He glanced around again, unable or unwilling to keep his lip from lifting in a sneer.
The cat rubbed firmly against the visitor’s ankles, leaving a track of hair against the fabric of the black trousers. Hardy squawked, jerking his legs aside as though his boots had slid him into a cesspool.
“Cat!” Old Nathan snapped, coming up off the rocker. “You git back from there!”
The cat lifted his nose. “Hmpf,” he said. “That un don’t half hate cats, don’t he?”
The cunning man’s left index finger pointed. A spark of static popped in the air between Old Nathan and the animal.
“All right, all right,” the cat grumped. “Keep yer britches on.” He padded across the floor, then disappeared out the back door in a single fluid bound.
Bascom Hardy settled himself again in his chair. “That’s better,” he growled. He indicated the roof poles with a lift of his clean-shaven chin. “If thet dirty beast comes up t’ me again, I’ll kick him right through yer shakes.”
Old Nathan remained standing. “Did you hear thet I don’t eat meat, Bascom Hardy?” he asked.
Hardy raised an eyebrow. “I heard thet,” he said. “I don’t see how it signifies.”
“But,” the cunning man rasped, “ye never heerd I was a Quaker as wouldn’t larrup a man to an inch of his life ifen he kicked my cat in my home. Did ye now?”
He grinned at his visitor. His eyes flashed like sparks of burning copper.
“I beg your pardon,” said Bascom Hardy. His voice was sincere, at least in its undertone of fear.
Old Nathan relaxed and walked again to the water barrel. “Tell yer tale, Mister Hardy,” he said. “Tell yer tale.”
“I reckon Bynum knew his time or purty close to it,” Bascom Hardy resumed. “For nigh a month, he’d been sellin’ his notes and his land holdins—at a discount to shift ’em fast, like he’d gone out of his head!”
Hardy’s voice lowered from its tone of shrill disbelief. He bent forward and added, “But he turned it into gold, all his paper and land into gold; and there must ‘ve been a mort of it, rich as Bynum was!”
Old Nathan felt his skin tingling. There was nothing he could put a name to, no image or echo from the words his visitor had spoken; but there was something here waiting, and mayhap waiting for the cunning man himself. . . .
Old Nathan saw the image of gold coins tumbling across the surface of the rich man’s mind, as though the brown eyes were windows to Hardy’s thoughts. “Go on,” he said. “Tell yer tale, Bascom Hardy.”
The rocker still nodded from the vehemence with which the old man had risen from it; back and forth, a skritch and a squeal against the wear-polished pine floor.
Hardy blinked and returned to the present moment, but his voice was husky with memory as he said, “Bynum ‘n me, we didn’t git on, never had from childhood. We split Pappy’s holdings when he died, and I don’t mind tellin’ ye that Bynum would hev cheated me on the settlement—but I was too sharp fer him!”
“You were full blood kin, you and your brother?” Old Nathan asked suddenly.
Bascom Hardy blinked again. “Eh?” he said. “The same mother, you mean? Thet’s so, but I don’t see how it sig . . .”
His voice trailed off as he heard it echoing previous words.
Old Nathan reached into the air above and behind his head. His eyes were open but fixed somewhere far beyond the solid log walls of his cabin. He felt . . . and it was there, his fingers closing on the bone-scaled jackknife as they always did when he twisted them just right.
He wasn’t sure where the knife was or how he found it; but he did find it, this time and each time before, and perhaps the next time as well.
His visitor’s eyes narrowed. Hardy was sure that the knife had come from Old Nathan’s sleeve, or perhaps had been hidden all the time by the cunning man’s long knobby fingers . . . but it looked as though—