The old sheriff was struggling with his breakfast when Hunter entered the room. Mason didn’t seem to have much appetite and, if anything, looked worse this morning than he did the night before.
“How do you feel, Hank?” asked Hunter with concern.
“How does it look like I feel?”
“Like a beaver, two days in a trap.”
“That’s about right.”
“You’d feel a lot better, Uncle Hank, if you would eat a little more,” said Morna, who was sitting in a chair next to his bedside.
“I can’t eat if I ain’t hungry, so stop pestering me,” he said irritably.
“All right. But at least have some more coffee,” she suggested.
“Okay, okay.” Then he smiled at Hunter and said, “Did you see how much sugar this little niece of mine puts in her coffee? God, it’s a wonder she isn’t four hundred pounds.”
Hunter laughed and then glanced over at the girl. She was staring at him, her eyes pleading with him to say nothing about Nick Kestler and the events of last night.
He looked back down at the sheriff and asked, “How long before the doc lets you go home?”
“Probably tomorrow. Doc wants the stitches to heal up a little more before I start movin’ around.”
“Did Morna tell you about the little fire in her room last night?”
“Fire? No! What fire?”
The girl looked down at the floor.
“Now don’t get excited, Hank,” said Hunter, calmly. “Your house is still standing, and as you can see, nobody got hurt. I just thought you ought to be told about it because there’s going to be a trace of smoke in the house for at least a week.”
“Well, what happened? How’d it get started?”
“Morna could tell you better than me. It happened in her room.”
In that instant the girl knew that he wasn’t going to tell on her. She raised her head, and with a grateful look in Hunter’s direction, said, “I should have told you about it before, Uncle Hank, but I didn’t want to upset you. And like Mr. Hunter said, nobody got hurt, and the damage was minimal.”
“But what the hell happened?”
“It was really very stupid of me. I was reading that novel Mrs. Kelverson gave me for my birthday, remember? Well, I was reading in bed and I got so exasperated by one of the characters, I slammed the book down on the bed table and accidently knocked the lamp onto the floor. The rug caught fire. I was frightened and I screamed. Thank goodness Mr. Hunter heard me. He raced in and smothered the fire with a blanket. If he hadn’t, the whole house might have burned to the ground.”
The old sheriff relaxed and remembered how his niece hadn’t wanted Hunter to stay as their house-guest. Gloating just a little, he said, “I guess it’s a good thing Warfield didn’t stay at the hotel last night.”
She smiled at her uncle and nodded her head.
Hunter was smiling too. He was impressed. She was a pretty good liar.
With her story holding up and her uncle feeling self-satisfied, Morna decided that this was definitely the time to leave. She took up the breakfast tray and said she’d be back with his lunch in the early afternoon.
Then it was just Hunter and the old man.
They didn’t speak for a while, both of them thinking back to times long past, forever lost, except in memory. It was Hank Mason, looking straight ahead at the wall across the room, but seeing something far different in his mind’s eye, who was the first to speak.
“I was the first white man ever to see a lot of this country. God, it was beautiful. The North Platte, the Green River, the Arkansas. It was wild and rich, and it filled me up inside to see it. You were just a kid then, Warfield, but I remember how Andy would lift you up on his shoulders to give you a better view of a green and lush valley or a snow-capped mountain range. And I remember how your eyes would bug out and your mouth would drop open and how you wouldn’t stop talking about whatever it was that he showed you.”
“I remember,” said Hunter quietly. “In a lot of ways, the time I spent with Andy and the rest of you back then was the most important part of my life, and maybe the happiest.”
“If only we’d known you were alive,” sighed the old man. “When Andy heard that the men who were supposed to take you down to St. Louis never arrived, he cried for two days and three nights. He loved you, boy. Thought of you like a son. It was his intention to see that you got an education and grew up a gentleman. If only we’d known you were alive,” he repeated.
“Well, I got an education of sorts,” said Hunter, brightening, “but not the kind Andy sent his daughter to get.”
The pensive, melancholy mood was beginning to break. The old man chuckled and said, “If you had turned out like Morna, why Andy would’ve sent ya back to the Crows where we found ya.”
Hank Mason finally turned his head, and, looking thoughtfully at Hunter, asked, “What happened to you, Warfield? How did you get along?”
“Any which way I could,” laughed Hunter. “After the raft broke up in white water on the way down to St. Louis, I stumbled into a group of missionaries. They sent me back east, to New York. I was put into some orphanage and, I’ll never forget, the room I slept in had no windows. I couldn’t see the stars or smell the night air. I felt like I was suffocating. Ran away the first chance I got.
“I was growing up fast. Though I was only around eight years old, I could pass for a kid of eleven or twelve. I lied like hell to get a job as a cook’s errand boy on one of those fancy sailing-ships that went back and forth between New York and Boston. I jumped ship in New Bedford and made my way to Nantucket where I signed on as a cabin boy on a whaling ship.
“My first voyage lasted four years and three months. It would take me the better part of a winter to tell you about the places I saw, the things I did, the people I met. It wasn’t all fun and excitement, but Lord, I learned a lot.
“Almost as soon as we hit our home port, I signed on another ship and went right back to sea again. Though I was still only a boy, I did a man’s worth of work. And for the first time I got a man’s measure of respect. Three years and nine months later we were back in Nantucket.
“One of the seamen on this second voyage was a man given to reading. I’d never had much interest in learning till then, but he took the time to teach me a little and loaned me some of his books. I thought I knew it all from sailing the four corners of the earth, but the books told me I wasn’t so smart as I thought.
“I didn’t sign up for another voyage this time. I was thinking of other things, a thousand different things. And then, just by the luck of the draw, a young sailor’s widow took a shine to me. As far as the public was concerned, she was giving me room and board in exchange for some much-needed work around the cottage. But in private, she was my woman in every way.
“I stayed with her nearly two years, working, loving, fattening up, and reading every damn thing I could get my hands on.
“And then one day she says to me, ‘Warfield, every man should have a code of conduct that he lives by, rules of honor.’
“Well, I agreed to that.
“And then she says, ‘Here, read my Bible and you’ll find your code of conduct.’
“I just couldn’t believe it. After two years, she was suddenly trying to convert me.
“Now I’d seen things: my folks getting tortured by the Crows, the insides of a man being fed to a fish, and this while the man was kept alive to see it. Religion is fine for some, but not for me. If there’s a God out there, the only thing he does is to make sure the sun comes up every morning and goes down every night. Maybe he makes the wind blow from time to time and gives us a little rain. But that’s it. The rest is up to us.
“Well, there’s nothing worse than a woman quoting scriptures to you while you’re both lying naked in bed. It seemed to me like it was time to move on. And I did. But I learned a lot from that woman. And I worked out a code of conduct that I lived by, too. It’s maybe not the kind she had in mind, but, just the same, it’s served me well.
“I didn’t only leave her behind; I left my books behind too. The books, they taught me one final lesson: that you can’t learn everything from books. You’ve got to go out and live.
“It was the sea I thought I knew best, so I shipped out again and made my way to San Francisco. Got a job as a first mate on a trading sloop. Pretty soon after that, I got command of my own single-masted ship.
“But whenever I came home to port, I kept hearing stories about new mountain passes being found, great herds of buffalo. I heard talk of railroads someday being built from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It seemed to me that there was an awful lot going on just behind those hills to the east of San Francisco. I thought of Andy and you and the others, and kept wondering if the country could really be as big and as beautiful as I remembered it from my childhood. Finally, I just had to find out. I quit the sea, bought a horse, a saddle, a bedroll, and a gun, and rode for the mountains. I haven’t once been sorry.”
The old man had been listening intently, a sense of wonder lighting up his face. “So you rode to the mountains,” he said quietly. “And by the time you crossed the mountains and reached the plains, you were known everywhere as War Hunter.”
“I never tried to build a reputation, Hank. I only followed that code of conduct I was telling you about. The rest just happened.”
“It’s not a bad reputation to have, Warfield,” said the old sheriff with admiration. “No one’s ever accused you of killing a man that didn’t deserve it. But still, I feel a little bit sorry for you. You’re young and the land is changing. You were born too late. You’ve seen the kind of people coming west. They’re just not the same breed we once had out here. It’s getting to be a time when it’s too late to be a man.”
“There’s some truth in what you say, Hank, but to my way of thinking, no man is ever born too late to be a man. You just do what you have to do.” The old man nodded and smiled sadly.
Hunter took a deep breath, exhaled, and said, “That’s a little bit of what happened to me during all these years. I’d like to hear about you and Andy sometime, but not now. You’re looking pretty tuckered out. Why don’t you get some sleep before Morna comes back with your lunch. You look like you could use the rest.”
“I guess you’re right, boy. I am feeling a mite weary. Stop by again later and we’ll talk some more.”