“Helen,” he warned.
Her eyes shot up with embarrassment.
He laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’d gawk, too, if you were standing in front of me with nothing but a pair of camouflage pants and a pair of suspenders. In fact, I think I saw a photo just like that in Playboy once. Girls of the Armed Forces, I think the series was called.”
“You are — ”
“Disgusting? Actually, honey, you wouldn’t have to pose in the nude for Playboy. They’d welcome you just the way you are.”
She looked down and saw that perspiration had caused her T-shirt to mold her breasts and abdomen like a film of green Saran Wrap. And her normally loose military pants were plastered to her hips and legs due to her treks back and forth across the stream.
Rafe winked at her, but she was too tired to rise to his bait, or think of a smart comeback. Luckily, he decided to drop the enticing subject of their mutual, very visible sexual attributes.
“God, I could go for a cold beer right now,” Rafe told Zeb. “I can’t believe it’s so hot for October.”
“Injun summer,” Zeb explained, “but it could change overnight. You gotta appreciate the good days whilst you got ’em. Bad days are sure ta come.” The old man looked at the clear sky with a worried frown.
After dinner, Rafe stumbled to the bed, where he lay propped against the headboard waiting for Helen’s nightly ritual of reading. He couldn’t have sat upright across the table from her if his life depended on it. His eyelids drooped with exhaustion.
“How much did we make today?” Rafe asked Zeb.
The old man took his pipe from his mouth and adjusted Hector on his lap. The boy was playing with a crude wooden horse Zeb had whittled from a piece of hardwood over the past few weeks.
“I’d say ’bout two pounds.” Zeb calculated in his head. “There was some flakes and a few tiny nuggets today, along with the usual dust. Not a bad day.”
At the going 1850 rate, that would amount to more than five hundred dollars, Rafe knew, or more than twelve thousand dollars in the future. Divided in half with Zeb, and then his half shared with Helen, it wasn’t nearly enough. He needed to go back to the future with a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars to get himself out of debt and his family off his back. Only then would he be able to make any kind of plans for a future with Helen. He sighed at that last possibility, refusing to allow himself even to think about a future with Helen until he was sure he had something to offer.
“Did you say something?” Helen asked, sitting down at the table. Despite the dimness of the room, light from the lantern positioned next to her open book gave him a perfect view of her fresh-scrubbed face. Rafe liked looking at Helen.
Exposure to the sun had caused more freckles to erupt over her clear skin. He liked them. She’d bathed in the lagoon, after he and Hector and Zeb had done the same, and her clean hair sprung into damp, unmanageable corkscrews all over the place. He liked them, too.
She gazed at him with concern and repeated, “Did you say something?”
I love you, he mouthed silently, but aloud he said, swallowing over a lump in his throat, “I just wondered if you were going to read tonight.”
Helen nodded, her lips parted with emotion, and he knew which of his words she was reacting to.
“Si, si, si,” Hector piped in. “You hafta finish the story.”
“Before you start,” Zeb said, coughing nervously, “there’s somethin’ I gotta tell you.”
Rafe and Helen exchanged looks of foreboding.
“I’m gonna have to make a trip ta Rich Bar.”
“What?” he and Helen exclaimed at once. “Why?”
“Well, I din’t want ta alarm you, but that bear done more damage than we realized. Ain’t enough flour ta last more’n a month and hardly any salt pork ta mention.”
“We can make do.” Helen began to panic.
Zeb shook his head. “It ain’t the seasonin’ I’m worried ’bout. You’ll need salt ta preserve the game I bag fer the winter. When I get back, I gotta do some serious huntin’.”