Miss Harper’s considerable store of curiosity was mightily piqued.
Jason found the Harper steamboat not so very impressive. Not more than fifty feet long, it had a shape that reminded Jason of a shoe. The boat was a side-wheeler, with a tall, fluted smokestack coming out the middle, a wheel on either side to propel it, and an interior that was mostly filled with barrels and crates and sacks. It was called The Eliada, which, while not imaginative, at least hit the point. Its skipper could take a wrong turn or even two, and it would not stay lost for long before someone read the bow and sent it on its right way home.
Sam Green collected the umbrellas as they stepped on board, then cleared off a bench for them that allowed them to look out the side of the boat without getting rained on.
“It’ll be a few hours,” he said. “The river gets rough in spots as a matter of course, and the weather today is not ideal for it.”
Aunt Germaine smiled in a kindly way. “It is preferable to the alternative—riding horseback through Indian country.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, “I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed the trek. Particularly the horses. And the Indians—the Kootenays—oh, they were never any trouble. Mr. Green and his people were always most helpful in that regard.”
“I am just as happy,” said Miss Butler. “Indians terrify me.”
“There is no reason they should,” said Ruth. “Not these days.”
“Most of ’em are over in Montana now anyhow,” said Jason. The two women looked at him, and he shrugged. “Government set up a big reserve for Kootenays last year. I expect they’re all of them headed over there by now. ’Twas all the talk of Cracked Wheel.”
Miss Butler giggled. “Cracked Wheel? What sort of name is that?”
“Name of my home town, miss,” said Jason. “It is not very large, I guess. Or it was not,” he added.
“Was?” Ruth looked at him. “Mr.—Thistledown. You speak of your town with the weight of the world on you. Is there something the matter?”
Aunt Germaine caught his eye and gave him a warning glare, but that wasn’t what shut Jason up on the subject. He didn’t want to stray back to Cracked Wheel, didn’t want to pick at the scab forming over his grief. He’d misspoke, he saw, naming it at all.
So all he said was: “Sorry I brought it up. No. Nothing’s the matter.”
Had Ruth Harper known Jason a little better, she might have known to leave it lie, let him to himself for a few minutes. As it stood, her curiosity got the better of her, and she persisted.
“You,” she said, turning a third toward him on the bench, “have a secret, Mr. Thistledown. Is it, I wonder, a secret connected to your infamous surname?”
“My infamous surname?”
“I am sure,” said Aunt Germaine, intervening, “that he is unrelated to that scoundrel.”
“Well, Madame,” said Ruth, “as his aunt, you ought to know. Still—” she turned to Jason “—those are, as they say, ‘mighty big shoes to fill.’”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, but Ruth rolled her eyes. She looked at Jason, and pointed with her index finger. “Bang!” she said, and giggled.
Jason felt his hands squeezing into fists. He pushed them between his knees, and took a breath.
“Miss Harper,” he said. “I must apologize but I cannot make head nor tail of what you are saying.”
Miss Butler was trying not to laugh herself by now. “You are not alone, Mr. Thistledown. She has, I daresay, read altogether too many dime novels for her own good. And your name—”
“What about my name?” said Jason.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Ruth, having composed herself. “Never mind having not heard of the man—it beggars the imagination to conceive that no one would have suggested to you the similarity of your own name to that of Jack Thistledown’s.”
Jason thought that he might have enjoyed studying Miss Ruth Harper from afar a little longer. He did not like this sort of conversation.
“Oh come,” said Ruth. “Jack Thistledown—hero of the Incorporation Wars. Killed a dozen men fighting against Granville Stewart and his vigilantes, over the cattle ranges of south Montana. One of three men to walk away from the shootout at Snake River. Does that not jog your memory?”
“My pa’s name was John,” said Jason.
“Jack is another name for John.”
Jason sighed. This would come up from time to time in Cracked Wheel, when fellows were passing through town and overheard someone calling his name in the store. Jason said now the same thing he’d said then.
“I didn’t know him too well. But he was no good.”
“The same might be said of Jack Thistledown,” said Ruth. “Well—this is exciting. The son of a famous gunfighter—right here on this boat! I feel I ought to be swooning.”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, and this time Sam Green intervened too.
“Leave the boy be, Miss Harper,” he said. “It’s his own business who his pa is.”
This seemed to make an impression on Ruth where her old friend Louise Butler could not. Her face took a more sympathetic cast.
“Of course it is,” she said. “And look—my questions have made you positively crimson! Oh, I must apologize, Mr. Thistledown. As my dear Louise attests, I am quite mad for the dime novels. And here on my way to a summer at Utopian Eliada… Well. I am too hungry for intrigue and so invent it where there is none to be found. Can you forgive me?”
Jason had not been aware that he was crimson. He was not sure he liked having it pointed out. “I can,” he said.
They sat quiet for awhile, watching the shore of the Kootenai River transform from docks to tilled field to wilderness. After a moment, Aunt Germaine excused herself to freshen up. As she did so, Jason caught Ruth looking to him again. This time she looked away quickly, and Jason was fine with that. Let her turn all crimson for a change.
“What’d your pa buy this boat for?” asked Jason as they drew around a bend and the river stretched wide before them. “If I am not prying in asking.”
Ruth didn’t look over when she answered, and she spoke in a cool tone. “I suppose that he told the investors it was to haul his brailles of logs and lumber back to Bonner’s Ferry more efficiently. When he invested in the town, Father had hoped that the markets downriver in Canada might take an interest in Eliada wood; and he has always hoped that the Great Northern Railway might finally complete a line south through the town. Given that they have not…” She spread her hands to indicate the whole of The Eliada “… voila!”
“Voila. That’s what he told his investors,” said Jason. “You suppose.”
Now she did smile. “Yes. But you didn’t ask the proper question.”
“And what is that?”
“Why, given everything, did not my Father acquire his steamboat much sooner?” She did not wait for him to ask it. “That would be because it is only now that Father feels his grand project is enough of a success to let the world in.”
Louise Butler pursed her lips and shook her head. “Really,” she said.
“No,” said Ruth. “It is true. The fact of the matter is that until now, dear Father could not be certain that regular traffic through his community might not pollute it. Why—if the land were not so well-prepared, venal men might arrive and bring with them their terrible vices! Things such as cards—hard liquor—low women—”
“Ruth!”
She waved away her friend’s objections without even looking at her.
“—and worst of alclass="underline" dancing!”
Jason laughed and shook his head. He didn’t have much experience with young women, and at first Ruth had sure thrown him. But it was like learning a fancy a dance step, talking with her. And he thought he was beginning to get the rhythm of her humour.