Eddie brought the Tarbell cattle liner up Saturday afternoon and backed it up against the corral where they left it overnight with the ramp down. The black mare went without being fed all day Saturday. Henry felt guilty when he got up Sunday morning and saw her, staring at him over the rails, hungry and distrustful. Afraid of the liner, she danced nervously in the back corner of the corral.
Henry had dragged Eddie out of the Wheel at midnight. As soon as he took Henry home, Eddie went straight back with Henry’s pickup. Lots of Sunday mornings Henry found Eddie on his couch though he never expected to find him there, especially if Mary Ann and Eddie got hooked up at the Wheel. He wasn’t unhappy to find his couch empty that morning. It might be a good thing if Eddie slept in. Give Henry a few extra minutes to coax that mare.
He caught the buckskin and rode him bareback to bring the loose mares up from his back pasture. He herded them into the corral with the black mare. While they got re-acquainted, he fed the buckskin. Then he carried a bale of hay across the corral and up the ramp of the liner. The gentle mares followed, snatching at the bale impatiently, unworried by the truck. He spread the hay in the front of the liner, let himself out the escape door and circled back to check the black. She stood at the foot of the ramp, alone and hungry but suspicious. He resisted trying to chase her into the truck, hoping again that Eddie wouldn’t surprise him by being on time.
The mare was still in the corral alone when Henry saw his truck coming down the lane. Eddie got out and held his door for Gin. Henry started across the yard.
Eddie looked at him innocently. “I told Gin we’d give her a ride to work. She’s working for your Mamma today and she wants to say good-bye to the mares.” He winked significantly.
Henry relaxed. As usual, Eddie was thinking ahead. Gin would tell everybody who’d listen that she’d seen him ship the mares to pasture for the summer.
Eddie had another surprise. He lifted a heavy old rifle with a scope off the rack in the back window of his tractor cab. Henry watched him walk Gin over to the pasture fence and show her how to hold the gun and align the cross hairs in the scope. Soon she had the barrel resting on the top rail so she could pick out objects at the end of the pasture, using the scope. Eddie left her to join Henry watching the black mare.
Henry was worried. “What’s the gun for? You think she’s safe with a gun?”
“That there’s a very special gun. Got it from some ol’ boys over at Jackson Hole. They’ve been running a contract on griz over there, in the park. Use that rifle to knock ‘em down, then they weigh ‘em and tag ‘em.”
“Real bright. Tagging a bear carcass.”
Eddie laughed. “Oh, it don’t kill ‘em. It’s one of those tranquilizer guns. Shoots darts.”
“Well, what are you doing with it? I don’t like Gin handling anything like that.”
“Henry, you old woman, what’s she gonna do, wing one of your fence posts or something?”
“What are you planning to tranquilize with it?”
“This black bitch right here. I owe her a couple. If she gives me any trouble today, I’m gonna plug her for you and pay her back for kicking me all over my own truck.”
“That mare ain’t no bear. She gives us trouble, we’ll leave her off. Forget shooting her. She needs shooting, I’ll do it.”
“She’s needed something for a long time. Too bad you can’t talk Walcott out of that old stud horse for her.” Henry laughed with him and then they went over and Henry convinced Gin to relinquish the rifle. First, she showed him a long-eared owl in the half-dead cottonwood where his main ditch left the creek. He was impressed that she’d found the owl. It must have been a good three hundred yards across his pasture.
“See any bear?” Eddie asked her seriously. Gin’s eyes grew very big until she saw Henry’s smile.
He intended to put the rifle back behind the seat in Eddie’s rig but he wanted to leave the mare alone to see if she’d load so he stashed it instead on the gun rack in his pickup, with his heeling rope and an old denim jacket.
They had coffee on his porch and waited on the black. Just when Henry thought they’d have to go without her, the mare picked her way up the ramp and into the trailer. Eddie dropped the sliding door before she had time to panic and run back out. She shoved her way to the front and stood rolling her eyes at them and spooking against the metal panels of the liner.
Gin rode with Eddie in the rig and Henry followed with his pickup and the gelding in his trailer. After breakfast, Eddie would drop the mares at the community pasture corral off the Gillespie Dam turnoff. Then he had a load of yearlings to pick up in Flagstaff.
Henry would spend the morning working with the mares. He planned to lead three of them, head to tail and leave three loose to follow. He knew he’d have to lead the Idaho mare because she was sound and inclined to run and he knew there was no hope of tying the black. He figured to shake out the other four in an hour or two.
He would do no Wildlife Management work today. When he was comfortable with the mares, he was going straight to Lily. He’d come back for the mares after dark. He’d take them through where the tank at the foot of Lily’s patrol area was always overflowing. He couldn’t keep that one level in the wet, sandy base. That tank should be moved and he’d tell Wheeler so, in the fall.
Donna Bliss came out the door of the coffee shop and walked over to the liner as Henry pulled up beside it. She wore a neat blue and white uniform, the same as her waitresses though on her it looked smarter. She was barely five feet, as slim as a girl, still had the looks that had once made her Nez Perces rodeo princess and dazzled Kenny Bliss, world champion saddle bronc rider, all the way to the altar. Henry met her in front of the truck and hugged her off the ground.
“You’re a Nez Perce, not a hoist truck,” she told him and kissed his cheek before he set her down.
“Ahh Donna, you know he ain’t no Nez Perce,” Eddie said, “he’s too tall. I never saw me a Nez Perce any higher than maybe three, four feet. They’re just some sorta native American pygmy.”
“I guess that’s why it took six hundred white men in the United States Army four months to catch Lean Elk and Looking Glass and Joseph and a bunch of Nez Perce women and children,” she retorted.
“You see,” Eddie said to Henry, “she’s always trying to win by dragging up a lot of ancient history. For all I know, Nez Perces probably used to be real, man-sized Indians once.”
“Shut up, Eddie,” Gin said, indignantly. “Or you won’t get any breakfast.”
“And you better get in there and change into your uniform,” Donna told her. “You’re late, Virginia and I see why.” Donna peered between the slats of the liner, “Is that your nasty black mare in there, Henry? Good. I’m happy to see her go. She’s going to hurt you some day.”
“She’s had a rough life, Mom. Cut her some slack.”
Donna looked at Henry and Eddie appraisingly and then at Gin’s figure, disappearing into the restaurant. “Some things I can cut some slack for,” she said. “Some things not. When I was that girl’s age, I took a lifetime interest in a man who only had about a two month interest in me.” She looked at them both sternly.
Henry crossed his arms and fixed his gaze on the white-tipped Gilas above his mother’s dark head.
He disliked hearing her talk about his father. Most of the time, he just forgot he’d ever had one and that suited him. People were always reminding him at rodeos, comparing him to his father and telling him about the times his father had took somebody’s head off for kidding him about marrying a squaw and raising a savage. Well, the man had never bothered with him and he’d had to fight those battles all by himself. He only had one parent; that was all he’d ever had, and she was plenty.
He knew she wasn’t worried about him and Gin. This was for Eddie. He just wished she’d leave his father out of it.
“Ahh, now Donna.” Eddie held up both hands, shoulder high in mock surrender, “Don’t you go looking at me like that. I ain’t even five minutes’ worth of interested.”
“Just so we understand each other.” She put an arm around both their waists to walk them inside. “Come and eat. You’ll want to get those horses unloaded before it gets too hot.”
A Buckeye County Sheriff’s patrol car with door emblems but no roof rack was prominently parked in the parking lot. Sheriff Blake was just leaving the restaurant when they got to the door. He had his Smokey Bear in one hand and held the door for Donna. Henry and Eddie exchanged greetings with him then went and sat down at the booth where Gin was already pouring their coffee. Donna walked back outside with Jerry Blake.
“Why do you suppose ol’ Jerry don’t just go ahead and marry your momma?” Eddie leaned his long frame across the booth and attempted to crane his neck far enough around the window ledge to catch a glimpse of Donna and the sheriff talking beside the patrol car.
Henry threw his hat down on the booth and raked a hand through his hair. “Hell, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Not this cowboy. It ain’t my momma.”
“No, it ain’t,” Henry said with uncharacteristic shortness. He’d heard enough about his mother’s husbands, past and future, already today. He didn’t have any problem with Jerry Blake marrying his mother. He guessed his mother could marry just about anybody she wanted. Sheriff Blake and his mother had been practically living together since she moved to town, anyway. He figured, just maybe, his mother wasn’t in any hurry.
Funny, he’d been thinking about marriage himself lately. But he had no intention of letting Eddie in on it. Matter of fact, wouldn’t hurt any if Eddie never got an eyeful of Lily. At least not until she was already married. To him. “Gin honey,” he said, “take this coffee back in the kitchen and put it in a glass with some ice for me, will ya?”