Nor was it the money either, the sixty or eighty thousand dollars which might surprise him by being considerably more than that. It was principle. Yet he did not rush back to it, on the premise that man cannot rush destiny anyway. Instead, he dropped hints and promoted rumors until some four thousand five hundred dollars in new rewards had accrued to his name. And even then he thought of this as mere exercise, as a sort of renewed apprenticeship before the ultimate, irreproachably professional enterprise of the safe itself.
But it amused him to wait, also, since it further enhanced the mood of anticipation. Deliberately he set out on a long, aimless journey into Old Mexico, where he had never been, to prolong it.
So then in Chihuahua he caught dysentery, a case so extreme that it not only postponed his return to Yerkey’s Hole for some months, but precluded mobility of any sort in the interim. “Less’n I want to leave a trail clear across the territory that even a old stuff-nosed mule-sniffer like Hoke Birdsill couldn’t miss,” he said.
Then, when he did return to New Mexico, the first thing he discovered was that the bounty on his head had mysteriously more than doubled, in major part because of a posting by something called the Fairweather Transportation Company, of which Dingus could have sworn he’d never heard. “But maybe I ought to get to it at that,” he decided, “ifn they even made it a criminal offense when I shit now.” He was some two weeks’ distance from Yerkey’s Hole when he picked up an innocuously moronic drifter named Turkey Doolan and headed west.
He had no attack in mind, only an abiding, bemused sense of confidence, as if the entire project were now less a matter of premeditation than of ordination, of fate itself. And even when Hoke Birdsill turned out to be as irascible as ever, not only banging Turkey Doolan from the saddle but wounding Dingus himself, Dingus remained merrily undaunted.
So he was still laughing, still delighted with the world he had merely put off conquering until tomorrow, when he took time out to deceive a drab, horse-faced woman named Agnes Pfeffer.
“Well, anyways,” he rationalized some few hours later, “at least it were a nostalgic sort of error, since I’m darned if’n she dint remind me jest a trifle of both Miss Grimshaw and Miss Youngblood theirselves.”
So it wasn’t Hoke Birdsill he was angry with tonight when he awoke in the bleak, familiar cell, of course, it was his own irresponsibility. Because he actually believed the conclusion he was to reach once Hoke left him alone to brood over his new incarceration. “That’s it, sure as outhouses draw flies,” he declared in resignation, fingering the swelling lump behind his ear. “A feller has to face life without a mother to guide him, he’s jest nacherly doomed to tickle the wrong titty, ‘times.”
Nor would there be any solution quite so simple as talking his way into a fake escape this time, Dingus knew. In fact Hoke seemed determined to give him no opportunity to talk about anything at all, since it had been well before ten o’clock when he departed, voicing his intention to look in on the indisposed Miss Pfeffer, and now at eleven there was still no sign of him. Although perhaps it was not quite eleven at that, since Dingus still made use of the old, engraved watch of his father’s which cousin Magee had given him, and it had long ago ceased to be reliable. “But jest the fact that I keep it proves I’m downright sentimental at heart,” he mused, “which shows all the more how I would of surely paid dutiful heed to a mother’s advice.”
Meanwhile the confinement had already begun to annoy him physically, albeit mainly because he was still unable to sit. He had dressed himself, once Hoke had removed the handcuffs, but he had been pacing restlessly ever since. On top of which it hurt where Hoke had bushwhacked him in Miss Pfeffer’s bed.
So he was still pacing when the woman, the squaw he had met earlier, came striding suddenly into the empty main room of the jail. And for a moment, preoccupied, Dingus did not even recognize her. Then he literally bounded toward the bars. Because she was still carrying his shotgun.
“Hey!” he cried, glancing to the door to make certain she was alone at the same time. “Howdy there! Remember me? From that there gun, when—”
But she ignored his interests completely, scowling in a preoccupation of her own. “Where that loose-button son-um-beetch?” she asked. “I decide never damn mind midnight, he marry up with me right now I think, hey?”
Dingus could scarcely recall what she was talking about, if he even fully knew. “Yeah, sure, anything you say,” he told her anxiously. “But lissen, that gun — it’s mine, remember? From out by that wagon, I give it to you. But it were only a loan, you understand? And now I need—”
She finally paused to consider him. “Oh, is you, hey? How you feel now, you still in bum shape? How come you in there anyways, yes?”
“Howdy, howdy, yair, I feel jest fine,” Dingus dismissed it, “but never mind that now, let’s—” She was holding the weapon inattentively, one finger through its trigger guard, and Dingus strained as if attempting to will her toward him. “Come on, now,” he pleaded. “I jest couldn’t carry it before, being hurt and such, but now I need it urgent again. Look, you got to—”
So then she was paying him no regard at all once more, clomping across to glance briefly into the back room, and then considering the desk. “He don’t come back here yet, hey? Not since I see him up there, suck round that pale-rump teacher-lady place?”
“Oh, look, look, I don’t know nothing about that—”
Dingus’ voice was rising, becoming mildly hysterical. “Ma’am — Miss Hot Water, ain’t that it? — look, please now, you jest got to give me that gun back. And before nobody else comes along neither, or it’ll be too — say, here, look, I’ll even buy it from you, I’ll give you…” He was fumbling anxiously in his pockets, then desperately. He had been carrying several silver dollars when he had undressed at Miss Pfeffer’s. His pockets were empty. “Oh, that unscrupulous, self-abusing old goat, even thieving from a unconscious prisoner, I’ll — aw, lady, please now, give me the—”
“You a pretty young feller be in hoosegow. What your names anyway, hey?”
“Dingus,” he sobbed absurdly. “Look, lady — ma’am — I jest got to have my—”
But Anna Hot Water was suddenly frowning, tilting her rhombic blunt head. “Dingus?” she said. She mouthed it slowly, in part with its common pronunciation but with overtones of the way it was enunciated by Indians or Mexicans. Then she said it again, wholly now in the second manner. “Dean Goose?”
Then something began to happen to Anna Hot Water. Her mouth was slack, and her eyes turned cloudy. For a long moment, while Dingus agonized over the shotgun, one arm actually stretching helplessly through the bars toward it now, stroking air, she seemed to be in agony herself, in an ordeal of what might have been attempted thought. Then he saw her begin to grasp it, whatever it was. Her eyes widened and widened.
“Dean Goose?” she repeated tentatively. “Feller stop one time up to Injun camp near Fronteras? Feller take on seventeen squaws in twenty hours nonstop and squish the belly-button out’n every damn one? Dean Goose? You that Dean Goose feller?”
“Well, yair now,” Dingus stated, “I reckon I been through Fronteras, but what’s—”
But he did not get to finish, because the rest of it happened so quickly then, and was so inexplicable, that for an instant he was totally at a loss. In fact for the first firaction of the instant he was terrified also, since he thought the shotgun was being aimed at himself. So he was actually leaping aside, sucking in what he believed might well be his last breath, when the gun roared, although by the time she had cast it away and flung the smashed cell door inward he had already realized, had understood that her aim had been true if still comprehending little else. Her face was radiant. She tore at her clothes.