“What’s that you say?”
“If you dog somebody, don’t silhouette on the crest of a hill. Don’t aim your binoculars into the sun, either.”
“Why would we be dogging you?”
“You got me. Why not make a clean breast of it? Dip your soul in the Jordan, know what I mean? I think it was y’all cut my wire and busted up my hog pen and trampled my pumpkins.”
“My opinion is you’ve got your head up your ass.”
“Cod Bishop and Arnold Beckman will leave you twisting in the wind. You take the risk, they take the profits. Sound like a good deal to you?”
“We’ll be going. We didn’t mean to bother you,” said the man with the rifle. He grinned again, as though he could hardly contain his goodwill.
“I got a question,” said the man with the lazy eye. “Is that a cap and ball?”
Hackberry’s revolver lay on a flat rock on the other side of the fire, its belt coiled around the holster. “I had it converted for cartridges many years ago. I hardly shoot it these days. Want to shoot it?”
“You can leave it where it’s at.”
Hackberry proppe
d his hands on his thighs and stared into the fire.
“Got yourself in a bind?” said the man with the lazy eye.
“That’s what age does. Your judgment goes. You want to believe in your fellow man, but you end up in sackcloth and ashes, wondering how you could be such a fool. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? You boys hungry? I got plenty.”
The man with the rifle smelled himself. “Thank you. Maybe later. We got a job to do.”
“You don’t get it, do you, son?”
“Get what?”
“You shouldn’t try to outsmart your betters.”
“Our betters?” said the man with the rifle.
“That’s right. Somebody hired you to follow me around, then report back to them. Instead, you got ambitious and decided to find out what was in this cave. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here except cougar bones and bat shit. So now you’ve made enemies with a man who in his youth put a number of people on the wrong side of the grass, and in the meantime you got yourself crossways with Arnold Beckman.”
It was silent in the cave. Hackberry leaned over and removed the onion and tomato and jar of lemonade and loaf of bread from the bag and set them on a flat rock. He sliced open the bread longways with the bowie and bladed mustard on it, then began halving the onion.
“Say all that again,” said the man with the rifle.
“I was trying to say I feel sorry for you.”
“Sorry for us?”
“You were probably unwanted at birth and had parents that were either poor-white trash or one step this side of feral. There’s no fix for it. The seed goes from generation to generation like congenital clap. I’ve heard Bedouins are warned not to shake hands with Southern poor whites. You sniff your armpits and blow your nose on your napkin and spit on the floor and wonder why nobody likes you. On top of it, pert’ near every one of you was beat on with an ugly stick. That’s what I mean about life not being fair.”
“I think you got rabies from these bats,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“Son, have you looked in the mirror lately?”
Hackberry squatted by the fire and began picking the strips of cooked roast off the iron rod with the tip of his bowie, laying them out on the bread.
“I’ve had all of you as I can take,” said the man with the lazy eye. He shut the breech of his shotgun. “Lay the knife down.” The man with the rifle reached over and picked up Hackberry’s revolver and tossed it behind a rock.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Hackberry said.