anyone to mind. He had a way of standing with his thumbs hooked in his belt and his chin tipped back surveying a room as though he already owned the air in it. To Dale Coburn, the price tag on a thing was the whole truth of it.
He had never in his life been able to see a value that did not come with a number stamped on the side, and he had certainly never seen one in a Callaway. The safe came up near the end, after the tractors, the tools, and a church pew nobody wanted. Two men wheeled it out on a hand truck, and the room got a good look at it. It was an ugly thing.
There was no arguing that. The fire had scorched it black and warped the door so that one corner pulled away from the frame. The brass dial had gone the color of an old penny. It looked exactly like what the catalog said it was: a ruined box that no one had been able to open in 16 years.
“Contents unknown,” the auctioneer said, and a few men chuckled because everyone knew the only contents of a hotel safe sixteen years cold were soot and disappointment. “We’ll start the bidding at—oh, let’s say twenty-five dollars.” Nobody moved. A safe you couldn't open was worth less than the scrap in it, and the scrap in this one would cost more to haul than it would bring. Arthur raised his hand.
It was a small motion, but the room caught it the way a quiet room catches any movement, and heads turned. He felt the attention land on him, the particular weight of it, and he kept his arm up. “Twenty-five from the young man,” the auctioneer said, and there was a thread of amusement in his voice that he did not bother to hide. For a moment, Arthur thought it might be that simple.
Then Dale Coburn turned, took the measure of the boy with the raised hand, and a slow grin spread under his mustache. He did not want the safe. Everyone in the barn could see he did not want the safe. What he wanted was the sport of it, and a Callaway boy spending money he plainly could not afford was the best sport to come through Harlan County in a long while.
“Thirty,” Coburn called out, lazy as a man swatting a fly. The crowd stirred, delighted. Arthur's jaw tightened. He had $90 and not a cent more, and Coburn had a Lincoln parked across two spaces, but the boy had not walked all the way out to the county road to walk home empty-handed.