And he wondered if they were going to put out the fire at the news and run for it, maybe higher into the hills, and off the trail. It was what he might do if he were Jonas and he thought Harper and several of his friends were behind him with hostile intent.
“Sit down,” Jonas muttered. “We’re not budging.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and sat down and shed his baggage on the ground beside him. It was dirtier and more scuffed than it had been in the morning. Maybe it looked a little less like a novice’s gear. By some miracle he still had the gun in its holster and it made sitting uncomfortable. He took it off, and decided, in the smell of bacon and sausage starting to cook, and the sight of tea on to boil, that he was very glad they weren’t going to budge.
But he thought he should figure out what the rules were.
“Do I put in, or cook my own, or what, sir?”
“What’re you carrying’s the question.”
“Bacon and biscuit-makings mostly.”
“You can put in tomorrow. We made enough. You got jam?”
“Yessir,” he said, thinking then that he’d been too judgmental, and they’d figured all along that he’d make it. “Got jerky, too. Fair deal of it.”
“Save it. You mix up the breakfast dough, leave it set the night. There’s clean water. You wash up.”
“Yes, sir.” That was Luke Westman who gave him that order, and it was fair. “So what about this Harper, sir?”
“There’s time,” Hawley said. “There’s plenty of time to settle with that one.”
How? he wanted to ask. Did they mean have a fight, or wait in ambush and shoot them, or what?
“Scared?” Jonas asked.
He hadn’t planned to shoot anybody. Jonas had talked about it in meeting as something they’d do if there wasn’t a choice… but it hadn’t seemed what they had any intention of doing.
And now there was this Harper following them, who might, Danny thought with a lump in his throat, shoot them as easy as thinking about it. Harper had been all too eager to go shooting at people and horses right up near Shamesey walls, which was unthinkable and dangerous as hell to the camp and the whole town. It didn’t encourage him to think that Harper was any more reasonable out of reach of those walls.
No camp-boss out here and nobody to tell town law what had happened between a group of stray borderers with feud on their minds.
There was a real chance he might not get home next spring. Things could happen out here, very final things, he began to take that into truly serious account—things nobody would ever know about except the ones that pulled the triggers.
He just didn’t know right now why these men had ever needed a junior in their midst, or what good he really was to anybody. He wished he hadn’t come. He wished he’d asked somebody like Lyle Wesson what his mature judgment was of his going off like this, somebody who might have said Don’t do it, kid, you don’t count for anything out there.
He got a dark, chilly feeling then. There was one of the horses he couldn’t pin down—Froth was easy to identify, agitated most of the time and full of temper; and Ice just didn’t communicate much.
And that left the horse named Shadow, just the faintest thought, just the skitteriest images, a hostility you couldn’t get hold of.
Shadow didn’t like him and didn’t like Cloud, that much he picked up, and Shadow was always there, behind the other two, lurking behind Froth’s jittery everywhere images and Ice’s unfriendly quiet… Shadow didn’t swear like Cloud did, Shadow just sent hostility slipping out around the edges of what was going on, so maybe it was easier to feel unwanted, and easier to feel danger in the night.
<Cattle tails. Kick and bite. Lightning flash and rain.>
That last was surely Cloud, and Shadow didn’t like it.
“Keep it down,” Jonas Westman said, while their supper cooked. “We’ve no need for that, boy. Calm that horse of yours.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, asking himself what about the situation deserved calm, and how, the same as at home, everything got down to being his fault.
They didn’t have any preachers here to say so. But it seemed a reliable commodity, guilt. You could get it here cheap, handed out like come-ons to a sale.
“Not my damn fault,” Danny muttered. “Cloud and I can go by ourselves if you don’t need us.”
“Did I say that?” Jonas asked. And Hawley Antrim, Ice’s rider:
“Nobody said that. Just calm down. Horsefights feed off quarrels. And we don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. Everybody was sir, being senior. And they weren’t telling him in any sense what they were doing waiting here, or whether they’d found any sign of Guil Stuart. He knew he hadn’t come across any tracks but the ones he’d been following. But he’d been up in the hills a good deal of the time.
“Gone overland,” Luke Westman said. “Same’s we could, but we know where he’s going.”
“We don’t need to hurry.” Jonas said, put another stick on the fire, and adjusted the frying pan. “Stuart won’t appreciate interference. He’s an independent type. We let him handle the business up-country, if he can.”
It seemed dangerous to him, and not too helpful to Stuart. He wanted not to have an opinion, but they kept coming up. He kept his eyes on the fire and tried to keep his mouth shut.
“Don’t trust us?” Hawley asked.
Nosy question. It scared him just thinking about it. There were a lot of ways a junior could get into trouble with men like this, as rough as this. He didn’t want trouble. They had Stuart’s gear in those extra packs they shared out, everything he owned. Hawley carried Stuart’s rifle, having none of his own. At least he thought they meant to deliver it all to Stuart.
“Easy on the kid,” Jonas said. “He’s noisy enough. Quiet mind, kid. Quiet. Think about supper. You’ll be fine.”
You could get fiber from knifegrass. You stripped off both the edges with your fingernails and you braided the strands you got. You could braid as many strands together as you had the skill for, and Guil just round-braided it as he rode, with a little wrap of nighthorse hair when a piece quit and the end wouldn’t quite stay tucked on the splice.
The result was a tough cord. You wouldn’t break it by pulling on it—it’d cut right through the skin of your hands.
It was also fine-gauge enough that it made a fair fishing line; a notched large thorn, carefully scored about for the cord to tie on, made a decent small hook, a dry twig tied into the line a convenient float, while he was sitting on the bank of a fair-sized stream. He dropped a rock into a shallow to trap a handful of minnows, baited his hook, cast near a low branch that touched the water, and waited.
<Burn eating fish,> Burn thought.
“Pest! You had yours. This is my fish.”
< Delicious fish frying in fragrant bacon grease.>
“Do you see bacon? Do you see a frying pan?” <Rider hostel in Shamesey. Guil’s gear in corner of room.>
Burn sulked.
Effectively enough Burn got the next fish. Guil filleted it while he was waiting for another to bite. Burn couldn’t manage the bones, but he so loved the taste, almost as much as Burn loved sugar-cured bacon.
Fish wasn’t bad, raw. He drew the line at other things. He hadn’t the makings for fire, hadn’t the energy for fire-making, even given that he did, now, have the cord for a bow-drill; raw fish was good enough.
And he found a number of spotty-neck shellfish along a rocky edge, which were also fine eaten raw. Burn got a couple of them, which pleased Burn mightily—a knife left them in ever so much nicer condition than cracking them open under nighthorse feet, and Burn liked for his to be washed in water before eating—in beer, if it was available.