13

IT WAS EMBARRASSING is what it was. There Jug stood, wrapped in an old blanket, while folks—decent female folks even—came and went. Had to be done though. It takes some time to wash a pair of nastied-on britches and get them halfway dry again. He knew that. He just didn’t like having to stand here like a cigar store Indian while it was being done, that was all.

He must have been there the better part of two hours before Lily gave him one of her huge, gap-toothed grins and waved his pants high to show him they were ready. Lily wasn’t her actual name. That was understood. But no one in Bonner except for Anna Chong and Lily’s husband and cousins could pronounce her right name, and they’d all gotten so accustomed to the name Lily that it would have been impossible now to think of her as anything else. Lily was always smiling, always friendly.

Jug grabbed his pants and went slinking off to one side of the little storefront, hoping nobody would come in and observe this procedure, so he could hold the blanket in place with one hand and struggle into his pants with the other.

The cloth was hot from being ironed. That was the way they’d hurried up the drying process of course, ironing and ironing and ironing them to drive the moisture out. It worked pretty well, too, although they still felt damp. Clean damp, though, so that was all right. And hot. The heat felt kinda good to him, then less so as the heat quickly dissipated and the dampness began to feel clammy. Even that was okay compared to the feeling he’d had before, of course.

“Ten cen’,” Lily told him and he gladly paid. Would’ve paid ten times that to get rid of the mess from the Bullhorn.

He thanked her and started for the door.

“You wai’.”

“Huh?”

“Wai’ he.” Her hand gestures told him this meant “wait here.” Lily’s English was not perfect. On the other hand, it was a helluva lot better than Jug’s Chinese and he didn’t figure he was in any position to criticize anybody else’s linguistic abilities when he himself had none at all.

He had his britches and he’d already paid, but if Lily wanted him to wait here, well . . .

She ran into the back of the laundry with that odd little short-step run she had and re-emerged a moment later carrying some papers.

Jug couldn’t figure what that was about until he saw that she had some envelopes, too. Then he remembered. He’d had the outfit’s letters in his back pocket. They must ’ve gotten drenched right along with everything else back there. He hoped they could still be read.

And there sure seemed a lot of them. There’d only been, what? Four letters. The one to Billy and the rest addressed to the foreman. Lily handed him four envelopes and at least a dozen sheets of paper. Maybe more. They were smudged and the ink faded just about clean away in some spots.

Lily or one of them in the back had tried to salvage things as best they could. They’d gone to the trouble of ironing the paper, too, to try to dry it. The creases where the paper was folded to go into the envelopes were ironed out and the paper sheets had a brittle feel to them from the ironing, but they were in better shape than they should have been.

“Lily, that’s mighty nice o’ you. Thanks.” He dug into his pocket for more coins, but Lily waved the offer away. “No mo’. Pan’ only.” She sure wasn’t big on the letter “t.” It occurred to Jug that one of these days he’d have to see if he could inveigle Lily into saying “tip-top Hottentot” just to see how she’d handle it.

He thanked her again and made a mental note to himself that he owed her and her kin a kindness, and he’d have to remember to do something nice for them sometime. Finding unexpected goodness in folks always tickled him, and this example went a long way toward brightening what could have seemed a rather sour ending to a long day.

He thanked Lily one more time with a tip of his hat and a grin that was near about as gap-toothed as hers and went off to find that slow—but steady, oh yes, steady—old Lady Horse for the trip home.

It would be late when he got there, but what the heck. He’d just take a wrap on the horn with his reins and sleep most of the way.