Tucker and Bethrah came toward the fence, and Harry thought, but only for an instant, they would say something, a final word of explanation; instead they walked around the wagon and went up the road in the direction of Willson City.

The men turned from the fence, each realizing how warm and wet the fire had made the front of his body, each mumbling to the man next to him something like “Well, ain’t that a bitch!” or “That tears all, don’t it?” or “Never in all my born days have I…” They climbed into the wagons, unhitched horses, started the popping, bubbling motors.

Harry lingered at the fence and when he had seen everything he thought there was to see, reached down his hand for the boy to grab it. The boy was not there. He looked around him, then up the road and saw Harold, his neck craned backwards, talking quietly with Tucker in the silent shadows. Bethrah waited beyond them. He saw Tucker turn, join Bethrah, and disappear, enveloped in the thick night. Harold started toward him, walking backwards as if the blackness would not swallow the two figures as long as he watched. When he reached him, Harry said nothing, just put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

By now the men were settled in Stewart’s wagon, ready to return to town. Harry handed the boy up to one of them, climbed up himself, and the crippled horse pulled them toward Sutton, leading, as before, two separated groups. Harold sat close to him. It was cold and he was shivering. Harry looked down at him and, holding the reins in first one hand and then the other, took off his jacket.

“Here.” He pushed the coat into the boy’s arms. “Put that on.”

Mister Leland

TUCKER CALIBAN had never said very much to him, but Mister Leland considered him his friend. As far as he was concerned, Tucker had proved that friendship, its depth and permanence, forever, one morning the summer before.

Early that morning, even before Mister Harper had appeared at the porch, he and his father had come to town, his father to talk with a doctor about a cough he could not throw off, and Mister Leland had been sitting alone on the curb in front of Mister Thomason’s store carving in a crack at the edge of the Highway. After he gouged down about an inch into the hard mud, and there was no more dirt in that crack, he had stood and peered into the store window, not concerned with the cans of food, or the guns, or fishing equipment, or even toys, concerned only with the vial of hairy brown peanuts, wishing someone would come along like them fairy godfathers you hear about who knows what I’m thinking and just up and buy me some.