“Yeah, that’s it! Something like that.”
“And you need to stay on here for that to keep happening.”
“Right.” My hopes rose to the rafters of the barn.
Only to be dashed again as he contemplated Herman out there jawing happily with the horseshoe players, and then me dippily telling my troubles to a horse. “Nothing against being redheaded, understand,” he began. “But we’re running a ranch, not a charitable institution, and Jones is a bearcat about everyone on the place pulling his own weight. I don’t see—”
The thunderous whump of a car on the livestock crossing took care of whatever he was going to say. Even Queen sharpened her ears at the telltale sound. Rags and I watched wordlessly as the Wisdom deputy sheriff’s car, the star on the door a blaze of white, pulled into the yard.
My mouth went dry and Rags whistled silently through his teeth as the arriving car drew us out of the barn toward what could amount to trouble. “You happen to know anything about why we’re being honored by this visit?”
Reluctantly I enlightened him that the crew had been in a little bit of a fight at the Watering Hole with the Tumbling T outfit. He frowned, saying that was simply Saturday night behavior and for as long as he had known her, Babs always wrote off fights as the cost of doing business. “This must be some other can of worms.”
“Excuse me,” I threw over my shoulder, already on the run, “I have to get over there to Gramps.”
By the time I dashed across the yard to where Herman stood, caught motionless beside the horseshoe players, the deputy sheriff from Wisdom was climbing out of the patrol car and giving a sickly smile all around.
“Sorry to disturb you, gents.” Which every one of us there knew meant disturbance of some sort was about to reach into our number. But I in particular should have seen what was coming when, on the passenger side, a big crow-black hat barely appeared above the top of the car.
? ? ?
HIS FIRST STEP out of the patrol car, the mean little sheriff from the first dog bus of all, back at the start of summer, spotted Harv taking life easy in the shade of the bunkhouse.
“Well, if it isn’t the object of my affection.” Sheriff Kinnick made a mock simper. “Harv the Houdini of the stony loneseome. Took me a while to run you down, but here we both are, just like old times.”
“Howdy, Carl. You out seeing the country?” Casual as anything, Harv unfolded out of his chair and sauntered toward the lawmen, although not too close. Veterans at knowing trouble when they saw it, the rest of the crew guardedly drifted near enough to follow what was happening, with me doing all I could to steer Herman—looking guilty as sin, the way he did in the Butte depot—to the rear of them in the hope we wouldn’t stand out. In the meantime, Skeeter set the tone for hobo attitude toward visits from the constabulary by piping up. “Shouldn’t ye be tracking down horse thiefs or somethin’ instead of botherin’ honest citizens?” He was more or less backed in that by Jones arriving at a high trot and caterwauling, “What the hell’s this about?”
“If you have to know, I been on the track of this character”—the sheriff from Glasgow pointed an accusing finger at Harv, standing quietly there looking like the least troublesome man on earth—“every chance I got all summer. Talked to bus drivers until they was running out my ears, but I lost his trail in Butte. Then I got smart and asked myself who else makes regular runs to burgs off the beaten path. Beer truck drivers.” He let out his mean little laugh. “You make sort of a conspicuous hitchhiker, Harv.”
“You’re barking up the wrong gum tree, big hat,” Highpockets took that on, bringing no small challenge with his height as he stepped forward and confronted the much shorter wearer of the badge. “Got the wrong man. I’ll testify Harv’s been with us following the harvests, California fruit to this here hay.”
Hand it to Sheriff Kinnick, he didn’t give ground, only chuckled that chilly way. “Nice try,” he said up into Highpockets’s face, “but no hearing judge in his right mind is gonna take the testimony of a hobo over the Wolf Point jailers who had Harv for company days on end, when the fool wasn’t busting out. Besides”—he looked over the rest of the crew scornfully, with me half tucking out of sight behind Herman, standing so still he barely breathed—“you get in court, and there might be some natural curiosity about this crowd’s propensity for law-abiding or not.”
Harv followed that with a warning hand to the angry circle of men. “It’s my tough luck, Pockets, Skeets, the whole bunch of you, thanks anyway.”