supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts,
staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was
blessedly quiet, and the air was clean. ..- Residing in the city, it
was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the
teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real
world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for
reality. In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night,
Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle's Roost, Montana, at three o'clock
in the afternoon on the sixth of .. November.
To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack's favorite novels, and Atticus
Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in
Paul Youngblood's office on the top floor of the only three-story
building in Eagle's Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from
mid-century. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were
glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of
gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history
and philosophy as well as lawbooks.
The attorney actually greeted them with, 'Howdy, neighbors! What a
pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure.' He had a firm handshake and a
smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags.
Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A. and
he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever
visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century
City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with closecropped iron-gray hair.
His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big,
leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots,
tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the
form of a bucking bronco.
In L.A. people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or
executives, costumed for an evening at a Country-Western bar, and could
not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had
been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and
raised on horseback.
Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and
take on a mob of machine wranglers, the attorney was soft-spoken and so
polite that Jack was aware of how badly his own manners had
deteriorated under the constant abrasion of daily life in the city.
Youngblood won Toby's heart by calling him
'Scout' and offering to
teach him horseback riding 'come spring, starting with a pony, of
course . . . and assuming that's okay with your folks.'
When the lawyer put on a suede jacket and a cowboy hat before leading
them out to Quartermass Ranch, Toby regarded him with wide-eyed awe.
They followed Youngblood's white Bronco across sixteen miles of country
more beautiful than it had appeared to be in photographs. Two stone
columns, surmounted by a weathered wooden arch, marked the entrance to
their property. Burned into the arch, rustic lettering spelled
QUARTERMASS RANCH. They turned off the county route, under the sign,
and headed uphill.
Wow! This all belongs to us?' Toby asked from the back seat,
