California Bloodstock by Terry McDonell Page A

rain. He wanted the cool relief of mist and fog on his face and in his lungs. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that he might be dying. But imagine how Millard felt.
41
Millard
    Poor Millard. Most of the time he was like an empty house: nobody home. His brain sailed back and forth in the space of his head like a phantom trapeze. Dumb habits dominated and he never felt much one way or another, with one obvious exception. He loved his brother.
    Millard would have led apes into hell for Galon, and now he was lost, orphaned, like a child told to sit in the corner without the faintest understanding of what he had done wrong. He watched Galon disappear into the brittle golden hills and it occurred to him that the best way to get him back would be to buy him. Galon had always wanted to be rich, so if Millard got a lot of money and could buy Galon whatever he wanted….It is not an unusual line of reasoning even today.
    Thus, Millard Burgett, at the age of fifty-nine, set out to make his fortune. He rode east, toward Sutter’s Fort and what turned out to be a golden future.

TEN
42
Counsel
    Great dark birds sailed huge and aloof on the hot wind above the clusters of blue oak and digger pine that sheltered Counsel’s place on the dry, rocky approach to Tejon Pass. Taya and T. D. Jr. rode in, sweating and winded, late in the afternoon.
    Everyone around Counsel’s had a frontier mind. You could tell by the way each could carry on long and complicated conversations without the aid of another person. The shrewdest spoke of themselves only in the third person, which sounded pretty clever until you spoke to Counsel himself. He was special, a truly superior frontier mind.
    In his travels, his bouncing around on the frontier to establish one trading venture after another over twenty-five years, Counsel had come to believe that conversation, talk, was not simply cheap. It was alsodangerous. Words were weapons that men used to trick and dominate each other, especially in the trading business. If he let another man impress him as to the worth of, say, a bundle of beaver pelts, it inevitably cost him more money. And if he made the worse mistake of talking about himself, sooner or later it came back to undermine him. Better misunderstood than to let on how your mind works, he had decided. Thus, he never told stories, and more important, he let nothing he heard impress him.
    I couldn’t care less
he had found to be a most useful phrase and over the years he had refined it. First by shortening it to a sly
I couldn’t care
, and then, in what he considered a major breakthrough, he had honed it into verbal shorthand with
care nothing.
Eventually, when he reached California, he had hit on the ultimate:
care.
    Yes, it gave him the perfect image. That one simple word used alone, Counsel found, communicated a disdain of disarming power. When Taya and T. D. Jr. showed up that afternoon asking about Buckdown his response was predictable.
    Care.
    What’s this care? Taya wanted to know. But it was no use. Try as she might, she could get nothing more from Counsel. Even T. D. Jr.’s elegant attempts to reason with the trader were met with the same monosyllabic response.
    The trappers who witnessed the exchange found it hilarious and volunteered nothing for fear of cutting short what was shaping up to be a real howl. If it had not been for Counsel’s wife, Taya and T. D. Jr. might have learned nothing. When she returned from herwood gathering and found Taya almost pleading with her husband, she put an end to the foolishness.
    Buckdown is in the North, she said, but he is probably crazy. There are jokes about him.
    With that, the trappers figured that the fun was up to them, and proceeded to tell each other Buckdown jokes.
    Did you hear that Buckdown won’t eat tongue anymore?
    No, how come?
    He says it ain’t clean to eat anything that comes out of an animal’s mouth.
    Oh, yeah, well then what does he eat?
    Eggs.
    —
    Taya and T. D.