keep your nose out of other people's business. You hear what I'm saying to you?'
He smiled a slack, inane smile and returned to his sweeping. After she brushed past him and padded back upstairs with her bottle, his embarrassment turned to bitterness. For crying out loud, he'd only said what he said for her own good! To shake off his feelings of unjust rejection, he applied himself energetically to his push broom, raising clouds of churning dust that first discovered, then defined, a shaft of morning sunlight that had climbed high enough to come in over the bat-winged bar door.
Lodgepole Creek Gully
EVENING WAS CLOSING IN when the prospector tied his riding mule and his two coffee-colored pack mules to scrub pine and started his cooking fire with pine cones and sticks of windfall. He had snared two nice fat jack- rabbits, and he meant to have one for his supper.
A susurrous scurry of sliding scree drew his attention to three men climbing up the slope toward him. Well now! It had been a donkey's age since he'd had a good chin wag. By the time he'd added more windfall to the fire and blown on the ash-scabbed pine cones to get his coffee pot boiling, the men were closer. He answered their call with a cheerful wave of his hand. By God, he'd roast both jackrabbits! Have a little celebration. These flatlanders probably never ate jackrabbit in their lives. It'd be a treat for them. He could tell they were flatlanders from the elegant clothes of the one in front: that leather doohicky for a tie, and that fancy green-and-gold waistcoat.
LIKE EVERY SATURDAY, THE noonday meal with the Kanes was bigger than usual because Mr. Kane and Ruth Lillian would only have time for a quick sandwich that evening. Matthew was expected to follow his Saturday custom of taking supper at Bjorkvist's boarding-house. Since he had the whole afternoon on his hands, he knew that he really ought to go up to the Livery to see if B. J. Stone and Coots had any chores for him, but he was still uncomfortable about them, and he was afraid that something in his manner might reveal that he knew their secret. The idea of men 'doing' one another seemed to him-well, not exactly evil or repulsive, but odd. And sort of embarrassing, too: an embarrassment he felt on their behalf, something like the embarrassment he had felt on his parents' behalf when he first learned how babies are made, and pictured his folks doing it. He hadn't known whether to laugh, or shudder in disgust.
But he had been avoiding B. J. and Coots for a week now, and he made a firm resolve to see them soon. Tomorrow for sure!
… Or maybe the day after.
When evening brought the miners hooting and shooting their way down the street, he joined the queue, paid Mrs. Bjorkvist her silver dollar, and took his usual place at his usual table. When Kersti leaned over and pressed herself against him while serving the biscuits, Doc nudged him and pumped his eyebrows. 'I do believe you've made yourself a conquest there, Ringo! And I'll bet she never quits! As for her looks…? Well, hell's-bells, all cats are gray in the dark, like the fella says.' He nudged him again.
Matthew glanced up to see Oskar Bjorkvist staring at him from the kitchen doorway, his bland face puckered into a frown of intense hate. He felt a flash of anger at the idea of that slack-mouthed idiot thinking of Ruth Lillian while he 'did' himself out in the back shed.
That night he sat up in bed, reading The Ringo Kid Takes His Time by the light of his kerosene lamp, while from out in the street came the occasional yelp or hoot of a miner raising hell. His attention kept sliding off the page, not only because he had read the book more than a dozen times already and it was not one of his favorites because there was too much 'pink-and-silver sunsets' and 'yellow-streaked dawns' and 'purple-tinged deserts' and such fancy truck between the interesting action bits, but also because his ears kept straining toward the back door, harkening for Kersti's arrival. Just before leaving the other night, she had said something about coming again Saturday, after she had cleaned up at the boardinghouse. He had gone over in his mind half a dozen times how he'd tell her that they couldn't do it anymore-not because he didn't like her, he would hasten to say-but because it wasn't fair on Ruth Lillian, who was his… well, he didn't know exactly what she was, but anyway they couldn't do it anymore, and that was that! But he'd tell Kersti that it wasn't because he didn't like her! 'Cause that wasn't true! He did like her. In fact, he thought she was… you know… just fine. And he hoped someday she'd manage to get out of Twenty-Mile and get a job in some city and find friends-and a fella, too, of course!
What really troubled Matthew-and made him angry with himself-was that even while he was remembering Kersti's beefy face, thick body, and tangy smell, and thinking about how terrible it would be if Ruth Lillian found out that he and Kersti had done one another, he felt himself getting hard, in spite of himself. He couldn't explain it. How could low feelings of lust get hold of a man when all his loftier aspirations were tugging him in another direction? Maybe Mr. Kane was right when he said that men were lots closer to the animals than women were. One thing was for sure, you could bet the Ringo Kid never found himself getting hard while he was talking in his polite, soft-voiced way to one of the pretty young women he met in his wanderings from town to town, looking for chances to do good.
It suddenly occurred to him that he shouldn't be lying in bed in his long Johns when Kersti arrived, because that would give her the wrong idea. He was tugging his trousers on when he heard her scratch at his back door, and he was still stuffing in his shirt as he opened it and told her to come in and sit down, because there was something they had to talk about. She sat on the edge of his bed and made a little pouting face when he sat in the chair over by his reading table and began by saying, 'Now look, Kersti. There's something we got to talk about. You and me, we can't-'
'Ain't you afraid somebody might look in the window and see me here, and you with your shirttail sticking out?' Kersti asked, cupping her hand over the kerosene lamp and blowing it out. 'That's better. Now come sit over here by me, so's we don't have to talk so loud and risk being heard by folks.'
With an impatient moan, Matthew crossed and sat on the edge of the bed as far from Kersti as possible, which wasn't all that far, as she was sitting in the middle. 'You see, Kersti, the fact is… listen, we got to talk about-'
But she avoided the 'lecture' she could feel was coming by the straightforward expedient of reaching out and grasping his penis, right through his trousers.
'I knew it! You're hard, and that means you want to do it. So what are we waiting for?'
He stood up. 'No, now look, Kersti, we really-' But she pulled him down onto the bed and started fumbling with his belt.
And he didn't stop her. Lordy, he didn't stop her.
But as soon as they'd finished, he told her that they mustn't do this again. Never, ever. (It was somehow easier to tell her now that he was spent and soft.) She lay beside him, silent and heavy, and he could feel anger and hurt radiating from her. Then she began to cry. Great sobbing snorts… oddly like her snorts when she climaxed. Her voice was all wet and slippery when she blubbered that she knew it was because of that stuck-up Ruth Lillian Kane… with her piled-up hair and her orange-blossom water! But what about her? She didn't have nobody but old Murphy, with his falling-off hair!
In that overly patient tone of weary reasonableness that men use on women they've wronged, he reminded her that she intended to get out of town pretty soon anyway. And he went on to assure her that she'd find someone who'd love her, and take care of her, and always be- Well, maybe she didn't need to be loved and taken care of! Maybe she didn't need him nor anyone else! Yes, and another thing! She'd just as soon he didn't come to the boardinghouse to eat on Saturday nights anymore! And if he did? Well then, she'd be damned if she'd serve him!
He asked if she was mad at him.
What did he think?
'Sh-h-h! Somebody'll hear you!' Her mention of the orange-blossom water that Ruth Lillian sprinkled on her handkerchiefs had reminded him that he should have said something nice about the vanilla extract Kersti had dabbed behind her ears and under her arms, largely eclipsing the smell of stale sweat. 'You're not thinking of telling anyone about you and me, are you?' he asked.
After a petulant silence that she maintained for a punitively long time, she finally said… no. No, she wouldn't tell, because if her ma found out she'd beat her into next Tuesday. So he needn't worry! She wouldn't tell his precious Ruth Lillian!
She turned away from him and lay there, brooding over her hurt. Then, to hurt him in return, she said that her pa had told Jeff Calder that he'd better hire Oskar to do the breakfast chores at the hotel and kick out this Chumms or Ringo or Dubchek, or whatever-the-hell-he's-calling-himself-this-month, because he was mighty friendly with
