“What’s that supposed to mean?” The sheriff cocked a look up at the much taller man.
“Just what it sounds like. No.”
“If you do the crime,” the sheriff erupted, “you’re supposed to do the time! That’s practically in the Bible! Now get in the patrol car!”
“Still no,” Harv declared, not budging. “Not until we work this out. That jurisdiction you talk about so much—it maybe’s slipped your mind I busted out of jail in Wolf Point, and that’s not in your county, the way I see it.”
The Glasgow sheriff scowled. “You’re turning into a regular jailhouse lawyer, are you, all the experience you’re building up behind bars.” He poked his hat higher on his head to try to look taller as he faced Harv. “All right, let’s get down to the * purr here. I’m taking you in for violating my custody, not once but twice when I packed you over there to the Wolf Point stony lonesome. Like I’m gonna do again, damn it.”
Listening hard, the deputy sheriff from Wisdom appeared uneasy but didn’t say anything. Harv did, though.
“Carl, I’ll go with you, on a couple of conditions. First one is, you leave these other two fellows alone. You don’t have to play bloodhound where you don’t belong.” The sheriff started to shake his head, but Harv lifted a warning hand. “Hear me out on the rest of this. I serve my sentence, how much was that again—?”
“Forty-five days,” the sheriff answered peevishly.
“That’s way to hell and gone too much for fightin’ in a bar,” Peerless objected, while others in the hobo circle whistled in disbelief.
“And they’re brothers!” I could not hold that in any longer. “I heard them both say so, and I’ve got their names in my autograph book to prove it!”
“Step-brothers, damn it. Don’t make it worse than it is,” Sheriff Kinnick snapped, glowering at me. “But that don’t matter,” he plodded on, glaring around at his restive audience as Highpockets coldly mocked, “Of course not. You just didn’t have anything better to do than track your own kin down across half the state.”
“Like I was saying,” Harv put the rest of his proposition, “I serve my sentence, but in your jail there in Glasgow. That way,” he said, as if it made all the sense in the world, and to me it did, “Letty can visit me when she gets off work at the supper club and I won’t need to bust out all the time.”
“Nothing doing,” the sheriff turned the proposition down flat, still a stickler or worse. “The foreign geezer and the loose kid ought to be hauled in for investigation, they’re suspicious characters if I ever saw any, and that’s that.” He brushed his hands together as if we did not count for much, his real ire directed at Harv’s other stipulation. “Wolf Point is where you broke jail, that’s where you’re going back in, period and end of sentence.”
Harv shook his head that minimal way of his, enough and no more. “Carl, I’m sick of you yanking me around just to prove you can, and you shouldn’t be arresting these other two for no good cause, either.” He looked unflinchingly at the smaller man, the doll-like face turning red under his gaze. “As to packing me back to Wolf Point, they’d be happy not to have me back in that two-bit slammer of theirs, it’d save them a lot of trouble. Jugging me in Glasgow instead of booting me to the far end of the state isn’t that much to ask, and you know it.”
In my eyes and Herman’s, fully as stalwart as any hero who ever faced a six-shooter, Harv stayed set as stone in front of his step-brother. “If you won’t do that for me, Carl, you’ll have to shoot me to take me.”
“You stubborn fool,” the sheriff raged against being defied, dropping his hand to his holster. “That can be arranged, too, according to this pistol.”
? ? ?
THE MOMENT SEARED into me, I can feel it yet. Was this how shootouts happened in the Old West? Some dumb pistoleer goes for his gun and, next thing, there is bloodshed everywhere? Both of us tense as sentinels, Herman and I could see it happening, clear as a bang-bang page out of Karl May. Except that Herman in a swift move rewrote that ending, thrusting me aside to safety and crying out, “No need for shooting! I will go with sheriff!”
“No, you won’t,” Highpocket’s voice cut into the scene, the other hoboes fanning out around him and us as he spoke. “Harv has his reason to be hauled off with this little jaybird, but you don’t need to.” His words were backed up by the pitchforks Skeeter had distributed upon his return from the blacksmith shop, tines gleaming fresh from the grindstone.
The sheriff stared in disbelief at the cordon of grim men, weapons at the ready. “If that’s the way you want it,” he unsteadily tried to bluster, “getting a helping of lead for obstructing justice—”
“Whoa.”