Brass in the Desert by Richard S. Wheeler

Author:Richard S. Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-07-12T15:23:47+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Gladstone Brass had a new mission in life, which was to prevent Wet Agnes from washing anyone else’s feet. Washed feet were the source of all happiness, he discovered. He hadn’t had happy feet since he was in his twenties. He had forgotten what happy feet felt like. He had ignored his unhappy feet for decades, ignored their howling, overriding their pain, expressing scorn for the dirt and grime that caked them.

But then Wet Agnes came along and restored them to their natural beauty, pink and clean and healthy, and with most of the ache scrubbed out of them. All he could think of was having Agnes wash them regularly, before and after his prospecting trips, maybe even once every two or three weeks.

But he didn’t know how to achieve this. If she washed his feet and made them happy, she would wash other feet and make them happy, too. He didn’t want her washing the feet of Bitter Bowler, who deserved only the most miserable of feet, feet that tormented him with every step. And Bowler was simply at the top of the list. He didn’t want her washing anyone’s feet except his own—and that only in secret, where no one could see her soap up his toes and scrub and polish his toenails.

The task was daunting. All prospectors had unhappy feet. There was not a prospector in Nevada, except for himself, who sprang along on happy feet, in comfortable boots, feet that smelled like roses or lilacs. And there was Agnes, willing to perform this service on them all, or so he imagined. Maybe she was just doing him a favor. Or herself a favor, since his feet were offending her. But now he wanted to post a no trespassing sign near her watering hole.

He had business to attend to, namely finding ore and selling it to sustain himself. It was a hard life, looking for ore in an arid waste, and no one ever thanked him for sacrificing his life to such a purpose.

“Sylvester, if your feet smelled the way mine did, would Wet Agnes wash them?” he asked. “No, she did it for me alone. She’s in love with me. That’s it. She scrubbed my feet because she cared about them—and about me.”

Sylvester butted him, which was a sure sign of disagreement, if not mockery.

“You are toying with extinction,” Gladstone replied.

He reached the foot of Portuguese Peak and realized he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do next. He could not stay at Wet Agnes’ another day, because she wanted another dollar for man or beast. So there he was, back in the arid wastes of Nevada again. He stared across the flat basin, and up at distant ridges, and south toward Tonopah—but that didn’t help him. His lifelong goal was to avoid work, and since he lacked the proper equipment, thanks to Bitter Bowler, he didn’t have to work. So he wouldn’t pry ore out of the few little deposits he knew of, and trade it for food.

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