The Searchers by Alan LeMay

rug. This was called the grandmother
     room, because it was meant for somebody old, or sick, who needed to be kept warm. Nowadays it had a couple of rawhide-strung
     bunks for putting up visitors without heating the bunk house where the seasonal hands were housed.
    When the family had retired across the dog-trot, Amos and Mart dragged out a wooden tub for a couple of long-postponed baths.
     They washed what meager change of clothes they had, and hung the stuff on a line back of the stove to dry overnight. Their
     baggy long-handled underwear and footless socks seemed indecent, hung out in a room where Laurie lived, but they couldn’t
     help it.
    “What kind of letter you get?” Mart asked. The average saddle tramp never got a letter in his life.
    Amos shook out a pair of wet drawers, with big holes worn on the insides of the thigh, and hung them where they dripped into
     the woodbin. “Personal kind,” he grunted, finally.
    “Serves me right, too. Don’t know why I never learn.”
    “Huh?”
    “Nothing.”
    “I been fixing to tell you,” Amos began.
    “That ain’t needful.”
    “What ain’t?”
    “I know that letter ain’t none of my business. Because nothing is. I just set on other people’s horses. To see they foller
     along.”
    “I wasn’t studying on no letter. Will you leave a man speak? I say I made a deal with old Mathison.”
    Mart was silent and waited.
    “I got to be pushing on,” Amos said, picking his words. Passing out information seemed to hurt Amos worse every day
     he lived. “I won’t be around. So Mathison is going to run my cattle with his own. Being’s I can’t see to it myself.”
    “What’s he get, the increase?”
    “Why?”
    “No reason. Seemed the natural thing to ask, that’s all. I don’t give a God damn what you do with your stock.”
    “Mathison come out all right,” Amos said.
    “When do we start?”
    “You ain’t coming.”
    Mart thought that over. “It seems to me,” he began. His voice sounded thin and distant to himself. He started over too loudly.
     “It seems to me—”
    “What you hollering for?”
    “—we started out to look for Debbie,” Mart finished.
    “I’m still looking for her.”
    “That’s good. Because so am I.”
    “I just told you—by God, will you listen?” It was Amos’ voice raised this time. “I’m leaving you here!”
    “No, you ain’t.”
    “What?” Amos stared in disbelief.
    “You ain’t telling me where I stay!”
    “You got to live, ain’t you? Mathison’s going to leave you stay on. Help out with the work what you can, and you’ll know
     where your grub’s coming from.”
    “I been shooting our grub,” Mart said stubbornly. “If I can shoot for two, I can shoot for one.”
    “That still takes ca-tridges. And a horse.”
    Mart felt his guts drop from under his heart. All his life he had been virtually surrounded by horses; to ride one, you
     only had to catch it. Only times he had ever thought whether he owned one or not was when some fine fast animal, like one of
     Brad’s, had made him wish it was his. But Amos was right. Nothing in the world is so helpless as a prairie man afoot.
    “I set out looking for Debbie,” he said. “I aim to keep on.”
    “Why?”
    Mart was bewildered. “Because she’s my—she’s— ” He had started to say that Debbie was his own little sister. But in the moment
     he hesitated, Amos cut him down.
    “Debbie’s my brother’s young’n,” Amos said. “She’s my flesh and blood—not yours. Better you leave these things to
     the people concerned with ’em, boy. Debbie’s no kin to you at all.”
    “I—I always felt like she was my kin.”
    “Well, she ain’t.”
    “Our—I mean, her—her folks took me in off the ground. I’d be dead but for them. They even—”
    “That don’t make ’em any kin.”
    “All right. I ain’t got no kin. Never said I had. I’m going to keep on looking, that’s all.”
    “How?”
    Mart didn’t answer that. He