7

QUITE A LONG TIME ago a determined young woman named Emma Russell said goodbye to her determined father at a railroad station in Illinois. She would never again walk in that lazy town, never again smell the Mississippi River. Her father, a Civil War captain with a fine record for discipline, was the warden of the prison. He had only to look at you. Emma had a look, too.

She had a normal school education, excelled in elocution, English and mathematics; she was dependent on nobody.

Some in the world can't imagine their own failure. Yours, yes, but not theirs. She would teach school in Idaho Territory, Idaho, Gem of the Mountains. That had a ring to it! If the German woman her father was bound to marry meant more to him than his daughter and the memory of his dead wife, she must go. She was surprised at him. Thought he had more common sense. Remarriage was an indulgence. He was no longer young. But that was a man for you.

His beard was trimmed. He saw no reason why he must go a widower into old age, have no one to warm his bed.

He coughed. She was a strong young woman.

Then the tracks hummed with the magnificence of the approaching train.

“Goodbye, Paw,” she said.

“Goodbye, Emma,” he said. They touched cheeks. Neither flinched. “You'll do well,” he said.

“Indeed I will,” she said. “Write, and I'll write.”

He moved his hand to touch her. He couldn't believe she would leave, but he did believe.

She boarded the train with her sturdy leather luggage. When the train pulled away, she took a copy of the Atlantic Monthly from the Gladstone bag.

“Sometime during the middle of the second night out,” she later told her grandson, “the train stopped out there on the prairie. Nobody knew why. So I stepped down off the train and smelled the sagebrush. You know how it smells after a little rain. I looked up at the millions of stars. You can't look up at the western stars and be much concerned with your own death. We're all a part of things, dead or alive. And then for the first time in my life, I heard a nighthawk dive. It was as if Someone had cast a cord across the heavens and tightened it like a fiddle string, and plucked it.”

Her grandson, Thomas Burton, never forgot that.

For two years she taught in a one-room school, sod roof, sturdy black wood stove with a kettle of water on it that simmered away and moistened the dry winter air. At noon she brewed herself a cup of tea. Slate blackboard. Colored map so old more than half the country consisted of territories, not states. Fruit jar on her desk for the wild flowers the girls brought her. Privies for boys and girls, well separated, out back and a shed for saddle horses. She rode, too. Bought a chunky black gelding from the man in the family in whose house she boarded and roomed, half Percheron, half Standardbred. So many women out there rode astride with their divided skirts, but she preferred a sidesaddle. Looked better for a woman. Women and men are not alike. Each has powers.

She was strict. They said she had eyes in the back of her head, that she saw around corners. She seemed to sit at her desk long after she left her chair. Before her the guilty stammered the truth; and the innocent recalled with icy clarity earlier transgressions. Her rectitude was chilling, but she played lively tunes on the piano for dances in one ranch house or another.

The young man who played the riddle was the son of a man who had discovered gold, who had had the gumption to put his money in land instead of kiting off when the gold failed. She had no use for rolling stones.

She wondered that a young man should play the fiddle and so well, as if it mattered; but he had a thousand head of Durham cattle and he laughed when she spoke of her interest in sheep because everybody in the Lemhi Valley knew you couldn't run sheep and cattle on the same range — sheep grazed the land so close they destroyed the roots. She thought about his laughter.

He paid her little attention apart from asking her to sound her A. A dozen young women were after him, rolling their eyes this way and that, cinching in their middles and pretending to be helpless, and all the time seeing themselves riding about the Lemhi Valley in a Studebaker surrey behind high-stepping Hambletonians. Didn't he see through them?

Men see what they want to see. They were all prettier than she, who was never pretty. Years later her own children remarked that Mama was never pretty, but they meant it as a compliment: she didn't have to depend on looks.

No, Thomas Sweringen had no need to make a hasty choice; it was pleasanter for him, when he laid down his fiddle, to dance with this one and that one of those scheming girls while she thumped out the tunes he danced to. It made her blood boil. The pretense, the flattery.

She refused to think of it. Some are born pretty; some with brains. She would not think of it.

He was tall and lean, with a way of putting on his hat as if it didn't matter; he had three hats that she knew of. His fingers arched and stretched on the neck of that fool fiddle, as if he loved it. His eyes had a strange shape; his high cheekbones were a Slav's or an Indian's.

School began again. By the river the willows turned a rusty red; smoke from far forest fires trailed over the mountains. But excitement was in the air: Idaho had just become a state. President Harrison journeyed out to Boise for the signing of the constitution and he was said to have been very pleased with how everything looked. The Glee Club was on hand from the university and sang the state song, the words yet unknown to anybody else, but they recognized the tune, “Maryland, My Maryland,” a good choice because everybody already knew it and “Idaho, My Idaho” fits right in.

Governor Shoup himself urged those who believed themselves artistic to submit designs for a State Seal.

Even school children were included in the rites of Statehood and it was they, district by district, who chose the syringa as the State Flower — or it was said they chose it. Her own pupils had chosen the bluebell for the very good reason that the bluebell was the first up in the spring; and she doubted that any child, anywhere, would choose a flower with so ugly a name as “syringa,” even if he could spell it.

Why, the excitement filtered right on down to the man next door. You might have thought that Statehood had some mystical significance. People seemed to think they were in for a sobering change, that they stood on the threshold of a world so altered that in years to come they must sometimes pause, perhaps looking into a mirror at an older face, trying to recall the structure and the meaning of those earlier days.

Statehood appeared to be an excuse for many parties that fall.

One evening she sat in a house she had never before entered. She had been bidden to have dinner, and later on to play bezique. She didn't think much of social card playing — not because it was immoral, Lord knows, and anyway people's morals are their own blamed business — but because cards were a sad waste of time. A game of solitaire was a different matter: you played it to settle something in your mind, and you played it against yourself — your other self, your only significant adversary. The poet Walter Savage Landor put it very well indeed:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife …

It meant little to test yourself against another. It was only one's own self who could settle one's own hash.

She had learned to play bezique because the nice old couple with whom she boarded were restless on winter evenings. They were not of a thoughtful turn of mind, nor did they read or play an instrument. They pined for their card-playing daughter who, having married, had elected to desert them, since the new husband's business was in the state of California.

And ah-ha! She was pretty good at bezique! She had a good memory and could sense in an opponent's discard what he was holding back.

It was a pleasant party in that house — crisp chicken and plenty of good rich gravy for the biscuits.

And there she met the mother of Thomas Sweringen, who sat across the card table. The lady — and lady she was — was a widow, and about her shoulders was the handsomest Paisley shawl you ever laid eyes on. Her hands were narrow, long-fingered like her son's.

“I believe you know my son,” the lady said.

“I do indeed. He plays the fiddle well.”

“He loves his fiddle. Would you be so kind, and come to supper with us?”

That evening Emma Russell looked long at herself in a mirror, perhaps for the last time. Ever afterwards she believed there was a plot against her, that she was part of a plan, that Thomas's mother had detected something in her that Thomas needed, that his dead father would have wanted her for his son, that his mother had said, “She is what your father would have wanted for you.” Certain families are liable to make such plans, and certain others are likely to take advantage of them.

But to tell the truth, she did love Thomas, and he had a great deal she wanted. He was the beginning of her plans.

And so they were married and one night everybody came with food and drink and a banging on pots and pans and charivaried them.

As a joke — because he did remember — he gave her two sheep for her birthday. He remembered birthdays and everybody remembered his. And by that time their first child was born, Elizabeth. Beth. By the time their fifth child was born, a boy, Tom-Dick, she owned seven thousand head of sheep and it didn't seem to her that a house with a sod roof and muslin under the ceiling to keep the dirt from drifting down was the place to rear children, so she caused to be built a house of sandstone with six bedrooms. Downstairs was a library, for she had long since had all her books shipped out from Illinois, all now behind glass in sectional cases and not read again because there was never time to read. There were electric lights; sconces with fluted globes sprouted from the walls; chandeliers hung from the high ceilings. For some years the electric lights worked, and from up and down the Lemhi Valley the curious arrived on horseback and in buggies to see the sixteen-volt bulbs glowing.

The house was piped for water, but the tub, the toilet, the handbasin and the sink in the kitchen remained dry. A water pump was never installed. Anyway, to abandon the hand pump out front was a radical break with a past that had been kind. Water or not, the Recorder Herald, published in Salmon, the county seat thirty miles down the river, described the house as “palatial,” and everybody came to a party.

Two years later, in 1909, the railroad came in over the Continental Divide from Montana, and down in the town of Salmon they celebrated.

“The Salmon City Band came,” said the Recorder Herald, “with a soulful blow of voluptuous music, and the thousand people present felt like the Fourth of July.”

It was assumed that the Gilmore & Pittsburgh railroad — the G&P — would do great things. It would open up the world to the Lemhi Valley; the price of land would shoot up. Freight rates would go down. Friends could be visited. Only scoffers repeated the story that a traveling salesman had once asked Andy Burnham, the conductor, if he couldn't go any faster and Andy said yes, but he had orders to stay with the train. And suppose it was slow — wasn't it pleasant to take a box lunch along and look out the windows and sit and visit with strangers and to share an orange? You could go into the toilet and by the time you were through in there you might have covered several miles. Suppose the train did get stuck in the snow on this or that side of the tunnel at the summit? Wasn't that an experience to savor — eight thousand feet in the air and the night coming down and lamps to light?

Emma Russell Sweringen now had ten thousand head of sheep; a journalist dubbed her the Sheep Queen of Idaho. Printed in the Salt Lake Tribune was a picture of her riding in the baggage car of the G&P. She sat on a coffin. There was no place else to sit. She is quite heavy now. In her hand and in the hands of those around her are tin cups, for Andy Burnham kept a pot of coffee on the stove for people he knew. Strange how Fate returns us to the same stage and the same director but hands us a different script. On that train a few years later the Sheep Queen held a dying child in her arms.

Thomas Sweringen was not troubled that he sat at his wife's right at the table, that her foreman sat opposite her. He disliked routine and was often late for meals; his absence was not so conspicuous if he was not sitting at the head of the table; he could slip in and out. He might have been out riding or walking; when he walked he carried one or another of several walking sticks he had fashioned from carefully chosen cottonwood or aspen. So his children and grandchildren and then even his great-grandchildren remembered him as he walked with them to their cars, their Appersons and then their Franklins and finally their Chryslers and their Cadillacs, and forever they saw him in their mind's eye as they had seen him in their rear-view mirrors, one of those old sticks raised in a benediction of farewell. At least one of his grandchildren began to carry a walking stick early on, and he carried it when he walked with his children and then his grandchildren out to the garage and he hoped they would remember him as he remembered his grandfather, in the rear-view mirror.

Thomas Sweringen might have been out hunting arrowheads with eyes that could spot and identify an animal on the side of a hill a mile away. He might have been out fishing or visiting the Indians at the agency. In him, the Indians saw something of themselves, a stoicism. He was not so much close to nature as a part of it, of the water in the streams and of the trout that waited just under the lip of the bank for the unsuspecting dragonfly. His affection for the Indians he passed on to Beth, his eldest daughter. As a child she raced with them on her own cayuse; from them she learned which berries to eat and which not, how to smoke salmon, and where the Indians buried their dead.

Nor did it trouble him that the world looked on the ranch as his wife's, not his. She made the hard decisions and dickered with the wool buyers. His mother had told his bride long ago, “Thomas isn't like other men. He needs more sleep.” The Sheep Queen had thought first by example and then by insistence she could get him out of bed when other men got out of bed, but he was fluid, slipped between her fingers, and at last she laughed and gave up and their life was pleasant together. They did a lot of quiet laughing. They liked to get their hands on their children and grandchildren. They got their hands on the great-grandchildren.

He wanted his children to be happy. She wanted them to be a success.

The mother of a beautiful daughter has the right to expect she will marry well, marry a man who is certain who his great-grandfather was, who is stable and adoring, will provide flat sterling service for twelve, jewelry to excite envy, and money for the proper shoes because if the shoes aren't right the whole costume is awry. He will provide a house as a proper display case and will bring his wife home for Christmas. He will be liked by the family who will consider him one of them. He will sit a horse well.

If the daughter is a truly great beauty, the mother's expectations are boundless, especially if that daughter has been educated at a private Episcopal school where she has learned to be not unfamiliar with the stylish French tongue, can paint a still life of bread and fruit, has a stunning handwriting, walks in a special light and sits a saddle like a princess. Such a girl was Beth Sweringen.

When the railroad came through, it was preceded by young surveyors, college men who had read Owen Wister's Virginian and like Wister had long thoughts of big skies, tall timber and rolling prairies. Out there beyond the Mississippi, beyond even the Red River, they could test their manhood; if the test proved unfair, there was Tuxedo Park or the Berkshires.

Among these young men were several who did not expect to meet out there the Girl of the Golden West, whose family was quite as important in the state of Idaho as theirs back East where their father's grounds might be reckoned in acres, while the Sweringen Ranch was reckoned in sections of six hundred and forty acres each.

One of these young men was ardent; his sister was sent out West to investigate, and investigate she did. The Sheep Queen's daughter was pronounced more than suitable. She was not only a great beauty; she had been presented at Court in Ottawa.

As for the Sheep Queen, she had long since decided her wedding gift to her daughter would be a sum of money and a Steinway piano, since the Chickering on which Beth had learned to play Schumann and Chopin was some years old and anyway should remain on the ranch because Beth would be back Christmases. The young man had made his proposal and had been accepted by the Sheep Queen, if not so warmly by Thomas, and by Beth. All was well.

The young man left the valley on the now-completed railroad to go East to have a house designed and built and to staff it with servants.

In the Lemhi Valley was a round of parties, young ladies and young men coming in from around the state, some of them by motorcar and some by train. The train was still a novelty and the Sheep Queen preferred it to the Model T Ford that Thomas had bought to see if there was anything to this automobile craze, and it was the train she and Beth took down to Salmon for a shower to be given by a Mrs. Melvin who published the Recorder Herald after her second husband, an unpleasant man, had been gored to death by a Jersey bull.

The G&P had published an unreasonably strict schedule and did not follow it; the train would stop anywhere to pick up passengers if the engineer or the conductor knew them, and therefore it was wise to call neighbors up or down the valley to ask if they had seen the train pass and how fast it was going.

On the day of the Melvin shower the train was comfortably far off and would arrive at two instead of noon so there was plenty of time to dress and then walk across the field where the train would stop because the Sheep Queen wanted it to.

“Mama, have you your gloves?”

“Gloves, Beth? What do I want with gloves this time of year?”

“The ladies will be wearing them.”

“Let them. I have no reason to hide my hands. Anyway, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”

“Mama.”

“Beth, I have no gloves.”

“Mama, I gave you gloves at Christmas.”

“Why so you did.”

The Sheep Queen routinely misplaced objects that did not appeal to her, a way of saying she stored them in the library where all the books were that she no longer read. Over the years the library had become so cluttered and piled with foreign bodies that it was almost impossible to reach the telephone on the wall: saddles that had come to rest there instead of in the barn, a brace of pheasant skins somebody had meant to stuff and mount, Indian saddlebags of thick buckskin embroidered with dyed porcupine quills of red, yellow and green; a broad-brimmed Mexican sombrero once worn by Thomas Sweringen to a masked costume ball, but he was recognized by the way he danced; boxes of dried fruit and soda crackers, ailing furniture on the last stop before the dump on the side of the hill where there were so many rattlesnakes; branding irons, canned milk and cases of the slick, flinty peaches preferred by the Sheep Queen's sheepherders; boxes of tallow candles and drums of kerosene for the lamps that had replaced the electric lights that no longer worked. In the library she was likely to get sidetracked; she paused to read old letters, to wonder again if anybody on earth could do anything about her old beaver coat, to consider old snapshots; she shuffled through Christmas cards and wondered what had become of time.

“Mama, we're going to miss the train.”

“The train will wait. I told Andy last week I wanted it today.”

“You've found your gloves?”

“I was about to look.”

“Mama.”

“Beth, you Sweringens are so impatient about things that don't matter and so tolerant of things that do.” Thomas was tolerant and his sister Nora was tolerant and so were the girls. She didn't know but for her what would happen to any of them. Alone among them, her son had something of steel about him.

But at last she walked with her beautiful Beth across the horse pasture with their purses and their gloves; the wild roses were a-bloom along the barbwire fence; the alfalfa in the next field was getting a good start — and yes, that was a rattlesnake, all right. Behind her was the big stone house and the handsome new barn which was even bigger. In it, protected by the best of lightning rods, was her husband, checking over the harness for the coming haying season. Everything but the wild roses and the rattlesnake was her creation.

“Beth,” she said, “I don't see how you walk in shoes like that,” and felt a queer pleasure that Beth could walk in them. At St. Margaret's School Beth had been taught to walk correctly in various shoes because for some women there are various shoes for various occasions. Of her own shoes little could be said, only that they were wide but not wide enough. Not even comfortable. At forty her feet troubled her. She was too heavy; she must get around to doing something; why could she not be trim like the rest of them? But it was lovely to have such a daughter who understood shoes and was about to marry well.

Far up the track the train whistled and then in a little while the rails began to hum.

The train slowed and stopped. Many curious eyes looked down. Andy the conductor stepped down with a metal stool.

“How are you there, Mrs. Sweringen? And here's my little Beth!” Small civilities passed. How many antelope had Andy seen on the trip over the hill? And elk? Yes, there were still deep drifts on the Montana side piled against the snow fences but the grass was greening. Good to see Old Sol climbing higher and higher. Going to a party in Salmon, were they? Yes, Andy had heard of the engagement. You hear everything quick enough in this valley, don't you? “My goodness, Beth,” Andy said. “You know you have my good wishes.”

“Andy, you're a dear.”

The Sheep Queen admired her daughter's ability to please simple people without allowing them to come too close. They, on their part, took no liberties with her. You can't beat money and education and knowing about shoes and gloves.

“Two months before Beth leaves,” the Sheep Queen said. “They'll marry at the church in Salmon. I'm having his people out.”

His people. She had done her own checking. The president of the G&P had come from Pittsburgh and now lived in Salmon. He was a close friend and knew a thing or two about who was who in Pittsburgh.

“I hear tell of a honeymoon in New York City,” Andy said. “East side, west side, all around the town. That about it, Beth?”

“That's about it, Andy.”

“Always wanted to go up in the Statue of Liberty,” Andy said. “Hear you can go up and look out through the eyes.”

Up ahead the engine sighed.

The passenger coach was crowded. Few even among those who could afford motorcars drove over the Divide; in places the road was so steep that the stagecoach, while it still ran, dragged logs behind it to keep it from running over the horses; mere brakes would not hold.

There was, in fact, but one vacant seat, but already a dozen men were on their feet, for this was the Sheep Queen of Idaho and her fabled daughter.

A face caught her eye; she stood suddenly amazed, alert as a beast to danger from some yet unknown quarter. She could smell it. Yes, the young man who rose beside the one empty seat was handsome beyond belief. The Arrow Collar Man whose likeness appeared with tiresome regularity each week in the Saturday Evening Post faded before this stranger. Except for Thomas, she did not care for even ordinarily handsome men; they have an air about them even as children on a playground. They are likely to trade on their looks, to accept favors without deserving or asking for them. Plain people courted them, made fools of themselves. It is a different thing with women; except for women like her who had been given brains instead, looks are a woman's stock in trade.

She darted a glance at Beth and then back to the impossible stranger. For a moment she was confused, partly by the apparition of male beauty which spoke to something in her she thought she had shed long ago and partly because the car lurched and she feared losing her footing. She would have died before she would have let him help her up. As she was standing so close to him, it would have been pointedly rude to reject his offer of his seat, and to reject it would in a sense show him that for a moment he had a power over the woman in her. He might even interpret it as coyness. No doubt he had often exercised that power over women. Certainly he was the male counterpart of Beth, his profile as startling, features as compelling, so you might say once and for all, “Well, there you are.”

He wore no wedding band.

“Madam?” he said. “Won't you please?”

She had been called Ma'am many times. Her sheepherders Ma'amed her, storekeepers Ma'amed her, pupils had Ma'amed her. Never before Madam. Never in that voice. She couldn't place his accent, but his voice was tuned like an instrument.

And she allowed herself to be bowed into the seat beside the window. She and then Beth sat down. Now, had the young man the manners he pretended to, he would have moved on down the car and sat on the narrow bench beside the stove. For heaven's sake, there was no fire in the stove. But he did not. He thought his presence wanted. Smiling a smile she could feel touch her skin, he spoke again. “What a beautiful part of the world this is,” he said. “Nature has been lavish. You would be the Sweringens.”

“Not only would be,” she said, “but are.” So he wanted to play games with the subjunctive.

He shook his head, the smile intact, painted. “We hadn't got through the tunnel on top before they all began a little betting. Some bet you'd be waiting here and some wondered if we'd get to see you walking across the fields. My name is Burton.”

His grandfather, he said, his grandfather the judge, had been a friend of Benjamin Harrison's, and that's why he was Benjamin Harrison Burton. He himself had been born the year Harrison took office. He removed from his pocket that tinkled with loose silver a gold coin, probably gold-filled only, that bore in bas-relief the bearded profile of Benjamin Harrison, a coin struck, he said, at the time of Harrison's inaugural.

He was now sitting on the arm of the red plush seat; the fabric of his stylish clothing at one point touched the blue velvet of Beth's suit. Why on earth, the Sheep Queen wondered, had she allowed herself to be shown the seat beside the window. She didn't give a hang if his clothes touched her garments.

He understood from talk roundabout that Miss Sweringen had gone away to school? “There's nothing,” he said, “like seeing different parts of the world.” Had she, in school, been interested in dramatics?

“She was in several plays there, yes,” the Sheep Queen said.

“Just little parts, I'm afraid,” Beth said.

“It's precisely the little parts,” Burton said, “that are the hardest to play. You know — make them memorable?”

Precisely!

He might have been an actor. Perhaps he was.

“I'm afraid I wasn't awfully good,” Beth said.

Now Burton turned to the Sheep Queen; he smiled as if he had accepted her as his confidante. “What is it,” he asked, “that is so appealing in modesty?”

“I'm quite certain neither you nor I would know,” the Sheep Queen said.

He hardly listened. She felt his brief attention to her move like a draft to Beth. “I should have loved to have seen you onstage,” he said. “I truly would have, Miss Sweringen.” He spoke the words “Miss Sweringen” as if he tasted them. He himself had been interested in amateur theatricals. Shakespeare, chiefly. Some Congreve, some Dekker. “You would have been charming as Portia. When you turn — your profile, you know?” He turned a moment. “I take great stock in profiles, Mrs. Sweringen,” he said. “And I take great stock in hands. Mrs. Sweringen, do you believe in the lines in the palm of the hand?”

“I believe in hands,” the Sheep Queen said. “Yes, I believe in hands. I do not believe that the lines in the hands foretell what a person will be. I believe in what hands can do. I believe that with your hands you can make whatever you like of yourself.”

Burton inclined his head in a certain way and nodded. “Well put,” he said as if he had received a correct answer. “All too often we judge by the wrong facts.”

The train had long since passed the mud and timber fort where old George Sweringen had once defended his family against the Nez Percé Indians. Then carelessly young Burton proceeded to destroy his image — as Beth might see it, anyway. It was an image that might fool some fool woman who thought she could change a man.

At sixteen, he said, he had shipped as a cabin boy to Siberia. This ring he wore, this stone in this ring had come from there. He held out his hand for them to see. “Vladivostok,” he said. Further, he had been for some time in the circus. God alone knew what he had done there — cleaning up after the animals? And now? Now he was with a fine company selling a fine line of merchandise. “You know, Mrs. Sweringen, how hard it is to keep food? From spoiling? My company has solved the spoilage problem. We draw out the moisture from both fruits and vegetables. Without moisture, you see, they can't spoil. It's the water, you see. You know that already — raisins and dried apricots and so on. Prunes. We apply this process to all fruits and vegetables, including berries. You have only to soak the product in water — and there you are. My firm is Everfresh Products.”

Everybody in the car was listening; he had charmed the car to silence, rambling on about dried turnips in that Shakespeare voice of his, that circus voice. She knew about circus people, the lives they led, the looseness and the tinsel. In such a voice he might have introduced sideshow freaks. A young drummer now on the prowl and thank God there was the railroad station on the outskirts of Salmon. Never had she been so glad to see a building.

She was first on her feet, her purse in her hands. She had not removed her gloves, neither knowing nor caring whether you removed them when traveling on a train. She glanced at Beth. Beth was wearing only one glove. What significance had that?

“Beth, where is your other glove?”

“My other glove? Oh!” Beth cried out in an artificial voice most unlike her own, and there was a pretty confusion, an unnecessary confusion that cries out for the help of a man.

The three of them now stood. And then young Burton stooped and retrieved the white kid glove from the floor of the car. He seemed not so much to have stooped as to have bowed; he might have worn and removed a plumed hat as he swept towards the floor. Now he began to hand over the glove, his head bowed, and when he thought the Sheep Queen's head was turned, he brushed it with his lips.

Many had expected Mrs. Melvin to have changed in looks or attitude — at least for a little while — after her husband had been gored by the bull, but she had not; at the core of her personality was a gentle acceptance. She knew that sooner or later something happens to husbands and that a woman prepares herself unconsciously for a husband's passing. By what means he passes is of no great significance. She had been forward-looking as well, had trained herself in the newspaper business even before he had gone into the pasture that morning — it almost seemed she had expected something untoward in the near future. Forward-looking, too, in her clever gathering of dormant forsythia from the big yard behind her house in Salmon. Now it bloomed many weeks too early and in precocious golden splendor in her house for Beth Sweringen's shower like thousands of perfect butterflies posed for flight.

“How lovely!” and “What an idea!” were on many lips, and now it was understood why for some weeks Mrs. Melvin had not entertained, not wishing to expose her secret flowers. All the ladies were there, the brooding Rocky Mountains beyond the windows a strange, somehow disapproving background for the pretty frivolous clothes and the dainty talk. All the ladies, not just the ladies from the old landed families who had once been frightened by the Nez Percé uprising and remembered the first discovery of gold. There would not have been enough of them to make a good showing at a shower. The new ladies were there, too, whose husbands were in business, but although times were changing rapidly the new ladies understood and accepted their position. When two ladies of about the same age, one of an old family and another of the new, approached an open door at about the same time, the new lady slowed down a bit and allowed the other to pass through first. For it was understood that however successful a husband's business might be, Salmon Feed and Seed, the Red Cross Pharmacy, the Ford Automobile Agency or even the State Bank and Trust, business was but the fantasy of some man's imagination and might vanish like a puff of smoke. The land, on the other hand, was eternal.

Nora, the Sheep Queen's sister-in-law, was there, looking the twin of her brother, the same high cheekbones, the deliberate movements, the lean figure. Nora ate whatever she cared to without gaining a pound; she had an annoying habit of pausing in the middle of a meal, putting aside her utensils and sitting there with her hands folded. Resting, she said. Like Thomas, she was tolerant of everything and everybody and had indeed married a Southerner, a doctor who admitted of having once fought a duel. As the daughter of a Civil War captain, the Sheep Queen was suspicious of Southerners; their voices alone set them apart; they talked like darkies. She could not imagine why they would wish to talk so and why they allowed themselves to react to such primitive feelings as revenge. She would have preferred that her husband had no sister. It is easier without in-laws. Nora called her brother “Brother” in a gentle, possessive voice that underlined their relationship, their closeness as children, making it clear that Thomas was not the Sheep Queen's alone but was part of a tribe that had existed and flourished long before she had set foot in the state of Idaho. It pained her that Nora and Beth were close, that Beth was quite a different person with Nora. You might have said they were girls together with their silly secrets.

“What were you telling Nora over there?” she asked Beth. “I saw you just talking away.”

“Nothing really, Mama. She was saying how Marcia and Laura wanted to come today but they are too young, and how interested they are now in boys. Marcia wants to start sweeping her hair up.”

“I don't doubt it.” Nora was left-handed and had a special pair of scissors to accommodate that handicap. The Sheep Queen believed that if a child is left-handed he should be trained to be right-handed, like the rest of the world, and not encouraged with special left-handed scissors. “Nora seemed interested in what you were saying.”

“She wondered if she ought to let Marcia sweep her hair up. I was simply saying that at St. Margaret's some girls sixteen were beginning to sweep their hair up in the afternoons.”

“You seemed to be going on at some length.”

“Yes, and she asked if we won't stay the night with her and Uncle Doctor.”

“Where else would we stay?” How like Nora to extend an invitation where one wasn't needed and to extend it to a young woman barely out of boarding school while her mother stood in the room.

“Mama, you're on edge again.”

“I don't like parties and my feet hurt.”

Mrs. Melvin moved smiling among the guests, dropping words. She served coffee and tea and little sandwiches, some containing nothing but butter and lettuce brought in by train from warmer climates.

She admired Beth's ease, how she could charm with small talk. You might have thought she meant to spend the rest of her life among these people, so attentive she was to them, so sure to ask them of their children and their little ailments and accomplishments. In her own house, if she found her audience worthwhile, the Sheep Queen was a notable storyteller; she read well aloud, had regularly read aloud to her daughters and still read aloud to Tom-Dick.

But now the last cup had made a last contact with the saucer, here were the gifts, and exactly what was expected, articles each lady would have wished for as a bride: tea towels hand-embroidered with such flowers and songbirds as easily come to mind, a corn popper, an orange squeezer — something of a joke since fresh fruits other than apples and cherries and wild berries were seldom seen in Lemhi County except in the toe of a Christmas stocking. Here were all the homely tools, knives to apportion, bowls to contain that spoke not of the drudgery of homemaking but of the first years of marriage and the good wishes of friends, precious objects to look back on as the harbingers of home and family.

But the shower for Elizabeth Birdseye Sweringen was no more than a ritual, and the homely offerings simply a part of it. Beth would herself never have need of tea towels. Her dishes would be wiped for her, her oranges squeezed. The ladies knew this and they knew that except for brief encounters over the years they would see little of her. They would never even know her. Pittsburgh was a long way off.

As for young Burton, his grandfather may have been a judge, or not. But if he had meant to lie he would not have revealed that he had shipped to Siberia as a cabin boy and had got mixed up with circus people. Sold Everfresh Products, did he? Imagine — dried turnips that swell up!