To Charles Stanton, there was nothing similar to a decent, close shave.
He stood that morning before the large mirror tied to the side of James Reed’s cart. Toward each path, the grassland spread out like a cover, sometimes undulated by wind: mile after continuous mile of bison grass, disturbed simply by the red tower of Chimney Rock, standing like a guard somewhere out there. If he squinted, the cart train seemed as though kids’ toys dispersed in the tremendous, ceaseless brush—unstable, useless, insignificant.
He went to the mirror and steadied the sharp edge under his jaw, recollecting that one of his granddad’s #1 articulations: A mischievous man takes cover behind a facial hair growth, similar to Lucifer. Stanton knew a lot of men who were cheerful enough with an all-around sharpened blade, even some who utilized an ax, yet for him, nothing would do except for a straight razor. He didn’t contract from the vibe of cold metal against his throat. Indeed, they sort of enjoyed it.
“I didn’t think you were a vain man, Charles Stanton”— a voice dug out from a deficit him—”yet if I didn’t have the foggiest idea about any better, I may contemplate whether you weren’t appreciating yourself.” Edwin Bryant came toward him with a tin mug of espresso in his grasp. The grin blurred rapidly. “You’re dying.”
Stanton peered down at the razor. It was streaked with red. In the mirror, he saw a line of ruby at his throat, a vast three-inch cut where the tip of his sharp edge had been. The razor was sharp to the point that he hadn’t felt a thing. Stanton snapped the towel from his shoulder and squeezed it to the injury. “My hand probably slipped,” he said.
“Plunk down,” Bryant said. “Allow me to investigate it. I have a little clinical preparing, you know.”
Stanton evaded Bryant’s outstretched hand. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. A setback.” That was this terrible excursion. One sudden “incident” after another.
Bryant shrugged. “If you say as much. Wolves can smell blood from two miles away.”
“How would I be able to help you?” Stanton inquired. He realized that Bryant hadn’t descended the cart train just to talk, not when they should burden up. Around them, the normal morning mayhem spun. Teamsters crowded the bulls, the ground thundering underneath the creatures’ weight. Men destroyed their tents and stacked them into their carts, or covered out flames underneath the sand. The air was loaded up with the sound of kids yelling as they conveyed cans of water for the day’s drinking and washing.
Stanton and Bryant hadn’t known each other long yet had immediately fostered a companionship. The gathering Stanton had been going with earlier—a little cart train out of Illinois, comprising for the most of the Donner and Reed families—had as of late got together with a lot bigger gathering drove by a resigned military man, William Russell, outside Independence, Missouri. Edwin Bryant had been one of the main individuals from the Russell gathering to acquaint himself and appeared with an incline toward Stanton, maybe because they were both single men in a cart train loaded with families.
By all accounts, Edwin Bryant was Stanton’s inverse. Stanton was tall, solid without attempting to be. He had been commended on his attractive features for as long as he can remember. It had all come from his mom, as should have been obvious. He had her thick, wavy dim earthy colored hair and heartfelt eyes.
Thy looks are a blessing from Satan, kid, so you may entice others to sin. Another of his granddad’s declarations. Whenever he’d crushed Stanton’s face with a belt clasp, perhaps expecting to pursue out Satan he saw there. It hadn’t worked. Stanton had kept every one of his teeth, and his nose had recuperated. The scar on his brow had blurred. Satan, supposedly, had remained.
Bryant was presumably 10 years more established. A long time as a newspaperman had left him milder than the greater part of the men on the excursion, who were ranchers or woodworkers or smithies, men who earned enough to pay the rent through hard actual work. He had frail eyes and required a couple of exhibitions continually. He had an unendingly tousled air like his contemplations were in every case somewhere else. There was no rejecting that he was sharp, however, presumably the most astute man in the gathering. He’d confessed to having put in a couple of years as a specialist’s disciple when he was youthful, however, he would not like to be squeezed into administration as the camp doctor.