Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (11 page)

“‘Cause he ain’t right for you, he just
ain’t right! Don’t you see, Lainey, we’ve got the cream of Alton
County—”

“Right here in our own milk pitchers. I
know,” said Lainey, “but what’s
that
got to do with it?”

Gerald’s voice was a mix of impatience and
wheedling. “You’re only nineteen, Lainey; you don’t want to just up
‘n’ marry the first feller who asks you. You can pick an’ choose
from lots better.”

“Pa, I been cooking supper for half the men
west of St. Louis since I was fifteen, and I’ve never yet met
anybody else I liked well enough to want to marry him.”

“But Lainey”—Gerald gestured helplessly—”you
don’t understand, girl. Why, I always figured for you to marry some
nice feller who’s got himself set up proper in the world, and—and
have the right kind of house, with one of them newfangled
cookstoves, and glass in the winders, and them—doilies on the
rockin’-chairs in the parlor.”

“Pa, we’ll come to all that later. Bob wants
to raise horses for the army; he—”

“Yeah, an’ Johnny Wagner wants to be a
cattle king!”

“I don’t want to marry Johnny Wagner!”

“You’re doggone right you don’t!” barked
Gerald.

They glared at each other for a minute,
slightly sidetracked.

“Instead,” began Gerald again, a little
calmer, “you want to marry a two-bit mustanger without a red cent
that he won’t spend next week, and he’ll get some bum cowpunching
job and have you set up housekeeping in a tar-paper shanty
with—”

“Bob’s not going to get a job here. He’s
going back mustanging in the mountains again, and I’m going to go
with him.”

This time even Gerald’s outrage failed him.
“What!”

Lainey explained animatedly, still not fully
appreciating the gathering storm. “I told you, Bob wants to raise
horses, and he’s got some mares, but he’s got to sell a couple more
strings of broncs to get enough money for grazing land. He was
going to go back himself and then we’d get married when he came
back, but I said I could go along with him. I want to.”

Gerald found his voice again. “No! You ain’t
going. You don’t know your own minds, neither of you. He can just
go on by himself, and you can—”

“Can stay here and have the cream of Alton
County slung in my face every day till he gets back? Not by a
Mississippi mile!”

Gerald pawed the air again. “You—you git on
out and git back to what you were doin’! I said what I said and I
ain’t going back on it.”

Lainey folded her mouth up tight, and then
she plunged through the door to the kitchen, her flying skirts
slapping the doorframe. There she proceeded to heat more water for
the wash with a loud clanging of kettles and stove lids, and gave a
fine study in irony by singing “If ever I marry in all of my life,
a railroader’s bride I’ll be” in a clear carrying voice. Gerald
might not have been able to define irony, but he could feel it—he
gave a few more puffs and snorts and then banged out of the front
door of the shack.

For two days Gerald glowered, Lainey was
more lively and bright-eyed than ever, and Bob Russell minded his
own business studiously. It had all the hallmarks of a stalemate.
But on the third day Gerald looked a little smug, for he had heard
through the grapevine that Bob Russell was having his pack-horses
reshod and laying in supplies for a several months’ trip. They’d
get over it after not seeing each other for a few months, he
thought comfortably. He didn’t deceive himself into hoping that
they had quarreled; they were both too practical for that.

On a windy evening shortly following, Lainey
sneaked out of the shack to meet Bob down by the cattle chute
again. He had his camp outfit lashed to his pack-horses and his
overcoat on, and they kissed goodbye for quite some time, as if to
make up for the long separation ahead of them. Next morning Bob was
gone, and Gerald allowed some more of his good-humor to come back.
One point gained, anyway.

For a few days everything was back to
normal. Lainey behaved marvelously, so much so that Gerald observed
to himself that she must be growing up some. Depending on the point
of view, this observation was either remarkably accurate or another
good example of irony. The next morning Lainey McCarthy and all her
worldly goods were absent from the shack and from the stockyards
and wagon yard entire, with no trace left behind.

Gerald roared, considerably. Nobody knew
where she was, but he was sure they were all in a giant conspiracy
against him. Everybody he questioned was only too thankful to have
a clear conscience.

That was a very bad day at the Alton
stockyards. Breakfast burned, dinner didn’t happen, and supper was
best not mentioned. Most of the men who were there went uptown and
got another one afterwards. The truth of Lainey’s whereabouts did
not transpire till the next afternoon, when Old Digger turned up.
He’d talked to somebody who’d heard it from somebody else. He’d
figured Lainey must have left a letter or something (he said), or
else he’d have been by sooner. Anyway, Lainey had gotten a ride
from an unsuspecting teamster who was leaving the wagon yard at
midnight, who took her as far as the nearest stage stop; and then
had taken the stage to Bright Hollow, two stops further on the
route. Bob Russell met her there and they went out to the Baptist
minister’s claim shanty a mile outside town and got married. They’d
been a little more practical than even Gerald had figured them for.
It was seven-thirty in the evening by the time the ceremony was
through and a rainstorm was starting to blow up, but they’d refused
the minister’s offer of hospitality and said they’d start right out
on the trail; they had a camp outfit and would be just fine,
thanks—and had vanished into the night, beyond the range of Old
Digger’s informants.

And that, seeing that they had got
themselves well and truly married, seemed to be that. Old Gerald,
for all the noise he made, wasn’t generally homicidal. His new
son-in-law didn’t have to worry about bullets coming unexpectedly
from behind. For three days Gerald bellowed, and his right-hand man
Joe made what they call comforting noises, and everybody else,
mostly understanding, kept their opinions to themselves. Then
things more or less slid back into routine.

Without Lainey to look after it, the shack
soon became dusty and cluttered. Gerald couldn’t find any properly
mended clothes and he despised his own cooking. He stood it as long
as he could, and then he hired a woman to cook and clean; and then
promptly fired her a few days later. After that he hired and fired
new cooks regularly, one every three weeks or so. Everybody knew he
was trying to find a replacement for Lainey, but not
succeeding.

Now you might be thinking there would be
only two ways for this story to go. If it was a literary
masterpiece Lainey would suffer untold hardships and find she’d
made a dreadful mistake, and come back and admit as much to her
father. Or, in the magazine-story mold, Bob Russell would stumble
over a gold nugget while hunting wild horses, or else would turn
out to be the son of a rich rancher who’d been right in Gerald’s
milk pitcher all along. But none of those things happened. It was
more complicated and more ordinary than that.

For several months the young Russells camped
out in the hills, trailing the herds of wild horses and
occasionally closing with them long enough for Bob to cut out some
likely specimens. They were very much in love with each other and
very happy. Lainey had never lived in the open before, but as she
told her new husband, it wasn’t much different from keeping house
at the stockyards, except there had been a cookstove and less
chance of the roof blowing in on your head. He laughed when she
said that. It was their first family joke—the tent had blown down
on them that first stormy night they spent in it.

In fact, Lainey’s stockyard upbringing had
fitted her very well to be a mustanger’s wife. She cooked their
meals—cooking for two was practically a lark after feeding a table
of twenty ravenous men every night—washed their clothes and kept
them patched together, and administered first aid when Bob came
away from a tussle with a horse somewhat the worse for wear.
Gerald’s rheumatism and the occasional calamities among the cowboys
had given her practice for that.

“I really don’t know what you ever did
without me,” said Lainey cheerfully one evening in the tent, as she
rubbed liniment into a sore shoulder that Bob had sprained that
afternoon.

“I’m not sure either,” said Bob, wincing at
the soreness and smiling at the same time.

As Lainey corked the bottle of liniment and
wiped her hands he twisted around and lay down with his head in her
lap. “You’re not sorry about running off, are you, Lainey? You’ve
never complained about anything.”

“Of course not!” said Lainey. “It’s been a
lot of fun—and it will be, so long as you don’t break your neck.”
She gave him a reproachful dig in the ribs.

“I promise I won’t be dragging you all over
creation forever. Soon as I sell these horses I’m going to build
you a proper house—with a good roof and glass windows right from
the start—”

“And ‘them doilies on the rocking-chairs in
the parlor,’” added Lainey mischievously.

Bob craned his neck to look up at her.
“Huh?”

“That was one of the things Pa always wanted
for me,” Lainey explained.

“Then you can have all the doilies you
want,” said Bob comfortably, closing his eyes.

In the late summer, the Russell outfit
descended on a small mountain trading-post where prospectors,
mustangers and the like replenished their supplies and traded
horses and mules, run by a youngish man named Quint. One of their
pack-horses had begun coming up lame in the evenings, and Bob
wanted to swap it for a sound animal for the last few weeks of
their journey. A woman of any stamp was rare in this corner of the
mountains, and Lainey, being young and lively and entirely
undaunted by her surroundings, completely charmed the handful of
men at the post during the two days they stayed over. She was a
particular revelation to the delighted Quint, who informed Bob
Russell in the course of haggling over the price of a mule that he
was a doggoned lucky man.

“I never saw anything to beat her,” declared
Quint admiringly. “I tell you, if I could find me a wife as pretty
as that who’d be willing to camp out in the hills with me, I’d—I’d
take up sheepherding, that’s what I’d do!”

Bob took advantage of his envious admiration
to drive a very good bargain for the mule, which fact did not dawn
on Quint until well after the Russells were gone. He was
good-natured enough to chuckle over it.

Two more weeks and the weather had begun to
change. Winds blew more, and nights often threatened rain. They
were on their way homeward now, the string of horses complete.

“One more week and we’ll be back in Alton
again,” chanted Lainey gaily in a singsong voice as they crested a
ridge and headed downward into a narrow canyon, the mustangs linked
halter to halter prancing ahead and the mule and the remaining
pack-horse plodding behind. “I’ll be awful glad to see Pa. I’ll bet
he’s getting impatient for us to be back.”

“You don’t think he’ll still be mad?” said
Bob, turning in the saddle to look back at her over his shoulder.
“Last I talked to him he didn’t sound in any danger of being glad
to see
us
together at any time.”

“Well, maybe. But he
might
have
simmered down. He generally does after a while once he knows he
can’t do anything about it. Of course,” said Lainey, reflectively,
“I never crossed him on anything as big as getting married
before.”

They were fifty yards down the canyon when a
low sound from somewhere behind made Bob look back. The sky
overhead was fair, but in the notch visible at the head of the
canyon it had turned black. The sound had a tremor to it. Bob swung
around and swiftly scanned the sides of the canyon. Some distance
ahead on the left a narrow shelf of rock cut back toward them as it
climbed under a shallow overhang in the cliff.

“Lainey,” said Bob, “take the pack-horses
around and get ahead to the bottom of that ledge up the cliff. Go
straight up it and don’t wait for me.”

Lainey looked back, and saw the sky, and
knew from his quiet voice what was happening. She kicked her horse
into a trot out around the knot of mustangs, pulling the pack-horse
and mule after her. Bob was loosening the ropes on the mustangs; he
already had his knife in his hand and sliced through them instead
of pulling the knots undone. The tremor was louder; the cloudburst
was coming up behind them. Bob shouted at the horses and scattered
them into a run down the canyon, spurring ahead on their right to
turn them up the ledge, the only hope of safety. Now the wind was
roaring and the hammer of rain pounding down on them. He saw Lainey
ahead, on the slope of the ledge—the little mule was already
hitching itself up; Lainey was leaning from her saddle trying to
drag the balking buckskin pack-horse after her.

“Let him go!” Bob yelled over the howling of
the cloudburst, and Lainey dropped the rope and clung to her
horse’s neck as it shouldered its way up the ledge in the face of
the whipping water. The loose mustangs clustered at the bottom of
the ledge and found their footing: one, two, three, they found
their way up and Bob spurred his horse up among them, others coming
behind. Ahead, Lainey reached the end of the overhang behind the
mule and slid from her horse on the wrong side, between horse and
rock wall, and stumbled under the overhang, blinded and gasping.
Bob fought his way down out of the saddle among the drenched,
frightened horses and worked his way along the rock wall until he
reached her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her back under
the narrow overhang, shielding her with his body from the
hard-driving wind and rain.