voice so unexpectedly after sixteen years caused her eyes to fill. The sound took the years away. She stood on the stairs in momentary agitation, uncertain for a second as to when it was, or where she was, so much did it remind her of other times when Augustus would show up unexpectedly, and she, in her little room over the store, would hear him talking to her parents.
Only now he was talking to her girls. Clara regretted not changing blouses-Gus had always appreciated her appearance. She walked on down the stairs and looked out the kitchen window. Sure enough, Gus was standing there, in front of his horse, talking to Betsey and Sally. Woodrow Call sat beside him, still mounted, and beside Call, on a bay horse, was a young blond woman wearing men's clothes. A good-looking boy on a brown mare was the last of the group.
Clara noted that Gus had already charmed the girls-July Johnson would be lucky to get another bowl of soup out of them as long as Gus was around.
She stood at the window a minute studying him. To her he seemed not much older. His hair had already turned white when he was young. He had always made her feel keen, Gus-his appetite for talk matched hers. She stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway, a smile on her lips. Just seeing him made her feel keen. She was in the shadows and he had not seen her. Then she took a step or two and Augustus looked around. Their eyes met and he smiled.
'Well, pretty as ever,' he said.
To the huge astonishment of her girls, Clara walked straight off the porch and into the stranger's arms. She had a look in her eyes that they had never seen, and she raised her face to the stranger and kissed him right on the mouth, an action so startling and so unexpected that both girls remembered the moment for the rest of their lives.
Newt was so surprised that he scarcely knew where to look.
When Clara kissed him, Lorena looked down, nothing but despair in her heart. There the woman was, Gus loved her, and she herself was lost. She should have stayed in the tent and not come to see it-yet she had wanted to come. Now that she had, she would have given anything to be somewhere else, but of course it was too late. When she looked up again she saw that Clara had stepped back a bit and was looking at Gus, her face shining with happiness. She had thin arms and large hands, Lorena noticed. Two men were walking up from the lots, having seen the crowd.
'Well, introduce your friends, Gus,' Clara said. She had a hand on his arm, and walked with him over to the horses.
'Oh, you know Woodrow,' Augustus said.
'How do you do?' Call said, feeling at a loss.
'This is Miss Lorena Wood,' Augustus said, reaching up to help her dismount. 'She's come a far piece with us. All the way from Lonesome Dove, in fact. And this young gentleman is Newt.'
'Newt who?' Clara asked.
'Newt Dobbs,' Augustus said, after a pause.
'Hello, Miss Wood,' Clara said. To Lorena's surprise she seemed quite friendly-far more so than most women were to her.
'I don't know whether to envy you or pity you, Miss Wood,' Clara said. 'Riding all that way with Mr. McCrae, I mean. I know he's entertaining, but that much entertainment could break a person for life.'
Then Clara laughed, a happy laugh-she was amused that Augustus had seen fit to arrive with a woman, that she had stunned her girls by kissing him, and that Woodrow Call, a man she had always disliked and considered scarcely more interesting than a stump, had been able to think of nothing better to say to her after sixteen years than 'How do you do?' It added up to a lively time, in her book, and she felt she had been in Nebraska long enough to deserve a little liveliness.
She saw that the young woman was very frightened of her. She had dismounted but kept her eyes cast down. July and Cholo walked up just at that time, July with a look of surprise on his face.
'Why, Sheriff Johnson,' Augustus said. 'I guess, as they say, it's a small world.'
'Just to you, Gus, you've met everybody in it now, I'm sure,' Clara said. She glanced at July, who so far hadn't spoken. He was watching her and it struck her that it might be because she was still holding Gus's arm. It made Clara want to laugh again. In minutes, the arrival of Gus McCrae had mixed up everyone, just as it usually had in the past. It had always been a peculiarity of her friendship with Augustus. Nobody had ever been able to figure out whether she was in love with him or not. Her parents had puzzled over the question for years-it had replaced Bible arguments as their staple of conversation. Even when she had accepted Bob, Gus's presence in her life confused most people, for she had soon demonstrated that she had no intention of giving him up just because she was planning to marry. The situation had been made the more amusing by the fact that Bob himself worshipped Gus, and would probably have thought it odd that she had chosen him over Gus if he had been sharp enough to figure out that she could have had Gus if she'd wanted him.
It had been one-sided adoration, though, for Gus considered Bob one of the dullest men alive, and often said so. 'Why are you marrying that dullard?' he asked her often.
'He suits me,' she said. 'Two racehorses like us would never get along. I'd want to be in the lead, and so would you.'
'I never thought you'd marry a man with nothing to say,' he said.
'Talk ain't everything,' she said-words she had often remembered with rue during years when Bob scarcely seemed to utter two words a month.
Now Gus was back, and had instantly captured her girls-that was clear. Betsey and Sally were fascinated, if embarrassed, that this whitehaired man had ridden up and kissed their mother.
'Where's Robert?' Augustus asked, to be polite.
'Upstairs, sick,' Clara said. 'A horse kicked him in the head. It's a bad wound.'
For a second, remembering the silent man upstairs, she thought how unfair life was. Bob was slipping away, and yet that knowledge couldn't quell her happiness at the sight of Gus and his friends. It was a lovely summer day, too-a fine day for a social occasion.
'You girls go catch three pullets,' she said. 'I imagine Miss Wood is tired of eating beefsteak. It's such a fair day, we might want to picnic a little later.'
'Oh, Ma, let's do,' Sally said. She loved picnics.
Clara would have liked a few words with Augustus alone, but that would have to wait until things settled down a little, she saw. Miss Wood mostly kept her eyes down and said nothing, but when she raised them it was always to look at Gus. Clara took them into the kitchen and left them a moment, for she heard the baby.
'Now, see, all your worrying was for nothing,' Augustus whispered to Lorena. 'She's got a young child.'
Lorena held her peace. The woman seemed kind-she had even offered her a bath-but she still felt frightened. What she wanted was to be on the trail again with Gus. Her mind kept looking ahead to when the visit would be over and she would have Gus alone again. Then she would feel less frightened.
Clara soon came down, a baby in her arms.
'It's July's son,' she said, handing the baby to Gus as if it were a package.
'Well, what do I want with it?' Augustus asked. He had seldom held a baby in his arms and was somewhat discommoded.
'Just hold him or give him to Miss Wood,' Clara said. 'I can't hold him and cook too.'
Call, July and Cholo had walked off to the lots, for Call wanted to buy a few horses and anyway didn't care to sit in a kitchen and try to make conversation.
It amused Lorena that Gus had got stuck with the baby. Somehow it made things more relaxed that the woman would just hand him to Gus that way. She stopped feeling quite so nervous, and she watched the baby chew on his fat little fist.
'If this is Sheriff Johnson's child, whereabouts is his wife?' Augustus asked.
'Dead,' Clara said. 'She stopped here with two buffalo hunters, had the child and left. July showed up two weeks later, half dead from Worry.'
'So you adopted them both,' Augustus said. 'You was always one to grab.'
'Listen to him,' Clara said. 'Hasn't seen me in sixteen years, and he feels free to criticize.
'It's mainly Martin that I wanted,' she continued. 'As life goes on I got less and less use for grown men.'
Lorena smiled in spite of herself. There was something amusing about the sassy way Clara talked. It was no
