mountains had taken the horses. It’s possible. One thing I know, Chase’s men don’t ride Arrowhead horses, and I brand foals as soon as I can catch their mothers.”
“That’s probably why they don’t ride them,” Jud suggested very dryly. “Awfully hard on a man’s neck, getting caught riding a horse he doesn’t have a bill of sale for.”
She looked cynically at Jud. “Not on Cane’s Mesa, it isn’t, Mister Hudson. Who would hang them?”
Rufe grinned down at her. “You, more’n likely. You can rope pretty well, shoot pretty well. I figure you could also lynch pretty well.”
She watched them, and never smiled, and after a while she turned and went back to the big old log house. They finished mounding the earth, hauled Rufe’s outfit as well as the shovels back to the barn, then headed for the creek that ran from north to south on the east side of the yard, out a quarter mile or so, and got deeply into the willow thicket before they stripped down. Every now and then Jud would part the willows and look back at the lighted window in the log house. Finally, when Rufe stepped into the water and gasped, Jud said: “All right, you go first and I’ll keep watch.” He was standing back there naked as a jaybird except for his hat, swatting at mosquitoes. Rufe took another step, shivered all over, then gasped back an answer.
“You don’t have to keep watch, for hell’s sake. She’s in the house, and, anyway, she don’t even know we’re out here.”
Jud would not accept this. “Like hell I don’t,” he hissed. “She came up onto us over where we buried your horse, didn’t she, and this is a sight worse.”
Rufe did not argue. For one thing that innocent-looking water must have come straight down off some Colorado mountaintop that had ice on it all year around. For another thing, the mosquitoes, accustomed to having to feed off animals with thick coats of hair, were coming to the bathing hole in clouds, and, until Rufe finally got deep down into the water, they bit him mercilessly. Up in the willows Jud finally used his hat, and his sizzling profanity, to fight them off, and the hat worked fairly well, while the cursing did not help one bit.
Ordinarily they creek-bathed at the hottest time of day, then lay under a blazing sun to dry off. To-night, they dressed while still dripping wet, then hightailed it for the bunkhouse, closing and barring the door after them as though those ravenous little flying creatures had the strength to open the door.
They fell into bed and did not even look up when a rooster crowed from the barn loft, did not stir until the sun finally listed up out of New Mexico, and shone across Cane’s Mesa in Colorado.
IV
Jud rode out to drift back a little herd of horses that had appeared westerly a couple of miles. Elisabeth was sure they belonged to her, at least that some of them did, and, when Jud had saddled up, he had cast a long look at Rufe, who had said nothing, simply nodding his head.
But nothing happened. There was not another horseman in sight, and the day was another epic of golden fragrance and perfect visibility. A man could see for many miles.
They corralled the horses, Jud took his horse in-side to care for him, and out where Rufe was leaning upon the stringers, gazing in, Elisabeth said all those AC horses belonged to Chase, and the ones with the Lance and Shield mark on their left shoulder belonged to her. Of the thirty-three horses, nine were Lance and Shield. Rufe was interested, and, while she was explaining, Jud ambled out to stand with them.
She pointed to a barrel-chested, handsome dun horse that acted a little like a stallion. He kept maneuvering himself between the other horses and the people, and would flatten his ears if another horse seemed about to move past him, in front.
“He’s stagy,” she said, “for a very good reason.
He ran at stud until he was seven. Now he’s almost nine years old.”
Jud leaned and slowly straightened up wearing a slight frown. “You altered him at seven, ma’am?”
She put a withering look upon Hudson. “Chase altered him, Mister Hudson. Do I look that green?”
Jud, catching Rufe’s amused twinkle, rolled up his eyes as though in supplication. “Miz Cane, all I did was ask a question. How come, every time I open my mouth, you want to shove your fist down it?”
She gripped the topmost corral stringer with strong, tanned hands and stared stonily in at the horses for a long while, a battle obviously under way deep down. Finally she looked at Rufe, who was relaxedly watching her, then looked on past to Jud.
“I apologize. I…you’re right, Mister Hudson, I’ve been downright rude.”
For Jud, this was worse than being snapped at, so he pointed to a rather raw-boned dark horse and mentioned that one time, years back, he’d owned a horse with that build and color that had been tougher than a rawhide cannon ball.
The conversation got back to normal, which, for livestock people, was to a discussion of animals, horses or cattle, or the things that affected either or both, such as the weather, the prospects for a good season, and so forth. In the end Elisabeth, who had been leaning there studying that seal-brown horse, said: “You can have him, Mister Miller, if you want him.” She glanced at the other horses. “He’s a well-broke animal, and so is that sorrel mare with the flaxen mane and tail. So is the little chunky gray horse, but the others…I haven’t had time even to break them to lead.”
They moved to release all the horses but the brown one, and, when they closed the sagging old gate, confining him, he raced back and forth whinnying to his departing friends.
They went around to the front of the bunkhouse, which had been built to house Elisabeth’s long-gone brothers, and sat in kindly shade beneath a warped wooden overhang upon the plank porch where two benches were dowelled into the wall, and where two handmade chairs showed the ravages of being left out in the weather through many harsh winters.
There, while Rufe tossed his hat down beside him upon the bench, disclosing a face Mexican-dark from the eyes down, and almost indecently white from the eyes up, Elisabeth sat in one of the chairs, and Rufe cocked back the other one, with his booted feet hooked over the railing as he said: “About that dun stag, out there, Miz Cane, did he just come in one day, altered?”
She explained. “I found him by himself under some trees, with a fever. They cut him in midsummer and the flies had maggotted him pretty bad, Mister Miller. He was sick, so I didn’t have very much trouble driving him home, and doctoring him.”
Rufe said: “In July, ma’am?”
She raised cornflower blue eyes. “Yes.” Then she added the rest of it, because they were all livestock people and cutting a stallion then turning him out in fly time meant the same thing to all of them—a prolonged, agonizing death for a bleeding animal that could not really protect his wound from foul-smelling, inescapable infection.
“They knew what they were doing, Mister Miller, the same as when they shot my bull. The same as when they’ve somehow or other whittled me down to may be a dozen horses and those few old gummer cows we worked yesterday They’re telling me what to expect.”
Jud rolled a smoke and passed the makings to his partner. As though he hadn’t been listening, he said: “Tell us about that town, down yonder.”
“Clearwater? There’s not much to tell. It’s a stage stop. Once, a few years back, there was some talk about the telegraph coming in, but it never did. There are some log holding pens south of town, for when several cow outfits want Tomake the drive eighty miles to rail’s end together. It has a big general store and so forth.” She smiled faintly. “My parents used Tomake the trip by wagon. We’d start early one morning, reach town by afternoon, lie over, and head back the next day. That general store…around Christmas time when my father would read to us from a book he had about Christmas and Santa Claus and the North Pole where all those wonderful things were… well, I’d think of that general store.”
Rufe smiled at her with understanding, but Jud pursued the topic from a quite different angle. In a drawling tone he said: “Clearwater’s got a store, and a tradin’ barn, and all like that…and a jail-house?”
Elisabeth agreed. “Those things, and a retired Army doctor named Bruce Tappan. It’s a cowmen’s town.”
Jud understood. “Pretty wild on Saturday night, eh?”
She did not know about that. “I’ve never been in Clearwater on a Saturday night, Mister Hudson.”
Jud looked at her, slightly startled, then dropped his head a little and studied the flaky accumulation of ash on
