more over thisaway,” Old Red said. “Coming and going.”
He stopped, but his gaze kept on moving along the forest floor, following a trail I was blind to. Soon he was staring straight into the sun streaming down through the trees.
To the east. Toward the lake.
Old Red started off again.
“Uhhh…shouldn’t we be movin’ along?” I called after him. “Salt Lake City ain’t gonna come to us, y’know.”
“Salt Lake City ain’t goin’ nowhere,” my brother muttered.
I sighed, then started after him—but only after dashing back to the barn to collect the Winchester.
It was a comfort having it at hand, for the deeper we went into the woods, the stronger the feeling grew that we weren’t alone. And we weren’t, of course: There were chipmunks and squirrels and songbirds all around us. But they went on about their business in their usual jumpy, oblivious way, whereas the presence I sensed was steady, quiet, watchful.
And purely imaginary…or so I tried to tell myself.
It wasn’t long before the lake came into view ahead of us. I hadn’t spied much more than the occasional dimple in the sod or trampled twig after the first set of prints, but that changed but good as we approached the shoreline. There were tracks in the bank so deep and well-defined even a bottom-rail, bat-blind sign-reader like myself couldn’t miss them.
One set led one-two, one-two straight into the water.
The other led out of the water.
“You know what I just realized?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Whatever made them prints…it walk son two feet.”
Old Red shook his head sadly, as if—through my keen powers of observation and deducification—I’d just surmised that mud is brown and water wet.
“You don’t say,” he mumbled.
The tracks ran parallel to a big, rotten cottonwood that looked like it had toppled into the lake a half dozen years before, and my brother stepped up onto the trunk and walked along it, using it as a pier. The water was crystal clear back toward the bank, but the farther out Old Red went, the more it deepened and darkened until you couldn’t see what might be beneath the surface.
The tree dipped under my brother’s weight, tilting farther forward with his each step until the water was swirling over his feet.
“You wanna know what else I just realized?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I wanna get the hell outta here.”
“What are you still doing here, then?” a voice boomed out behind me.
I jumped so high I was wearing the sky for a hat.
“Easy,” the voice warned when my feet touched ground again. “Put the rifle down and turn around…slow.”
I did as I was told and found myself facing a big-boned, potbellied man of perhaps fifty-five years. He had a long, white, wild beard and even wilder eyes, which were glaring at me, incidentally, over the leveled barrels of a scattergun.
“You,” he said to Old Red. “Keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
“Ain’t got nothin’ to do with ’em anyways,” my brother said.
We’d left our gun belts back at the barn.
“Listen, mister—you wanna do us all a favor?” I said. “Point that cannon of yours at the water. Cuz you won’t be gettin’ any trouble out of me and my brother…but that there lake I ain’t so sure about.”
Rip Van Winkle didn’t oblige me. He was about thirty yards off—far enough that a shotgun blast might not kill me outright, but close enough that he couldn’t miss if he tried.
“Oh, ho. Seen something, have we?” he said, and for the first time I noticed a hint of brogue in his voice.
“We seen something, all right—something that come outta the lake, from the look of things.”
“You got a notion as to what our something mighta been?” Old Red asked. He was still balanced precariously on the end of that log with dark water lapping up around his ankles.
“At the moment, I’m more interested in who you are,” Rip told him.
“Amlingmeyer’s the name,” I said. “Otto and Gustav—Big Red and Old Red to our friends.” I grinned as genially as a preacher passing out how-do-you-dos at an ice cream social. “That could include you, provided you point your artillery some other direction.”
The old man tightened his grip on his shotgun. “Your kind and my kind can never be friends.”
“Now, now—let’s not be so hasty,” I said (hastily). “I’ve known cats and dogs that come to be bosom chums, by and by.”
“Which ‘kind’ is it you’re thinkin’ of, mister?” my brother asked.
“What do you think? Gentiles and Mormons.”
“Oh. Those kinds.” I did my best to look guileless. “And which might you be?”
Rip narrowed his eyes. “Which are you?”
Never in my schooling days (all five years of them) had I ever faced a quiz as weighty as this. Stand up and spell “danger” with a j, and the worst you’ll get is laughed at. But answer wrong now, and the punishment might be a bellyful of buckshot.
I peeked over at my brother, hoping he’d Holmesed out which faith it was Rip seemed to hold so dear. As you so well know, it’s amazing the things Old Red can tell about a fellow from little more than a quick glimpse and some careful cogitation. A man’s trade, his home life, his hopes and fears—my brother can see it all in a hangnail and a dirty collar. I’ve often told him he could clean up as a sideshow fortune teller if only he didn’t have his heart set on detectiving.
And yet all I got from him now was a shake of the head.
I couldn’t bullshit our way out of this. I’d have to gamble on honesty.
I hate when that happens.
“I suppose we’d be Gentiles, as Mormons reckon it. We was raised Lutheran, but ain’t neither of us seen the inside of a church in a coon’s age.” I looked heavenward, palms pressed together as in prayer. “Sorry ’bout that. No hard feelin’s…I hope.”
Apparently, He was in a forgiving mood: Rip lowered his scattergun and favored us with a grin wide enough to spy even through the white thicket of his beard.
“Well, then—welcome to Kennedyville, boys!” he said. “I’m Kennedy.”
There were handshakes all around (my brother having been allowed
