The sun had sunk far enough over the hill that the shade engulfed them. Ingram shivered. He watched the man lean forward over his injured leg and warm his hands at the fire. What a thing it was that a man could walk into another man’s camp and demand his help. He should tell him to be gone, he thought. He should tell him to get the hell out of his camp, never mind that he was a preacher.
Ingram walked away toward his tent and rubbed his face so hard his skin stung where it had been bitten and scratched. There was his gun propped against the base of a tree. Part of him want to seize it and chase this stranger out of his camp. He flexed his hands before shoving them deep in his pockets. Through the thin lining bled the warmth of his thighs against his fingers, and the coolness of his fingers against his thighs. He was a man of flesh and blood, and so was the man sitting at his fire, and that man was hurt. What would it cost him to feed him some beans and coffee, like he’d want another man to do for him if he were hurt? Still, annoyance stuck in his throat. This man had come with nothing. No supplies, no gun, no bedroll, nothing except his stick and his dog. Even for a man who’d met with an accident it felt wrong, and the wrongness of it galled him.
When he turned back the preacher was poking at the fire with his stick. As for the dog, it was watching Ingram, and when he stared back it growled and half rose to its feet. “Hush now,” the preacher said, and it sat down with the thinning light glancing off its dark coat, and when at last it lay down Ingram said, “Beans won’t be cooked for a good while yet.” The preacher nodded. “Makes no difference to me,” he said. Before long he’d fallen asleep, right there where he sat.
* * *
Night didn’t fall so much as the color drained from the sky and took the lively green of the birch leaves with it. The world stood ghostly. Ingram stared through the flap of his tent at the slight shiver of leaves, the jerky flight of a small bird from one branch to another, a blur of mosquitoes lifting on the air like a fine net being shaken. His body had turned heavy. He wanted nothing more than to sleep but each time he drifted off he’d startle back to wakefulness with his heart pumping and his mind on the gold hidden beneath the birch. He’d curl his fists on his chest and wonder how he’d been so stupid: while the beans were cooking and the preacher was dozing by the fire, he’d walked softly over to the tree. He’d been about to stoop when he glanced back, and there was the preacher watching him. Like a fool he’d pissed against the tree instead, for how could he retrieve his gold in front of another man, then lie down to sleep with it in his pocket, even if that man were a preacher?
Now his heart beat in panic at the thought of the preacher lying only a few yards from where the gold was hidden. He must have noticed something: What man tiptoes off to take a piss? But the man had said nothing, hadn’t looked toward the tree even, and when he’d needed to piss, he’d limped over to the dank leaves where the black thing had risen up the evening before.
Every few minutes Ingram lifted his head and looked out through the pallid night toward the fire and the mound of the preacher lying beside it. By his feet his dog sprawled twitching in its sleep with its mouth slack and its fleshy tongue protruding. Occasionally it got to its feet to stretch. Then it might sniff at its master, or snap at the mosquitoes circling the warm air above its head, and when it lay down again it would rest its head on its paws and watch Ingram until its eyes slid shut. As for the preacher, he hadn’t moved since he’d lain down in the blanket Ingram had handed him. A man might shift in his sleep, especially a man lying on dry leaves heaped together before a dying fire, but not the preacher. He’d turned his back to the rock Ingram used as a seat, and tilted his wide hat sideways across his head to keep off the mosquitoes, and there it lay yet.
It occurred to Ingram that the preacher might be shamming, for what man can lie so still in his sleep? When the preacher thought he was unobserved, perhaps he’d creep toward the tree and search for the hole where the gold was hidden. But as the pale night drew on it occurred to Ingram that he might be dead, for such things weren’t unknown—a cut could turn septic and in a matter of hours a strong man be taken off by fever. Ingram would bury him. He could picture it—the hole he’d dig a little ways downstream, and the stones from the creek he’d pile over the fresh earth to keep away animals, and the way he’d slap his hands against his pants when he’d finished. In his throat there’d be a tightness at the thought of so much time wasted when he could have been washing off panfuls of dirt in the creek, and who knew what gold he might have found in those hours that had been lost?
From close by came the quavering hoot of an owl, then another calling back. There was the preacher lying by his fire, and there, in Ingram’s throat, the bunched up resentment of having already lost a day to burying him. He swallowed against it and stared through the few yards between them. Nothing moved except for a mosquito swimming through the air just out of reach, and he made himself look away to the stained canvas of his tent. At least the preacher was a man of God, at least there was that. A whining and he slapped, felt a tiny softness crushed against his cheek. He flicked it away and closed his eyes.
That dark thing that had turned itself out onto the air—what had it been it but bad luck made manifest? He’d been wrong to run from it. A man mustn’t turn his back on bad luck, no matter that it’d left his wife and baby dead from fever, because if a man took off across the country that bad luck would ride with him, and it’d rage up through him when he’d been drinking, and his fists would smash against other men’s faces and break their noses and their teeth, and one morning he’d wake locked up in a cell. Because this much was true: a man couldn’t escape bad luck unless he faced it down, the same way he had to face down a man who tried to steal his boots from under his bunk, even if that man was bigger than him and known for his temper, even if he got hit in the jaw so hard he couldn’t eat for five days, because living wasn’t worth the trouble if he let what was his be taken from him so easily.
Ingram knew that, yet he’d run from that nightmare thing. Like a coward. Like a fool. And in the end, what had overwhelmed his terror? The thought of the gold he’d dropped, and the gun, and how he must retrieve them. How could a thing that appeared out of nothing do a man harm? He couldn’t have said, but lying there in his tent with his eyes clenched shut he recalled the air shrilling and thickening, and the specks of darkness gathering themselves into a half-formed man, and that man turning to face him, and remembering the terror that had lodged in his gut brought back its ghost now so that, even in the cool night air, it took only a few moments before his heart was punching hard inside his chest and his palms were damp with sweat.
Then, of all the luck, a preacher had come limping into his camp. He should be thankful—a man of god to keep at bay that nightmare thing—but how could such a broken-down man be more than a burden? A man who’d followed the smoke of a fire to this camp and brought nothing with him except his dog? Who’d seen Ingram steal toward a tree and must have guessed he had gold hidden close by? In the morning there’d be no escaping the preacher when he set to work in the creek, but how could a man pan for gold while another man watched? There’d be nothing for it but to wade across the creek and work facing the camp with his gun in easy reach, and if the preacher tried to talk about prospecting, or any other damned thing, he’d turn a sullen face on him and say conversation often stirred him to anger, and that wasn’t far from the truth anyways.