Flipping past the scrawled sentiments of my classmates and the other schoolkids—When you see a skunk in a tree / Pull his tail and think of me was pretty typical—I picked out a nice fresh page, holding the place with my thumb, and set off for the office down the wood-paneled hall.
Only to slow to a halt as ever at the display table in the hallway nook. The show-off table, Gram called it, there to impress visitors with items discovered on the ranch from pockets of the past. I never passed without looking the fascinating assortment over. A powder horn and bullet pouch from the days of the fur trappers. A long-shanked jinglebob spur a cowboy lost on a trail drive from Texas. A big bone of some beast no longer seen on earth. All stuff like that until the array of Indian things, spearpoints and hide scrapers and flint skinning knives and other remnants of buffalo hunts long before Double W cattle grazed the same land. And resting there prime amid those, the object I longed for, the dark black arrowhead that was my find.
I was heartbroken when Gram made me turn it in. I’d been hunting magpies in the willows when I spotted the glassy sparkle in the gravel bottom of the creek crossing. When I reached in the water and picked it up, the glistening triangular shard of rock was sharper and more pointed than other arrowheads that sometimes surfaced after winter frosts or a big rain. Much more beautiful, too, solid black and slick as glass—which actually it was, I later learned, a hardened volcanic lava called obsidian from somewhere far away—when I stroked it in the palm of my hand. My excitement at gaining such a treasure lasted until I burst into the cookhouse and showed it to Gram, and was given the bad news.
“Donny, I’d rather pull my tongue out than tell you this, but you can’t keep it.”
“W-why not? That’s not fair!” Dismay sent my voice high. “I’m the one who found it, and if I hadn’t, it’d still be there in the creek and the haying crew might break it when they pull the stacker across, and so I saved its life, sort of, and I don’t see why I can’t—”
“You can talk that way until you’re blue, but I just don’t like your having something that rightfully might be theirs,” she laid down the law as she saw it. “Sparrowhead makes the riders turn in anything like this they come across, you know that.” I absolutely could not see why the Williamsons were entitled to something that had fallen to the ground probably before the ranch even existed, but Gram’s mind was made up. “Go on up to the house and give it to him.”
“Good eye, Buckshot” was all the thanks I got from Wendell Williamson when I did so. “Lucky to find one of these. It’s pre-Columbian.” He liked to say things like that to show he had been to college, although Gram claimed it only went to prove he was an educated fool besides a natural-born one. Anyway, when I looked up the meaning of the phrase in the Webster’s dictionary Meredice Williamson kept in the bookcase with the Condensed Books, I was awed. Older than Columbus! That made the black arrowhead even more magical for me. Just think, it had lain there all those hundreds of years, until, as the man himself said, I was lucky enough to be the one to find it. Equally unlucky, it had to be admitted, to be forced to part company with it. Well, that would not have to happen for good if my gamble of calling on the boss of the Double W paid off in that way, too.
? ? ?
WITH HOPE AND TREPIDATION, I now approached the office. The door was open, but I knew to knock anyway.
When he saw it was me, Wendell Williamson sat back in his swivel chair, which Gram claimed was the only thing on the ranch he knew how to operate. “What can I do you for, Buckshot?”
This was new territory for me, as I had only ever peeked in when he was not there. The office smelled of tobacco and old hides like the mountain lion skin and head draped over a cabinet in one corner, enough to set a visitor back a little, but I advanced as though life depended on it. “Hi,” I said, my voice higher than intended.
The man behind the desk, no taller nor heftier than average, had a kind of puffy appearance, from his fleshy hands to a pillow-like girth to an excessive face, his hairline in deep retreat up to a cluster of curly gray in the vicinity of his ears. Gram called him Sparrowhead behind his back because of what she believed was the quality of birdbrain under that jag of hair. Or sometimes her remarks about her employer were more along the line that he was the sort of person who’d drown kittens to keep himself busy. Regardless of what she thought of him, or he of her, they had maintained a prickly standoff, the boss of the ranch reluctant to fire the tart-tongued cook because of her skill at feeding a crew on the cheap, and the often-disgusted mealmaker who ruled the kitchen putting up with his stingy ways on account of me.
Gram’s bad turn of health was about to bring all that to a crashing end, if I couldn’t do something about it. Wendell—I didn’t dare think of him as Sparrowhead just then—was examining me as if he hadn’t seen me every day of the past couple of years. “I hear you’re getting a trip to Minnesota.”