Quickly, he gassed up the car, tore off the thin receipt to shove into his pocket, then closed the gas cap before heading inside for a quick bathroom break. After that, he'd grab some snacks for the road, as he was already caffeinated enough. Some beef jerky would do him good, and maybe some powdered donuts, which he loved.
Inside, the little convenience store was a tad warmer, but it was poorly stocked, as if the owner imagined that nobody would be driving anywhere on Christmas and would therefore not need anything to eat. Clayton bought his food for the road, turning up his nose at the two hot dogs sliding greasily across the metal rollers, paid for his stuff, and went back out to the car.
Once again, his brief time inside of a gas station seemed to have encouraged the weather to turn colder and snowier. The whole sky was full of sharp white flecks coming down at an angle, and the wind, while it had not picked up, was now sharp and cold as a knife blade.
He had at least a two-hour drive to Lusk, though in this weather, with the roads getting slippery, it would probably be a three-hour drive, at least. From there, it was probably another three hours to Harlin, Colorado, where he kept his small apartment. He'd promised to make it to Parker that day, but it was taking too long. If he made it home by midnight, surely he couldget to Parker the next day, which would make it Christmas Eve, which would be fine.
The wrench in the works was the most recent caller, Kyle Tobin, a guy who said he had the knife and sheath and who also said he didn't want the reward. He seemed to think that Clayton's coming to get the knife was a reasonable prospect, so he probably lived somewhere that Clayton could get to without too much trouble.
But as Kyle's exact location was an unknown, at the moment, Clayton did not feel hopeful. This whole thing was turning out to be a shitstorm, and he was going to spend hours on the road for no purpose, and worse, he was going to let Sarah and her family down.
He climbed back into his now icy cold car, started the engine, and waited while it warmed up before he turned the heater on. He tore open some beef jerky and gnawed on it. As he sat there shivering, his phone rang, and he tapped the button on the steering wheel to answer it. Five minutes on the dot.
"Hello," said Clayton.
"Hello, Mr. Nash?" asked the caller. It was Kyle. Of course.
"Don't call me Mr. Nash, that's my dad. Call me Clayton," said Clayton, though he didn't put too much friendliness in his voice, as he didn't want Mr. Kyle Tobin to get the wrong idea.
This was not a friendly arrangement. It was Clayton doing his best at putting everything right, whatever it took.
"Okay, so here's what happened," said Kyle, starting in on his story as though he and Clayton were old friends, and naturally Clayton would want to know about everything. This guy was way too talkative, considering he was conversing with a complete stranger that he'd allegedly stolen something from.
"I'm at this arts and crafts festival in Ft. Collins just today," said Kyle. "I drove there to look at all the cool things, to buy some homemade beef jerky, you know, the kind the mountain men make by hand? Anyway, I always like to imagine I'll go tothe next mountain man rendezvous in the summer. There's like three in the state of Colorado alone, can you imagine?"
"No," said Clayton, almost mumbling as he swallowed his beef jerky, unable to stop himself from thinking how much better it would taste if it had been made by hand, rather than by machine in a plant somewhere in New Jersey.
"They sell stuff too, you know," Kyle went on, his voice seeming to warm to his subject. "You can buy a fringed jacket made from buffalo hide, you can buy a three-legged cast iron frying pan, you can buy soap made from goat's milk, all that good stuff."
"Uh-huh," said Clayton.
He switched on the heater full blast, with most of the air aimed at the inside of the windshield. He then pulled onto I-90, which was, thankfully, plowed, though the wind sent more snow spinning across the four-lane highway.
He'd get to follow the bigger, more well-tended road for a while, and it made him feel hopeful about the rest of the drive, but he knew the truth. At Sundance, Wyoming, he'd turn south and be at the mercy of the elements in the worst way. At Sundance, there was no turning back.
"Well, anyway," said Kyle, continuing. "I'm walking by one of those booths that sell the really expensive stuff, you know?"
"No, I don't know," said Clayton. "I don't go to arts and crafts festivals, so I don't know."
"Oh," said Kyle, and the tone in his voice seemed to indicate that he thought Clayton was missing out on something really good. "Well, the booth had the good stuff, the real stuff. Antiques. Classy replicas, hunks of quartz, Native American pottery and beaded belts and stuff. In the corner of the glass case was a bone-handled Bowie knife, and beside it was this antique beaded sheath. The little card said it was hand done using actual Indian beads on brain-tanned deerskin, and I about lost my mind, as you can imagine."
Clayton opened his mouth to say something sarcastic about arts and crafts and overly priced supposed antiques and dreamers who wanted to live in the past when he stopped. At the same time, he had held that hand-crafted article in his own hands. Even though he wasn't much for history, the sense of what those beads had gone through, the beauty of Ricky's work, and the story behind it, of Adeline making such a wonderful pattern, had not gone lost on him.
For the first time since Kyle had started telling him his story, Clayton thought he might begin to understand why he was telling it.
"Okay, go on," said Clayton. He tore off another hunk of beef jerky with his teeth, keeping one hand on the wheel, squinting at the sky as he drove.
"It was priced at seventeen hundred dollars. But I had the case of the wants so bad, I decided then and there to cut back on my goat's milk subscription just to have that sheath in my hands."
"Goat milk?" asked Clayton, rolling his eyes even though there was nobody to see. "Oh, brother."
"Hey," said Kyle. "Goat milk is good for you and it tastes delicious."
"Whatever," said Clayton. "So you bought it."
"Yes, I charged it." Kyle gave a little laugh, as though embarrassed at his own foolishness, which he most certainly should be, for who paid that much for something like that? Well, software engineers who worked from home, apparently.
But if Kyle was willing to pay that much, it might explain why the one woman caller had demanded one thousand dollars reward; the value of the item, which had been lost on Clayton, was now coming into importance. Uncle Bill, who didn't give a damn about money, had given Clayton something quite old and valuable, and in high demand in the mountain man world.
