Still holding tight to the chain and keeping Wolf from pulling away from him, but allowing him into the room, Jeebee stepped backward one pace. Wolf strained against the chain, not fighting it, but trying to get to the inner room. Jeebee let Wolf pull him into the inner room, and only stopped him with the chain some three feet from the near edge of the bed. Merry was sitting up, eyeing Wolf narrowly, with the baby on the far side of her, lying out of sight beyond her body.
Jeebee allowed Wolf to go a step forward; he was still about a foot and a half from the bed, whimpering now, wagging his tail and looking both agreeably and appealingly at Merry.
Without warning, the baby cried, a thin wail, and tossed its arms in the air so that they appeared on the other side of Merry’s body. Merry turned and took the tiny figure up into her arms, laying the little head against her breast.
Long before she had lifted the baby fully into sight, Wolf had jumped backward, and hidden behind Jeebee.
“Will you look at that!” said Jeebee. “He’s afraid of the baby!”
“He’s hungry,” Merry said softly, to the baby rather than to Jeebee or Wolf. “Is he hungry?”
She had lifted the baby to her breast and it found the nipple and nursed—but just for a few moments. It was evidently not as hungry as it thought it had been. It let the nipple out of its mouth and turned its head away toward Jeebee, small blue eyes flashing about.
A long gray muzzle sneaked around the side of Jeebee’s leg. Wolf was peering at the baby.
The baby jerked up an arm in a sudden motion like a reflexive wave, and Wolf’s muzzle was gone behind Jeebee’s leg once more, almost before the arm had started to lift.
The baby looked around for a moment more before deciding to find the nipple again, and went back to nursing. The gray muzzle crept out again.
Silently, almost imperceptibly, Wolf emerged from behind Jeebee, his neck outstretched, his nose flared toward the bed, and his eyes on Merry and the baby. Merry herself was looking down, watching the baby, absorbed in the process of nursing.
Wolf floated gradually forward until most of his body was past Jeebee. The chain, which Jeebee had kept slack, drew tight and stopped him a foot from the near bedside.
Jeebee moved forward a little, himself, slackening his chain; Wolf started to take up the slack and suddenly froze. Jeebee looked at Merry. Merry’s eyes and attention were all on Wolf. Her face was fixed in an expression and her lips had drawn back from her teeth. It was not a welcoming face. The glitter of her teeth in the fluorescent light was like the glitter of the teeth of any carnivore mother. Wolf’s ears had flattened to his head, his head itself had lowered, and his tail had begun to wag as he moved forward. Now he stood still in his same position and began to make little appeasing whines.
“Let him come as far as the edge of the bed?” Jeebee said.
“As far as the edge”—Merry’s face had not changed—“but no farther!”
Jeebee stood where he was, with a slack chain. Gradually Wolf inched forward until his nose was barely inches from the bedside.
“That’s enough!” Merry said suddenly.
Jeebee checked Wolf. He only twitched the chain taut for a second, but Wolf had stopped even before the words were out of Merry’s mouth. Now, Wolf backed a step and then turned to leave, out of the inner room, through the outer door and into the open air.
Outside, Jeebee took the leash off.
With the leash off, Wolf appeared to lose all interest in the cave’s interior. He greeted Jeebee in the usual fashion and tried to get Jeebee to play with him and chase him. Jeebee, however, was too wise in Wolf’s ways by this time to be drawn from his post in the doorway. Wolf had left the inner room on his own decision. But it was one of his oldest tricks to see if he could not get Jeebee’s attention away from something that Wolf himself wanted, and then beat Jeebee back to whatever it was. Wolf might actually have been wanting to romp and roughhouse in the usual fashion; but he could equally well have been trying merely to draw Jeebee out of position so he could slip past him and in through the door again. Perhaps he thought that Merry might let him come closer to the new pup if Jeebee was not there.
In any case, Jeebee stood his ground, and after a while Wolf, panting agreeably, suddenly turned and pulled his usual vanishing act through the trees. Jeebee turned, himself, closing both the front and inner doors behind him as he went back inside.
He doubted that Wolf would still try to come back for a while, or that his disappearing just now meant that he had given up trying to get in. But just to be on the safe side, Jeebee made sure the inner door was firmly latched.
Back inside, the light was still on and Merry still sat up in bed, holding her child.
“I hope it didn’t worry you to have him that close,” said Jeebee.
“Worry me? No,” Merry answered.
Her right hand came up from the hidden side of her where the baby had been lying. It was holding Jeebee’s revolver. “I’ll be carrying this from now on.”
Jeebee gazed at the gun and at her and let out a deep breath. He remembered the moment coming up out of the root cellar with the cans, months before.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, I don’t really think he’ll be a danger to the baby.”
“No,” said Merry.
She put the revolver away, laying it back down where it hadbeen, and her mood changed as abruptly as Wolf’s had seemed to, outside.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” she said fondly, looking down at the baby.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, wondering a little to find that he really did think the baby was beautiful. He was not used to thinking in those terms about men, boys, or even male children. But Merry was right. Their baby was beautiful.
“We’ve got to name him,” Merry said decisively.
There was a little lift to her voice at the end of the sentence. Not enough to make it a question, but enough to invite comment from Jeebee. Or, if not, some kind of response.
“What do you want to name him?” Jeebee said diplomatically.
“Paul,” she answered immediately. Her gaze clouded a little. “He’ll never know his granddaddy, but he can carry his name.”
She looked up at Jeebee.
“You don’t like Paul for him?” Merry asked.
“I hadn’t even thought,” said Jeebee. “No, of course I like Paul.”
His answer was completely truthful. He simply hadn’t thought that far ahead; and in any case, he had no objection to the baby being named after Merry’s father. The thought came to him, too late, that he might have put forward the name of his own father. But Merry had never known his father. In fact Jeebee had all but forgotten him in the years since his father’s death and his own maturing.
Paul, he thought now; Paul was a name he probably would have picked himself, given time to think about it.
“Turn out the light,” Merry said sleepily, settling down with the baby in her arms and closing her eyes. “Leave the doors open a little, though.”
Jeebee did as she had said and went outside again. If Merry was not concerned about Wolf returning, then it was foolish for him to worry about it.
The evening was warm. He looked around at a meadow in the full stride of a northern summer. The pines stood up, straight and dark-needled around a green meadow in which the two streams ran down the natural slope from their point of divergence. The waters were deep blue under a sky that was darkening steadily, enormously high, with a few large clouds at a distance from each other, high to still be bathed in the light of the sun, and moving steadily together like a fleet of treasury galleons sailing eagerly before a westering wind to the lands of gold and promise.