David Nickle - Eutopia

“Not much call for it,” said Jason.

“Are you sure about that? Nothing a young lady likes better’n a fellow who’s quick on a two-step.”

“Mayhap I should learn that then.”

Sam tilted his head. “Mayhap,” he said.

Jason slid out of the window. “How is he?” he asked.

“He?”

“Fellow I shot,” said Jason.

“Oh,” said Sam, “you’re interested. That’s something. Wouldn’t have thought that of a Thistledown boy. Particularly one as you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Sam smiled and set down in the window where Jason had been. “You shot a man today. You shot him right, just where you needed, to take him down but not kill him. And then you held him—kept that gun on him steady until my men could show up.”

“Wasn’t much else to do.”

“Well you did the right thing—exactly the right thing—and that is something most fellows would not have been able to. I know because I’ve seen how most fellows get when they start to shooting. Some of them keep shooting, doing all sorts of harm and you got to calm them down or shoot ’em to make ’em stop. Others—well, they shoot the once and miss, and then start shaking so bad they can’t do it again and they get themselves shot often as not as well.

“And then there’s another sort. Like you.”

“Like me.”

“Ice in your veins, boy. I could tell the minute I showed up, and looked you in the eye.”

“What did you see?”

“What I’ve seen in your pa’s eyes.” Sam was nodding slowly as he looked at Jason, and things got quiet. Jason did not take the bait.

“You going to tell me how that fellow’s doing?” he said. “The one I shot so well?”

Sam smiled and chuckled deep in his chest. “He’ll be fine soon as the doctor sobers up enough to work on him. Then I will talk to him. We found some other sheets in the orchard—dropped, like their owners heard the gunshots, dropped the costumes and bolted—not far off. Did you happen to hear or see anyone else?”

“No. Just him.”

Sam nodded. “Figured you’d say if you had. That wasn’t what I came here for, though.”

“What did you come for?”

“Tell you thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks for keeping that matter between us. And thanks for taking care of Ruth. That was a near thing.”

“Well, you are welcome sir,” said Jason.

“And son,” he said as he pushed himself off the windowsill and headed for the door, “you might want to take my advice and learn that two-step. More reliable way to impress a young lady than shooting folks with a borrowed six-gun, you want my opinion.”

The second visitor was a mystery—just a knock at the door, and a wax-sealed envelope slipped beneath it. By the time Jason opened the door, the footsteps were going down the stairs.

So Jason opened the seal and pulled out two folded sheets of paper and an empty, unaddressed envelope. One sheet was blank, one was full of fine handwriting. He did not have to look to the signature at the bottom to know who it was from.

Jason read the letter from Ruth Harper twice before he could put pen to paper and make up a reply. Lord, but the girl was verbose. She used up not one but four sentences describing how much she liked being kissed by him and kissing him back. She felt less kindly toward her father, and she took three more sentences to say how awful he was for making Jason leave town so fast. She was also cross with Miss Louise Butler (although on this she did not elaborate), which was why she had imposed upon Harris, one of the servants, to deliver her letter instead. He would be by later in the evening, to collect any reply that Jason might wish to write, which was what the blank sheet of paper and empty envelope were for. She apologized for not sending along a stick of wax, but it would not have fit under the door.

Jason did reply, but not to any of what she had written, other than to say that he had liked kissing Ruth Harper fine too and hoped they might do so again before he left.

On the final points of her letter he was more specific:

You are welcome for saving your life, although I should thank you for loading the gun or else I would be dead. I am sorry you lost your Colt.

I do not want to go to the quarantine again without a gun at least. But I will meet you at the place you wrote in your letter this night and we can talk about it.

And then he set the pencil down and thought for a moment and wrote:

I am terrified of this too but you were terrified of kissing so I will be brave like you .

He thought about changing that sentence—it was not at all as pretty as the sentences that Ruth had set down in her long letter, and it was not made any prettier by his awful handwriting. And there was that other question—one that he should have an answer to by now. So he wrote his name at the bottom, folded up the note paper, slipped it into the envelope, and settled down to wait for the servant’s return.

Jason kept Ruth’s letter and read it over a couple of times more. His eye kept moving to that single question—the one that he could not figure.

She wrote: I cannot yet fathom why you asked him that question: “Who sent you to murder Dr. Waggoner?” I have been beside myself with wondering—how you would have thought this fellow had gone to murder Dr. Waggoner? Will you not tell me, Jason my darling? Is there another piece to this mystery you have kept from me?

And what of his answer, Jason? What of that? What is this “old man” of whom he speaks? Is it Dr. Bergstrom? That creature you described in the quarantine? Some other man? Do you know? Pray write me & say!

Jason read the letter over and over, until the hour struck three, and it was time. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and with a shaking breath, slipped out through the door and padded down the corridor.

How in tarnation was he supposed to know who the old man was anyhow? All he knew was what Nowak had said, lying in his own quickening blood and spitting through the pain:

“The Oracle is on the march. She deliver God.

“She deliver God.”

“You are ever punctual, Mr. Thistledown,” Ruth said.

Jason didn’t see her, but he felt a warm hand on his arm as soon as he stepped through the doorway of the cider house. She drew him further along, and the door swung shut. In the dark now, Jason leaned over to where he thought the voice came from with another kiss in mind.

Fortunately, Ruth Harper was deft enough to move aside, so when Louise Butler struck a match and held it to a candle, they stood blinking in the flickering light a respectable distance from one another. Louise granted Jason a bare smile and set the candle on a wooden shelf behind her, and gave Ruth a look of ambiguous meaning. Jason nodded a how-do-you-do and Ruth let go of his arm.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Ruth’s voice was taut as a banjo string. “Louise has elected to join us.”

“Pleased to see you again,” said Jason. Then to Ruth: “You sure you want to go to this place?”

“Soon enough,” she said. “But not right away.”

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “We have only a little while to sunrise. You want to figure out a mystery, we best be on our way.”

“On your way where?” said Louise. “I thought—”

“Yes,” said Ruth quickly. “There’s work to be done here first. Jason, why don’t you sit down a moment.”

Jason looked around. They were alongside the curve of a huge wooden barrel that he guessed was for pressing apples. There was a bench along the wall underneath where the candle was. As he looked around, he saw a dark shape on the plank floor. He squinted and stepped closer.