Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Sam tilted his head. “Mayhap,” he said.

Jason slid out of the window. “How is he?” he asked.

“He?”

“Fellow I shot,” said Jason.

“Oh,” said Sam, “you’re interested. That’s something. Wouldn’t have thought that of a Thistledown boy. Particularly one as you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Sam smiled and set down in the window where Jason had been. “You shot a man today. You shot him right, just where you needed, to take him down but not kill him. And then you held him—kept that gun on him steady until my men could show up.”

“Wasn’t much else to do.”

“Well you did the right thing—exactly the right thing—and that is something most fellows would not have been able to. I know because I’ve seen how most fellows get when they start to shooting. Some of them keep shooting, doing all sorts of harm and you got to calm them down or shoot ’em to make ’em stop. Others—well, they shoot the once and miss, and then start shaking so bad they can’t do it again and they get themselves shot often as not as well.

“And then there’s another sort. Like you.”

“Like me.”

“Ice in your veins, boy. I could tell the minute I showed up, and looked you in the eye.”

“What did you see?”

“What I’ve seen in your pa’s eyes.” Sam was nodding slowly as he looked at Jason, and things got quiet. Jason did not take the bait.

“You going to tell me how that fellow’s doing?” he said. “The one I shot so well?”

Sam smiled and chuckled deep in his chest. “He’ll be fine soon as the doctor sobers up enough to work on him. Then I will talk to him. We found some other sheets in the orchard—dropped, like their owners heard the gunshots, dropped the costumes and bolted—not far off. Did you happen to hear or see anyone else?”

“No. Just him.”

Sam nodded. “Figured you’d say if you had. That wasn’t what I came here for, though.”

“What did you come for?”

“Tell you thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks for keeping that matter between us. And thanks for taking care of Ruth. That was a near thing.”

“Well, you are welcome sir,” said Jason.

“And son,” he said as he pushed himself off the windowsill and headed for the door, “you might want to take my advice and learn that two-step. More reliable way to impress a young lady than shooting folks with a borrowed six-gun, you want my opinion.”

§

The second visitor was a mystery—just a knock at the door, and a wax-sealed envelope slipped beneath it. By the time Jason opened the door, the footsteps were going down the stairs.

So Jason opened the seal and pulled out two folded sheets of paper and an empty, unaddressed envelope. One sheet was blank, one was full of fine handwriting. He did not have to look to the signature at the bottom to know who it was from.

§

Jason read the letter from Ruth Harper twice before he could put pen to paper and make up a reply. Lord, but the girl was verbose. She used up not one but four sentences describing how much she liked being kissed by him and kissing him back. She felt less kindly toward her father, and she took three more sentences to say how awful he was for making Jason leave town so fast. She was also cross with Miss Louise Butler (although on this she did not elaborate), which was why she had imposed upon Harris, one of the servants, to deliver her letter instead. He would be by later in the evening, to collect any reply that Jason might wish to write, which was what the blank sheet of paper and empty envelope were for. She apologized for not sending along a stick of wax, but it would not have fit under the door.

Jason did reply, but not to any of what she had written, other than to say that he had liked kissing Ruth Harper fine too and hoped they might do so again before he left.

On the final points of her letter he was more specific:

You are welcome for saving your life, although I should thank you for loading the gun or else I would be dead. I am sorry you lost your Colt.

I do not want to go to the quarantine again without a gun at least. But I will meet you at the place you wrote in your letter this night and we can talk about it.

And then he set the pencil down and thought for a moment and wrote:

I am terrified of this too but you were terrified of kissing so I will be brave like you.

He thought about changing that sentence—it was not at all as pretty as the sentences that Ruth had set down in her long letter, and it was not made any prettier by his awful handwriting. And there was that other question—one that he should have an answer to by now. So he wrote his name at the bottom, folded up the note paper, slipped it into the envelope, and settled down to wait for the servant’s return.

§