West of Nowhere

by Alan Lemay

  "Stand to your partners!"

  Jean Campbell sprang up, caught Curt Webb by the wrists, and pulled him to his feet. Nobody else moved, and those two, just those two alone, dancedd something that was partly square and partly improvisation.

  Curt Webb danced constrainedly, his powerful shoulders looking hulking and awkward in his black coat. But the slim, quick-spirited Jean danced like a brightening flame. Her red-glowing hair tossed loose about the black silk muffler at her throat, and she clicked the puncheon floor with the high heels of boots that were the envy of every cowhand in the Silver Bow.

  Presently some of the others joined them-Johnny Bassett and Sigrid Norgaard, Rees Butler and Charline Bassett.

  Sigrid Norgaard was tall and very lovely, but it was Charline Bassett, that wild, hard-riding girl who had been reared in the saddle, who was able to help Jean pick up the spirits of them all.

  Steve Bassett, at seventeen the best roper in the Silver Bow, got Helga Norgaard to dance with him as Jud went into "Powder River Buck."

  And now Grandpap Noah Bassett, a little bald-headed man with a face like a carved walnut shell, got himself a pair of axe handles and began a syncopated drumming on a pack box. The fiddle, astonishingly, began to hold its own against the roar of the norther. Jean Campbell, whose spirit was sister to flame, was dancing as Jud had never seen her dance, and the flash of her defiance was spreading to the others. There was something fantastic, but glorious, too, in the vitality of those youngsters, dancing under the storm.

  The pack-box drum ranted and hammered; the fiddle was singing its heart out. Pouring himself into his work, Jud Hyatt did not realize that he played an hour, and a second hour. He played until his fiddle got hold of them all, and picked them up, and carried them along. He played until even old Abe Campbell got up and danced with Ma Campbell. At last, when Jud looked at Luther Kendricks again, he saw that the old man's heavy face was relaxed, and the drill-hard eyes that had seemed unable to smile were smiling.

  But even with Jean Campbell to help him, he could not carry them forever. Presently, when he saw that Jean was tiring, he found himself thinking of another dance they had had in the Silver Bow, three years before, in celebration of the arrival of Abe Campbell's first big white-face herd. Once, while they were bringing that herd up from the old Nations, Jud had ridden thirty-six hours foodless and thirsty, back trailing a little bunch of eight or nine that had got off from them some place. All that, years of it and now unless the storm turned....

  The tune he was playing came to end, and Jud Hyatt was straining his ears to hear if the changing timbre of the norther's roar suggested a swing of the wind. No one spoke; all the rest were listening, too. The tension of waiting for that improbable change of wind had become unbearable. Suddenly Campbell got up and lighted a lantern.

  "Abe, you're not...?"

  "I'm going out to look at the thermometer, and the wind."

  Luther Kendricks spoke for the first time in an hour. "It's been sounding to me as if she might be turning."

  "She had to turn!" There was a strange steady surety in Abe Campbell's voice. It was as if he believed that his own faith, bred of bitter necessity, could itself have turned the storm.

  Jud Hyatt went out with Abe Campbell. The thermometer hung in front of the house, but because the house faced the north the Silver Bow was on that side they didn't dare open the big front door to let the storm blast in. They went out the back way and fought their way around the house, the lantern sheltered under Abe's sheepskin coat.

  At first, as they came out on the south side, Jud thought the wind was as savage as before. At the corner the full force of the norther struck him bodily backward, snatching the breath from his throat. He struggled on along the wall of the house and gained the front. There was no thermometer to be found upon the north wall. When Abe Campbell couldn't find it with his mittened hands, he half uncovered the lantern, and in the moment before the wind blasted out the shielded light they saw that the wind had taken their thermometer downcountry with the lost stock.

  Just outside the door of the ranch house, in about the place where the thermometer should have been, stood a black hulk the carcass of some lone steer that had barged, blind and driven, against the logs. There it had stood, resting, with the points of its horns in the wood, and there it had died on its feet, stiffening in the whip of the storm.

  Abe Campbell was trying to shout something in Jud's ear, and, although the words were lost, Jud managed to guess what Abe was trying to say, and a sudden stir of hope jerked up his head. For a moment or two he stood trying to compare the set and power of the norther with his memory of it three hours before. The fury of the norther was terrible yet, but it seemed to him that its force had Lesserted.

  Abe Campbell, obviously of the same opinion, was pounding him with a sledge-like fist. If their judgment was correct, it meant that the power of the norther was broken. They groped for each other in the bitter cold, and shook hands, then Campbell led the way back around the house at a run.

  When they had got the kitchen door shut again, Hyatt saw that the fighting light had come back into Abe's eyes. "She's broke," Campbell said. "She's turned and done!"

  Jud Hyatt wasn't sure yet. "That steer," he said, "you recognized that steer that's dead in front?"

  "No!"

  "That's that old longhorn leader."

  Abe Campbell knew what animal he meant. The old steer was a Texan; he had been a marker in their herds for a long time. "Maybe so."

  They went back into the main room. "She's broke!" Campbell told them all. "She's playing out, and we'll have the ponies under saddle before noon!"

  For a moment the others were silent, as if they had been dazed by the punishing of the storm. "It comes too late," Rees Butler said at last. "These many hours, the bulk of the herds have been stiff and down."

  Old Abe turned on him furiously. "Down, hell! These cattle know every foot of the Silver Bow ranges. If they was new on the range, they'd be finished. But they're not new. There isn't a gulch nor a bank nor a willow windbreak that isn't sheltering its cows tonight!"

  "Seems funny," Jud said, "that there's none under the Hat Crick bluffs."

  "I can't explain that," his boss admitted. "But I tell you they know their range. There'll be losses, sure, but they'll be little losses that we'll never feel. We'll find the bulk of them standing safe in the Sauk Breaks!"

  There was a silence. "Well," said Grandpap Bassett, without conviction, "they'd better be in the Sauk Breaks."

  The house so creaked and complained, with everything loose about it taking on a voice of its own, that they did not hear a fumbling rattle at the kitchen door, or guess that any living thing was there, until a cold blast ripped through the house. Abe Campbell, moving quickly to shut the door against the wind, let out a great shout as he reached the kitchen.

  "Liefl In God's name...."

  As Abe got the door shut, they all crowded into the kitchen to see for the second time that night a man who had undertaken to travel in the storm.

  Lief Norgaard, not so tall as his daughters, was squarely and massively built, with great powerful hands that could pick up a horse by the hocks and set him over into the traces. He moved stiffly and clumsily now, staggered by exhaustion. His feet were bundles, for he had cut his saddle blanket in two and wrapped the halves about his boots.

  He said hoarsely: "My pony give down out here within the half mile. Good thing you had the door open, minute ago. I'd have missed the house, for sure."

  Sigrid put her arms around her father's neck, beginning to cry, but he gently put her away and began unwrapping himself. There were great clots of ice in his mustache and in his chestnut beard.

  "Man, man," said Abe Campbell, "what ails you, to come through the storm?"

  "I was down at the south fence, cutting wire, like you know...so's the cattle could drift through, in place of piling up on the fence to die. I holed up in the storm shack for a while, but the roof blew free and a wall come in
, and I couldn't keep any fire there. So I come on, following the fence." His voice was weary, dead. "We're finished, Abe. Cutting the wire was a waste of time."

  "Finished? You mean...?"

  "The big end of the cattle is already dead. Along the drift line they're piled up by the hundred. Half of 'em was dead, some on their feet, some down, even before I come with the wire cutters. Even them that was alive couldn't be quirted on."

  Abe Campbell said: "I thought the Sauk Breaks...."

  Lief Norgaard flared up at him, his voice rising with a bitter rebellion. "Sauk Breaks, hell! All you'll find in the Sauk Breaks is them that died there! We don't own fifty head of live cattle to the brand. I've been there, and I've seen, and I know! In all the world before there's never been such a cruel night."

  They stood and looked at him, nobody having anything to say. This, then, was the end, utter and final. The end to even Abe Campbell's stubborn faith. Now the storm could turn and break and die, or never come it would all be the same to the people here.

  At last, after many moments, Ma Campbell turned automatically to the stove, getting coffee for Lief, and something for him to eat. Abe Campbell moved slowly toward the main room.

  The others mostly followed Abe. They moved silently, like people struck dumb and stupid by the finishing off of hope.

  Suddenly Jean Campbell broke. She clung to Jud Hyatt, tears running down her cheeks. "It can't be true...it can't! We mustn't let it! You're the only thing I've ever wanted in all...."

  Abe Campbell called to her from the door. "Jean," he said in a hard voice.

  She stiffened, shook her head as if to clear her eyes, and wiped the tears from her face. As she turned to follow her father out of the kitchen, she was composed and her head was up.

  Jud Hyatt walked after her, aimlessly. He looked about him, thinking idly that this was the last time he would see these people together here. He was noticing casual, pointless things. Abe Campbell's gun rack. Stock saddles piled in the corner. Jean's hair, like a sullen flame against the silvergray of the peeled logs.

  Something else was behind Jean, behind the log wall. As if he were looking through the solid logs, he remembered that black hulk that stood there the frozen leader steer, grotesque evidence of the savagery of the night.

  Suddenly Jud Hyatt angered, somehow caught between his desire for the girl and the pressure of that frozen steer that stood horn-locked against the outer wall. Driven, he caught up his fiddle again and gave a long wildcat wail as he dragged the bow across the strings. Everybody looked at him, startled, and he began to grin, a little crazily, out of the white heat of his anger. Then abruptly he began to play again.

  Jud had a face that was always grinning, and anger could not wipe that grin off. It put a kind of craziness into the grin, making him look like a man who could be shot away bit by bit, and still keep coming back for more, not knowing he was licked even when he was dead. That same crazy grinning recklessness had, in different ways, its counterpart in them all, only temporarily subdued. They were of several races, but of one frontier. A group of people who had no common ancestry or tradition, but something else that could bring them closer together than that --a concealed courage, a resistance to misfortune that marked them as the material of a new breed the breed that was called American, once.

  "Stand to your partners!"

  For a little longer they stood uncertain. Then Curt Webb began to laugh, a wild roaring laugh that ended in a hazing cowboy yell. Curt looked about him and saw that Jean was laughing, too, unsteadily. He caught her up with an arm about her waist, and spun on his heel, swinging the girl clear off the floor.

  Jud Hyatt set up a long yell answering Curt's, above the squalling of the fiddle, above the continued voice of the storm. "To hell with it!" he shouted. "What's couple of thousand cows?" It was strange to hear that from Jud Hyatt, who had given all that was in him to save the herds. "Leave 'em all die! Leave 'em all blow over the hill!"

  Abruptly something broke, there in that log house under the storm. Charline Bassett pulled Rees out into the middle and made him dance, and Steve caught up Sigrid Norgaard. Abe and Ma Campbell joined them. Suddenly Jean Campbell dropped Curt Webb, ran across to Luther Kendricks, and made him dance with her. Curt Webb began shouting the dance calls.

  The thing that had broken in that big dim room was the grip of disaster. Strangely, abruptly, it had cracked away, unable to hold them any longer, now that the last of their hope was gone. The fiddle ripped and sawed, and, although it was but a thin voice under the diapason of the tormented prairie, its song was the soul of something else that was the master of disaster.

  After all, those old square dances had something. They were dances full of swing and drive, dances of motion and liberated energy. In those people was the vitality of a thousand miles of prairie soil the soil that had supported ten million buffalo and, now that the buffalo were gone, did not know what to do with all that vitality, but was destined to support a nation. The bitter lash of disaster could not beat back the upwelling thrust of that waiting power. "Big Tom Bowlin," as they danced it now, diverted into a defiance, the very energy that the ebbing storm had spent to destroy them.

  Presently, as they danced, something changed within the lamp-lit room, so that somehow it became friendly and cheerful. That barn was home, the buffalo robes on the walls were luxury, and even the chilling drafts were reminders that here was haven from the ruthless black wrath of the night.

  A faint gray light was coming up over the edge of the prairie as Abe Campbell brought out a bottle of whisky with cobwebs on it; he had been saving it for a long time. It was unusual, then, for women to drink whisky with men, but everyone recognized that this was an occasion of which they had never seen the counterpart.

  "Well, here's to the gone stock," Campbell said, his eyes on the liquor.

  "And the better stock we aim to get," said Noah Bassett.

  They tossed off the glasses without looking at each other. Then Jud Hyatt's fiddle began its last tune, and so weakened was the dying norther that the fiddle no longer had to rant and squall to make itself heard.

  Soddy back of Silver Bow....

  They had heard Jud Hyatt play "Silver Bow Soddy" a hundred times, but they supposed now that they would never hear it again. It was a song in the old dance rhythms, half mocking, half roisterous, but at the same time very dear to the range with which they had struggled for so long.

  That fiddle-ringing, boot-stamping refrain was going to come back to them all sometimes, growing dimmer and more vague, but never quite forgotten, through the years beyond.

  The storm was a low uneasy moaning, almost the equivalent of a restful silence after the wild roar that had held on most of the night. They had half expected the blizzard to last two or three days, but the fact that it had died down after fifteen hours meant nothing. The prairie hay was a flattened tangle sheathed in glaze ice.

  If a few bunches of the thaw-softened cattle had survived the terrible drop in temperature and the scour of the blizzard, they would still pay heavy toll. All signs suggested a long siege of bitter weather, and the Silver Bow owned no hay.

  Jud Hyatt, the fire gone out of him, went into the lean-to room to get his sheepskin coat. He stood there alone, rubbing a clear place on the frosted pane, weary and more than half resigned at last. This was Jean's room. There were in it a light four-poster and a maple dresser that had come by oxen all the way from the Missouri. He was soaking up the feel of those things that she had lived close to, before it was too late. They would be gathering up the remainder of the stock, and moving it some place. After that he would be riding on.

  Beyond the ice-distorted face of the plain, the dawn was coming up out of the Cherokee country. It made a long line of silver-gray, with a drift of color delicate as wild rose blooms, on top. It was the time of day when Abe was generally getting ready to saddle, and saying always: "Well, it's another day."

  Jean came in silently and stood beside him. He felt her fingers tou
ch his hand, and he gripped them hard, but she did not flinch. They stood there close together, not looking at each other, or speaking, with their eyes on the far chill east, while slowly the light increased.

  Lief Norgaard came clumping in behind him, and touched Hyatt on the shoulder. "You're wanted in here."

  "All right." Hyatt shot a glance at Norgaard, and found that Lief `s eyes were curiously baffled, filled with a flabbergasted wonderment. He followed Lief into the main room.

  Luther Kendricks had a lot of papers on the table in front of him. He and Abe Campbell were in an argument, and old Abe seemed dazed. "I don't know what you mean," he kept mumbling.

  "Anything's for sale," Kendricks growled. "You don't seem to understand me. You're to keep control. That's my system. That's always my system."

  "But this" fumbled Campbell-"this... there ain't anything to buy! Our notes...."

  "I've got a list of your notes," Kendricks told him. "Am I a child?"

  "But what do you think you're buying, man? Not cows ...there aren't any cows...not range, because the range is free."

  "There's going to be cows," said Kendricks.

  "You're buying...."

  "People!" roared Kendricks. "I buy people! I've never bought anything else but people. I keep telling you... that's my system. You think a bull-headed cowman can change my system now? I tell you I want Jud Hyatt...and you, Abe, and Lief, and the Bassetts. This range ain't hurt! All you need is money."

  "All we need is.. .good God!"

  "And I have it," said Kendricks. "Now I've got a kind of organization figured out. We'll keep the three brands separate as before. But...."

  Hyatt heard a choking catch in Jean's throat, and he followed her as she turned and fled. Behind the rough door of the lean-to, Jean collapsed, sobbing hysterically, into his arms.