“Where’d you hear this?”
“There was a meeting. Actually a couple of meetings. I—should have come sooner—but—” He was embarrassed in the face of Carlo’s questioning look. “I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure who’d be watching. I get the feeling they haven’t come here to tell you you’ve got rights. I’ll expect they’re going to talk to you. They better talk to you.”
“They haven’t. I figured—I figured they’d do something about getting the warehouses down there going. But—”
“I get the idea a lot of people are thinking about claims down there. And you have rights. So’s Randy.” He hesitated. “—How’s your sister?”
“Don’t know.” Carlo’s whole body said he didn’t want to think about it.
“You could take care of her. And Randy. This Mackey guy is the only one that would be interested in the forge down there. He might try to buy you out, trade you here for what’s down there.”
“That wouldn’t be a bad deal—”
“No. Don’t take it. That’s what I’m hearing: there’s a chance—a real chance—that this village could go under—if the important people, all the people who know how to do anything, head downhill at the first thaw. It’d leave just miners and loggers up here— unless, I guess, people from the next village over decided to come over here and the next claims them—it’s going to be a scramble, is what.”
Carlo bit his lip. “I could go back down there. I would. Dammit, I would. I could set us up proper. Hell if I couldn’t. Damn Mackey!”
“If they come to you don’t sign anything. There’s lawyers involved.”
“Yeah. I hear you plain.” Carlo looked then as if he’d just been stung. “I got to get back to the forge.”
“Sure. I didn’t tell Ridley I was coming over here and Callie thinks I’m the devil on her doorstep. I didn’t tell ’em I was going.”
“I owe you a drink. At least. Several, in fact.”
“No difficulty. Anytime. You can come to the rider camp. No reason not. You get some time off—I can come across. I guess I can. Nobody seemed shocked I was here. —Suppose they’d serve riders in the tavern there?”
Carlo looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I’ll ask.”
“Hey.” It dawned on him that was one of a set of things more that he could do. They needed him. The village might have yet to figure it. But they needed him. The Evergreen riders needed him—or it was going to be an ugly scene, people wanting escort and Ridley and Callie with a kid they wouldn’t want involved. He suddenly resolved he wasn’t as down-and-under the local situation as he’d assumed— and that his situation was in some respects like Carlo’s. “Who’d guide anyone anywhere but me? And there’s horses painted in the church. This isn’t too bad a place. We should have a drink.”
“I’m supposed to get paid the rest of my wages. He better pay me.”
Cash money was a problem he hadn’t solved—having not a penny to his name. Villageside, it mattered.
“Sure,” he said. He had a time to do something. He had somewhere to go. Amazing how that pinned the world down. “Sundown?”
“We’ll be there.”
He went with Carlo back to the door, and when it opened the heat inside was stifling and the inside was obscured with shadows and fire.
The heavyset kid was standing real near that outside door. Randy was still keeping the bellows going, looking their way the while. “See you,” Carlo said, tight and careful. And shut the door between them.
Danny turned and walked back up the street, through the veiling snow.
Pretty town, all the evergreens, shadows in the white. Pointed roofs. Nice place.
He was still a little worried about Carlo. He didn’t know what he personally could do until the day Carlo and Randy showed up and said Get us out of here.
Well, he did. He could go in there, let a fight start, and beat hell out of Mackey’s offspring. He could tell the whole village to swallow it or choke, so long as they wanted his help. He’d not been a good kid, in town. He had what his Father called real bad tendencies when somebody shoved him.
But—pushing back too hard and trying to deal his own hand in this apart from Ridley could make him a target for those who didn’t for one reason or another want a rush down to Tarmin. That included Ridley, it included Callie, and probably the marshal and the judge and maybe even people who’d like to go but who didn’t want certain other people to go.
It could get just real complicated.
One thing was sure: with gold, furs, and timber and all, Tarmin village wasn’t going to die. Tarmin was going to rise from a bloody grave. He hoped—hoped Carlo and the kid could benefit, and that they wouldn’t get robbed. Or hurt.
And he hoped Carlo kept the lid on Randy. When the news got out, and it was, he was sure, all over town—except near Carlo and Randy, which he found troubling—it was going to be just real uncomfortable in the Mackey household.
Because if the rest of the town was going to benefit from claiming free property in Tarmin, the smith couldn’t. Not while Carlo and Randy and Brionne were alive.
But Carlo wasn’t a fool. Carlo was far from a fool. Carlo had understood everything from the first hint of what was going on.
And Carlo, who’d swung a hammer for his living, wasn’t defenseless, either. That surly guy crowding him was running a real risk.
Chapter 12
Van Mackey had been at the tavern all afternoon. Van Mackey had drunk quite a damn lot, as fairly well seemed his habit in the afternoon, and was a fire hazard around the forge when he came down to have a look around and criticize what those who had worked during the day had done.
Fact was, Carlo said to himself, watching this inspection, and with Danny’s warning racketing all day in his consciousness, there wasn’t any fault to find. He’d worked hard and he’d stayed later than he was agreed to stay, and he was ready to go out to the tavern to catch a cheap bite of supper with his brother, when Van Mackey came in showing the effects of having been there for some time. He’d worked till his shoulders ached and his hands hurt like very hell. He’d hammered and shaped and finished the whole pending job for Mackey’s inspection, a job for which Mackey would get paid a lot more than he’d see. He’d done a day’s work in anybody’s book out of a great deal of pain, and if after he was through and after Randy had cleaned up the place, Van Mackey was going to find any fault or mess up what he’d done, he was going to—
He was going to have to sit on his temper and not say a thing, that was what, figuring that any other course was going to get them bounced out of the shop and put on Danny’s tab. He’d been building up a real head of resentment where it regarded the Mackeys— and he held it under an especially tight lid, watching the man poke into this and that.
But after looking it all over, Van Mackey came over to him and said, cheerfully, “Come inside. Have a drink.”
He really didn’t want to. In two ticks of his heart he knew for dead certain what the deal was, but he didn’t see a way to duck it.
“My brother, too,” he said. “I don’t want him knocking around the street alone. It’s our suppertime.”