“My seat,” Carlo said. “My supper. My brother. ’Scuse me.” He quietly got possession of the seat, glared at the departing miner, and shoved a beer at Randy.
“There.”
Randy picked up the mug and took a gulp.
“Go easy on that. I’m not carrying you.”
“You should have bashed Rick.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not thirteen.”
“I’m fourteen.”
“Then act like it.”
“Listen. You—”
Another commotion started near the door, but it wasn’t Rick, it was Van Mackey, who was tolerably drunk, telling his son go home.
Rick didn’t want to go.
There was pushing and shoving.
Carlo sipped his beer and had a spoonful of stew. The Mackey family argument was headed for the porch when the door opened and Danny Fisher came in.
Danny paused for a look at the argument going out the door past him, and walked through the murmur of people who’d moved in with questions for a rider to answer.
Like what about the horse, he was sure. Danny meanwhile spotted them, came to the bar and gathered up a beer, probably telling enough in the process to make him look like a fool with the bartender. He wished he had had sense enough to keep his mouth shut. God! he was a fool.
Then Danny came toward them. Randy scrambled up and got an unused chair from another table, and Danny joined them, the object of every eye in the tavern, at least it felt that way.
Danny had certainly said something to the bartender. Gossip had started there, heads together with the bartender, a buzz of conversation just out of range of hearing, the nearer tables preferring to stare and hunch down over their beers.
“I heard—” Carlo began, “—about last night.”
“We went out today,” Danny said, “with no better luck.”
“I dreamed about the horse,” Randy said. “I heard it. I keep saying, if you’d just let me go—”
“No,” Carlo said. “He’s still got a notion about being a rider.”
Danny shook his head. “No. Not that horse. Take it from me, not that horse.”
“I hear it.”
“Him. If you heard him you’d know it’s him. He’s confused, he’s lost. And if you were going to be a rider—you wouldn’t want that horse. Believe me.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Listen to him,” Carlo said.
“I don’t want to listen. I want somebody to listen to me.”
“Randy,” Danny said, “when I was not too much older, I took up with Cloud. And we were fools together, down in the warm flat-lands, in a good season. We managed not to break our necks—close as it was. We managed not to get shot. I’m telling you—plain as I can say it—this horse is likely to get shot.”
“You can’t!”
“I’ve been trying not to. So’s Ridley. But there’s a limit to what he’ll let go on near this village. We can’t put this village in danger.”
Randy was shaking. Literally shaking. He looked as if he’d cry. He had a gulp of beer instead.
Danny reached out and put his hand on Randy’s shoulder. “Believe me. Randy. I’d do anything but shoot that horse. We’re up here because I didn’t want to shoot him. But that’s not saying anybody belongs with him. This horse isn’t for a kid. No way. A senior rider might be able to pull him out of his confusion, if he could get close enough, but I’m scared of him—I’ll tell you I’m scared of him, as far as putting Cloud at risk. I went out hunting him today, but I went with the camp-boss and his horse, and he wouldn’t show. We did some shooting. Might have scared him off.”
“You said you can’t hear a horse over ten meters,” Carlo said. “That sure wasn’t the case on the road.”
“Yeah, well. Most times. This is the exception.”
“This horse? Or this time?”
“Don’t want to talk here,” Danny said.
“Yeah,” Carlo agreed. Randy had taken down too much of the beer and too little supper. “Eat, kid. Remember when you went hungry.”
Randy began to pick at his food.
“Eat it while you’ve got it,” Danny said. “There’s no game out there. Biggest damn vacancy you ever heard. Meat’s going to get real scarce and the flour’s going to rise come midwinter, what I hear.”
“I want to live in the rider camp,” Randy said.
“Randy,” Carlo said. He never called his brother by his given name. It got the kid’s attention. “Twelve. Hear me?”
“Shit.”
Carlo got up, went to the bar and got another round of beers. Brought them back and set them down.
Danny gave him an odd look and didn’t say a thing. Randy, heart set on being a fool, didn’t say, No, I’ve had too many. Randy finished off the one when the second arrived.
Carlo tried to hold himself back, because tonight he’d rather the beer than the stew, himself.
“Buy you supper?” Carlo asked.
“I’m having supper in the camp,” Danny said. “Maybe next week.”
“Sure. But the beers are on the Mackeys.”
“Thank ’em for me,” Danny said.
“Sure,” Carlo said. He spooned down his stew and the part of Randy’s Randy didn’t eat. Had two pieces of bread. And by that time Randy was sotted.
“You ought to beat Rick up,” Randy said, out of nowhere.
“Yeah. Sure. Someday. Don’t push it. You’re not cute when you’re drunk and you’re getting there real fast.”
“Am not.”
“Yeah.” Carlo watched, and finished his beer, and had the notion with Danny never saying a thing that Danny wanted to talk to him in private before he left.
And in not too long Carlo shoved back his chair, gathered up Randy by an arm and had Danny’s help on the other side. They got his coat and his hat on. And theirs.
There might be a village rule against drunk kids. Nobody said anything and they walked Randy out into the chill air.
Randy didn’t come around to sobriety. They walked him down the steps and across the intervening yard toward the junk pile and the tree.
There Carlo stopped. “Let the kid sit,” he said, and he and Danny let Randy down to sit in the snow.
“So what couldn’t you say inside?” Carlo asked.
Danny drew a long breath. “That I had to tell Ridley about your sister.”
“Damn!”
“I think,” Danny said, “he’s all right. I think he’s all right about it. He knows we didn’t have much choice. Rider business and village business don’t cross from one side to the other. He’s worried— he’s worried about the horse coming for your sister. That’s the main thing. Have you seen her? Do you have any idea—whether there’s been any change?”
“I can find out,” Carlo said. He didn’t want to know. He was supposed to go there tomorrow. After church. And he didn’t want to. Not after finding out the riders knew. He didn’t know if he could keep himself calm around her. “What’s he going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. I think he understands we were out of choices. —Carlo, I—had to tell him the rest of it. About where you were. And why.”
Supper went to ice on his stomach.
“He won’t tell the marshal,” Danny said. “It’s just—if I’m going to ask Ridley’s help, I have to tell him the whole thing.”
“Yeah,” Carlo said bitterly.
“No one will know.”
“The rider camp is no one? I don’t believe it. I’ve got a brother—”
“Nothing will happen to him.”
“Dammit. Dammit. I trusted you!”