Rest and Be Thankful (2 page)

“If he gets lost—” Sarah began, in alarm.

“We’d have to camp out here until he gets unlost. It
has
been done before, you know. I expect this country at one time was dotted over with covered wagons waiting for scouts to turn up again. Cheer up, Sarah! The Indian wars are over, and the bears all spend the summer nowadays in Yellowstone to get their photographs taken. We’ve little to worry about. Imagine if we were sitting in a covered wagon sixty years ago, and a band of Sioux were watching us from the top of that ridge over there! It must have been quite unpleasant to comb your hair out each night before you went to bed. So reminding. I think I’d have travelled with a shaven head, just to annoy them.” Mrs. Peel’s eyes suddenly narrowed, and her voice sharpened. “Now, how did that get there?” She pointed to the ridge where she had placed her scalping-party, and stared angrily at the grey mist which was creeping over it, swirling lower, thickening, even as she watched. “Was that distant thunder?” she asked. She looked anxiously at the rest of the sky, still blue and brightly smiling.

“It’s quite near,” Sarah said. “And not thunder. Hoofs, I think.”

“Oh, dear! More bulls,” Mrs. Peel said, abandoning her pioneer-woman attitude and climbing back hastily into the car.

“Coming this way,” Sarah Bly informed her with some satisfaction. Of course, they would only be cows, but still she removed the red chiffon scarf which she wore tucked into the neckline of her grey flannel suit. “Poor Jackson. Do you think dodging a stampede is one of his secret accomplishments?”

“They aren’t bulls; they’re wild horses!” Mrs. Peel called loudly above the mounting uproar, as a mass of flying manes and tails and pounding hoofs suddenly swept over a hillside and poured down towards the car. Half-circling them, urging them on, were five men on horseback.

“And this,” Sarah said quickly, remembering the grass bridge at the edge of the road which made such a convenient turning-place for the car, “this is where they will cross!”

Mrs. Peel looked at her with horror.

“Cliffs, precipices, canyons!” Sarah shouted in explanation, and waved her arms to the front and back of the car.

One of the riders raced towards them, while the others altered their half-circle to a flanking manoeuvre to turn the horses and slacken their speed.

“Get that car out of the way!” shouted the rider. Sarah Bly, ignoring her tight skirt, climbed desperately over into the front seat. She was rarely allowed to drive—Jackson had a well-developed sense of possession—but she knew roughly what to do. She did it, conscious of the man’s furious look, of the angry voice, of his impatient horse, of the loud shouts and terrified neighs which were now alarmingly close.

That’s it!” the man directed. “Now turn the car across the road! Just there! There!”

Mrs. Peel wondered what Jackson would say if he heard the gears being stripped like that. But Sarah had managed it, bringing the car to rest before it fell over the bank on the left of the road. “But why?” Mrs. Peel said. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

“To form a road block,” Sarah answered. “And stay in the car, Margaret!” She felt ridiculously pleased with herself, and with her guess, as the man now rode his horse over to the other side of the broad natural gateway and took his position there. In one hand he held a ready loop; in the other the rest of the long rope was neatly coiled. He had quite forgotten them, Sarah thought, as she watched his concentration. Then his eyes lifted towards the milling herd of horses, as its leaders were once more directed towards the road. The surging wave hesitated, gathered force, rushed suddenly with renewed speed, shook the car as it poured over the road and thundered past to cover everything and everyone in a cloud of dust.

“My dear!” Mrs. Peel’s voice rose chokingly, as a horseman appeared suddenly at the edge of the cloud on the high bank above them and, without altering speed, rode down its steep slope, swerved to avoid the car, and then disappeared down a steeper slope at a gallop to turn a couple of straying horses back into the mainstream.

It was over as quickly as it had begun. They were left staring after the moving mass of horses, listening to the fading calls of the circling riders.

“So that’s a cowboy,” Mrs. Peel said faintly, and sat down on the nice quiet safe seat of the car. “We really do choose our moments... Imagine arriving in the middle of a rodeo!”

“A day’s work for them, which we nearly ruined.”

“They very nearly ruined me,” Mrs. Peel said.

Sarah didn’t reply; she was watching the man who had guarded the road now riding slowly towards them. He seemed to be paying more attention to re-coiling the rope and fixing it on to his saddle than he was to the two strangers. He was a tall man, thin, muscular. His face, set in strong lines, was impassive. He reached the car and halted his horse. He touched the battered felt hat, wide and curved in the brim, which he wore pulled well down over his forehead. He sat easily on his horse, his body now relaxed, his right hand resting on his hip, his left arm leaning on the saddle-horn. He said nothing. He sat there and he looked at them.

“We really are sorry,” Sarah Bly said, and tried to smile. If we had been men, she thought, he probably would have sworn at us.

“It was very considerate of you to warn us,” Mrs. Peel said, still flustered by her experience. “I suppose the horses would have scattered and divided and taken different directions and all that.”

He nodded. He was less angry now. His eyes, a clear grey against the deeply tanned skin, had a smile in them. He shifted his hat farther back on his head, and then pulled it over his brow again. Then he looked at the car.

“Having a little trouble?” he asked. His voice, now that he had stopped shouting, was very pleasant: quiet, controlled, with a touch of humour in it.

“We are lost,” Mrs. Peel said. “At least, we know where we are going eventually, but meanwhile—”

“Keep on for another six miles and you’ll reach the ranch. It might be an idea to hurry a bit. Looks as if a storm’s coming over these mountains.” He lifted his hand to his hat, touched the flank of his horse as he wheeled it round, and was off. At the rate he was travelling it would not be long before he overtook the horses.

Sarah said, “Did you notice the spurs and the high-heeled boots?”

“Where’s Jackson?” Mrs. Peel asked, trying to reassert herself. But she was in for another attack of bewilderment as Jackson’s square-set figure came scrambling down from the hillside on to the bank above them. He stood there, looking down at the rough slope, shaking his head. Then he walked along to the more sedate path by the natural gateway to reach them. In his hand he held a large bunch of wild lupines.

“Horses!” He was still shaking his head. “Horses come down here.” He pointed to the bank. “In my country many horses. Many horses, cowboys. But ground is flat.” He waved the lupines in a horizontal line. “Flat. And grass. No this.” He looked with wonder at the bank, and then at the boulder-strewn hillside down which the horses had raced.

“In your country? Cowboys? In Hungary?” In all her eighteen years of Jackson Mrs. Peel had never heard him mention a horse.

“We’d better start moving,” Sarah said to him. “Keep on for another six miles. Looks as if a storm’s coming over these mountains.” But both women stopped smiling as the first roar of thunder reached the valley. As the jagged lightning struck down at the pinnacles of rock Jackson manoeuvred the car round without one reproving look for the shameful way it had been treated, and drove with all the abandon of a Hungarian cowboy along the darkening road. They passed groups of trees now, tracing the banks of a stream. At first they could hear the angry rush of water, and then the rising wind silenced it as the tall trees groaned and bent. The lightning encircled them, cracking like a whip. The thunderclaps echoed across the valley, rebounding from peak to peak.

“Oh!” Mrs. Peel moaned, and put up her hands to her hat too late. Sarah laughed unfeelingly, for she had lost hers at the first blast of wind.

“Jackson!” Mrs. Peel shouted. But she couldn’t compete with the thunder. And the rain had begun to fall, large, heavy drops changing to a stream of wind-swept water. Jackson, driving as if the hounds of hell had been unleashed at his heels, was obviously not going to stop the car to put up the hood, far less search for hats on a hillside.

“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Peel said, and hung on to the rocking car with both hands. The lights in the ranch-house could now be seen, but at the moment they gave little comfort, for it would take another three minutes to reach their promised safety. And in this country, Mrs. Peel had learned, anything could happen in a matter of seconds.

The men came into the ranch-house kitchen, hooked their slickers on the wooden pegs at the door, shook their hats and threw them on the broad window sill, straddled the benches that stood on either side of the oilcloth-covered table, and reached unanimously for the bread. The full stew-plates began to empty rapidly.

Mrs. Gunn waited until they had some mouthfuls of good hot meat and mashed potatoes inside them before she started asking questions. She had been brought up on a ranch. Now, as she added another half-pound slab of butter to the table and refilled the bread-plate, she looked round at the old-fashioned and cheerful kitchen with its large wood stove, then at the five wind-tanned faces enjoying her cooking, and felt content with her world. She was an elderly woman, big-boned and yet spare. Her movements were brisk and neat. Her red hair had whitened; her face seemed very pale in contrast to the men’s tanned skin. There was warmth and kindness in her eyes, frankness in her look.

“Got the last horse into the south pasture just as the rain broke,” Jim Brent said. “Very nearly didn’t though. There was a car on the road, right where it shouldn’t have been, and a couple of women with feathers in their hats, and a man, all dressed up in a blue uniform, picking flowers. Darnedest thing I ever saw.” He smiled, shaking his head.

“What were the women like?” Mrs. Gunn asked, her interest aroused by hats with feathers in them.

“One was kind of middle-aged...white hair, brown eyes, and a quick smile. She was fussing a bit. The other—oh, she was all right, I guess.”

“Climbed faster over that car than a colt trying to get to his mother,” Ned put in. His handsome dark face had a ready grin.

“Burst the seam of her skirt, too,” Jim said, “but she had a nice way of not noticing. She had a nice smile too—quiet but steady.”

“And where did this happen?” Mrs. Gunn wanted to know.

“Just below Snaggletooth. They couldn’t have picked a better spot to scatter us if they tried. Seemed as if they were having a picnic.”

“Didn’t they know a storm was coming up?”

“Look, Ma,” Ned said. “Them Easterners wouldn’t know a thunderhead even if they was swallowed up by it.” Ned, who had spent an October calf-roping in Madison Square Garden two years ago, knew all about New York and its peculiar inhabitants.

“I told them to drop in, by the way,” Jim said. “Better keep some of that stew.”

“Them damn Easterners, taking the meat out of a man’s mouth,” Bert grumbled, the furrows on his face deepening. He wasn’t going to let young Ned there get away with all the information on the subject. He had met Easterners too, for he had worked for some summers, before the War, over at a neighbouring ranch that took in dudes. He poured his fourth mug of coffee, and stirred its thick layer of sugar vigorously. His long, pointed face had a comical twist to it.

Mrs. Gunn removed the stew-dish from his reach and brought over a bowl of peaches. No nasty cans on her table. Things were nicely served. She insisted on that, just as she insisted on everyone’s being washed and brushed up and boots scraped and no language in her kitchen. They were good rules, she had found. A new wrangler might think she was fussy, but he came to enjoy a supper at her table as much as the others. It was a rough life they had, sometimes eating and sleeping in the hills for days on end. It didn’t hurt to give them a little of the woman’s touch when they got back to the ranch. She put a large plate of freshly baked doughnuts at Bert’s elbow to help him forget his disappointment.

“Well,” she said, “whoever they are, they’re taking their time. Ought to have been here by now. Wonder if that loose plank on the bridge gave them any trouble?”

“We’ll have to dig them out of a hillside,” young Robb predicted in his quiet, slow way. “That stoneface above the bridge was beginning to crack up again. I noticed it last week.” His face was thoughtful, but the fresh colour in his cheeks, and the fair hair and blue eyes, made him look even younger than he was.

Ned said, “It’s all that rain we get here.” He came from Arizona, and anything more than a shower once every three months seemed flood proportions to him. His dark eyes had a laugh in them, ready to take on all arguments. But Robb, who came from Montana, wasn’t taking up any challenges tonight. He was thinking about the storm.

So was Mrs. Gunn. “Hard to hear a smash on a night like this,” she said, and listened half expectantly.

Bert helped himself to some more peaches. “They’ll be taking pictures,” he said. “Over at Fennimore’s there was a crowd of dudes, and all they did was take them pictures.” He looked at Ned, defying him to contradict. “They come to the corral in the morning, all two hours late, with leather straps around their necks and leather boxes dangling on their chests. They was as near well harnessed as the horses.”

“Dudes...” Chuck said reflectively. He was the oldest wrangler there—perhaps the oldest in the county. Age had made him still thinner, but his eyes had lost none of their alertness, and the colour on his lean cheeks was still fresh. He admitted he was near seventy-six, but the rest of the boys thought he was being kind of modest. He treated Bert, who was forty-five or thereabouts, as a brash young fellow from Idaho who had only spent twelve years of his life in this part of the world, so that the other thirty-three were negligible. Ned and Robb, twenty-six years apiece, and newcomers since they were demobilised, were practically in the kindergarten. Jim Brent had been born here, and he had lived here most of his life, so even if he was only forty-one he made up for his youth by being not too ignorant about the country.