by Les Weil
Conrad's face had gone serious. "Owe anyone but our bank?"
"A little. To Mr. Bob Ford at Sun River, who loaned me money for a mower and rake."
Conrad made a humming noise in his throat. "Who else?"
"A little to Marshall Strain, which is the same as the Tansytown Mercantile Company."
"How much, altogether?"
"Just a couple of hundred." Conrad hummed again.
"That's it, except for those land entries made for me, and they're not due yet."
"How about our interest?"
"I've got it."
"Payment on principal?"
"I can pay some this fall by selling my three-year-olds. Mr. Ford will be combing the country, wanting to buy. He's got a big Canadian contract. He'll trail to Fort Mcleod, where the beef will be rationed to Indians."
"I know." Conrad spread his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. "Where did your money come from?"
"From wages. I've sold a few head when I had to, but mostly it's money from others, earned in the time I could spare. I hire out when I can. To keep going, I have to."
"Nose to the grindstone, tail to the blizzard?"
"Pretty much."
"Work never hurt anyone." Conrad picked a fleck from his broadcloth. "What you say jibes with reports that have come to me. Play isn't your failing, they say."
"Thanks."
It was over then, or better than over. "Don't sell the threeyear-olds," Conrad had said with a smile. "Let the principal ride, and the interest, too, if you wish. Actually, Evans, in view of your record we're prepared to advance you more money."
The snow was running with a breeze from the north, sifting now straight ahead, now in windings and twirls; and a man could lose himself in it, imagining it was white water and his pony a boat until he looked farther and saw a butte lifting, fixed to the solid earth, stock-still in the sky, and even it was an iceberg, or could be, moving too slow for sight. The storm had come on last night, borne by a Hudson's Bay chinook, and the night had been a raw one for cows but good for a man if he shut out the thought of them and lay snug in the soogans, hearing the wind crying wild and the sleet rasping outside and the cabin complaining but standing brave to the night. Whitey's snores had become one with these sounds, had become proof that someone else was alive in the world if dead to its doings.
He had his cabin and his claim and the rest. More than his holdings, he had free range for his cows, though it was grazed close -which accounted for the trouble he'd had with that Whey Belly Hector. The man stood in his mind, big-jawed, big-eyed, big-mouthed like a frog, with the look in his body of someone whose height had pounded down in the saddle. "Why, goddam you," he was saying, "you're inside my line! Ask anybody! Look in the Rocky Mountain Husbandman, where I paid for a notice! And you figure to squat here? Now get out!"
For himself he was saying, "It's owned by the government. It's open to all, to file on or graze."
Hector leaned forward in his saddle. For an answer he patted the butt of a rifle slung underneath.
"I'll be here," Lat said, and Hector wheeled around and galloped away. There hadn't been any more trouble. There wouldn't be any. Hector was running a bluff, or attempting to.
The wind had swept out any footprints. There was nothing to go by but the fact that the cattle would have drifted south or southwest, down from the long river flat where in winter he tried to hold them by close herding and occasional dribbles of hay. A nursemaid, they called him. In every direction the snow to the skylines stretched empty and clean, without movement on it or the smudge of a fur. To the right, though, like a hump in a blanket, rose one of the Indian wolf traps he'd built. Probably it would be empty, wolves having grown fewer, but more than once it had given him pin money for town, and at no cost but the sweat of putting it up. He reined the Appaloosie that way, again seeing himself and Little Runner wrestling the poles, pole by pole building a pen so sloped at the sides that wolves could climb up and drop in, so high they couldn't leap out. Beat strychnine for costs. He rode around it, peering over and down. There was nothing inside but the snow mounds of jackrabbit carcasses he'd thrown in for bait.
No pin money, no side money here. What he spent tomorrow in town would have to come out of his regular pocket.
"No, Lad" He was hearing Callie again. "But why do you always make me take money?"
Miss Fran would turn in her coffin at that, or would screech in the place she'd been sent to. Wherever it was, it would be hell if she couldn't yell, "Company, girls!"
He sat looking at the mounded carcasses. Miss Fran dead the big bust, the big bottom, the little feet and fat wrists, the hunger for money all gone away. Fort Benton near dead, with no cargo blood in the vein of the river.
"What shall I do, Lat?" Callie had asked. "I don't want to stay here. I don't need so much money. Aunt Fran left me some. We could operate smaller." She waited. "And wouldn't it be easier for you if I moved to Tansytown?"
It was easier.
He found the cows along about four o'clock, not against the drift fence and not in the river brush but in a coulee to the west that gouged down from the benchlands. A spring seeped there, crowded by snow, and clumps of sarvice and chokeberry fretted its course, clicking to a touch of the overhead breeze. The cows stood dumb and unmoving, their coats glinting with hoarfrost, their snoots puffing vapor. Their slow eyes, circled with ice crumbs, asked what they had done to be punished this way. But they were all right. Only a rancher maybe too keen for tallow would worry about them or think to haze them to grass.
Nevertheless he pushed them out on a slope that the wind had brushed thin of snow. They'd get a few mouthfuls before they came back.
The straightest line home lay up the ridge to the north, over the pitches and into the gullies that lower down flattened off to the Tansy. Not in weeks had he ridden that way. He just might find a stray.
At the top he reined in and looked back. The herd was grazing halfheartedly, making a ragged patch on the blanket of snow. Now that the sun was low, the reds and roans of the bunch were dimmed with dove-gray. Up here was no wind at all, no least movement of air unless the creep of the cold could be called that. Up here was no sound but the silence of cold. The wrinkled country ahead seemed frozen tight, locked up forever, dead and preserved like a fish frozen-in in the frozen ocean of air.
Farther on, with night closing down, he spotted a blotch on the hazed sheet of the earth and reined in to look. The blotch moved, setting in movement smaller blotches around it. He kicked the Appaloosie.
Wolves and a stray cow, or a bull, three wolves circling around, dashing in and back out. The stray wheeled to meet them. Lat blinked and looked again.
He had come out of nowhere, this ancient buffalo bull, out of hidden hills or lost plains or the great hole in the ground that the Indians invented to account for the disappearance of the herds they once knew. A lone bull, the last bull, hooking at the places the wolves had just left.
At Lat's shout the wolves raised their heads. They loped off as he came on. At a little distance they slowed and faced around and rumped down. They knew when a man wasn't armed. They grinned at him, their teeth showing white against the dark of their muzzles.
The bull didn't move except to front the new danger. Starved to bones, rimed with frost, he stood with his head down, daring anyone to come on, daring the world and everything in it. Above his stubborn eyes his forelock dangled, still fuzzed with last season's burrs, still sandy from remembered wallows, from watering places he wouldn't see any more. The blizzard had driven him, the wind and the cutting snow, out of some echoing solitude down here to ranges made strange since he grazed as a calf.
If he could be driven on toward the cabin, to safety and hay?
Lat pulled off a mitten and untied his rope, feeling the quick bite of the cold. He maneuvered closer and flicked the bull on the side and got a sweep of the horns in return. He tried again, and again, too close for comfort.
The three wolves were s
till laughing. Before help could arrive, they'd have the bull down and the soft parts, the guts and the bag, eaten out. There was nothing to do but ride on.
22
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON, and here was the town, and he had no worries now that the west wind had sprung up, making mush of yesterday's snow. He could idle with Godwin and Whitey and Carmichael, if he had arrived, and see Callie afterwards and spend the night there and ride home in the morning, made free and easy by knowing the cows were all right. It was seldom enough he had nothing to do and so could find pleasure in doing it.
He put Sugar up at McCabe's corral and started down the street for the Tansytown Merc., stepping careful so as not to ruin entirely the shine on his boots. He could buy a bottle at the Gilt Edge or the Lally Cooler or the bar at the Jackson Hotel, where the ranchers held out when in town, but because Marshall Strain trusted him he'd pick it up there.
Take away the saloons and there wasn't much left, just the mercantile company with the post office in it, the hotel, McCabe's barn, the blacksmith shop, a meat market of sorts, Bob Reed Saddles and Harness, a couple of shacks that did for offices -all pressed against the board walks that the townspeople had pitched in to build along the main track. Back of these, now in sight and now out, sat the homes, built mostly of log. Callie's house, put up by an overblown booster who'd been forced to sell it, looked big by comparison. Not much of a town, even counting the bars. It was the ranchers that kept the place going. But a town was a town.
The snow squished under foot. The ring of steel against steel came from the blacksmith shop and, between blows, a word and an answer and the clicking of chips from the Gilt Edge. Two boys were throwing snowballs in the street, and a man in a work wagon yelled, "Hey, you!" as he ducked a throw. A woodpecker splashed with red hammered at a cottonwood in front of the Jackson Hotel. Whey Belly Hector came out the door and gave a grunt and passed on, his legs bowed from weight and riding. One saddle horse stood at the hitch rack in front of the Lally Cooler. A team slept alongside the Tansytown Merc.
No one was inside, though, except Marshall Strain. He came up smiling, a spectacled, grayish man who looked out of place in a store. He held out his hand. "Been wanting to see you, Lat." Out of his ears, under the pencil he kept slanted behind one of them, little tufts of hair sprouted. "Where you been keeping yourself?"
"Out of mischief."
The place smelled of coal oil and potatoes and smoked meat and new shoes. It had a counter and shelves and stacks and sacks and barrels of stuff, all arranged to be handy, and in the rear, close by the whiskey barrel, a little grilled box of a post office.
"There's a letter here for you," Mr. Strain said. He stepped to the box and sorted it out and brought it back. It was from home.
"Much obliged. And I'll take a quart of whiskey. For cash."
"Your credit's good."
"Thanks. Not for whiskey."
Mr. Strain nodded. "Still your rule, huh? Except for necessities, pay as you go or don't go." His smile said he understood. "But what whiskey you buy isn't much." His gaze turned to the door, which had whined as it opened. "Come in."
"Evenin'." It was Happy, standing solemn with his hand on the latch, his eyes like dark moons in the lighter moon of his face. He closed the door softly.
"I'll be with you as soon as I wait on this gentleman."
"Yassuh."
Lat bobbed his head for hello.
Happy gave a bare "Howdy." Outside the house he never named names learned there.
"Poor soul!" Mr. Strain said under his breath. He shook his head slowly and raised it and went on as if to justify himself, "But they have to eat, Lat." He took a bottle from under the counter and went to the barrel and filled it and came back, twisting a cork in its mouth. "You'll want it wrapped up, of course," he said and proceeded to wrap it.
Lat put two dollars out, but before making change Mr. Strain put his palms flat on the counter and leaned over. "Would it be possible for you to have supper with us tonight?"
It was the first invitation to come from anyone like Mr. Strain.
"I told my wife I was sure you'd enjoy a good family meal. Nothing fancy, just home fixings."
"I appreciate that."
"What's more, I've got something I want to say to you, something to suggest and talk over. Can't you come?"
"Why -uh- of course. I'd be happy to."
Mr. Strain straightened and said while he returned fifty cents, "About six o'clock then."
"Fine." Lat went toward the door, passing Happy on his slow way to the counter. He stopped before going out and stuck his bottle in an overshoe displayed on a bench and opened the letter from home.
DEAREST SON,
It has been a long time since we heard from you, and I thought I would write to say that we are both well and hope that you are.
Your pa and I keep wondering why you stay in Montana when you could be right here in Oregon, but that is your business now you've grown into a man. Maybe you will change your mind later. I know whatever you do, anywhere, will be a credit to you, and that is the greatest comfort of all. You were always a good son, and it isn't for old folks to interfere when their children grow up but just to pray that their rearing was wise. That was always first in your pa's mind, to make you a fine and successful man. He wished it so hard that it hurt him sometimes and made him seem cross, wishing you better things than he ever had. He has taken life hard, or I could put it the other way round, which is one reason why he's so anxious for you. It may take you a while yet to understand, until you have your own children.
A family named Newton took over the Graves place a couple of months ago, and I wish you could meet them. They have a daughter, Mary Moore, who is just as sweet and good as can be.
Your pa has had a touch of rheumatism lately and isn't too frisky. In other ways he's fine, and there's nothing to worry about. He said Sunday he wished you were home to eat my chicken and dumplings with him. Remember how you two used to gobble them up?
I hate to tell you that old Shorty is dead. Pa found him in his stall where I guess he died in his sleep. He was a colt when you were a baby, and just to tease me your pa used to say it looked like the blue ribbon for mothers went to the mare.
Thank you for that money, son, but you had already bought us a carpet, and we don't like to think you're going without. Don't send any more, dear. We can make out. Please, please take care of yourself. We think about you, and our prayers are with you every day.
All love,
MA
P. S. Write to us when you can. Pa gets as lonesome as I do.
Lat stuffed the letter in his pocket and picked up the bottle and went out, hearing Happy's voice with the back of his ears as he brought the door to. "Yassuh, an' some whiskey. A gallon, she say."
Ma wanted him to come home. She wanted him to meet a girl as sweet and good as could be. She wanted him to understand Pa. Old Shorty was dead and please write. Their prayers were with him, and their thanks for the money.
Yes. Yes. But no web-foot, close-herded, pot-poor life there while here the sky sailed high. Tonight with a good family he'd have a good supper, complete with grace. And then? From blessing to bed, and for what we are about to receive!
It was good to be with old friends again, Carmichael thought, good to be shooting the breeze in this Tansytown shack that Godwin and Whitey were baching the winter in, good to be told that Lat would show up by and by. Lat was still Lat, they were saying.
"For a man that watches his money-" Whitey began.
"It ain't that he's tight," Godwin was quick to put in. "It's just he wants to get where he don't have to be tight."
"For a man that watches his money, he's open-handed with friends." Whitey spread out his palms. "Know what? Don't matter how pushed he might be, I never appealed to him yet that he didn't fork over. When that damn McCabe lays me off at the livery stable, Lat's got a chore for me or a few bucks to loan. He ain't forgittin' his friends."
Godwin said, "Nope."
"And with him you're always plumb welcome to bed and board for long as you please," Whitey was adding as if this item was the clincher. "Not as I abuse it. And I don't forget my debts."
"You don't have to stand up for him with me," Carmichael said. Of them all maybe he understood Lat best. Looking back in his life to the young years, to the years that had left him almost middle-aged, he saw in Lat some lost part of himself. He'd had a rearing, too, though no one would know it now, and he had had hopes, but always to be acted on later, until it was too late. The difference between them was itchy feet and a funnybone. But a man had to make choices, and he had made his and didn't regret it. It was just that he felt close to Lat underneath and so took a close pleasure in his advance.
A little center of things pretty sure to grow bigger. That was Lat. A man that men tended to follow. Godwin. Whitey. Even himself. He was reminded of what he had thought out before. "A man with a purpose don't lack for a party," he said. "I hear that little hooker followed him here."
"It ain't what you'd call an open subject," Whitey answered.
"Who says?" Carmichael asked, already knowing.
"Lat."
This, too, he understood, thinking back to his first times with women, to the green fears and the shame and the longer concern with what good people would say. They didn't matter to him now, none of them, the talk as little as the rest. They didn't need to. But they mattered to the Lat in him. He could understand.
Tom Ping didn't. Tom couldn't. There in Fort Benton, where Carmichael had broken his ride from the Judith country, Tom had leaned across a bar table. "The son-of-abitch!" he said. "The high-toned son-of-a-bitch!"
