“We really are sorry,” Sarah Bly said, and tried to smile. If we had been men, she thought, he probably would have sworn at us.
“It was very considerate of you to warn us,” Mrs. Peel said, still flustered by her experience. “I suppose the horses would have scattered and divided and taken different directions and all that.”
He nodded. He was less angry now. His eyes, a clear grey against the deeply tanned skin, had a smile in them. He shifted his hat farther back on his head, and then pulled it over his brow again. Then he looked at the car.
“Having a little trouble?” he asked. His voice, now that he had stopped shouting, was very pleasant: quiet, controlled, with a touch of humour in it.
“We are lost,” Mrs. Peel said. “At least, we know where we are going eventually, but meanwhile—”
“Keep on for another six miles and you’ll reach the ranch. It might be an idea to hurry a bit. Looks as if a storm’s coming over these mountains.” He lifted his hand to his hat, touched the flank of his horse as he wheeled it round, and was off. At the rate he was travelling it would not be long before he overtook the horses.
Sarah said, “Did you notice the spurs and the high-heeled boots?”
“Where’s Jackson?” Mrs. Peel asked, trying to reassert herself. But she was in for another attack of bewilderment as Jackson’s square-set figure came scrambling down from the hillside on to the bank above them. He stood there, looking down at the rough slope, shaking his head. Then he walked along to the more sedate path by the natural gateway to reach them. In his hand he held a large bunch of wild lupines.
“Horses!” He was still shaking his head. “Horses come down here.” He pointed to the bank. “In my country many horses. Many horses, cowboys. But ground is flat.” He waved the lupines in a horizontal line. “Flat. And grass. No this.” He looked with wonder at the bank, and then at the boulder-strewn hillside down which the horses had raced.
“In your country? Cowboys? In Hungary?” In all her eighteen years of Jackson Mrs. Peel had never heard him mention a horse.
“We’d better start moving,” Sarah said to him. “Keep on for another six miles. Looks as if a storm’s coming over these mountains.” But both women stopped smiling as the first roar of thunder reached the valley. As the jagged lightning struck down at the pinnacles of rock Jackson manoeuvred the car round without one reproving look for the shameful way it had been treated, and drove with all the abandon of a Hungarian cowboy along the darkening road. They passed groups of trees now, tracing the banks of a stream. At first they could hear the angry rush of water, and then the rising wind silenced it as the tall trees groaned and bent. The lightning encircled them, cracking like a whip. The thunderclaps echoed across the valley, rebounding from peak to peak.
“Oh!” Mrs. Peel moaned, and put up her hands to her hat too late. Sarah laughed unfeelingly, for she had lost hers at the first blast of wind.
“Jackson!” Mrs. Peel shouted. But she couldn’t compete with the thunder. And the rain had begun to fall, large, heavy drops changing to a stream of wind-swept water. Jackson, driving as if the hounds of hell had been unleashed at his heels, was obviously not going to stop the car to put up the hood, far less search for hats on a hillside.
“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Peel said, and hung on to the rocking car with both hands. The lights in the ranch-house could now be seen, but at the moment they gave little comfort, for it would take another three minutes to reach their promised safety. And in this country, Mrs. Peel had learned, anything could happen in a matter of seconds.
2
FLYING TAIL
The men came into the ranch-house kitchen, hooked their slickers on the wooden pegs at the door, shook their hats and threw them on the broad window sill, straddled the benches that stood on either side of the oilcloth-covered table, and reached unanimously for the bread. The full stew-plates began to empty rapidly.
Mrs. Gunn waited until they had some mouthfuls of good hot meat and mashed potatoes inside them before she started asking questions. She had been brought up on a ranch. Now, as she added another half-pound slab of butter to the table and refilled the bread-plate, she looked round at the old-fashioned and cheerful kitchen with its large wood stove, then at the five wind-tanned faces enjoying her cooking, and felt content with her world. She was an elderly woman, big-boned and yet spare. Her movements were brisk and neat. Her red hair had whitened; her face seemed very pale in contrast to the men’s tanned skin. There was warmth and kindness in her eyes, frankness in her look.
“Got the last horse into the south pasture just as the rain broke,” Jim Brent said. “Very nearly didn’t though. There was a car on the road, right where it shouldn’t have been, and a couple of women with feathers in their hats, and a man, all dressed up in a blue uniform, picking flowers. Darnedest thing I ever saw.” He smiled, shaking his head.
“What were the women like?” Mrs. Gunn asked, her interest aroused by hats with feathers in them.
“One was kind of middle-aged...white hair, brown eyes, and a quick smile. She was fussing a bit. The other—oh, she was all right, I guess.”
“Climbed faster over that car than a colt trying to get to his mother,” Ned put in. His handsome dark face had a ready grin.
“Burst the seam of her skirt, too,” Jim said, “but she had a nice way of not noticing. She had a nice smile too—quiet but steady.”
“And where did this happen?” Mrs. Gunn wanted to know.
“Just below Snaggletooth. They couldn’t have picked a better spot to scatter us if they tried. Seemed as if they were having a picnic.”
“Didn’t they know a storm was coming up?”
“Look, Ma,” Ned said. “Them Easterners wouldn’t know a thunderhead even if they was swallowed up by it.” Ned, who had spent an October calf-roping in Madison Square Garden two years ago, knew all about New York and its peculiar inhabitants.
“I told them to drop in, by the way,” Jim said. “Better keep some of that stew.”
“Them damn Easterners, taking the meat out of a man’s mouth,” Bert grumbled, the furrows on his face deepening. He wasn’t going to let young Ned there get away with all the information on the subject. He had met Easterners too, for he had worked for some summers, before the War, over at a neighbouring ranch that took in dudes. He poured his fourth mug of coffee, and stirred its thick layer of sugar vigorously. His long, pointed face had a comical twist to it.
Mrs. Gunn removed the stew-dish from his reach and brought over a bowl of peaches. No nasty cans on her table. Things were nicely served. She insisted on that, just as she insisted on everyone’s being washed and brushed up and boots scraped and no language in her kitchen. They were good rules, she had found. A new wrangler might think she was fussy, but he came to enjoy a supper at her table as much as the others. It was a rough life they had, sometimes eating and sleeping in the hills for days on end. It didn’t hurt to give them a little of the woman’s touch when they got back to the ranch. She put a large plate of freshly baked doughnuts at Bert’s elbow to help him forget his disappointment.
“Well,” she said, “whoever they are, they’re taking their time. Ought to have been here by now. Wonder if that loose plank on the bridge gave them any trouble?”
“We’ll have to dig them out of a hillside,” young Robb predicted in his quiet, slow way. “That stoneface above the bridge was beginning to crack up again. I noticed it last week.” His face was thoughtful, but the fresh colour in his cheeks, and the fair hair and blue eyes, made him look even younger than he was.
Ned said, “It’s all that rain we get here.” He came from Arizona, and anything more than a shower once every three months seemed flood proportions to him. His dark eyes had a laugh in them, ready to take on all arguments. But Robb, who came from Montana, wasn’t taking up any challenges tonight. He was thinking about the storm.
So was Mrs. Gunn. “Hard to hear a smash on a night like this,” she said, and listened half expectantly.
Bert helped himself to some more peaches. “They’ll be taking pictures,” he said. “Over at Fennimore’s there was a crowd of dudes, and all they did was take them pictures.” He looked at Ned, defying him to contradict. “They come to the corral in the morning, all two hours late, with leather straps around their necks and leather boxes dangling on their chests. They was as near well harnessed as the horses.”
“Dudes...” Chuck said reflectively. He was the oldest wrangler there—perhaps the oldest in the county. Age had made him still thinner, but his eyes had lost none of their alertness, and the colour on his lean cheeks was still fresh. He admitted he was near seventy-six, but the rest of the boys thought he was being kind of modest. He treated Bert, who was forty-five or thereabouts, as a brash young fellow from Idaho who had only spent twelve years of his life in this part of the world, so that the other thirty-three were negligible. Ned and Robb, twenty-six years apiece, and newcomers since they were demobilised, were practically in the kindergarten. Jim Brent had been born here, and he had lived here most of his life, so even if he was only forty-one he made up for his youth by being not too ignorant about the country.
A hard ride nowadays took Chuck’s breath away, as he put it. But now that the warmth of the food and the coffee was working on him he was ready to join in the talk. “Dudes,” he said reflectively. “First bunch of dudes I ever seen, back in 1898, was—”
Jim Brent, who knew all Chuck’s stories and wasn’t even expected to listen to them, rose to his feet. “Come on, Bert. You know all about Easterners. We’ll take a couple of shovels in case that flower-picker has gone wandering into a ditch looking for watercress.” He moved stiffly over to the door—he had been in the saddle since six o’clock that morning—and started to pull on his slicker. Bert followed him, saying nothing, listening to the increasing gusts of wind, the renewed thunderclaps. They both halted for a moment, before they opened the door, and listened to the wind and the rain outside.
Mrs. Gunn said, “Perhaps they drove right on to Sweetwater.”
Jim shook his head. “Didn’t know if they were coming or going, far less that Sweetwater ever existed. Ready, Bert?” They plunged into the night, and it took both men to close the door.
“There was five of them, all straight from St Louis,” Chuck was saying.
“Sure rains here in Wyoming,” Ned said. “Ought to have known it. At the Garden the Wyoming ponies had webbed feet. Sure puzzled me at the time.”
“Sure, sure,” Robb said. “And the Arizona ponies all had humps in place of withers. Crossed them with camels, they tell me.”
“Now, boys!” Mrs. Gunn said. “Anyone else for a doughnut? If the ladies come here they won’t touch them. Bad for their figures, they say.” She laughed, and patted her own gaunt hipbones. “It’s not the eating, it’s the sitting, if you ask me. Well, I’d better get a couple of beds ready. Robb, give me a hand with some logs. We’ll need a fire in the guest-room to cheer them up. Hasn’t been used now for almost seven years.” Her smile faded as she thought of the changes the War had made, and she left the kitchen quickly. Fortunately, she thought, as she climbed the stairs to the linen closet, she had always kept the house aired and cleaned and polished as if all the Brents were still living here. It would be nice to have the guest-room used again.
In the kitchen Ned stretched his long, thin legs towards the bright fire. Like Chuck, he was going to wait to see the arrival of this flower-picker. He rolled a cigarette and listened to Chuck, whose breath had fully recovered and now matched his memory.
3
REST AND BE THANKFUL
Sarah Bly awoke first.
She lay quite still, enjoying the soft warmth of the bed, the deep silence, the pale sunlight filtering through green curtains, the comforting disorder of opened suitcases, the feeling of having slept so well that no more problems existed. If they did exist—for, after all, the car was still in the ditch, and their clothes were probably shrinking to nothing as they dried in the warm kitchen downstairs—they would be solved. That was the kind of morning it was. Cold, too, she decided as she stepped out of bed. But she had to see what lay outside the green curtains.
* * *
Mrs. Peel stirred, yawned, and then looked round in a dazed way. It was the pleasantest hotel room she had seen in a long time. She stared at the fireplace, with its evidence of a log fire, and gradually she remembered. She drew the four blankets and wool comforter more tightly about her. At least, here was safety. Last night... She shuddered. She closed her eyes, but she could still see the three miserable, drenched, mud-covered scarecrows being brought into a warm, cheerful kitchen. And that thin, white-haired woman, Mrs—Mrs. Pistol, taking them in charge, helping them unpack their suitcases, finding them dry clothes, lending them an extra cardigan, heating up stew and coffee for them. All in the quietest way, as if this were nothing unusual. Yes, everyone had been like that, all the strange, expressionless men who didn’t say much but looked politely at the bunch of lupines which she had still clutched in her hand as she walked into the kitchen.
After all, she couldn’t hurt Jackson’s feelings by leaving them to drown in the car: she had told him so often that blue flowers were her favourite ones, and he had picked the lupines yesterday to cheer her up for having been so wrong in insisting on that road. Jackson never explained, because he still thought in Hungarian, and that kept him silent except in moments of great excitement. Once Mrs. Peel had suggested that she would learn Hungarian, and then he would have someone to talk to. But the proposal had alarmed Jackson. That Mrs. Peel had understood too. It was Jackson’s consolation that he was able to do one thing that very few people in France or America could do. Whenever he felt perplexed by the Western world he would smile, knowing that if he started talking Hungarian he could bewilder it too. She couldn’t take that smile away from Jackson. He had understood the logic that if she wasn’t to learn Hungarian, then he would have to be renamed. Jackson was something she could pronounce without having her tongue trip over a weird assortment of strange sounds. Too many sneezes, Sarah had agreed.
“Sarah!” she called. She lifted her head to look across the room. But the other bed was empty, and the bathroom was silent.
“How extraordinary!” Mrs. Peel said, and began to worry. Sarah never behaved this way. What could have happened to her? Where was she?
After all, this was a strange house in a strange—a very strange—place, and they were miles from civilisation. The people had been very kind last night, but now that she came to think of it, hadn’t they been also very quick? Yet there was a little town only twenty-five miles farther along this road—Mrs. Pistol had talked about it—and there must be a hotel there. Never, in Mrs. Peel’s long and varied experience of getting lost, had she been welcomed as a guest overnight in a strange house and treated as a friend. Either she had been directed politely to the nearest inn or, if she stayed, she paid.
Mrs. Peel sat up in bed, shivered, searched for her watch under the pillow, and couldn’t find it. Her purse—she couldn’t remember where she had put it last night, but she had put it some place in this room—wasn’t visible, either. She stared wildly round. Twenty-five miles to the nearest house, she remembered. She set out bravely for the door.
A sound of chopping came upstairs from the kitchen. Then, as she hesitated on the landing, wondering if she should dare call Sarah once more, she heard Mrs. Pistol’s voice and Sarah’s laugh.
“Sarah!” she called sharply, angry with herself and with Sarah. As she heard Sarah’s high heels leave the kitchen she turned and ran back to bed. She was cold. She was hungry too, and the tantalising smell of eggs and bacon and coffee which had drifted up from the kitchen had sharpened this unaccustomed early appetite.
Sarah, looking most attractively healthy, carried a tray into the bedroom. She was alarmingly cheerful too for this time of day.
“Lazybones,” she said. “It is practically mid-morning, ranch time.”
“My watch—” Mrs.
Peel began fretfully.
“It had fallen on the floor. I put it on the dressing-table. Now have something to eat and you’ll feel much better.”
“You know I never eat in the morning,” Mrs. Peel said.
Sarah only smiled. “You’ll be surprised how good ham and eggs are after all these years. I’ll have a cup of coffee and give you the news of the day. No morning papers here, you know.” She laid the heavy tray on Mrs. Peel’s lap, and then went over to the broad stretch of windows. She drew back the green curtains and let the bright sunshine spread into the room. The sky was blue. The clouds were white and innocent. A tree-top stirred in the gentle breeze and fluttered its fresh green leaves.
“What time is it?”
“Half-past nine,” Sarah said.
“You made me think it was noon,” Mrs. Peel said accusingly, and sipped a cup of strong black coffee. “Did you have breakfast with the cowboys?”
“Good heavens, no. They had breakfast hours ago. I only got downstairs about half-past seven. And they seem to be called wranglers.”
“If cowboy was good enough for the West for fifty years or so it’s good enough for me,” Mrs. Peel said rebelliously. “And they are all out riding again... What an incredibly romantic life!” She was becoming more human as the cup of coffee took effect. She looked at the inviting slice of ham and the two perfectly cooked eggs. “I’ll just have a little taste,” she said, and cut into the first yolk.
“Not entirely romantic,” Sarah said. “It seems there is a lot of work around the ranch, and it’s done by them without outside help. We’ve rather added to their chores, I’m afraid. Jim Brent—he’s the tallest one, with greying hair and grey eyes, who spoke to us on the road yesterday evening, and he’s the owner of the ranch, did you know that? Jackson was quite surprised, and rather pleased, when he heard that: it made him feel better, somehow, about eating supper along with us last night. You know how feudal he insists on being sometimes! Anyway, Jim Brent has gone with Jackson and Robb to get the car back on the road. Once that is done Jim and Robb have to clear the road to Sweetwater, where a tree fell last night. Ned is repairing a saddle. Later he and Bert have a job of mending fences to do. But meanwhile Bert has gone to clear the stream with Chuck (the very old man: he’s worked on this ranch for years and years, even before Mrs. Gunn came here), so that the water-supply won’t be blocked by the storm.”