The Betrayal by Sabin Willett

Author:Sabin Willett [Willett, Sabin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82305-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

“Well, boy, the guests are a little antsy.”

“Usually the way it goes, ain’t it? Up late, in a hurry,” says sixteen-year-old Johnny Trapp.

“I’ll have to git ’em out to the road. Looks like you got to break camp and clean up. I’ll have to take the guests. Yep,” Trapp’s Uncle Frank goes on, sounding, as he so often does, as though he were having a conversation with both himself and whomever he was addressing.

“Ain’t that a surprise, Uncle Frank!” Johnny looks up and winks at his uncle, who always finds a way to stick him with the clean-up on the last day of a pack trip, always with a big smile across his baby face as he bustles through the camp. Johnny calculates that he will have the dutch oven and the griddle to wash up, the coffeepots and the hot-water pots. He looks around the camp at the three canvas sleep tents and the cook tents he’ll be striking. F&B Outfitters usually uses this campsite for its last night on a pack trip. It backs against the trees and looks out over a mountain meadow. To one side, Two Elk Brook flows gently. It almost always yields a trout or two, even to the dudes, and this morning one of them caught his limit.

“You gonna leave me Maxine and Rhonda?”

Uncle Frank is working his first chaw of the day around into his left cheek. “I’ll have to take Maxine,” he says, looking over to where the big bay nibbles at the sparse meadow grass with the other horses. “Have to take Maxine and the mules, yep. Leave you Rhonda, though.”

“Well, ya’ll better take the tents, then,” Johnny says.

They strike the camp and Johnny Trapp chats with the dudes, a bachelor party. They were pretty good company, and they had good fly rods, but only one of the four could fish as well as he could drink. This morning they’ve been keeping their voices down, their heads pounding from too much bourbon the night before.

He shakes each one’s hand as they mount up and wishes them well. His mind is already figuring as he watches them disappear into the trees. He’ll get through the cook stuff in a half hour, and then take Rhonda back a half mile to where he knows a good trout pool—one he doesn’t share with the guests. The sooner he gets back to the stables, the sooner they’ll set him to airing out tents and grooming the horses, and the sooner his mother will want to know if his homework is done. One more day of Columbus Day weekend, he thinks. No sense rushing it.

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