7

THE TRIP TO Bonner wasn’t so awful bad except for taking twice as long as usual. Jug saddled the outfit’s Lady Horse, the slow and settled creature that hadn’t fire enough to be a man’s proper mount yet was sound and strong and could be counted on to not booger nor cause trouble if a visitor—one of the investors, say, or, worst of all, an investor’s wife—wanted to go for a pleasure ride.

You never knew what some silly dang investor might do. Jug saw one once insist on having fresh cream for his lady’s tea. Wanted somebody to milk a cow for him and couldn’t understand why they didn’t keep fresh milk in the spring house since there were so many cows all over the dang place. Would’ve been different if he wanted to milk the cow himself. That woulda been kind of fun to watch. Instead he wanted it done for him and the cream brought to him.

They’d gotten together, Clay—he’d still been foreman then—and Jesse and a couple of the other hands, just about all of whom had moved along by now, and talked it over. It was either put on one helluva rodeo, for which they might as well advertise and sell tickets, or lie to the man. So, of course, they lied to the man. Poured regular evaporated milk into a crockery mug, smudged the rim of the cup so as to look like it’d been hard used, and presented it for the sweet young thing’s tea. She never knew the difference. Wasn’t the investor’s wife neither as Jug learned a couple years after when that same investor and three others came out on one of their infrequent inspections. Which usually was for the purpose of shooting critters and carousing except this time the real wives came along, too.

Funny, but the inspection trips weren’t so popular after that.

Anyhow the outfit still kept a few Lady Horses around just in case one of the investors took a notion to be wild and woolly. So Jug saddled this one and crawled on from the off side, that left leg not yet so much better that using it to mount a horse was a good idea.

Clamping down hard with his legs or even using his knees properly would’ve been plenty uncomfortable but a Lady Horse could be ridden by a sack of potatoes and not cause trouble, so all Jug had to do was sit up on top of the thing and aim it where he wanted to go.

Which in this case was Bonner, Wyoming. The State of, if you please, Wyoming having been admitted to the Union as a regular state just a couple years back. Jug felt a certain amount of pride over that, albeit a pride that was mixed in with some other feelings, too. When he’d first come up here with a trail herd of stockers, about the only law in Wyoming Territory was what a man knew to be right or wrong. Now they wanted to put it all down on paper and hire lawyers to decide right from wrong. Jug wasn’t entirely sure that was an improvement.

Still, they were a state now and that was progress.

He took the Lady Horse down the road at a slow and steady gait that would’ve been embarrassing if there been anybody to see it, and by the middle of the afternoon he could see what passed for the big city around here. Normally he would’ve made it in time for lunch but not this time down.

That was all right. He wasn’t coming in for any purpose that would get a man’s blood to bubbling, and if it got too late going back that evening he could just close his eyes and catch a little nap while the horse did the work. Which, come to think of it, was a decided advantage a Lady Horse can have over a properly lively cayuse.

He thought about seeing if a jab of the spurs would perk up this horse for his entrance to town, then thought better of that notion. Taunt fate so deliberately as that and a man never knows what result he might end up with. So he made the safe and sensible choice and plodded dogged and steady the last couple miles into Bonner.