He made it to the bathroom, illuminated only by the fire in the open-face wall heater, and then down the hallway and halfway across the living room before he stumped his toe on the rung of a rocking chair.
“Shit!” he muttered.
His coveralls, face mask, and hat were hanging on a rack beside the back door, and his boots waited on a rug right underneath them. He zipped the mustard-colored canvas coveralls all the way to his neck, pulled the face mask over his head, and pushed the bottom behind the collar of the coveralls. Then he stomped his feet down into his work boots and crammed an old felt hat down on his head. It was a tight fit with the knitted mask, but a cowboy didn’t even do chores without his hat.
He leaned into the whirling wind on the way to the barn located only a football field’s length from the house. He’d run that far lots of times when he was quarterback of the Gold-Burg football team and never even thought about it. But battling against the driving snow sucked the air out of his lungs and by the time he reached the barn he was panting worse than if he’d run a fifty-yard touchdown. The barn door slid on metal rails and they were frozen. At first he thought muscles, force, and cussing wasn’t going to do the trick, but finally he was able to open it up enough to wedge his body through.
The air inside wasn’t any warmer, but at least it didn’t sound like a freight train barreling down the sides of the canyon. He shook off a flurry of white powder, grabbed his gloves from the bale of hay where he’d left them the night before, and pulled them on.
“Won’t make that stupid mistake again,” he said.
He hiked a hip onto the seat of the smaller of two tractors and planted a long spike implement into a round bale of hay and drove it up close to the double doors at the back of the barn. He got off the seat, opened the doors, and ran back to get the hay out before the cows came inside. They had crowded up under the lean-to roof and eaten the last of the bale he’d put out the morning before. It took a lot of hay to keep them from losing weight in the winter. He just hoped he’d hauled enough big round bales from the pasture into the barn to make it through the storm.
The feeding job that should have been done in half an hour took twice that long. The two breeder sows holed up in the hog house were so cold that they barely grunted when he poured a bucket of food in their trough. One rooster was brave enough to come out of the henhouse and crow his disapproval before he hurried back inside. When Creed finished feeding, it was time to milk the cow. Glad to be back inside the dry barn, he filled a bucket with grain and gave it to the cow. While she got started on her breakfast, he fetched a three-legged milking stool and a clean bucket from the tack room. His hands were freezing, but he couldn’t milk with gloves.
“Sorry about the cold hands, old girl,” he apologized to the cow before he started.
When he’d finished that job he headed toward the house. Steam rose up from the top of the warm milk, but it didn’t do much to melt the snow coming down even harder than it had been.
“And it’s not letting up for three days!” he mumbled.
When he opened the back door into the kitchen, a scraggly mutt raced in ahead of him. Ada hadn’t mentioned a dog and he hadn’t seen the animal before, but there he was, ugly as sin, shaking snow all over the kitchen floor.
* * *
Sage was an early riser, so sleeping until eight o’clock had given her a stinging headache. She grabbed her forehead and snuggled back into the covers, but the pain didn’t go away. She needed a handful of aspirin and a cup of strong black coffee. She seldom won a fight with Grand when they were playing on an even field. A blasted headache would give her grandmother a real advantage. She jerked on a Christmas sweatshirt printed with Tweety Bird all tangled up in a strand of lights on the front and pulled on a pair of gray sweat bottoms. She finished off the outfit with fluffy red socks from her dresser drawer.
Grand hadn’t even stopped long enough to get a fire going. That could wait. Coffee came before warmth. Sage passed the fireplace and went straight to the kitchen. She filled the electric coffee maker, added a filter and two scoops of coffee, and flipped the switch.
“Well, shit!” she exclaimed.
Old habits sure died hard. If the lights wouldn’t work, neither would the electric coffeepot. And that left out the washing machine, the clothes dryer, and the electric churn to make butter, too.
The fact that the electricity was out wasn’t anything new in Palo Duro Canyon. If the wind blew too hard, and it did real often in the winter, the electricity went out. Grand said that if someone sneezed too loud up in Silverton or in Claude it went out, so no electricity in a blizzard was no big surprise. That’s why they heated the house as much as possible with the fireplace and cooked with propane.
Sage opened a cabinet door and removed the old Pyrex percolator, filled it with water, put a filter in the basket, added coffee, and set it on the back burner of the stove. She wasn’t as good as Grand about knowing just how long it
