"And he used to work in tugboats in New York?"
"Well now, I don't know about that."
"I guess you only knew him in the West."
"I reckon.
I ain't never been to New York."
"Well, damn me, I'm amazed you know him.
This is a big country.
Yet I knew you must have known him."
"Yessir, I know Big Slim pretty well.
Always generous with his money when he's got some.
Mean, tough fellow, too; I seen him flatten a policeman in the yards at Cheyenne, one punch."
That sounded like Big Slim; he was always practicing that one punch in the air; he looked like Jack Dempsey, but a young Jack Dempsey who drank.
"Damn!" I yelled into the wind, and I had another shot, and by now I was feeling pretty good.
Every shot was wiped away by the rushing wind of the open truck, wiped away of its bad effects, and the good effect sank in my stomach.
"Cheyenne, here I come!" I sang.
"Denver, look out for your boy."
Montana Slim turned to me, pointed at my shoes, and commented,
"You reckon if you put them things in the ground something'll grow up?" – without cracking a smile, of course, and the other boys heard him and laughed.
And they were the silliest shoes in America; I brought them along specifically because I didn't want my feet to sweat in the hot road, and except for the rain in Bear Mountain they proved to be the best possible shoes for my journey.
So I laughed with them.
And the shoes were pretty ragged by now, the bits of colored leather sticking up like pieces of a fresh pineapple and my toes showing through.
Well, we had another shot and laughed.
As in a dream we zoomed through small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night.
They watched us pass in one motion of the head, and we saw them slap their thighs from the continuing dark the other side of town – we were a funny-looking crew.
A lot of men were in this country at that time of the year; it was harvest time.
The Dakota boys were fidgeting.
"I think we'll get off at the next pisscall; seems like there's a lot of work around here."
"All you got to do is move north when it's over here," counseled Montana Slim, "and jes follow the harvest till you get to Canada."
The boys nodded vaguely; they didn't take much stock in his advice.
Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now and then Gene leaned out of his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy's ear.
The boy nodded.
Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears.
I wondered where the hell they would go and what they would do.
They had no cigarettes.
I squandered my pack on them, I loved them so.
They were grateful and gracious. They never asked, I kept offering.
Montana Slim had his own but never passed the pack.
We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line of tall lanky men in jeans clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert, and returned to the tremendous darkness, and the stars overhead were pure and bright because of the increasingly thin air as we mounted the high hill of the western plateau, about a foot a mile, so they say, and no trees obstructing any low-leveled stars anywhere.
And once I saw a moody whitefaced cow in the sage by the road as we flitted by.
It was like riding a railroad train, just as steady and just as straight.
By and by we came to a town, slowed down, and Montana Slim said,
"Ah, pisscall," but the Minnesotans didn't stop and went right on through.
"Damn, I gotta go," said Slim.
"Go over the side," said somebody.
"Well, I will" he said, and slowly, as we all watched, he inched to the back of the platform on his haunch, holding on as best he could, till his legs dangled over.
Somebody knocked on the window of the cab to bring this to the attention of the brothers.
Their great smiles broke as they turned.
And just as Slim was ready to proceed, precarious as it was already, they began zigzagging the truck at seventy miles an hour.
He fell back a moment; we saw a whale's spout in the air; he struggled back to a sitting position.
They swung the truck.