“You think that? Is that the feeling you got from it?”

Terry shrugged. “Like always. Watch your back. Keep your head down. All that’s changed is there’s more people keeping their eye out.”

“I believe I’m good that way.”

“But there’s complications behind you now as well as out front.”

“I know it. But I got reins on Carrick pretty tight. I believe I’ll see it coming he tries to slip the bit. And he knows what I have in store for him, he takes a mind to. That’s enough for now. Everything else, I wait and see. The biggest problem with him is I got him milking cows and tending sheep.”

Terry smiled. “He thought he was off the farm.”

“What I thought was I’d nose around the hotels. Find some girl waiting tables or working in the kitchen. Some big strap of a girl homesick for the homeplace. One just good enough looking so Mister Carrick’s little head takes over for his big head. One thing I know: A smart woman’s smarter than a lucky man.”

“There’s no end of people looking to get back to where they came from.”

“Those are the ones made us the wealthy men we are, Estus.” Jamie grinned at the older man.

Terry did not smile. After a moment he said, “I was curious also about the farmer. And his wife. They can’t be happy with the arrangements.”

Jamie nodded. “The money’s good for them. And the work is being done, someway at least. It’s not his worry anymore. I think I got him cornered up pretty good. For now at least. It’s a slippery time, is what it is. I’m jumping from rock to rock. But I know it.”

Terry stood, stretched his arms up toward the sun. Gray wet ovals under his arms on the white shirt. He bent, took up the whiskey from the grass, held a bottle close to read the label, his eyes pinched. Then looked at Jamie. His eyes still pinched but the focus changed. Something near to affection. He said, “Even an old rat, caught in a barrel, you’d be surprised how high he can jump.”

Throughout the early fall when school let out Foster would come through the house shedding some clothes and adding others, sitting only long enough to eat a slab of bread while he laced up his boots and then would take up the silver whistle on a cord and loop it over his neck and be out the door into the afternoon, the puppy Lovey dancing around him in a steady bob and weave and lather of tongue. Both boy and dog over the summer had sprouted, spindles of arms and legs, both clumsy-gaited and agile at once. Foster already shoulder high to his father. Jamie had not felt so small since he was Foster’s age. And some afternoons felt himself near anger with the boy, as if he could give up his mother and sister so easy as this. And steadied himself, recalling he had no clear notion of what went through the boy’s mind. Anymore than the boy did his. What frantic urge took Foster off into the woods, into the bleak beautiful mystery of the world? He did not know. He did know there was a tremble in himself, an uncertainty that had not been there before. Was this circumstance, or growing older?