The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,113

asks. Her teeth are rotted off into sharp points. “Got us a camp jus’ thar. Hungry fer some hot grub, err ya? We don’ mind to share our’n. Carryin’ any coin, err ya? You gimme jus’ a little, Clary, here, she’d skee-daddle on over to the merkateel store, git us’ns some coffee. Drunk up the las’ of our’n in camp. But it ain’t far…to the merkateel.”

I look yon, and there’s a man standing and watching us. I back off the path and pull Missy with me.

“No reason for to be so skeert and skitterish.” The woman smiles, her tongue working the holes where teeth are gone. “We’s right friendsome folk.”

“We have no need of friends,” Juneau Jane says and moves away to let the woman pass.

The man down the hill stays watching. We wait till the women round the courthouse, then we turn and go that way, too. Back up the hill.

I remember what Pete said. There’s good people, and there’s bad people. Here in Fort Worth town, round every corner we turn, seems like somebody’s looking us over, seeing if we’re worth the trouble to steal from. This is a place of plenty and none, this Fort Worth. A town you’ve got to know the way of to be safe in it, and so we go to the blacksmith shop to find John Pratt. I leave Missy and Juneau Jane outside, and step in just myself. He’s kindly, but can’t say about Mr. Washburn.

“Been many folk leave the town since the railroad didn’t come on,” he says. “Lot of people had been speculatin’ on that. Shucked out when the news come. Hard times, right now. But there’s some who moved in to grab up what can be bought cheap. Could be your Mr. Washburn is that kind.” He tells us how to get to the bathhouses and the hotels, where most folk new to town would go if they had money. “You ask around there, you’ll likely find news of him, if there’s any to be had.”

We go along as he told us, asking anybody that’s willing to talk to three wandering boys.

A yellow-haired woman in a red dress calls us to the side door of a building, says she runs the bathhouse, and she offers a bath cheap. They got hot water ready and nobody to use it.

“Slim times, right now, boys,” she tells us.

The sign in the window says my kind ain’t welcome there and Indians ain’t, either. I know that because Juneau Jane points and whispers it in my ear.

Lady in the doorway looks us over good. “What’s wrong with the big boy?” She folds her arms and leans closer. “What’s wrong with you, big’un?”

“He simple, Missus. Simpleminded,” I say. “Ain’t dangerous, though.”

“Didn’t ask you, boy,” she snaps, then looks in Juneau Jane’s face. “What about you? You simple? You got Indian blood in you? You a breed or you a white boy? Don’t take no coloreds ner Indians in here. And no Irish.”

“He a Frenchy,” I say, and the lady hisses air to shut me up, then turns to Juneau Jane. “You don’t talk for yourself? Kind of a pretty little boy, ain’t ya? How old are you?”

“Sixteen years,” Juneau Jane says.

The lady throws back her head and laughs. “More like twelve years, I’d say. You ain’t even shavin’ yet. But you sure sound like the Frenchies, all right. You got the money? I’ll take it. I don’t got nothin’ against a Frenchman. Long’s you’re a payin’ customer.”

Juneau Jane and me move off from her. “I don’t like the look of it,” I whisper, but Juneau Jane’s got her mind made up. She takes the coins she needs and the bundle with her woman clothes and lets me keep the rest.

“We’ll be out here. Right here, waiting,” I say, loud enough for the lady to hear. Then whisper behind Juneau Jane’s head, “You get inside, you look for where there’s another door. See that steam rising out behind the building? They got to be emptying buckets and washing clothes back there. You slip out that way when you’re done, so she don’t see