Now Staley lay on his back beside the fire staring at the sky, thankful that the bullet wound Bill Barrone had given him had healed and didn’t hurt any more. He put his hands on both sides of him into the deep grass and listened to the roar of the creek that tumbled past just a few feet away; he caught the blue flash of a jay as it darted from one tree to another above him. Half a dozen foot-long trout lay beside the fire. Back in the timber a young buck hung from a pine limb.
He said: “Tally.”
“I know,” she said. “Your stomach is crowding your backbone and your tapeworm is yelling for fodder. I’m hurrying just as fast as I can.”
“It ain’t that,” he said. “I been thinking.”
“Thinking?”
“Yeah. I decided we couldn’t live like this all our lives. We ought to live in a house, Tally. A home.”
She came over from the cook fire and kneeled in the grass beside him.
“You mean you want to settle down and go to work? We can’t have a home and children unless you work.”
He sat up. “Work?”
“Work.” She kissed him and pushed him back into the grass. “Now I’ll go finish supper while you think about your future.”
He grinned as she moved back to the fire, as graceful as a young doe. He guessed he really could do some work for a wife like her.
the end
About the Author
Wayne D. Overholser won three Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and has a long list of fine Western titles to his credit. He was born in Pomeroy, Washington, and attended the University of Montana, University of Oregon, and the University of Southern California before becoming a public schoolteacher and principal in various Oregon communities. He began writing for Western pulp magazines in 1936 and within a couple of years was a regular contributor to Street & Smith’s Western Story magazine and Fiction House’s Lariat Story magazine. Buckaroo’s Code (1947) was his first Western novel and remains one of his best. In the 1950s and 1960s, having retired from academic work to concentrate on writing, he would publish as many as four books a year under his own name or a pseudonym, most prominently as Joseph Wayne. The Violent Lant (1954), The Lone Deputy (1957), The Bitter Night (1961), and Riders of the Sundowns (1997) are among the finest of the Overholser titles. Bunch Grass (1955) and Land of Promises (1962) are among the best Joseph Wayne titles, and Law Man (1953) is a most rewarding novel under the Lee Leighton pseudonym. Overholser’s Western novels, whatever the byline, are based on a solid knowledge of the history and customs of the nineteenth-century West, particularly when set in his two favorite Western states, Oregon and Colorado. Many of his novels are first-person narratives, a technique that tends to bring an added dimension of vividness to the frontier experiences of his narrators and frequently, as in Cast a Long Shadow (1957) filmed as Cast a Long Shadow (United Artists, 1959), the female characters one encounters are among the most memorable. He wrote his numerous novels with a consistent skill and an uncommon sensitivity to the depths of human character. Almost invariably, his stories weave a spell of their own with their scenes and images of social and economic forces often in conflict and the diverse ways of life and personalities that made the American Western frontier so unique a time and place in human history.
Summer Warpath Page 16
