by Gary D. Svee
“And if I weren’t married,” Catherine said, her voice so soft Max could just hear it over the roar of the flood, “I might have said yes.”
“Yeah?” Max said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “Joey all right?”
“We have to get him back and get him warmed up.”
Max drew a deep breath. “I’ll take the rope and wade into shallower water. You leave it tied until I get set. Then I’ll give you a hand coming in.”
The crowd at the Toomey place had swelled in the hour, year, century they had been gone. The women had a table heaped with food. There was a bonfire roaring in front of the cabin, and some of the men who had been wading the creek looking for Joey’s body were circled around it, blankets draped over their heads and open at the front to catch the heat, celebrants of an ancient rite.
Klaus hadn’t moved. He stood alone in a crowd of milling people, hat held across his chest, eyes fixed on the thin line that defines sky and land in Montana.
Children were scattered through the scene like pepper in a pot, and one spotted Joey. Wonder chased surprise from his face, and he ran for the dugout, shouting at the top of his voice: “They got Joey! They got Joey! They got Joey!”
All eyes turned to the creek in dread.
“No, there,” the boy shouted, pointing to Max and Catherine, “and he’s alive.”
A shout went up from the crowd, and the homesteaders pushed singlemindedly toward the riders. People were shouting and talking and pointing to Joey, clapping one another on the back and wiping tears away with aprons and sleeves.
Klaus looked up at Catherine, his face ravaged by tears strong enough to crack a rock, and when he spoke it was as though he were reciting a high and holy prayer.
“I’m sorry, Joey. I’m sorry, Joey. I’m sorry, Joey.”
Klaus reached for Joey and held him tight to his breast, his breath coming in choking sobs. And then, tentatively, two little four-year-old arms reached around his father’s neck, and the cheer from the crowd must have been heard in heaven.
Max and Catherine rode to the homestead in silence. They stopped at the dugout, and Max went inside to pull blankets and pillows from the bed. Catherine’s trunk was still sitting under the wagon, and she picked a change of clothing from that.
They left the door to the dugout open, and the dry fall air pulled moisture from the raw earth like a wick. After Max cared for the horses, he pitched hay into one of the unused stalls and spread his bedroll there. Then he carried Catherine’s bedding into the loft. As he came downstairs, she was looking out the bam door, seeing in her mind’s eye the tears on Toomey’s face and little Joey’s hug, perhaps his first.
“Maybe I was wrong,” Catherine said, smiling at Max. “Perhaps God did call this storm upon us for a reason.”
14
Catherine awoke to the scent of hay and fresh-cut pine. She had grown accustomed to the dugout—air heavy as earth and raw as a wound—and by comparison the hayloft seemed light and easing to her spirit.
Max’s snoring below had awakened her several times during the night, and she had heard him leave the barn some time ago. She dressed in the dark and made her way to the ladder leading from the loft, climbing down through shadow into the light of a kerosene lantern, painting the barn in yellows, browns, and blacks. She picked her way through the light to the door outside.
Max was sitting in a globe of flickering yellow light cast by a campfire, and Catherine wondered for a moment where he had found dry wood after yesterday’s storm. The sky was glorious, stars bright enough to tug at the soul. She stood in the midst of infinity and felt exalted, not humbled, for her small part in something so vast and beautiful.
Max had carried the table and chairs from the dugout to the campfire, and Catherine took hers, watching him as he cut bacon.
“Mud’s ankle deep in the root cellar, and the ice is gone,” Max said. “Bacon was hanging from the ceiling, and water doesn’t hurt potatoes so they’re all right. Everything else is gone.”
“What about the dugout?”
“Water got in, but not too bad. Don’t go in yet, though. The whole thing might just drop into the creek.”
“It’s good we got the trunk out.”
Max nodded.
“Max?” Catherine said tentatively. “Yesterday was special, but it doesn’t change anything. I’m still leaving when Father Tim comes.”
“It changed one thing,” Max said. “Catherine.”
Catherine nodded, and Max smiled. “I like the sound of it.”
The bacon and potatoes were done, and Max served breakfast on a table lit by the campfire and the stars. They lingered over coffee until the sun rose in the east, casting long shadows across the prairie of man, woman, and table.
They rose, then, walking together to the bank overlooking the creek. The water had retreated during the night, but the flood had strewn its bones across the bottom. There was silt and driftwood and carcasses from one high-water mark to the other. Catherine could hear the breath hissing through Max’s teeth as he viewed the desolation.
The day was backbreaking. Catherine rode the creek, looking for live animals mired in the bottom, while Max cleaned up around the dugout. A section of corral fence had been torn down by the flood. The outhouse was leaning on its side, and the creek had filled the hole with silt. The chicken coop was gone, and much of the grass on the creek bottom was covered with mud. He had counted on the creek bottom for winter grass, and now it was gone. He felt like a man going into a Montana winter without a coat.
Max was a practical man. He built his days on a framework of priorities, working first to last. But today as he looked at the desolation across the bottom, his mind returned most frequently to the swing he had built for Catherine, and when she returned, it was the swing he was working on.
She watched for a moment, a shadow crossing the pensive smile on her face, and then she took Lady back to the barn and unsaddled her.
They spent the next three days picking up after the flood. They butchered one steer they found, hanging it spread-eagled and obscene from the cottonwood. The owner offered them half the beef for their trouble, but they had no place to keep the meat, so they settled on one loin and ate steak and roast at their prairie table until it was gone.
Just as Catherine grew accustomed to the barn and eating by starlight, Max declared the dugout safe. They pulled out the canvas floor, scrubbed it in the creek and hung it to dry on the south wall of the barn.
And on their first night underground, they sat in the light of the kerosene lamp, eating the last of the loin steak. Max leaned back from the table picking at his teeth with a splinter from the kindling pile. Then he leaned forward, took his coffee cup, and whispered, “We’re being watched.”
Catherine jerked, her eyes probing the shadows that lay beyond the reach of the lamp’s circle of yellow light.
“How can we be watched?” she whispered. “A man would have to be buried in the wall to watch us here.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Max whispered. “I meant there is a man outside watching.”
“How can he watch us inside if he’s outside?” Catherine muttered, irritation creeping into her voice.
“I didn’t say he was watching us inside,” Max hissed.
“Then by all that’s holy, why are we whispering?”
“Sshhhh! He might be listening.”
Catherine’s eyes flashed, and with every word her voice crept up the musical scale. “Maxwell Bass, I have long thought that you have only a tenuous grip on your senses, and now you have lost even that.…”
Catherine was reaching for high C when Max cut in again, “Sshhhh!”
The muscles in Catherine’s jaw knotted, and she spoke through clenched teeth, “Don’t you sshhhh me!”
They glared at each other from across the table, eyes in slits, blood flooding their faces red.
“I’m sorry,” Max whispered, “but we are being watched, and I’m afraid there may be someone listeni
ng to us this very moment.”
Catherine’s temper fled, and she looked at Max from the corner of her eyes. She was sitting in a dugout in the middle of the big empty with a man who believed that someone was eavesdropping on their conversation.
He leaned forward and whispered, “There’s a willow bank about three hundred yards upstream. He lies up there during the day and watches us with binoculars. I saw the sun flash off the glass, and I found his tracks this morning going up to the stovepipe. He’s been listening down the stovepipe.”
Max’s voice dropped even lower. “He’s probably up there now.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know for sure, but you can bet the banker’s in on it. Whoever he is has been digging holes, just like the banker did that night.”
“Couldn’t figure it out, at first. Found lots of holes dug all over the place. Seems clear to me that he’s looking for the money, Catherine. Just like the banker.”
Catherine’s eyes narrowed as she sought some clue that Max suspected she had betrayed him. But there was none. “What are we going to do about him?”
Indeed, that was the question.
Milburn Phillips pressed his ear to the stovepipe, waiting for that cowpoke to give away his treasure.
So far, the only fruit of his vigil were the stories he would tell cousin Aloysius. If he’d married a looker like the Bass woman he wouldn’t spend his nights in the barn while she slept in the dugout. No, sir!
And the fights! Milburn had his ears blistered more than once, and it wasn’t because the stovepipe was hot, either.
That cowpoke, Max Bass, just didn’t know how to treat a lady, Milburn thought. No wonder she makes him sleep in the barn.
The current focus of Milburn’s amorous intentions was a little beauty he had found in Ma Bovary’s Liquor Emporium and House of the Gentle Arts.
The thought of her—blond hair, black eyes, a beauty mark that rotated from one cheek to the other, and a face hard enough to strike sparks—sent a quiver through his loins and drew his attention away from the pipe.
He had been true to her in the weeks before cousin Aloysius had called him to Prairie Rose—not going upstairs with any of the other women—but he had to admit that recently his thoughts had been pulled to Catherine as he watched her from the willow bank. Whoeee! Would he like to take her for a ride.
Phillips had been at the Bass place three days now, and those days had been hard on him. The right side of his face—his right ear was the good one—was stained black from the chimney. His hair had long since taken on a life of its own; it poked from his head here and there as though in some great jest, and his eyes were red-rimmed and wild.
But Milburn knelt singleminded on bunch grass and pressed his good ear against the stovepipe. Make believe about the Bass woman was fun, but money would buy him all the women a man could want. And after he had the money, Milburn could see no earthly reason to burden his cousin with that information. Aloysius already had a bankful.
Beneath him someone opened the door of the stove to put some more coal in. Good! He would be able to hear everything now.
Max tossed a couple chunks of coal on the fire and left the stove door open. Then he sat down across from Catherine, nodded, and took a sip of coffee from his cup.
She said loudly: “Max, I don’t like leaving all that wheat money just lying around in here. Gone as much as we are, anyone could come in and take it.”
“Yeah,” he replied, equally loud, “suppose you’re right. Best that I put it away.”
“You’re never going to tell me where you hide your money, are you?”
Max and Catherine’s voices came through the stovepipe muffled and a little hard to understand, but Milburn was all grins as he listened. Those days of lying outside, ear pressed to this damn pipe, hadn’t been pleasant, but they were about to pay off. Could be that he would be back at Ma Bovary’s living the genteel life within the week.
He heard Max say, “Well, I suppose I could tell you where the money is hidden. You promise to be especially careful?”
“Cross my heart.”
“I hide it under water.”
A thin line of spittle dripped from the corner of Milburn’s mouth. There was something about the mention of money that made him drool.
“You hide it in the creek?” Catherine asked.
“Nope. I hide my gold and silver in watering holes. Other cowhands used to wonder why I always volunteered to clean out the springs and reservoirs, but I’d come back to the bunkhouse smug as can be and my pockets plumb full of gold.”
Milburn was drooling out of both sides of his mouth now. The thought of pockets bulging with gold was almost sensual. He hugged the stovepipe tighter, and it shifted a bit, loosening a cloud of soot that sifted down on him like black snow. He fought a terrible urge to sneeze. He didn’t want to miss a word.
Max’s voice rumbled from the pipe, “What I do is poke the coins down in the mud, and they work their way down to bedrock. So when I want my money, I just start at the uphill side of a spring and dig down to bare rock and then work across. You leave one speck of mud on the bottom, it might be covering three, four double eagles.”
Milburn swallowed. Aloysius had said Bass had five thousand dollars: That would be two hundred and fifty double eagles or five hundred eagles. A man couldn’t carry that much money, no matter how big his pockets.
Max continued, “Happened a time or two that somebody would be digging in a spring and find one of my silver dollars. But they’d quit and never find the big money. Most of the time, it all works its way into one pocket, and you might dig the whole spring out before you find the coins.”
Milburn shook his head, and it banged lightly against the pipe, loosening another cloud of soot. Not him. He wouldn’t quit. He wouldn’t quit until he had the whole five thousand dollars.
“I’ve got it all hidden in a spring up on the ridge. I’ll show you where it is tomorrow, but we’ll have to be careful. A man sitting above us on the rimrock could see the whole thing.”
Milburn grinned. This thing was fitting together like a picture puzzle. He walked back to the willow bank to gather his bedroll, a little puff of soot marking each step he took. He’d be up on the ridge tomorrow morning when Max Bass and his new bride paid a visit to their bank. And as soon as they left, he’d slip down with the shovel and make himself a millionaire. Well, damn near a millionaire, anyway.
Milburn had spent the night on the bare rock that topped the ridge. A couple of nights ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do that, the rock outlining the bones of his body in pain, but he was weary from nights spent slapping insects on the willow bank. In comparison, the cold night on the hard rock seemed like a night at Ma Bovary’s.
He awoke before daylight, drifting between sleep and wakefulness until the sun stung his eyes open. Milburn rose, scratched day-old insect bites, and walked barefoot across the rim, wincing as his feet found sharp rocks, to a bush where he relieved himself.
He drank tepid, muddy water from the canteen and cut off a chunk of jerky, chewing hard and thinking about one of the big T-bones they served at the Stockman. Wouldn’t be long now before he’d be back in Billings living like a king. He put the jerky and canteen back in the bag with his bedroll, and walked to the edge of the rim, stretching. Long way down to those rocks, and farther still to that Bass fellah and his woman riding up that little valley—whoops! He dropped to his knees and scrambled back. They must have seen him, sharp against the sky.
Milburn set his mind to the creation of a believable lie that would explain his presence on the rim. But his mind was as empty as his belly. He snaked forward for another look. His luck held: The Basses were still coming. Milburn grinned. Rubes they were, and rubes were no match for a man of the world like Milburn P. Phillips.
Max stood at the edge of the spring, the double eagle in his hand flashing yellow in the fall sun. Then he slipped the coin into the palm of his hand and threw a pebble he had concealed there in
to the spring. Replenishing his supply of rocks from his pockets, Max repeated the process: fifteen pebbles and four silver dollars.
Phillips watched the performance with the intensity of a zealot, a small pool of drool collecting on the rock under his chin. More than anything, he wanted to get into that spring with a shovel.
Milburn P. Phillips would become a wealthy man as soon as those honyockers stopped dilly-dallying around that little valley and gave a. man a chance to go to work. Work—Milburn shuddered with aversion. But he would work today so that he could spend the rest of his life lying on a white beach in the south of France.
His mind turned to gentle, Mediterranean breezes stirring the revealing curtain dresses those French women wore shamelessly in public. Probably a lot of rubes there, too. Smart man like him might wind up with a castle. Let cousin Aloysius try to top that.
Max and Catherine had seen him silhouetted that morning like one of the redheaded buzzards that frequent southeastern Montana in summer. The trap had been laid but they had no way of knowing whether he had taken the bait.
After the chores were done and the chicken fried, Max saddled the two Appaloosas. Catherine came from the house in a light spring dress. On her head was the green hat from the Cole General Store, her hair spraying red-gold beneath it, and on her feet were Max’s dress boots.
He was so taken with her beauty that a lump rose in his throat. He tried to tell her how he felt, but the words stuck, and he busied himself with the horses, trying to take his mind off Catherine.
They rode east as though they were going to town, but after they reached the fence line, they turned north and rode coulee bottoms back up to the northern edge of the ridge. It was cool in the shade of the hill, and Catherine shivered a bit. Max hobbled the horses and left them to graze in a swale of knee-high grass. They hiked up the steep flanks of the hill and scrambled through a break in the rock to the top of the rim, taking care not to kick any rocks loose.
Their concern was wasted. Phillips had already left his nest, a scattering of muddy blankets near the edge of the rim. Catherine and Max walked toward the blankets, crouching as they neared the rim.
