Go With Me Page 14

  “Some kind of fight.”

  “Trouble at the Fort?” Whizzer said. “Well, sure. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

  “No,” said Wingate.“Where did she go when she left here without Scotty?”

  “You mean when she left here?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Well,” said Whizzer, “I don’t know where they went, exactly. To find Blackway, it looks like. Probably they were going up into the Towns, to the place he has up there.”

  “They?”

  “She went with Lester and Nate the Great, there.”

  “I told her to get Scotty,” said Wingate.

  “Scotty wasn’t here.”

  “So you said,” Wingate said. “You figured Lester and that boy were up to the business?”

  “I thought so,” said Whizzer.“Nate the Great don’t have a lot to say. He don’t look like much, but there’s more to him than you might think. And Les — well, you know Les.”

  “I know him,” said Wingate.

  “Les knows all the tricks.”

  “He does.”

  “Come to it, Les’ll go all the way through.”

  “He will.”

  “Les was willing,” Whizzer said. “So was Nate the Great. Scotty wasn’t here. And the girl said you told her there was nothing you could do to help her.”

  “The Towns are out of my district,” said Wingate.

  “You could have gone in there if you had to, though,” said Whizzer. “Couldn’t you?”

  “What do you think?”

  Whizzer nodded.

  “She was sitting in her car,” Wingate said. “She was sitting in her car with a little knife like you’d use to cut up an apple. If Blackway came after her, she was going to drive him off with a fruit knife.”

  “She’s a pistol,” said Whizzer. “Blackway might have picked on the wrong girl, this time, it looks like.”

  Wingate was silent.

  “Did you?” asked Whizzer.

  “Did I what?”

  “Tell her there was nothing you could do to help her.”

  “That’s right,” said Wingate.

  “Well, then,” said Whizzer, “Somebody ought to done something, it looked like. It wasn’t going to be you.”

  “She wanted me to arrest Blackway because she was afraid he meant to hurt her,” said Wingate.

  “He did,” said Whizzer.

  “Maybe he did,” said Wingate. “I told her I couldn’t arrest somebody for what somebody else thought he meant to do.”

  “Sure,” said Whizzer.

  “I told her I couldn’t do that,” said Wingate, “and she wouldn’t want to live in a country where I could. That’s a country with no law.”

  “Sure,” said Whizzer.

  “Would you?”

  “What?”

  “Want to live in a country with no law?” Wingate said.

  “Well, maybe not,” said Whizzer. “But I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t mind living in a country with no Blackway.”

  “Well,” said Wingate, “you do, it looks like. Don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Whizzer.

  Castle Freeman Jr. is the award-winning author of two previous novels, a story collection, and a collection of essays. He has been a regular essayist for The Old Farmer’s Almanac since 1982, and lives in Newfane, Vermont.