Skeeter giggled. “Smiley, natcherly.”
“He cut out of the saloon through the back door soon as his check was cashed,” Peerless testified. “Wouldn’t even stay and have one drink with us, the stuck-up bugger.”
“Then where the hell is the knothead?”
Silence. Until Skeeter further provided:
“Gettin’ his ashes hauled.”
That puzzled me but not Herman, who let out a wild drunken laugh. Revelation came when Highpockets swiped a hand toward the sheepwagons where the salesladies had set up shop.
Jones checked his watch. “Ever since we hit town, the sonofabitch has been at it? That don’t take forever.”
“More’s the pity,” said Shakespeare, to stifled laughs from the hobo audience.
Catching a second wind of swearing, Jones clambered into the driver’s seat, saying the goddamn fornicator could walk back to the ranch with his pants around his ankles, for all he cared.
? ? ?
THE RIDE to the Diamond Buckle was riotous, as fight stories were traded on their way into legend. You would have thought the Watering Hole was the Little Bighorn, and our crew was the victorious Indians. Better yet, under the watchful eye of Highpockets the jackpot winnings were being counted out by Skeeter, hunched over so the cash would not blow out of his hat and carefully holding up greenbacks one by one in the moonlight to determine whether they were sawbucks or twenties, doling out the proceeds of the bet evenly among us. Fingy clutched his with all eight fingers as if he could not believe his good fortune. Pooch burst into more words than he ordinarily issued in a week: “First time we ever come back from town with more moolah than we went in with.”
“Hee hee, stick with me and I’ll have you boys livin’ on the plush,” Skeeter took all due credit. He judiciously handed a fistful of money to me instead of Herman, slumped against the back of the pickup cab singing softly to himself in German. “Here be your and his share, Snag.”
For a long wonderful moment I clutched the winnings in triumph. Then, grinning back at the moon over the Promised Land that was the Big Hole, I stuck the folded bills down the front of my pants for safety.
? ? ?
THE CREW hit the bunkhouse still high as kites, but mostly from exuberance rather than what they had poured into themselves at the Watering Hole. The chilly ride in the back of the pickup had even sobered up Herman appreciably, so much so that he made it to his bunk without my help. He sank onto it, rubbing his head with both hands as if to get things operating fully in there. “Big night, hah?” he said thickly, blinking at me as I proudly patted the wad of cash pouched down there in my underwear. “How much did we winned?”
“Enough to get married on,” Harv’s serene answer took care of that, from where he was already fixing up an envelope to mail his windfall to Letty. The rest of the crew all were in the crapper at once, oddly enough. It sounded like some kind of hobo palaver going on in there, maybe something mysteriously connected to Skeeter’s ability to generate a jackpot. Pretty quick, Highpockets could be heard checking with the bunch one by one—“You for it?”—and the answering “Yeahs!” and “Yups!”
They filed into the bunk room like men with a mission, Highpockets in the lead, the others crowding behind him with a mix of expressions, from Skeeter’s crinkled countenance to Shakespeare looking wise to Pooch wearing an anxious attempt at a grin.
“The Johnson family has had a little powwow,” Highpockets announced as the hoboes gathered around us. “One Eye, we’re hoping you can stick with us after haying. Wheat country next, threshing out in Washington.” His gaze shifted to me. “Snag is welcome to come along, too, if that’s in the cards.”
Herman was unable to say anything for some seconds. “Honored, I am,” he finally got out. “Good eye-dea, for me.” He struggled even more for the next words. “The boy”—he swallowed so hard that it brought an awful lump to my throat, too—“has somebody to go to.”
“Any way you two work it out,” Highpockets left it at and turned away. “Let’s hit the sack, boys. Jones will be on a tear in the morning to make us earn those wages.”
? ? ?
NOW HERMAN and I adjourned to the crapper. He put a steadying hand on the sink and studied his somewhat haggard reflection in the mirror, my drained one alongside his.
“Donny, it is for best if I go with them. When haying is over, no more sickles, and I am ptttht here.”
“I know.”
“Will miss you like everything.”
“Me, too. I mean, I—I’ll miss you, too.” It took all I could do to stay dry-eyed and keep my voice from breaking. “Walk tall, podner.”
“You do same,” he managed. Tall over me, he looked down at me, the miraculous glass eye and the good one blinking with the same emotion as mine. “We were good pair on the loose, Red Chief.”