Jesse condescendingly patted Charley’s knee and rose up from the davenport. “So you see? Your cousin got off easy. I was only playing with Albert.”
Charley said, “I’ve made him squeal once or twice myself. I’m just not as thorough as you are.”
“You want to swap a tale with me now?”
Charley camouflaged his fright with ignorance. “I don’t get your meaning.”
“If you’ve got something to confess in exchange, it seems to me it’d only be right for you to spit it out now.”
“Can’t think of a single thing.”
“About Wood Hite, for example.”
“I’ve been saying over and over again I can’t figure out where he’s gone. I’m not going to change my story just to have something to spit.”
“Why was your brother so agitated?”
“Which?”
“Bob.”
“It’s just his way. He’s antsy.”
The dog in the kitchen sighed; Jesse reseated himself in the Queen Anne chair. He said, “You can go back to sleep now.”
“You got me agitated now: you see?”
“Just ain’t no peace with Jesse around. You ought to pity my poor wife.”
“Ed Miller was a good friend of mine. He introduced me to you at that one poker game. I’m a little angry with you, if you want the God’s honest truth.”
Jesse crossed his legs at the ankles and shut his eyes. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets. He said, “You ought to pity me too.”
THEY AROSE with the colored cook but did not remain for breakfast. Instead, Jesse fished around in the chicken coop until he could show off three brown eggs crammed between the fingers of one hand. He chopped the shells open with a pen knife and drank the yolks down, slobbering his chin with the clear albumen, and proffered one to
Charley.
He shook his head in the negative, saying, “I can get along without breakfast. I’ll eat something on the way.”
“It’s a good journey.”
“It isn’t Kansas City?”
“I moved again. San Hose-say!”
“Don’t know that—”
“Saint Joseph!”
“Oh.”
It was late afternoon when they arrived and their horses were sore in their mouths from the clove bits, and yet they were spurred into a leisurely walk so Charley could see the wonders of a city of thirty-four thousand. Jesse saved for the last the marvel that was the grand, red-bricked World Hotel, where wooden chests that contained bathtubs were rolled from room to room by bellboys, where gas lamps burned all night long in the corridors, where a sanitarium for epileptics covered one entire upper floor and was run by Dr. George Richmond, the inventor of an elixir called Samaritan Nervine.
Charley was nearly overcome. “There must be something to see every dad-blamed place you look!”
“It takes getting used to; there’s no argument on that score.”
Shopkeepers were locking up and girls in long woolen coats were crouching out of the evening cold as Jesse and Charley roamed south on Twenty-first Street to Lafayette, where Jesse had rented a cottage in November. It was common and white and sat on a corner behind the shade of a wide porch that curved around it like the bill of a cap. Because the lot was small, they stabled their horses elsewhere and on the walk back Jesse instructed Charley about his assumed identity. He said he was listed in the city directory as Thomas Howard. His occupation was supposed to be that of a cattle buyer, so he made a point of visiting the St. Joseph stockyards once per week, but he spent much of his time there in speaking about two fillies he was racing in Kentucky so that his nonappearances wouldn’t be suspect.