blow his head off."
But she had seen nothing of the kind in his future.
"Course it'll never happen," said Mike Fink.
"Why not?" she asked.
"Cause I owe that boy my life. My life as a man, anyway, a man worth looking at in the mirror, though I ain't half so pretty as I was before he dealt with me. I had a grip on that boy in my arms, ma'am. I meant to kill him, and he knowed it. But he didn't kill me. More to the point, ma'am, he broke both my legs in that fight. But then he took pity on me. He had mercy. He must've knowed I wouldn't live out the night with broke legs. I had too many enemies, right there among my friends. So he laid hands on my legs and he fixed them. Fixed my legs, so the bones was stronger than before. What kind of man does that to a man as tried to kill him not a minute before?"
"A good man."
"Well, many a good man might wish to, but only one good man had the power," said Mike. "And if he had the power to do that, he had the power to kill me without touching me. He had the power to do whatever he damn well pleased, begging your pardon. But he had mercy on me, ma'am."
That was true - the only surprise to Peggy was that Mike Fink understood it.
"I aim to pay the debt. As long as I'm alive, ma'am, ain't no harm coming to Alvin Smith."
"And that's why you're here," she said.
"Came here with Holly as soon as I found out what was getting plotted up."
"But why here?"
Mike Fink laughed. "The portmaster at Hatrack Mouth knows me real good, and he don't trust me, I wonder why. How long you reckon it'd be afore the Hatrack County sheriff was on my back like a sweaty shirt?"
"I suppose that also explains why you haven't made yourself known to Alvin directly."
"What's he going to think when he sees me, but that I've come to get even? No, I'm watching, I'm biding my time, I ain't showing my hand to the law nor to Alvin neither."
"But you're telling me."
"Because you'd know it anyway, soon enough."
She shook her head. "I know this: There's no path in your future that has you rescuing Alvin from thugs."
His face grew serious. "But I got to, ma'am."
"Why?"
"Because a good man pays his debts."
"Alvin won't think you're in his debt, sir."
"Don't matter to me what he thinks about it, I feel the debt so the debt's going to be paid."
"It's not just debt, is it?"
Mike Fink laughed. "Time to push this raft away and get it over to the north shore, don't you think?" He hooted twice, high, as if he were some kind of steam whistle, and Holly hooted back and laughed. They set their poles against the floating dock and pushed away. Then, smooth as if they were dancers, he and Holly poled them across the river, so smoothly and deftly that the line that tied them to the cable never even went taut.
Peggy said nothing to him as he worked. She watched instead, watched the muscles of his arms and back rippling under the skin, watched the slow and graceful up-and-down of his legs as he danced with the river. There was beauty in it, in him. It also made her think of Alvin at the forge, Alvin at the anvil, his arms shining with sweat in the firelight, the sparks glinting from the metal as he pounded, the muscles of his forearms rippling as he bent and shaped the iron. Alvin could have done all his work without raising a hand, by the use of his knack. But there was a joy in the labor, a joy from making with his own hands. She had never experienced that - her life, her labors, all were done with her mind and whatever words she could think of to say. Her life was all about knowing and teaching. Alvin's life was all about feeling and making. He had more in common with this one-eared scar-faced river rat than he had with her. This dance of the human body in contest with the river, it was a kind of wrestling, and Alvin loved to wrestle. Crude as Fink was, he was Alvin's natural friend, surely.
They reached the other shore, bumping squarely against the floating dock, and the shoreman lashed the upstream comer of the raft