He’d not known everything before he left home—but, damn, he knew his father would have had the insight to have pitched any of the Hallanslakers and probably Harper out of the shop on first sight. He didn’t know where his father had learned about people like the boys his father had found him with, but his father had had them pegged, all right, and he’d gotten the measure of the Hallanslakers in the same way: eager to go up that mountain to do all the harm they could to Stuart, who’d, by all he could figure, never done any harm to them personally. About Harper’s motives—he didn’t want to think.
They just had to have a target for their meanness, he guessed, because if they didn’t have one, they just had each other to pick on.
And that wasn’t much fun, since they were too damn stupid to feel pain.
He could think that, with his knee right against Quig’s. That was really odd. He thought: Quig’s a pig, just to see—not wanting another elbow in the ribs.
But he was quiet and secret now—mad; but he’d grown far more canny in the passing hours. He’d had to be hit a couple of times, like with papa and the boys—and then, damn, yes, he did learn. He could keep his thoughts quiet.
Or Cloud wasn’t paying real close attention right now.
He stole a glance sidelong, saw Cloud about his own business, nibbling the weeds that still poked up above the snow at road’s edge.
But Cloud didn’t look up.
<Cloud,> he thought.
But he didn’t move his elbows when he thought it, and Cloud still didn’t look up—didn’t seem to notice at all.
Maybe he had a lot better luck being quiet if he wasn’t right in Cloud’s convenient view, attracting Cloud’s attention. There were trees in the way. He’d made himself ever so quiet, even wrestling with the tarp.
And that led him suddenly, while Watt was swearing at the tarp and Quig was a slightly less bearlike mass beside him, to the basic fact that he’d heard a hundred times but never, somehow, gotten through his head in reality—that he could think anything he liked if Cloud wasn’t in range, and he suddenly realized—astonished— that the fact that he heard uncommonly far wasn’t necessarily all Cloud’s doing. Cloud certainly didn’t seem to hear him right now.
And with that, he acquired a notion of how he got a constant flow of images from farther than he was supposed to—dimbrained kid that he was, he naturally assumed when people called him noisy that it was some marvelous special gift he and Cloud had that nobody else did.
Special, hell. He fell off his horse and Cloud got into fights: it wasn’t exactly a shining performance on this trek. He’d annoyed two groups of seniors and nearly gotten shot on the last set-to because he couldn’t calm Cloud down.
Noise wasn’t exactly an advantage if you hadn’t any choice about it.
And Jonas had said that kids did it—and seniors didn’t—except Wesson, who needed to because of who he was.
So it wasn’t exactly a special gift, it was a special problem kids tended to have.
And if it ever was useful, this getting Cloud’s attention at a range at which most people didn’t have constant talk with their horses, it wasn’t always useful, witness the situation with Harper this afternoon.
When he was on the outs with people, he wanted Cloud’s attention; he just—wasn’t comfortable with people the way he was with Cloud, not even with his friends anymore, since the new had worn off him being a rider. Cloud was his friend. Cloud didn’t carp and criticize—
Maybe Cloud ought to criticize. Maybe somebody should have done what his father did and what Jonas did and what Quig had done—like tell him he was fouling up, mad as it made him. He was doing wrong with Cloud. Jonas had tried to tell him, but he’d been too righteous then to believe it.
Elbows still, Jonas had said. Knees still. Quit looking at Cloud, which he began to realize was almost impossible for him—every two seconds he was reaching for Cloud, wanting to know where Cloud was, like a toddler running after his mother.
Which kept Cloud’s attention all the time on him and nervous. Other riders had seen it. He’d been the only one not to see it—and it turned out so damn simple: if he could just hold his body still and not demand Cloud’s constant attention, he could hate the sons of bitches as hard as he wanted. Horses could hear humans, just barely, but humans didn’t hear well enough to hear each other— he’d known that, sort of, as a townsman kid knew anything, even before Wesson had told him. And what that really meant had just slid off him as one of those details like long division, which he never liked so he never bothered to think about.
Stupid kid, he said to himself. Smarted himself right into a real mess. Didn’t need to know things. Didn’t like to know things. Real damned bright—now he was in a situation where he wished to God he had listened to everything his seniors had tried to tell him. He swore he’d go back to mama, if God gave him another chance, and ask her to tell him again about long division. And he’d ask Jonas Westman to tell him all the things he was doing wrong, if God just let him and Cloud get out of this.
But thinking all those things, he didn’t move. He didn’t twitch. The tarp fluttered, but he didn’t bob around controlling it, he just bit his lips and tried to keep his arms still as if he had the same strength as Watt beside him.
The fire caught, streaming sideways in the wind. “Hold the damn tarp,” Watt ordered everybody. “Hang on, damn you.”
On one level he was fascinated with what Watt was doing. He’d never seen a fire built in a gale-force wind the way Watt was doing it, with a hastily thrown-up wall of wood, to which he figured the tarp was a help, not a necessity—and he wanted to see the technique. They’d failed it once and had to take it apart; but Watt, now that his inside kindling was set and lit, started assembling his small-grade wood inside his three-sided shield of bigger pieces, working fast so that the fire would stay lit—he stuck tinder and smallest kindling in out of the wind, shielding it with the edge of his hand the second after he set in a larger stick. There was never a hesitation in what he picked next, as if he’d had the sizes of the sticks in his head all along. Fast as he was working, every stick fit as tight as could be to its neighbor, so that, just with the irregularities of the wood, the fire could breathe; but the wind couldn’t get at the fire to blow it out.
Watt stuffed his next grade of sticks in with one hand while with the other hand he began to take bigger wood from the stack— he’d built the inner frame, and it was burning. The outer frame was a chimney now, and the fire held—until, Danny thought, the really big, last-an-hour stuff could go in after the firepit was full of coals and able to handle it, and when it wasn’t so prone to throw sparks on the wind. They were scum, but they were careful scum: nobody burned a forest down.
Watt was scum. But he had an amazing skill.
“More wood,” Watt said. “That wind’s going to burn a pile of it tonight.”
The others grumbled about it, but they moved off. Danny, being still, followed them with his eyes, thinking—
But Harper hadn’t gone. Harper sat with his arms on his knees staring at him, and it was Watt himself who went to gather wood with Quig.
“I really wouldn’t,” Harper said darkly.
“Get more wood?” Danny played stupid. Harper didn’t buy.
“You know what I mean. Go ahead. Run. See what happens.”
He didn’t want Cloud involved in his thoughts. Not moving at all took willpower. He stared at Harper, thinking that Harper might be asking himself why Danny Fisher was so quiet this evening.
He wasn’t faster than a bullet in the back. That was certain. And Harper had served notice he was watching.