“People are going down to Tarmin come spring,” he said, “and redo the whole village. We own the forge down there, and the house, and grandma’s house and maybe aunt Libby’s shop and her house, do you get it? They just figured out who we are. People from Evergreen are going to claim the houses and everything there’s nobody to speak for. And we’re all that’s left. We’re rich, kid, and we can kick ’em in the ankles and they’ll grit their teeth and smile at us.”
“That’s why they’re being nice.”
“First prize. The only way they’re going to get anything is if we make a deal with ’em, and I’m not ready. So you watch it. You keep your mouth shut and let me handle it.” He wished he hadn’t said that about kicking them in the ankles. “First thing, kid, we could end up dead. This is real serious.”
Randy got a strange look. “You think they’d poison us?”
He hadn’t thought of that. And wished he had. But it was one more reason not to take Sunday dinners at the Mackey table. “It’d be pretty obvious to everybody. But they might do about anything else. Like an accident in the forge. Like something happening to you. Or threats to you. So you stay out of dark places and stay where I know where you are. That’s an order. Hear?”
Randy’s eyes were big as saucers as he stopped at the tavern steps and looked up at him. “Yeah,” Randy said.
“I think we’re going to hear some deal out of them about the property down in Tarmin. Real soon.”
“Danny say so?” Randy asked.
“Yeah. He heard it in a meeting. He came over to tell us.”
“You know what I think? The Mackeys are scum.”
“I’d say so. But you don’t. Just don’t say anything. Especially anywhere the Mackeys can hear you.”
“You should get him. Rick can’t beat you.”
He didn’t think. He grabbed Randy’s arm and then knew he’d grabbed too hard and hurt the kid. He let go.
“You don’t talk like that. —Kid, I’m sorry. But you be careful what you say.”
Randy looked scared. And rubbed his arm.
“This is a public place,” Carlo said. “And you behave. You behave, brother. Or I’ll knock you in the head when I get you home. I mean it.”
“This isn’t our home!”
“Yeah, well, that’s fine. This is what we’ve got, kid. Quiet. Quiet! Hear me?”
“Yeah.”
He clapped Randy on the shoulder then and they went the rest of the way up the steps, opened the door—there was a glass pane with The Evergreen painted on it and a white tree below it, with light coming from inside, lamps and a couple of fires.
You weren’t ever cold in The Evergreen. Overheated, maybe. The food was good.
Real good, if you’d gone hungry.
They walked in with not near the silence and the stares there’d been the first night they’d come. But the ducked heads and hushed comments from the gathering there did notice them—again and in a different way. News had gotten around; and now people were re-interested, in a way that warned there was something in the undercurrents, and that there were people here who’d really like a chance at exactly what the Mackeys would.
But hell if he’d spook, or let Randy spook. The kid was picking it up, not knowing what to do with it and on the verge of showing out like a fool.
“They’re looking at us,” Randy said, being at that age: but the fact was, everybody was looking at them.
“Yeah,” Carlo said. “You wanted to be famous, right?”
“Shut up! They’re staring.”
“Fine.”
By now they knew where things were and how they were. There was a set-fee buffet. What they’d been spending gave you one serving. But if you laid down double it was all you could eat up to three bowls, which was more than fair: the bowls were large. He and Randy went to the line, which was none by this time, found a table and sat down to stew and, at the bar help’s order, a short beer for him, a cup of tea for Randy.
Then a shadow fell across their table, and a big miner or logger (devil a way to tell when both were in their tavern best) loomed across the light and sat down at the table with them.
“Hear you’re the Tarmin kids.”
“Yeah,” Carlo said, and nudged Randy with his foot under the table, a signal for Randy to keep his mouth shut.
“Hear you saw what happened down there.”
“Yeah.” He refused to let the guy ruin his supper. He and Randy had had supper in the middle of the carnage, in the store which was the only safe place with food, and he didn’t intend to be spooked. “I was there. It was a mess. Lost my whole family.”
“Hear so,” the guy said. “Real sorry. Stand you a drink?”
“Yeah, suppose so.”
The guy—he turned out to be the head of the miner’s union— seemed bound to talk. And after a little chatter about the oddness of the winter so far, and how spooky the Wild had been—asked the lay of the village, the size of the buildings in a jump so fast Carlo didn’t even see it coming.
He answered, having no reason not to.
Then other miners began to gather round. Pretty soon a good many of them were asking questions, or repeating information they’d heard, and a couple of men said they’d been there years ago but they didn’t know the place now.
“Not many would,” Carlo said without thinking, and didn’t intend to let emotion color his statement. But it did, and he saw Randy twitch to it and he saw a shifting-back among the crowd.
At that moment he saw Danny Fisher coming through the crowd—long fringes on his coat, gun on his hip: rider and no question of it, from the cut of the boots to the battered hat with the braided cording around the crown.
“Dan,” he said, half-rising—Dan or Danny had gotten confused in his head down in Guil and Tara’s cabin. But either way it was, he offered Danny a seat at the table as the one this time in his element, as Danny had been elsewhere.
There was a mild fuss made, and a beer gotten—Carlo wasn’t even sure who’d ordered it. But Danny was mildly famous, folk immediately drawing the conclusion that this was the rider who’d come up with them.
And folk wanted to buy Danny drinks.
“On me,” Carlo said, and with a wicked thought, got up and ordered at the bar: “What the rider drinks is on the tab.”
By the time he got back through the crowd to the table, there was a dish of the stew, a mug of beer, and a cluster of miners and loggers.
“You taking hire?” one was asking.
“Not yet,” Danny said. “Lord, I just got up here.”
“Fool,” someone said to the asker, and shoved his way in to introduce himself as Frank Remere, and head of a small mine.
Which could be real small.
“Excuse me,” Carlo said, and Danny pulled the chair back for him one-handed, so he could get past the guy trying to sit down. “Let the man have his supper, all right?”
“What about the Tarmin riders?” someone asked. “Why didn’t they stop it?”
“Because somebody ignored the rules,” Danny said. “Somebody was an exception. ’Scuse me. I came to have supper with my friends. Excuse me.”
“Move away,” someone said, “move away, let the man be.”
“So what did happen?” a logger asked.
“Shut up!” another man said, and there was nearly a fight among the crowd drawing off.