“Still, I can’t take money from you…”
“It’s not a gift, it’s a loan. I can have a paper drawn up to that effect if you like.”
“But you hardly know me…”
“I know enough. You’re good and honest and caring and you’ve already paid a high price for your sins. You shouldn’t have to pay any more.”
“I…I don’t know what to say…”
“Say yes. It will make starting your new life so much easier.”
She was silent for several seconds. Then, slowly: “Well, if it’s to be a loan…”
“From one new friend to another.”
I pressed the pouch into her hands again. This time she kept it, her eyes bright with tears.
Two stubborn, proud women, one strong, the other learning how to be.
T.J. Murdock
In the darkened bedroom I lay waiting for the pain in my bandaged shoulder to ease. It had been a long, rough ride in Shock’s wagon with Nesbitt driving and Annabelle making me as comfortable as she could inside, and the removal of the buckshot and treatment of my wounds had been another ordeal. But all I cared about, then and now, was that Annabelle was safe and unhurt.
“How’re you feeling, Murdock?”
Nesbitt. I hadn’t even heard him come in. If I’d been more alert, I might have been surprised to see that he wore one of my old, grease-stained dusters, unbuttoned, over a black broadcloth suit.
“Drowsy,” I said. “Sophie gave me laudanum.”
“You’ll have a doctor soon enough. You and Hoover both.”
“I won’t be in any shape to travel for a few days. You figure on staying here until then?”
Instead of answering, he said: “Pete Dell’s ready to travel right now. I told your wife I’d help her and Annabelle winch the stage across to Middle Island.”
“That why you’re wearing my duster?”
“That’s why.” There was a little silence and I could feel the pain dulling, my eyelids growing heavy. Then he said: “I owe you thanks for saving my life in Crucifixion River. Another second and Shock would’ve blown my head off with that Greener.”
“I know it.”
“You could’ve waited and let that happen before you shot him. Some men in your position would have, to save their own hides.”
“I’m not one of them.”
“No,” he said, “you’re not. Not the kind of man Patrick Bellright thinks you are at all.”
“Won’t make any difference to him when you hand me over.”
“I won’t be handing you over.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Say that again.”
“I’m not giving you to Bellright,” Nesbitt said. “Seems I made a mistake…you’re not Harold P. Baxter, you’re T.J. Murdock. Soon as the stage is ferried across, I’ll be heading to River Bend to talk to the sheriff and send you a doctor, then on back to San Francisco.”
“But…the reward…?”
“To hell with the reward. I’ve gotten along well enough on a Pinkerton salary and I’ll keep right on getting along. I don’t need a piece of land in the Valley of the Moon.”
I was too numb to ask what that meant. All I could manage was: “Why?”
“You saved my life, now I’m returning the favor. Simple as that. And you can quit worrying about somebody else like me finding you. It’s not likely to happen, and, even if it did, it’d have to be before next summer. After that it won’t matter.”
“Won’t matter? What do you mean?”
“I checked up on Bellright before I came out here. The old bugger’s dying of cancer. He’ll be gone in six months and his vendetta with him.” Nesbitt went to the door, then stopped again long enough to say: “I hope you keep on writing for the Argonaut and The Overland Monthly, Murdock. I really do enjoy those sketches of yours.”
Then he went out and left me to the first real peace I’d known in eight long years.
Free Durt
They were out for a Saturday drive on the county’s back roads when they saw the sign. It was angled into the ground next to a rutted access lane that wound back into the hills-crudely made from a square of weathered plywood nailed to a post. The two words on it had been hand drawn, none too neatly, with black paint.
FREE DURT
Ramage laughed out loud. “Look at that, will you? Proof positive of the dumbing down of America.”
“Oh, don’t be so superior,” Carolyn said. “Lots of people can’t spell. That doesn’t mean they’re illiterate.”
“D-u-r-t? A five-year-old kid can spell dirt correctly.”
“Not everyone’s had the benefits of a college education, you know. Or a cushy white-collar job.”
“Cushy? Anytime you want to trade, you let me know. I’d damn’ well rather be a school administrator than an ad-agency copywriter any day.”
“Sure. At half the salary.”
“Beside the point, anyway,” Ramage said. “We were talking about that sign. Whoever made it couldn’t’ve got past the first grade…that’s the point.”
“You can be such a snob sometimes,” she said. Then: “I wonder why they’re giving it away?”
“Giving what away? You mean dirt?”
“Well, out here in the country like this. Why don’t they just spread it over the fields or something?”
“That’s a good question.”
“And where did they get so much that they have to give it away for nothing? Some kind of construction project?”
“Could be.” He slowed the BMW, began looking for a place to turn around. “Let’s go find out.”
“Oh, now, Sam…”
“Why not? I’d like to know the answer myself. And I’d like to meet somebody who doesn’t know how to spell dirt.”
She put up an argument, but he didn’t pay any attention. He drove back to the rutted lane, turned onto it. It meandered through a grassy meadow, up over the brow of a hill, and down the other side. From the crest they could see the farm below, nestled in a wide hollow flanked on one side by a willow-banked creek and on the other by a small orchard of some kind. The layout surprised Ramage. He’d expected a little place, rundown or close to it, something out of Appalachia West. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
It wasn’t just that the farm was large-farmhouse, big barn, smaller barn, chicken coop, two other outbuildings, a vegetable garden, the rows of fruit trees, fences around the house and along the lane farther down and marching across the nearby fields. It was that everything was pristine. The buildings, the fences gleamed with fresh coats of white paint. The wire in the chicken run looked new. There wasn’t anything in sight that seemed old or worn or out of place.
“Whoever owns this may not know how to spell,” Carolyn said, “but they certainly know how to keep things in apple-pie order.”
Ramage drove down between the fences and into the farmyard. A dog began to bark somewhere in the house as he nosed the BMW up near the front gate. Once he shut off the engine, the noise of the dogs and the clucking of chickens and the murmur of an afternoon breeze were the only sounds.
They got out of the car. The front door of the house opened just then and a man came out with a dog on a chain leash. When Ramage got a good look at the man, he thought wryly: Now that’s more like it. Farmer from top to bottom, like the one in the Grant Wood painting. In his sixties, tall, stringy, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a face like an old, seamed baseball glove. He’s even wearing overalls.
As he brought the dog out through the gate, Carolyn moved close to Ramage and a little behind him. Big dogs made her twitchy. This one was pretty big, all right, some kind of Rottweiler mix, probably, but it didn’t look very fierce. Just a shaggy farm dog, the only difference being that its coat was better groomed than most and it didn’t make a sound now that it was leashed.