Buffalo Girls

by Larry McMurtry

  Though disappointed that Bartle had behaved so coolly, Pansy reminded herself of her resolution to be practical. She was in America, not England. Exciting as it might be to watch Bartle and Johnny battle for her, there was a distinct chance it would end the wrong way. Bartle might be the one to draw blood, and he might draw it in fatal amounts, in which case, since they seemed to be in a naked wilderness, she might have a deuce of a time getting down to New Orleans before the cold set in.

  “We’ll set you ashore, sir,” the captain said. He had been a bit uneasy about the prospect of conflict himself. He had heard that Bartle Bone was an old Indian fighter—such men were the devil to predict. One had bitten the nose off a friend of his from Providence. His friend had lived to describe the savage attack. A doctor had attempted to sew the nose back in place, but the sutures had become infected and his friend had had to make do without his nose, lack of which was a big disadvantage in New England. He had finally emigrated to Australia, where mutilation was said to be more common.

  With that memory fresh in mind, the captain had resolved to protect his nose at all cost. He was relieved that the old trapper was so agreeable about the matter.

  Calamity considered raising a ruckus on Bartle’s behalf—she had a desire to stir him up, to see if she could get him to behave like himself again. On the other hand, she felt queasy, and was very glad that Pansy was leaving. Much more of Pansy would not have been tolerable. Another reason for restraint was that girls of Pansy’s sort were unpredictable. If Calamity roused herself and tore into the captain and knocked one of his ears off with a rifle butt or otherwise bloodied him, the girl might decide her new beau was a coward and choose to stay with Bartle.

  “You didn’t say much this morning,” Bartle observed, once he and Calamity had settled themselves on the steamer Yellowstone and were looking at the muddy Missouri. Pansy and Captain John were by then enjoying a beefsteak in St. Louis, gone forever. Bartle still felt wistful—when would there be another such lithesome girl to warm his bed?

  “She was your wife,” Calamity said. “If you didn’t care to stop her or stomp that sailor, I didn’t consider it my place to interfere.”

  Night fell; the plains lay around them. They sat together on the deck of the little steamer, splitting another bottle. Both knew what a long river they had to ride; it edged northward, up the country and across the plains; more than any river it bound their youth to their age. Ghosts of lost enemies and lost companions dwelt by its banks: ghosts of a breed and ghosts of a race. Bartle had never imagined that he would be riding up the Missouri without Jim Ragg. As the prairie moon rose, Calamity mostly thought of Dora.

  PART III

  1

  DORA MET OGDEN IN THE MIDDLE OF A MUDDY STREET IN Belle Fourche. She had crossed to the hardware store to buy some tacks and curtain rods. Since Teat left to go work for Blue on his ranch, she had had no one to run such errands for her. The morning mist had become a driving rain; the few planks that had served her as a bridge on the trip over were soon pressed deep into the mud by passing wagons. Dora waited a bit, hoping the rain would let up; she had a touch of the weak feeling that had been plaguing her more and more lately, and sat down on a keg of nails to wait.

  Instead of diminishing, the rain increased; though the hardware man, Mr. David, was kindly, and would have let her sit all day, Dora decided she had best get back. She might as well go and take her soaking.

  She was not without experience in crossing streets that were little more than swamps; the streets in some of the cow towns would swallow a calf in certain seasons; in bolder days she would take off her shoes and stockings and plow through barelegged. But her bolder days were behind her. She was new in Belle Fourche; she didn’t intend to affront the local ladies unnecessarily, even if an inconvenient emphasis on propriety meant getting herself a scolding from Doosie, who hated cleaning up muddy shoes.

  Dora set out with her umbrella and had not got even to the middle of the street when the mud, violent as an animal, sucked off one of her shoes despite the fact that it was tightly buttoned. Dora balanced on the other foot, trying to keep her umbrella overhead and not drop her tacks and curtain rods. She tried to reach the shoe without dipping her skirt into the mud and couldn’t quite. The shoe had all but disappeared; the top was slippery with mud and she could only reach it with her fingernails, unable to get a grip on it. Her other foot was sinking deeper; the street seemed to have no bottom. No doubt that shoe would come off, too, when she attempted her next step.

  Dora began to feel a little desperate; there seemed no hope of getting her shoe, and she could not stand poised on one leg in the middle of the muddy street forever. Already her leg was cramping; she would be lucky not to fall into the mud. If she had to go home with her dress ruined, Doosie would not get over it for days.

  At that point she saw a team of large horses splashing toward her. Her heart sank—there went the dress!—but then she heard the driver yell “Whoa!” The team stopped well out of splattering range and a huge young man jumped down.

  “You are in a fix, aren’t you, miss?” he said. Without being asked, he pulled her lost shoe out of the gummy mud and then to Dora’s astonishment simply picked her up and carried her to his wagon.

  “Where did you want to go, miss?” he asked, when she was safely on the wagon seat.

  Dora felt embarrassed to admit that her house was scarcely thirty yards away. The boy and his team had just passed it. She didn’t like to ask a man to turn his team to deposit her thirty yards from where she sat.

  “I’m just there,” she admitted, pointing at her house. The youth watched her with large, unblinking blue eyes. Though just a boy, really, he was one of the largest men she had ever seen; he seemed to be built like a tree.

  “I thought I could make it home, but I didn’t step light enough,” Dora said. “You mustn’t trouble yourself. I can just take off my other shoe and wade it.”

  “I guess you won’t, though,” Ogden said. Now that she was on his wagon seat, he could not believe that he had actually had the boldness to pick up such a pretty lady. Although she had clearly been in a predicament, with one shoe lost eight inches deep in the mud, it was still unlike him just to go pick up a lady. He had never been forward with women; indeed, he had never been anything with women. He had just happened to notice Dora and didn’t want his horses to splatter her dress. He had jumped out of the wagon meaning to offer her a hand, and then just picked her up without thinking. Now that he saw how lovely she was, he began to feel his shyness coming; it felt as if it was coming in a rush. On occasion, usually at picnics, when some girl had spoken to him or accidentally touched him, his shyness had come in such a rush that he would almost faint. The lovely woman on his wagon seat obviously didn’t wish to scare him; but she was female, and that in itself was scary.

  He looked at her solemnly for a moment. He had a big face, big eyes. Dora felt she had never before been exposed to quite such a large solemnity. Why are you so solemn, mister? she wanted to ask—but of course that would be a ridiculous thing to ask someone who had just rescued her from a muddy fate.

  Ogden considered turning the team, but the house was just a few steps away. Unusual as it was for him to carry a woman twice in one day—except for his sisters, he had not carried one in all his previous life—it was clearly the quick solution to getting her safely home.

  “Carrying you’s the quickest,” he said, turning his eyes aside. He got down and held out his arms, hoping the woman would just arrive in them somehow. If she did, he would promptly carry her home.

  The sight of the young man with his arms held out and his gaze turned away was so comical that Dora laughed. Without realizing it, he had backed two or three steps from the wagon. Dora realized she would have had to make a skillful leap to land in his waiting arms.

  “What’s your name, mister?” she asked. She decided she liked this young giant.

  “Ogden Prideaux,” he said, astonished at the question. He looked,
and realized there was a gap between him and the wagon; he stepped closer, and Dora, who felt she wanted to be carried, put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. At that point, Ogden’s shyness struck with full force; he felt his legs tremble as he carried Dora through the rain to the front door of her house. Then he knocked loudly on the door but forgot to set the lady down.

  A black woman opened the door and looked at the two of them in silent astonishment.

  “Did she break her leg?” Doosie asked. It was the only explanation she could come up with for why Dora might be resting in the arms of such a very large man—resting happily, too, from what Doosie could see.

  “Goodness, no, I just lost a shoe,” Dora said. “Ogden, would you care to set me down?”

  Ogden just managed to. He set her down and awaited orders. He had momentarily forgotten that he had a wagon and a team of horses waiting in the street. Other wagons were having to squish around them. Two or three drivers were annoyed that someone had left a wagon smack in the middle of the street in order to go whore—it was only mid-morning.

  Ogden was oblivious. Dora sat down on her own front step and took off her other shoe. The buttons were slick with mud; getting the shoe off took a while.

  Doosie still stood in the doorway. She didn’t know what to make of the man, or of Dora. The one certainty was that Dora should not have tried to cross the street while it was raining. Usually if a man showed up too early, or if it was someone they didn’t want in the house, Doosie had only to block the door and glare and the culprit would slink away. But this young man was so large and his appearance so unexpected that Doosie didn’t feel up to glaring at him. Anyway, he wasn’t trying to come into the house. He just showed no sign of trying to leave.

  “You’ve helped a lot, Ogden,” Dora said—she felt she could use his first name. “If you care to come in I’ll offer you tea. Are you fond of tea?”

  The last thing Ogden would have expected was an invitation to take tea with a lady. He was not accustomed to expecting anything, but if he had been more used to expecting, he still doubted that he would have expected to be asked to tea. He would have liked to accept, but his tongue felt stuck; for a moment he didn’t say anything.

  Dora noticed that the young man had blushed a deep red; so deep was his blush that he seemed incapable of speech. Doosie, too, was incapable of speech, so shocked was she that the large boy had been invited in.

  Dora was a little surprised to find herself developing a frisky feeling. In recent years she more and more rarely developed her frisky feeling, the very feeling that had driven Blue and not a few others mad with love. She had supposed her frisky feeling was gone forever; even Blue didn’t provoke it often anymore; she was too disappointed in Blue. But for some reason, looking up at Ogden looming like a tree on her porch, she felt distinctly frisky. It might be fun to lure this big specimen of a male indoors and see if she could manage to untie his tongue.

  However, there was the problem of the wagon. It was right in the middle of the street and was beginning to cause commotion.

  “Maybe you ought to hitch your wagon first,” she suggested. “I fear it’s in people’s way.”

  Ogden remembered the wagon—there it was, and yet it felt like something he had owned long ago, in another life. Still, if the lady wanted him to hitch it, obviously he had to go hitch it. He started heavily down the steps. When he had descended far enough that his head was about level with the lady’s, he turned and found her grinning at him. But what had he done that was funny?

  “We’ve not been formally introduced—let’s just do it western style,” Dora said, offering him a small hand to shake. “I’m Miss Dora DuFran and I would be pleased if you’d join me for tea. Once you hitch your wagon, of course.”

  “Ma’am, I intend to come right back,” Ogden said, though getting his tongue unstuck took quite an effort.

  “Who’s going to clean them boots of his?” Doosie asked, once he had gone clomping off through the rain. “He can’t come in in his boots—they’re big boots!”

  “Oh, blow your nose,” Dora said. “Nobody asked you to do anything about his boots.”

  “I’m responsible for the floor,” Doosie reminded her—Dora’s precipitous decisions often annoyed her, and this one annoyed her a good deal. “I ain’t having no five pounds of mud on the floor this early,” she emphasized. “It’s too early! We ain’t even open.”

  Dora was watching Ogden. The driver of a wagon stopped behind his jumped off his seat as if he intended to fight, but when he saw how big Ogden was he changed his mind rapidly and pretended he had only got down to mend his reins.

  Ogden didn’t notice—he popped his horses, and pulled his wagon to the side of the street.

  “It’s early, we ain’t even open!” Doosie insisted. “Look how big he is.”

  “Well, you may not be open, but I am,” Dora said, picking up her muddy shoes. “I guess it won’t kill anybody if I ask a gentleman for tea.”

  “Look at how big he is,” Doosie said, still annoyed. “We’ll have to make the tea in a gallon bucket.”

  “Then go find the bucket,” Dora said with a laugh.

  2

  LATER, ONCE THEY HAD MARRIED, DORA FELT ALMOST GUILTY for the speed with which she had captured Ogden. She had made some rapid conquests in her day, but none so rapid or so complete as Ogden. Sitting awkward and frightened in her parlor that morning, drinking what turned out to be almost a gallon bucket’s worth of tea, Ogden became hers. Perhaps it hadn’t even taken that long. Perhaps he had become hers when she looked at him beneath the dripping umbrella on his wagon seat. Making him hers was so easy that it felt a little unseemly; but she had no impulse to spare him or even to slow her conquest. Ogden was awkward, even wooden, but at least he was all of a piece, and simple in a way that few men were. Blue was the love of her life, but Blue was too complicated; once, the complications had excited her, engaged her; now they just wearied her—of course, she would always love Blue, she couldn’t help it, but she felt too sad and too tired to go on with it. Blue loved being complicated; he thought he would beguile her forever with his devilish and reckless ways. Well, that he might, at some level; but at the level of day-to-day life she no longer felt lightened by his devilish and reckless ways. She needed someone she could be at rest with, someone large and simple. Ogden was both, in an endearing way. He wasn’t large outside and small inside, as so many men were. His dimensions were of a piece. It would not occur to him to be ungenerous; what he had, he gave. It didn’t even occur to him to question her—to Ogden, Dora was an oracle of truth, to be listened to and loved and obeyed. It startled him to find out that she was almost the age of his mother, but once that shock subsided he quite forgot that she was almost the age of his mother. Dora scaled down and then closed the whorehouse before Ogden quite grasped the fact that his wife had been running a whorehouse. When he did realize it he behaved exactly as he had when he found out her age; he was surprised, and then he quite forgot it. He himself had been too scared of women to visit whorehouses but attached no blame to Dora for having run one. Once Dora took him to her bed it became obvious to him why whorehouses made money.

  Only twenty-two, Ogden had experienced powerful yearnings, but had not really understood what the yearnings tended toward. He knew that people mated—after all, he had four strapping sisters—but no one had ever informed him that the act was pleasant. But Dora persuaded him otherwise, and the pleasure that resulted left him tongue-tied with surprise. Before that, his best pleasures had been swimming, or fishing, or maybe just running for a mile or two over the prairie. Sometimes Ogden felt so full of energy that he just burst off and ran. Because of his tendency suddenly to run, he had been considered rather strange back home in Wisconsin. His mother, worried by his odd behavior, had tried to curb his running, but Ogden couldn’t control it—there were times when he felt he just must run, or else pop from all the energy inside him.

  Once Dora led him into the mating act, Ogden sel
dom felt that imperative need to run. Now and then he still might lope a mile or two, but the frenzied speed that had once characterized his running diminished a lot.

  Without meaning to, Ogden more or less ruined Dora’s business. The Hotel Hope, so recently moved from Miles City to Belle Fourche, began to lose most of the customers it had just begun to acquire. Skeedle, so actively sought in Miles City that she scarcely had had time to think, had so little to do in Belle Fourche that she took up fortune-telling as a sideline. Trix, sprightly as ever, had two or three devoted customers, but could rarely find anyone to dance with; then a cowboy bound for San Antonio passed through on his way south, fell in love with Trix, and in two days Trix was gone, bound for a ranch on the Frio. Opinion was divided as to whether Trix would tolerate the cowboy all the way to Texas; Skeedle felt that her departure had more to do with ambition than love.

  “I predict she’ll leave him in Denver,” Skeedle said. “Trix always said she wanted to see Denver.”

  “That boy was sweet, though,” Dora pointed out. Marriage to a sweet cowboy was the dream of many a buffalo girl—it had been her dream, too, and yet, for fear of the country, plus a silly determination not to give in to Blue, she had let the dream slip by. For years she had cried about it, cried about it, cried about it. She had even cried about it the morning she met Ogden—she had had to hold cold rags to her eyes for an hour before she felt presentable enough to cross to the hardware store. How odd it was that she had recovered herself, crossed when she did, waited just the right amount of time on the keg of nails, and then set out for home again, only to lose her shoe just as Ogden was coming. What if she had decided she felt too grim to leave the store? What if she had held out a few minutes longer, stayed put on the keg of nails until Ogden had passed? She would have missed him. Now that she had him, the thought that a change in timing of even a minute could have meant missing him forever was disturbing. Dora, who had so often sat looking out her window wishing Blue would come, but knowing it would be difficult even if he did, now looked out her window in a state of amazement—amazement at her luck.