SUNLIGHT shimmered through a glass of orange-brown tea. It wasn’t a canning jar, but a real made for drinking-out-of glass. Gideon wondered how on earth it, and all of its shelf-mates, had arrived on the Rolling Rivers in one piece. Harris had used tin: tin plates, tin cups, and hardly any two a set. Even his eating irons had been a throw together mismatch.
Then there was Cricket, the cook; an unimposing figure in all respects who did most of the woman’s work and didn’t seem to mind. The cut of him was western, yet his skin held an indistinct brown hue that came of more than sun, could have been Mediterranean or a mix of any of a dozen places Gideon had never heard tell of. His voice had a slight accent, light as the limp in his gait, and, though he spoke English well, there was no mistaking his tongue had a more comfortable acquaintance with some other language. At times Cricket spoke what sounded Spanish, and was not, and sometimes French. An altogether unrevealing vegetable soup, yet he made some of the best grub Gideon had ever tasted. And he had a. . . a way about him.
As Gideon sat on the back steps trying to size the man up, Cricket gave a nod towards the round pen where Amos Rivers was working a young palomino. The gen-u-ine glass clunked as Gideon put it down. He leaned forward, arms propped on his knees. He would not offer aid to the enemy and said as much in the cook’s own French.
Cricket could have been offended; the Rivers had been exceptionally good to him. They paid him as a hired hand and treated him like an equal, which was completely contrary to his first experiences in the country. As he had done with the boys, so Cricket lent a hand here too.
“Is that what you think?” came the soft French words, the syllables leaning on each other as if they had all the time in the world.
“Enemy’s the only word I know for someone who holds you prisoner,” Gideon replied.
He could hardly move without one of the Rivers watching him, dogging his every step.
“The word you are looking for is ‘friend’,” said Cricket, “possibly even ‘savior’.”
“Perhaps my French is not as good as I thought because I cannot possibly be hearing you correctly.”
“Your French is very good, so is your hearing. The problem is in your head.”
“I doubt it.”
With no particular enthusiasm, Gideon picked up the tea and ambled down to the round pen. Giving aid to the enemy. That’s what it was.
Amos accepted the glass gratefully and set himself to draining half of it in one long, quenching swallow. Gideon promptly about-faced, determined to get out of there with a minimum of social do-se-do-ing.
“Thank you,” Amos offered to his back.
“C'est à partir de Cricket,” Gideon replied crisply.
“How’s that?”
Blast!
Gideon could have kicked himself. What he spoke or how he spoke it was nobody’s business but his own.
“Cricket done sended the tea,” he repeated, making it perfectly clear the act of compassion was no idea of his.
“Cricket has been a part of this family for nearly twenty years and I still can’t manage more than ‘good morning’,” Amos remarked conversationally. “How did you learn?”
Gideon turned his attention to the palomino, who had shoved her head between the rails of the round pen, nimble lips working for a meager tuft of grass. Amos wiped the sweat from his brow with a kerchief.
“Fellah out east a-ways learnt me some,” Gideon finally said, and turned his back, feeling not one whit obliged to discuss the time he had spent with the railroad or the French gentleman who had been kind to a little boy working in a man’s world whilst himself adrift in a world full of strangers.
“Thank you,” said Amos.
Gideon walked away, leaving Amos to the company of his horse.