Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (10 page)

Nolan, down on his knees beside Callie,
ripped her sleeve at the wrist and exhaled quickly in relief as he
saw that it was only a shallow cut and burn the gunshot had scored
along the inside of her forearm. He pulled a bandana from his
pocket and began to wrap it around her arm, whispering words of
comfort to her as her sobs quieted. Thorsden, meanwhile, glanced at
Jim Reid and at Lupin, still standing with gun in hand. His lifted
eyebrow asked a question.

“There’s your man,” said Jim briefly. He
added with an explanatory glance at Thorsden, “Our rustler.”

Virgil Thorsden motioned to one of the men,
who stepped forward and disarmed Lupin, taking Jim’s gun from his
hand and Lupin’s own from its holster. Lupin relinquished both
without protest, not even looking at the Sorrel Creek men. The man
who had disarmed him prodded him, indicating the entrance to the
tunnel, and Lupin moved to obey. But he stopped for a second by the
two kneeling together, and Dave Nolan looked up at him over
Callie’s head.

Lupin said, “You’d better take care of
her.”

“Don’t worry,” said Nolan quietly, but with
a toneless quality that hinted at what he might have said had there
not been the girl there between them, “I will.”

Lupin ducked in the tunnel, attended by the
other man. When they had gone, Nolan helped Callie to her feet. She
leaned close to him, as if seeking strength elsewhere since for the
moment she had used up all that was to be found in herself. Jim
could not see her face. Nolan put his arm around her shoulders, and
guided her out of the mine.

Virgil Thorsden looked after them for a
second. Then he turned and stepped over to the corner where Jim
Reid lay, and looked down at him. There was the barest suggestion
of a twitch at the end of his straight mouth.

“Not a bad couple of days’ work, for being
flat on your back,” he said.

Jim grinned up at him, a grin somewhat
tempered by the pain and the experiences of said two days. “No,” he
said, “not bad at all.”

Lainey was nineteen when it all started. Her
father, big old Gerald McCarthy, oversaw the Alton stockyards and
wagon yard, mainly by using his enormous voice. His interest in the
livestock that passed through the yards and the men who traded in
it was purely vicarious, but he was terrifically proud of being in
the middle of everything. “We’ve got the cream of Alton County
right here in our own milk pitchers,” he was fond of telling his
daughter. “Everybody that’s anybody in land and livestock, eating
at our table. Ain’t many people can say that.”

Lainey, motherless at twelve, through with
school at fifteen, cooked three meals a day for her father and one
for a long mess table of assorted drovers, buyers, mustangers and
drummers. A slight but emphatic girl with rust-brown hair and a
temperament like quicksilver, she kept their three-room shack on
the edge of the stockyards as neat as an Army barrack, mainly
because she didn’t have time for clutter. She knew all the
livestock buyers by name and had her own opinions on horse trades
and strains of cattle. To the settlers who stopped at the wagon
yard she gave advice on feeding mules and how to haggle with the
dry-goods storekeeper; she chased and caught small children for
their mothers, wiped their noses and occasionally spanked them. She
had a retort for every teasing remark tossed at her by the cowboys
continually passing through, and sometimes sent them away with
their ears burning.

If she hadn’t had so much responsibility to
keep her busy, she might have been the kind of child that drives
schoolteachers into nervous breakdowns and invents the delightful
schemes and plays for which somebody else always seems to get in
trouble. Even so, she still got into scrapes sometimes, mainly
daring the cowboys to do madcap riding stunts or putting pepper in
the coffee of somebody who didn’t have the sense of humor to
appreciate it.

She hadn’t been in this sort of trouble for
a while, which was likely why she was busy getting into it about
the time Bob Russell arrived at the Alton stockyards for the first
time. Bob Russell was a mustanger, age twenty-three. He was tall
and broad-shouldered, with dark hair, and a pair of blue eyes that
made you stop and take a second look at him. In spite of all this,
he was a solid citizen. Old Digger—an ex-prospector, who hung
around all day with a bony shoulder against corral gateposts and
panned for nuggets of human nature to amuse himself—had once summed
up Bob’s character nicely: he had enough brains to get him where he
needed to be, didn’t talk more than was good for him, and minded
his own business real well.

Bob arrived at the stockyards with a string
of half-broke mustangs and a pair of pack-horses in tow, and turned
the string into one of the pens. He was dusty and grimy and had a
three days’ shadow of stubble on his face, but still warranted a
second look. So if you add Lainey McCarthy into this equation, you
can see why things fell out the way they did.

Lainey, with her apron still on, had been
drawn from washing up after dinner to the back stoop of the shack,
from whence she was trading friendly insults with Johnny Wagner, a
skinny yellow-haired young cowboy with crooked front teeth and a
maddening grin. Johnny had declined a dare to slide from a corral
fence onto the back of one of the unbroken horses milling around
inside, and defended himself with the declaration that Lainey
wouldn’t have anything to do with those broncs if he’d dared
her
. Several of his friends backed him up in chorus.

Lainey only laughed. “I’m not scared of
them! Why, I could walk that rail with those broncs kicking up a
storm inside and not turn a hair.”

“You never could! You wouldn’t make it
halfway,” jeered Johnny cheerfully.

“Fall off or jump off?” said Lainey.

“Either. Whichever of ‘em came first.”

“Want to see me try?” Lainey came down from
the stoop, hung her dishtowel on a post and got closer to the
fence.

“I bet you don’t.”

“I’ve got nothing to bet, but I’ll take your
dare!”

“Shoot, then!” said Johnny.

Lainey, never minding her ankle-length
skirts, climbed the corral fence and swung round the post onto the
rail. It was a sawmill-planed board a good inch wide, plenty of a
grip for the worn soles of her slim scuffed boots. She balanced
neatly, her hands spread out, and moved forward. On her right hand
the snaky rough-coated mustangs snorted and bit at each other and
stirred up a whirlwind of dust. One slip and she would be down
among them. In the next pen were Bob Russell’s horses, no less
wild, and outside the fence Bob Russell had stopped unloading his
pack-horses and turned to watch what was happening. He came up
close to the fence, watching her warily, one eye on her nimble feet
and another on the whirlwind in the corral, but as she got closer
and closer to the next corral post his squinting gaze relaxed a
little, almost to amusement. But he hadn’t moved.

Lainey got almost to the post before her
right foot slipped, and even then it mightn’t have been her fault.
Old Digger examined the rail afterwards and told everybody the
board was warped. Down she went into the corral. Bob Russell
vaulted over the fence, scooped her up probably before the horses
knew she was there, and had her out through the gate that Johnny
yanked open and set her on her feet in two seconds flat.

Lainey couldn’t have had much breath left
after being swooped around like that, but she didn’t let that
bother her; the first thing she did was try to straighten her
apron. “You ought to know better than to try that on a corral full
of broncs,” said Bob Russell. “Practice on some tame ones.”

“They don’t make tame ones around here,”
said Lainey, and leaned to look past him at the fence. “Eight
inches!” she said. “I got that close. Johnny, you saw it.”

“Well—”

“A foot,” said one of Johnny’s friends who
couldn’t resist making trouble.

“Eight inches or nothing!” called Lainey
determinedly over the others’ laughter, and after a short noisy
debate they overruled Johnny and said it was eight.

Lainey glanced up at Bob Russell, probably
seeing him then for the first time. She took a second look. Then
without saying anything more, she picked her dishtowel off the post
and headed briskly for the shack. He stood and stared after her for
a minute, and then he turned and went back to his horses.

Bob Russell was at the long mess table that
night, washed and shaved and looking as much like a different
person as somebody can look on short notice. Old Gerald McCarthy,
for instance, might not have recognized him if he wasn’t
particularly looking, but Lainey did. Maybe because she wasn’t used
to being picked out of a scrape by someone who had blue eyes that
made you stop and take a second look. And, maybe because he had
never seen a girl walk the rail of a corral next to a swarm of
mustangs before, Bob decided to sell his horses in Alton instead of
going on somewhere else, which he probably would have done
anyway.

After that things went just about the way
you’d have expected. During her free time Lainey perched on the
corral fence and watched Bob Russell break his horses, and during
his free time he leaned against the fence and talked to her. In two
weeks Lainey had found out his whole family history, what he
thought about politics and religion, and a lot about mustanging
that she didn’t know before. After that they got confidential and
talked about what they’d learned and what they hadn’t learned in
school growing up, about Lainey’s mother, and about an aunt she
didn’t like and had managed to chase away in a week and a half when
the aunt came to visit.

By the time the horses were broken they knew
exactly where they stood, and all that was left was putting it into
words. Old Digger always claimed to have been a witness from across
the yard on the day when Bob Russell made his move, standing by the
fence as usual and looking up at Lainey sitting above him. It
didn’t take being close by to see the look in Lainey’s shining
eyes, as though she could hardly believe she was hearing what she’d
hoped for all along, as Bob told her in a few straight simple words
that he loved her and wanted her to marry him.

There was nobody around but themselves that
night, though, when Lainey slipped out to say goodnight to him by
the cattle chute—because saying it once when he left the table with
the others just didn’t seem like enough—and he took her in his arms
and kissed her; and Lainey, who never did anything halfway,
especially if it was her first time, kissed him back in a way that
amazed both of them a little. Full moons and nightingales have
their backers, but you don’t know how romantic a half-moon above a
cattle chute can be till you’ve tried it.

All that was left after that was speaking to
Gerald McCarthy, which Bob went to do the next afternoon. He passed
Lainey hanging out the wash in the side yard by the shack, and gave
her an optimistic wink as he mounted the stoop.

Three minutes later, a subdued roaring was
heard inside the shack which gradually made itself felt around the
stockyards. More than one person stopped what they were doing and
looked up. A minute later Bob Russell reappeared, looking a little
dazed and a little insulted, and was met by a friend who happened
to be passing.

The friend looked up at the window of the
shack, where noises of Gerald could still be heard. “Jumping
catbirds,” he said, “what’d you say to him?”

“I told him I wanted to marry his daughter,”
said Bob, looking back at the shack with some indignation.

The friend’s eyebrows went up, but he was
shrewd enough not to laugh.

The news had broken on Gerald suddenly and
unpleasantly. He had no objections to Bob personally, but he took
violent objection to him as an upsetter of calculations. Gerald’s
hopes for his daughter were vague but grand. To his mind, the cream
of Alton County was something that could be skimmed at any time to
produce an eligible husband. He saw her as the happy wife of some
well-off young rancher or livestock buyer, making life spin merrily
in some fine house the way she did at the Alton stockyards. That
somebody else might get there first had never entered his mind, and
that it had happened made him very cross.

Bob found Lainey, scrubbing energetically
away at her washtub near the clothesline. “What did he say?” she
asked him, looking up expectantly and pausing in her work.

“Leaving out all the trimmings,” said Bob,
“the answer was no, no, and no.”

“Well, of all things!” said Lainey, putting
a hand on her hip. “What’s he got against you?”

“Well, we didn’t get down to personalities,”
said Bob, “but if I got the gist of it right, he says I’m not good
enough for you and ought to have known better than to even ask. He
didn’t say why, though.”

“I’d better talk to him,” said Lainey,
wiping her hands on her damp apron.

“You sure?”

“Of course. He’s my pa, anyway; I ought to
know him pretty well.”

“Well, at least he can’t swear at you,” said
Bob, but he said it a little doubtfully.

Gerald was still pacing and fuming when
Lainey came into the shack, but she went straight to the point.
“Pa,” she said reproachfully, “why’d you get so mad at Bob? I want
to marry him, Pa, I really do. Can’t we—”

“No!” thundered Gerald. “Doggone it, I wish
you hadn’t gone and got yourself set on him, Lainey, and I dunno
why you did. I don’t want you to marry him.”

“But why? He’s just wonderful, Pa, and
anyway I heard Old Digger say he heard you tell Joe that he was a
fine decent boy, so why don’t you like him now?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like him, I didn’t
say that!”

“Well, if you like him, why can’t I marry
him?” Lainey was devastatingly practical.