your meat hooks on somebody else’s property in a kip like this? People’ve been knifed for less than that. Ain’t I right, One Eye?”
Taking the cue, Herman drew down the eyelid over his glass eye and thrust a hand into his pants pocket as if fondling something there besides lint, sounding amazingly menacing in uttering, “Lost count of stitches I have schneidered, ja.”
“Gramps means he’s next thing to a killer,” I furthered the bluff, rewarded by seeing the ex-clown’s fat red face drain of color until it matched his lardy body.
“Nobody told me he packs a shiv,” Smiley whined.
Highpockets took all this in and restored order. “Everybody shape up or Jones won’t let us off the place. Throw some clothes on,” he bossed Smiley, even though the choreboy did not belong to the hobo contingent, “and let’s get to town.”
? ? ?
THE RIDE INTO WISDOM was a carefully spaced truce, with Smiley hunkered broodily near the tailgate and Herman and me with our backs against the pickup cab and everyone else between as a buffer, and the miles down the valley of green haystacks passed as agreeably as a picnic outing, the soft and warm summer evening a rare pleasure for men who roughed it in the weathers of hobo life. Naturally Jones drove like the pickup was on fire, and quickly enough the little town made itself known, beer signs glowing in most colors of the rainbow at the Watering Hole, and the milk-white false front of the mercantile standing out in the dusk. Additionally, there were a couple of sheepwagons that hadn’t been there before, prominent now in the vacant lot between the saloon and the gas station. Fingy was the nearest of our bunch to me and I asked in curiosity, “What’re those doing here? I thought this was cattle country.”
“It’s where, ehh, some salesladies from Butte set up shop on Saturday nights,” he answered delicately, and at least I knew enough not to ask what they were selling.