I took a fancy to her first time I ever seen that girl, not just because she was pretty, which she was, and that extra size made her twice as attractive for my money, but mainly for the reason that she was the best-natured person I ever knowed. It was just about impossible to rile that girl, and I always had a weakness for tolerant women. For example, she never had the slightest suspicion that that family had got at least a 300 per cent return on what little they done for her. After we was married, it was all I could do to keep her from going back to them every afternoon and doing their chores when she had finished with ours.
By the following year me and Olga had ourselves a kid and I got that house built I mentioned, a right nice dwelling place of all wood construction with a peaked roof and four rooms. It couldn’t yet compare with the Pendrakes’ residence but it was good for Denver. That baby Olga had was a boy and we named him Gustav after her Pa what was killed by the Santee, and even as an infant he looked exactly like a Swede with his corn-yellow hair and blue eyes.
My boyhood amongst the Cheyenne had give me this conviction I was shrewd, and not even that time in Missouri had altered it, for I reckon cleverness doesn’t apply to love. But it does to business, and I thought I was being clever. We had not ever had a written agreement to our partnership. Bolt used to mention that every Saturday night when he figured up the week’s take, subtracted the costs, and then divvied up what was left three ways, though after a while I observed that only I got a handful of cash on such occasions. Him and Ramirez preferred to let their money ride in the safe. When I commented on that, I was informed they “ploughed back their returns.” Bolt was a great one for using phrases of this type to explain every peculiarity.
“Then what do you use for your everyday money?” I asked. Ramirez laughed with his strong white teeth, but Bolt said soberly: “Credit, of course. We got civilization here now, Jack, which runs not upon money as such but rather the
“By this means they could even out the highs and lows of their savage economy and live according to the same standard the year around, lean times and fat, paying back in periods of good hunting what they put on credit in bad.”
Well, he had a lot more to say about the theory of business, and how him and Ramirez preferred to reinvest their shares in the store rather than walk about spending dollar by dollar. They had charge accounts at the barber shop and the saloon, etc., and as to most of their other needs, they took them from our own merchandise and entered a charge against themselves in the books, as opposed to my own practice of buying Olga some yardgoods, say, and putting the actual money for it in the cashbox, though I would of course take an owner’s discount.
But now as to that other thing he would mention so often: that our partnership was founded on no more than a handshake. He was right proud of this, whereas to me it was a cause of some worry. I guess why he spoke of it so often was that I suggested with about the same frequency that we get legal papers drawed up.
However, by this tactic they succeeded only in raising my suspicions to the point where I had to put my foot down as I did with that sign, and we hired a lawyer and he made up the papers by which my third was certified. Or at least that’s what I thought, for I studied them documents very carefully, being able to read as you know. But I reckon legality has a language all its own.
Olga was a great comfort to me, and one of the main reasons why she was is that she had never learned too much English, and I of course couldn’t speak a word of Swede. Not being able to talk much to each other, we got along wonderful, and never exchanged a cross word.
That kid of ours, little Gus, he was a right cunning infant, and I took pleasure in rocking his cradle with my foot, while he burbled and goo-gooed and suchlike as tiny things do, and across the small room Olga set with her mending and would grin in that pink Swedish fashion if I looked towards her and ask if I wanted to eat, for she was like an Indian in that she expected everybody to be hungry at all times.
Then one day in the late fall of ’64, Bolt and Ramirez suddenly blowed town, leaving me with all that credit of theirs to make good. For that is what our agreement done, I then discovered: give me sole legal responsibility for the business and all debts in its name, and I have already suggested to you that them fellows even put their haircuts and shaves on the company account.
