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Chapter One
The Pine Box
I was hiding in the tall weeds. It was about the only place on the desert to hide from everybody. I remember when we first came to Blowfly, Nevada, my dad squinted one eye at the flat countryside and said, "Jake, I believe if you climbed a tree, you could see clear to Mexico, if you could find a tree."
I looked up at the hot, windy sky and watched a lone chicken hawk drifting like a speck of dust, hunting. Yesterday there had been a pair of them. I wondered whathad happened to the other. Someone might have taken a shot at it. I wondered if birds of prey grieved.
I turned over and thought about what was going to happen to me and to Dad's dog, Jim Ugly.
Jim Ugly was a big sandy mongrel, part elkhound, part something else, and a large helping of short-eared timber wolf. There was wolf in his throat, too, for he never barked. He might yip or bay or wolf-howl, but mostly he was silent. I'd never seen such a quiet, keep to-himself dog. You just never knew when he was going to behave like a dog or like a wolf.
Dad never got around to naming him. He had just called the dog Amigo, which means "friend" in Spanish, and sometimes Jim Amigo, but I never called him that. The mongrel never much liked me and I never much liked him, and out of spite I hung the name Jim Ugly on him.
He was a one-man dog--Dad's dog. And anytime I got too close to my father, there were Jim Ugly's yellow wolf eyes glaring like heat lightning.
Dad was buried less than a week ago, the morning of June 3, 1894. Jim Ugly was left to me, and me to Jim Ugly to get along as best we could. I'd hardly seen him since the funeral. He'dturn up once in a while, but mostly he kept to himself somewhere.
"If you won't shoot that infernal mutt, I will!"
It was my cousin Aurora, who was full grown, and her gambling man husband, Axie. She was always yelling that Axie was born tired and raised lazy, but I liked him. They were walking back toward the house and didn't know I was close by in the weeds. Dad and me had come to stay with them in Blowfly, where they were homesteading and Axie was growing about a million chickens. Who'd think to look for Dad on a chicken farm? He'd be safe.
Safe from that crazy yellowleg who was tracking him with a Colt army revolver. When I dreamed nightmares, I dreamed of the cavalry sergeant with the wide yellow stripes running down the sides of his blue pants. He couldn't still be in the army, not with a brown bowler hat cocked on his head, but he still wore his yellowleg pants stuffed into his boot tops.
After the funeral Aurora decided it was up to her to bring me up. But I just wanted to be left alone. I could bring myself up.
"He's the boy's dog now, Aurora," said Axie. "You can't shoot it."
"But that mongrel wolf is a sheep killer!" Aurora shouted.
"There's no proof"
"Ed Rippy saw him pull down a sheep, and he'll sue if we don't get rid of the mutt.
"Ed is a liar."
Aurora's voice had a lot of natural screech in it. "We can't keep a sheep-killing dog! I'll shoot the creature myself, Axie."
"Calm down. That dog's all your uncle left Jake."
"Except the diamonds."
"There are no diamonds, Aurora."
Someone in San Francisco had put a twenty-five-hundred-dollar bounty on Dad's head over some missing diamonds. "If I could find out who it was offering that money, I'd turn myself in and collect it myself," Dad had remarked in his rich, soft-edged voice.
At first the price on his head didn't seem to worry him. San Francisco was easy to stay out of. But not long after, we were crossing a muddy street in Monterey, where he had me in boarding school, and the yellowleg started blasting away at him. Dad shoved me down in the mud in the yelling and confusion the bounty hunter disappeared.
A lead ball had lodged in Dad's right shoulder, but what made him so lightning-mad was that the yellowleg had come so close to shooting me. "Jake," he'd said, "Pack your mother's picture, and let's make ourselves hard to find."
Jim Ugly. Copyright © by Sid Fleischman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
