CHAPTER I

THE first rays of the morning sun shot, yellow and burning, over the crest of the hogback that stood dark against the sky. Although it was still May, the early heat of a dry summer scattered the line of little clouds riding low in the west, leaving the horizon wide and bare over the hard-land table of the upper Niobrara. In the rutted trails dust began to curl and run like twists of smoke from dying campfires. And on the ridge the sparse sand grass rattled a little along the path worn deep and loose by the habit of one man’s feet.

Every day at this time Ruedy Slogum plodded up the steep, sandy slope and stood against the bright morning to look back upon Slogum House on the plain below. Then he went on, down the far side, his pace quickening. Sometimes he even ran a little, for the hillside was steep and pulled him foolishly.

Behind him Slogum House and its windmill, its sheds and pole corrals, huddled on the prairie like a gray wart in the pit of a worn and callused palm, drawing all the rutted trails of Oxbow Flat toward it. The house, a two-story block topped by a crow’s nest not much larger than a smokehouse, was a patchwork of used lumber put together as it came, with no paint to hide its bastard origins. On the west end of the second story bare studding waited for the siding, and under a tarp in the straw cowshed, where no stranger was ever to go, lay a pile of new lumber, nail-holed, but without the black streaks of rain on iron; midnight lumber, a Slogum purchase, as it was called—but guardedly, behind the palm. And in the deep canyon below the house lay four walls and a shingled roof of what had been the church of Pastor Zug on Cedar Flats yesterday evening.

Before the sun broke the far plain into a shimmer of heat dance, Libby, the eldest daughter of the Slogums, climbed to the crest of the hogback, her black cat running like a dog before her. Tall in her blowing skirts of yellow gingham, the girl looked down upon the empty trails of the plain spread before her. With her long hand to the brim of her sailor she searched the horizon, from the dark trees topping Cedar Canyon in the southwest, on past the deep, invisible oxbow of the Niobrara River to Sundance Table beyond, and to the feather of train smoke that smudged the sky over Dumur, twenty-five miles to the northeast.

Today she turned back to the line of blue-black trees that marked the bluffs of Cedar Creek. With her free hand on the signal cloth in her pocket, she watched the trail that crept out of the hazy southwest from the settlement of Pastor Zug, dipped into the Cedar Creek Canyon and up on this side, around Spring Slough and the west end of the hogback into sight of Slogum House.

But there was nothing of life on the shimmering horizon, nothing at all except the distant homestead buildings squatting like weary animals on the far sides of mirage lakes on the hot plain, and several rectangles that were the young groves of timber claims. Occasionally a dry-land whirlwind moved in a pillar of dust across a ploughed strip and then was lost on the nigger-wool sod, close-rooted enough to hold the soil in the longest drouth.

Once Libby turned from the settled tableland before her to the southeast, where a blurring sea of yellow-green sandhills hid growing ranches about the headwaters of Willow and Cedar creeks. But she looked nearer, down the slope of the hogback into the deep, timbered canyon of Spring Branch, its walls matted with wild roses in bloom, to where her father, Ruedy Slogum, worked in his gardens, his flowers and his fish ponds. She did it by a turn of her head over her shoulder, and swiftly, so swiftly that no watcher from Slogum House might see.

At last she pulled down the green veil of her hat, spread her skirt in a fan about her on the sandy ridge, and settled herself to watching the southwest, the signal cloth ready in her pocket. And away from her, no nearer than some curious wild animal might, sat her black tom, the tip of his tail nervous.

From the doorway of her room at Slogum House, Regula Slogum—Gulla, as she was called—watched her daughter on the hogback, the mother’s little eyes half buried in the flesh of her broad face, but ready to catch the first movement of a black cloth signal. And in the meantime she rocked her body, so like a keg in its dressing sacque over a drawstring petticoat, or tipped herself forward to find her lean mouth in a small hand glass while she plucked at the dark fringe of hair on her upper lip.

And every fifteen minutes or so the woman laid down the tweezers and plodded heavily upstairs to look out between the bare studding of the west side over Oxbow Flat to see that its trails were really empty. Satisfied, she went back, her felt soles soft as the padded feet of a heavy animal on the rag runner of her room, back to her watching and the tweezers and the glass.

While Gulla and her daughter were on the lookout, the two elder Slogum sons, Hab and Cash, sprawled on their bed upstairs, their cartridge belts heavy about their clothed bodies, their boots handy, sleeping away the day in compensation for the labors of the night. Down the hall, beyond the freighters’ bunk room, lay the two extra girls imported from Deadwood to free the Slogum daughters of the unimportant ranch hands that would be thick on the trails until the snow came and the roads were blocked for winter. The girls slept heavily, for the night had been a busy one with them, too. And in the third-story crow’s nest the yellow, dusty shaft of sunlight from a peephole moved down the opposite wall in a bright golden dot. Unnoticed, it touched the stubble-whiskered man hunched forward upon a box—another Slogum hide-out, as the settlers called them, suspecting more than they knew. Slowly the spot of light crept down the holster hanging from the man’s hip and away across the bare floor and the white chamber pot covered with a stained magazine.

But no prying bar of sun could disturb the cool first-floor room of Annette and Cellie, the twin daughters of Slogum House. In the green-blinded duskiness, the twenty-year-olds, supposed to be asleep, whispered the foolish words of their lovers between them and laughed softly as they lay with squares of flannel dipped in sweet milk upon their faces, for at Slogum House, as elsewhere, beauty is a precious thing.

 

A long time Libby Slogum examined the horizon through the green of her chiffon veil that lent a springlike freshness to the dry, hard-land table of the upper Niobrara country, almost as though there had been snow that winter of ninety-four and five, or rain in April. There was no movement on the far plain, and on Oxbow nothing but the slow roll of a tumbleweed, freed in a shift of wind from the line fence and zigzagging over the Flat like a wandering sheep. At Slogum House the windmill turned with a faint plump-plump, spouting hesitating water into the stilted supply tank, also a Slogum purchase. The mill had belonged to a homesteader with ranching ambitions in a hay fiat down east a ways, until he shot himself in the back. There was a lot of talk about it out at the breaking and around the hog pens of the newer settlers. How could a man shoot himself so, and without powder burns?

But it had happened before, often, in the range country. The Bar UY outfit got their meadow back and let the improvements stand for the use of their hay crews. Long before haying time the place was cleaned of everything but the cylinder hole. The windmill got damaged some in the long snaking with a log chain over the hills to Slogum House and took a lot of greasing, but with the supply tank from Brule painted over, and piping gathered up here and there, Gulla had running water pretty cheap.

 

When Libby was certain that no ridge or gully hid what she was sent to discover, she took her tight little ball of knitting from her pocket and began another round of fern-leaf insertion for the ruffle of Annette’s Fourth of July petticoat. The slim steel needles in her fingers were so Swift that the sun scarcely caught a glint from the metal as she worked. And every few minutes the finger guiding the delicate thread stopped erect as the girl looked away into the southwest.

The nooning sun that drove the shadows of the soapweeds into the protection of their sharp spears burned down on the girl’s head. But she preferred the heat to the shade of Cellie’s plaid silk parasol, a present from old eagle-beak Judge Puddley. Gulla had wanted Libby to take it. A little hot sun on the back might not hurt anybody, but it helped turn the skin of a lady to cowhide, she scolded. The girl gave her mother no reply, only a slow look from her narrow green eyes, and so the woman let her go. Like a white pig in a hog wallow, not get-up enough to climb out. Like all the Slogums.

By the time the faint tones of Gulla’s dinner bell came up the ridge, several horsebackers and creeping teams had moved along the slow, dusty trails to the Slogum yard. Usually the men stopped, perhaps to feed and water and eat, and then pushed on. When the last horse was gone from the hitching rack, the silent little Babbie, Gulla’s new kitchen help from the home for wayward girls, climbed up the hogback, the sun bright on the syrup bucket she carried. Putting the lunch down beside Libby, she went to sit alone among the dark clumps of soapweeds straggling up the ridge, even farther away than the black cat.

While Libby ate she watched the girl between the slitted lids of Slogum House. Babbie sat motionless, dead, her tear-faded blue eyes on the sand before her, not seeing the panting lizard in the shade of a soapweed or the lone grouse flying over the hogback to her nest in the bunch grass of the hills. The whirring of wings and the soft cackling were a friendly noise in the stillness.

Once the girl rubbed her water-roughened hands over each other, probably thinking of the baby she had to give away. Then she was still again, not even noticing the cat ignore a bit of beef thrown to him. At last Libby rolled her fringed napkin into its ring and mousey little Babbie carried the syrup pail back again, down the steep slope.

When she was gone, Libby got up to stretch her legs, stalking the crest of the hogback tall and straight against the whitish sky of midday, where the mother could see her from Slogum House, and Ruedy, the father, too. He was probably hoeing in his garden or resting under the slim young cottonwoods in Spring Branch Canyon and eating his dinner from another syrup pail, his pet antelope in the shade beside him. And on the windy hogback that stood between the range country and the settlers of the hard-land region, between the man and the woman of Slogum House, this daughter walked free and aloof, her black tom leaping along beside her, always too far and too wild for touching.

 

When the sun’s rays lost their worst sting, Cellie, the plumper of the twins, came out into the wind of the Slogum yard in her flying red dress to hang out a row of starched, gleaming white underthings: foamy petticoats, ruffly corset covers, and, demurely away from the road but perfectly visible, the embroidery-and-lace-trimmed split drawers. Usually at this time of day the twins took their horses out, alone or with some of their admirers, toward the timbered Niobrara, always riding astride, the one public lapse from her notion of what ladies might do that the mother permitted the twins. Sidesaddles were so dangerous on these wild Western horses, she sometimes said as she saw them go, the well-fed young colts crow-hopping a little, fine necks bowed, bits foaming. Actually it was because the twins were more conspicuous astride, showing off their white shirtwaists and their smooth-fitting divided skirts. Even settlers between their plough handles turned to look after them.

But to-day the twins must remain at Slogum House, for there might be trouble, trouble involving men, and therefore the line of snowy wash and the girls who wore these things should be useful.

 

All day Libby had watched the southwest, but because the trails from the settlement of Pastor Zug were bare as a sheep range the girl gradually let her eyes wander with any movement on Oxbow Flat below her, if nothing more than the slow bounce of a jack rabbit. Once, when she followed the gliding shadow of an eagle hanging against the light sky, she noticed a freight outfit coming fast around the northeast end of the hogback, along the Willow Creek road. Probably Old Moll’s white mules, the finest hauling outfit in the country, with either Moll or her hired man on the bedroll roped to the running gears. Two of the mules Moll raised herself and had to care for at the livery barns, since the time one of them kicked the hat off a man who tried to help her hitch up.

Libby watched the light outfit come, stirring up a trail of dust that moved in a low wall across the Flat. If it was the woman herself she would head directly for the Niobrara and camp out, always with a little extra grub in the box for, perhaps, the Masterson children, who might come to look shyly from the bushes as she laid out her lunch. Or perhaps for some horsebacker, traveling far and light.

Libby ate with the woman once, when she had been plumming, several years before. “Aw, hell, just forget you’re a Slogum,” Moll told her when she hung back. “You can’t let it stand between you and everybody all your life. Eat.”

So she ate, spearing bacon from the frying pan with an old iron fork and envying the lean, pepper-gray woman in her denim skirt and high, laced boots. She even envied her the last name, made up from her brand for the filing papers to her homestead—Barheart. Old Moll was very open about it, saying she had kicked her past in the pants and come West, like most of the other settlers, only they would n’t own up like she did.

So while the smooth, cream-white mules rolled their corncobs around on the grass that day, Libby Slogum ate bacon and buns and drank coffee with lots of sugar in it from a tin cup beside Old Moll. And around them the vagrant October wind swirled drying leaves into little piles, and the old cottonwood above them dropped fresh, golden-yellow ones, bitter-fragrant, into their laps.

It was Old Moll to-day, all right. The four mules swinging along abreast were headed toward the Niobrara ford, along the old trail across Oxbow that Gulla had closed with a four-wire fence and hung with tom underwear at the rain-gutted old ruts. No one else, not even the sheriff, would dare take down a Slogum fence.

The sudden boom of a shotgun brought Libby guiltily to her feet, her ball of thread rolling away into the sand. But everything was quiet enough down at Slogum House. Evidently it was only Ruedy shooting a hawk or maybe a rattlesnake in the sunny rocks above his gardens. The southwest was still empty, with no black knot of men following the trail over which the walls and the roof of a church came the night before.

By the time Libby was settled with her knitting again a piece of the western horizon line thickened, separated from the sky, and spread until it was a gray-brown blanket creeping toward the river—more Wyoming stock, burnt out by the settler-cattleman wars and the drouth, coming into the hills. Gulla would n’t like it, Libby knew. But she’d give them pasture in Spring Slough for the night, charge them well for it, and plan for the day when there would n’t be a shirt-tail patch of grass anywhere in the country for foreign stock.

And toward evening two specks of black crawled slowly out of the northwest from Fairhope way, lengthened into freight wagons, and dipped out of sight where the Niobrara River Canyon cut through the tableland. Libby let the thread of her knitting lay in its turns about her finger, the needles rest, and looked after the freight outfits, knowing how it would be. Sometimes, when there were more important things afoot for those who were the men of the Slogums, she rode a bedroll into town herself, and whipped the tired horses up the long pull from the river crossing to Oxbow Flat.

Often she had seen the heavy wagons creep across Sundance Table, perhaps loaded with stock salt or extended to hold great thirty-or forty-foot ridge logs for sod houses and barns. She had seen the wheels lurch over the edge of the bluffs and slant down toward the river, rolling upon the horses, their collars at their ears, the breeching cutting into their dusty, sweat-streaked thighs, the doubletrees pounding their legs as they set themselves against the steep descent amid the jingling of chain harness and the screech of post brakes against the low wheels.

At the easing of the slope the wagons would rumble between dusty clumps of ash and box elder and cottonwood, to plunge their wide-tired wheels into the swift river, churning up the soft, shifting bottom while the men whipped and cursed to keep the horses moving. Then came the long pull out of the Niobrara Canyon, the six-or eight-horse teams straining in the collars, their lathered flanks heaving, the men running alongside with leather-lashed whips, or chunking the wheels at the nearest thing to a level place to give the horses time to blow.

Sometimes the teams were doubled, one wagon resting beside the road, wheels still and tongue down, while another was dragged to the top by the long string of horses pulling with bellies low to the ground, their nostrils flaring. If the horses were balky and there was doubt of their starting again, the pull was made in a straight quarter-mile spurt from the ford to Oxbow Flat under whip and curse, the winded horses floundering desperately for footing in the loose gravel and sand against the drag of the long wagons, the last steep pitch to the top one final plunge under the skinning lashes and the bellowing of the drivers. Then there was the staggering stop of played-out horses and their slow quieting into a long rest before the men had to gather up the lines again for the two miles of flat, rutted road to Slogum House. In the meantime the freighters eased galling collars, rubbed a sagging hip or two with a handful of weeds, or patted a lowered neck. Then, spitting out their tobacco, they drank deeply of the tepid water of a brown jug and wiped their lips on the backs of their sunburned hands. Perhaps someone had a bottle on his hip to kill before Gulla saw it. Empty, the men would consider it mournfully and throw it to the pile of broken glass in a patch of bull-tongue cactus beside the road. Then, replenishing their cuds from the long plugs that wore holes in their back pockets, they would talk about rest and supper and the girls at Slogum House.

 

Not until the late sun slanted the sparse grass of the hogback to orange was there a moving thing upon the trail that came out of the southwest. Then a faint dot broke from the deepening haze of the horizon. It grew before Libby’s eyes, moving swiftly toward Cedar Canyon; horsebackers, she knew, with Winchesters balanced across their saddles, their eyes set upon the heavy wheel tracks leading away from the spot where their new church house had stood the evening before and where perhaps a passer-by to-day had seen only the limestone foundation open to the sky.

They came fast, leaving a wing of dust to spread over the plain as they dipped out of sight into the canyon at the rock crossing. Libby rolled up her knitting and speared it with her needles. Her hand ready on the signal cloth, she watched the men, five of them, ride out upon Oxbow Flat and follow the tracks that led directly to Slogum House.

But as they passed the last fork in the road the horsebackers slowed a little, dropping from a lope to a trot and finally to a walk. At the line fence, a quarter of a mile from Slogum House, they stopped in a semicircle to look toward the end of the hogback that shut out Gulla and her gaunt, wind-blackened sons. A few minutes they seesawed there. Several times one, probably the tall Pastor Zug himself, started forward and was brought back by the others, until finally they all reined their horses and loped off, but not the way they had come. Instead they took the trail that led down the river to Leo Platt’s, riding hard again, passing and repassing each other in their urgency.

Libby looked after them. Some day there would be trouble with Platt, the young locator from the Niobrara who rode openly through the Slogum yard into the Slogum range when it pleased him, his lean hard body a piece with his silver-maned blue roan. With surveying compass and tripod strapped to his saddle, the man came, teeth white in his wind-browned face, his eyes the bright gray of snow clouds. Gulla watched him from behind the curtain of the shack that was Slogum House then. She looked out upon him with her arms folded over her loose, pudgy stomach and saw that he was an enemy. Yes, there would be trouble with Leo Platt some day. He knew about Gulla’s planning in the duskiness of her room, her two dark sons, with their night rides and their hands always over the worn holsters of their guns. Yet he would come, not at the head of five men—fifty perhaps, or alone. Most likely alone.

But the girl’s exhilaration lasted no longer than a dry tumbleweed before the flare of a wax match. Wearily she put the surveyor’s tall brownness from her as she had often done since the day, five years before, when Gulla caught her running to open the yard gate for him as he came by, opening it and leaning against the gate stick to talk, laughter in her slim young throat and the wind in her silky, smoke-black hair.

With the departure of the five armed men toward Platt’s homestead on the Niobrara, Libby’s watching for the day was done. Slowly she got up, stretching the stiffness from her body that was long and straight and free of the necessity for the padding and the binding of her sisters, because her excellence, even at twenty-two, was only that of the kitchen.

Whistling the cat to her as one would a dog, Libby strode in her swinging, unmodish step down the path made by the timid feet of her father. The veil, loosed from her face and held only by the hat pins, whipped out far behind her, darkening the green of her long eyes and adding to her air of unconcern something of the aloofness of a thunderhead climbing the summer sky, or the earth under winter snow.

From these things, and because Libby seldom spoke at all, not even to the men who came to eat her food, the others of Slogum House saw indifference to, perhaps even scorn for, their plans and schemes and ambitions. But they needed her and planned never to let her go.

And so, although Gulla knew how things must have been before Libby would leave her place on the ridge, she stood just inside the door looking out upon her coming down the slope of the hogback in the sun of evening, the black tom leaping the soapweeds like a dog, a wild, free dog beside the girl. The mother saw the long, inelegant walk and that the girl’s face and bare arms were brown as polished wood from the wind and the sun, and she pulled at her smarting lip angrily. A daughter of Slogum House—fit for nothing but the kitchen.

And out at the barn, Hab, the eldest son of the Slogums, was watching Libby too, the sleep of the day gone from his gaunt, dark face, his hand careless on the forty-four hung over his worn chaps. As the girl neared the house he lifted his drooping black moustache fastidiously from his beaver teeth and spit as a man who must assert himself, spit into the dry horse manure at his feet. Then he wiped his mustache carefully down over his mouth with a red bandanna, his eyes black slits under the brim of his cowman’s hat.

At the milk pen, Ward, a long, lanky, tow-haired fourteen-year-old, the youngest son of the Slogums, was driving in the cows. He stopped his pony when he saw Libby coming and waved a hand carelessly high where all might see. His dog Wolf had found a mallard’s nest with fourteen eggs and Libby must hear of it.

But when the boy saw Hab watching he whistled to the dog, cracked his quirt at a bulling young heifer, and hurried the milk cows into the hair-clotted barbwire lot.

Apparently seeing none of these things, Libby crossed the yard, her belated chickens running in white waves toward her and breaking before the swirl of her full yellow skirt as she walked straight through the flock. They fell back, clucking a little in bewilderment, and then wandered off toward their roosts. With tail curling, the black cat circled the dejected flock, lifting his deliberate feet high.

Together the two went through the screen door of the side porch into the gloominess that was Slogum House. Across the turn of the hall, pleased so none could come or go without her knowledge, was the door, always ajar, to Gulla’s dark room, where she lurked in her crochet slippers.

While the cat settled himself on the high comer shelf in the kitchen to look down upon all its activity, Libby unpinned her veil, folded it into her hat with the ball of knitting from her pocket, and smoothed her hair before the glass in the duskiness of the hall. She ran a comb through it and knotted it again—a simple matter, without the switches, curls, or rolls her mother had bought for her. She did her hair leisurely, despite the awkward rattle of the dishes on the Slogum dining table.

“Babbie!” Gulla commanded impatiently from her room.

Abruptly the sad-footed little thing left her table setting, tripped over a chair, and hurried out with the cob basket. Libby listened to the slam of the screen door. It did n’t take Gulla long to train her girls, even simple little Babbie.

As though there were nothing on her mind except supper, Libby went to the kitchen, into the yellow light from the bracket lamp with its fluted tin reflector. She heard no sound behind her, but knew that the thick, squat figure of Gulla in her petticoat and challie sacque was in the shadow of the hall outside the door, her black eyes set low in the bony caverns of her broad face, her lips the dry gray of the lean in salt bacon, her grizzled bangs rolled on tins.

A long time the woman looked in upon this eldest daughter, watching her indolent and yet somehow swift motions as she washed her hands, lifted the lids from the pans and kettles of the supper that was already on, every movement sure as she whirled the flour sieve, tucked the yellow-flaked buttermilk into the biscuits with her finger tips, and turned the light mass out upon the bread board.

“Well?” the mother demanded at last, angry that she could never compel speech from this daughter.

Libby did not look up, just kept turning biscuits in melted butter and placing them in long rows across the black bread pan.

“They came,” she said casually, when the pan was finally full.

“Came, came!” the mother exploded. “But how far?”

“To the line fence”—pushing the biscuits into the oven and closing the door swiftly upon the shimmer of heat in her face.

“How many?”

“Five—with Winchesters, I think,” taking a malicious satisfaction in this.

“And then—” the mother demanded, tapping her soft slipper in anger.

“Then?—Oh, then? Why, they turned around, just turned around, and rode away again,” Libby chanted, making a little song of it as she whipped thick cream into the salad dressing with a fork—not for the freighters, who did n’t go for cow feed, as they called it, but for the Slogum table. She said nothing about the men going down to Leo Platt’s. And so the mother’s face was free to purple at the insolent ditty about rifles and angry men. But the next moment she patted her thick elbows in satisfaction. It was good that they knew where to stop. And some day the line fence would be farther away, much farther away.

 

At the first clank of the trace chains and the chuckle of heavily loaded wheels, Gulla Slogum hurried out to the yard, the stiff curls of her flat forehead bouncing, her plumpness well corseted now and covered by a fresh red and white pincheck dress and a starched lawn apron. She opened the wire gate and held it for the freighters as they pulled in out of the rosy light of sunset.

“Feed bag ready?” called Hank. Short, Diamond B ranch freighter who had whacked bulls into old Fort Laramie in the sixties, gray now and friendly, but still given the lead.

“I got the biscuits in the oven,” Gulla answered him, loud enough to be heard far out on Oxbow, as she acknowledged the sunburned grins of those who followed Hank into the pasture lot: three loaded wagons and five traveling light, just running gears and bedrolls, freighters from the deep hills going toward Dumur in the morning.

From the open window of the Slogum dining room Libby looked over the yard. As she listened to her mother blow, she tipped the poison saucer on the window ledge idly, wetting the upper edges of the gray paper for flies that were already crawling away to sleep before the coming cool of night. From out on the Flat came the far bawling of the Wyoming stock that Ward or perhaps the hunchbacked chore boy, Dodie, would point to the pasture in lower Spring Slough, down the gully beyond the corrals.

As Libby played with the fly poison she remembered the man in the crow’s nest and hurried to put up a tray before Babbie and the freighters came in. Carrying a little lantern hung from her wrist, she slipped up the stairs and through the clothes closet on the second floor to a hidden ladder that led to the third-story lookout. Pushing the latch aside with her head, she bumped softly against the trapdoor. It was lifted, and as always a mat of black hair hanging over light-blinded eyes moved out of the darkness behind the small round hole of a Colt. To-night, after a day on the hogback guarding the sons of Slogum House, the man’s fear sickened Libby more than ever.

“Still taking no chances, I see,” she said as she reached up the lantern that made the stubble-bearded face a thing of stark black and white.

Clumsily the man who called himself Blackie Daw managed to take the tray without laying his gun down. He held it before him, still kneeling at the hole, his eyes dark and wild as those of an animal defending the last depths of its burrow. And when the girl started to close the trapdoor he could n’t hold in any better than all the other times.

“Seen anybody?” he whispered, the dark little knot that was his chin twitching, the dishes on the tray rattling so he had to set it down.

Libby laughed out loud. “Oh, yes—half a dozen horsebackers came as far as the line fence—”

Then, because she saw that it was like quirting a frightened horse across the eyes, she slipped the latch and fled to her second-floor room, to stand in the darkness, shaking, with a bitterness as of ragweed dust on her tongue.

No soft little sounds of a man eating came to her from the crow’s nest. Instead he seemed to be listening at the crack of the trapdoor, not knowing about the Slogum purchase the night before, or that the man he shot up in the Black Hills was alive and already out of the hospital; not to know this until Gulla had what she wanted of him.

Finally there was a stealthy movement in the crow’s nest, but instead of eating the man started walking as he did so many hours, three paces from wall to wall and back, his bare feet a slow, soft padding on the boards.

 

The first supper bell carried clear and high over Slogum House and the hogback to Spring Branch Canyon, where Ruedy smoked his pipe among his flowers. He did not hurry toward the sound, or move at all, the father the only one of the Slogums privileged to remain away from the family dining table when within hearing of the bell. Gulla knew how things were done elsewhere, far beyond the hogback, where the Slogum name long meant something. She intended that these, her sons and daughters, should be prepared for their rightful position, do her honor when the opportunity came, as come it must.

Gulla knew also that hogs follow not the plougher of the field but the one who throws the corn to them, and so she always rang the bell in the yard herself. This evening the first clang brought Libby from the darkness of her room, hurrying to put another pan of biscuits into the oven. Outside, the freighters-Montana, a Diamond B line rider, and six dusty, sun-blackened cowboys from Wyoming—came trooping up the porch. They sloshed themselves with water in the row of tin basins along the wall and wiped noisily on the clean roller towels. Then, with clinking spurs, they stomped in to the long, oilcloth-covered table in the freighters’ dining room where platters of fried beef, bowls of steaming potatoes, stewed tomatoes, and baked beans waited. The two extra girls of the place, with clean powder on their faces, were ready to bring more coffee and biscuits and laughter. And last, as always, Dodie slipped in to hunch over his high stool and to hurry out again for the chores before any newcomer picked on him.

Always before the Slogums gathered to their meal, Gulla looked over the freighters’ table, her face red with the excitement of many men about her. Usually she brought in a little something extra, perhaps a tall dish of wild-grape jelly or a glass of mustard pickles. Then she went away and through the waist-high archway between the dining rooms, like a horizontal window decorated with rope portieres, the men could see her take her place at the Slogum family table, with linen cloth and napkins and glassware, waited on by Babbie.

Gulla always sat in the center, directly opposite the archway, flanked on each side by a pretty, white-skinned twin with hair built intricate and shining, bangs curling softly under the icicled hanging lamp. Beyond each daughter sat a son, Hab chewing carefully with his front teeth beside Annette, Cash and Cellie together. Out of sight of the freighters sat the boy Ward, next to the father’s place, with Libby’s chair at the opposite end, nearest the kitchen.

Sometimes, when Cellie or Annette had important guests, as often happened, they took the ends of the table for such privacy as the Slogum dining room permitted, and the others moved up toward the center, filling the chairs beside the mother. For special times, as when there was a sheriff or perhaps a judge who must not be seen at Slogum House, Gulla had a table up in the girls’ private parlor and Libby or perhaps she herself waited on him.

Always after supper, except the few times that the light of a prairie fire reached high toward the zenith, the Slogums followed Gulla to the parlor, Hab’s small, saw-roweled spurs rattling softly as he went around to bring in any strangers. While Libby played, perhaps “Pop Goes the Weasel” or “The Irish Washerwoman,” on the elaborately carved cottage organ loaded down with strings of blown birds’ eggs, two white china hens, and a vase of red paper flowers mirrored in the scrolled glass, the men trooped in. Most of them stopped near the door, chairs tilted back, or squatted on their heels along the wall, the newcomers with the Wyoming herd, still in their shotgun chaps, looking bashfully in at the door. Only Hank Short and Papo Pete from the Diamond B stayed behind, to help the two extra girls stack the dishes and then to tiptoe in creaking boots up the stairs with them. Libby played loudly to cover their going and then dropped into a few soft, sentimental songs. Cellie and Annette, in flower-sprigged batiste dresses, ribbons at their throats and around their pinched-in waists, with little pink and blue fans in their hands, came to stand beside the sister. As they sang “A Package of Old Letters,” the mother rocked slowly, looking up at the picture of Saint Cecilia at the organ, with cherubs scattering roses over the keyboard. Under the picture, on a pedestal, stood a statuette Tad Green, the county sheriff, had given Annette—a young girl in white marble that Gulla dressed modestly in a ruffled bertha and skirt of pale blue china silk.

At the organ, well out of range of the carefully blinded windows, Hab, dark and tall in boots and corduroy, turned the music for the girls. Not that Libby needed it, for Ruedy had taught her to memorize well, but it was part of the picture Gulla built up, and no one protested. The Wyoming cowboys looked around a little uneasily and reached for their Durham sacks, their eyes on each other as they licked the paper. They had stopped at hog ranches all the way down, heard much of this place as far as two hundred miles away. But not these things.

When Annette had to slip out to the yard where Tad Green’s buggy waited, Libby covered her going by asking the newcomers for some cowboy songs. They only moved a little, awkwardly, among themselves, making their spurs clink and rattle, grinning, their eyes light in dark faces. So Hab and Cash sang “Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” and

Whoopee ti yi, git along, little dogies,

For Nebraska’s sandhills will be your new home,

with one of the men from the door joining in, in a rumble. But when the newcomer started “The Little Brown Jug,” Libby dropping into the accompaniment, Gulla shook her thick finger at him and the song was changed to “The Drunkard’s Lone Child,” with Cellie singing it very plaintively while the cowboys joshed the venturesome one among them. Cash, gayer, lighter than Hab, laughed a little too.

After the singing was over, they talked, the men from the west finally letting out a little something of the settler trouble, and of the sheep that ate the roots out of the ground and dirtied the watering places. They were sparing of words, one offering a phrase or a little more, perhaps added to by another. Range burned out near Casper; no rain, no snow last winter, and plenty of matches loose in ragged britches. Cows dying of lead poisoning. A man, too, here and there. They were trailing the stock down to the Flying L toward the Burlington. They grinned when they heard that an early start would get them there by night.

And as they talked Gulla passed around the stereopticon with a handful of pictures of Venice and the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. Ward reached up to the whatnot over his head for his chain carved from a solid block of wood to show the strangers, who made light of the achievement in their heavy way, bringing a flush of pleasure to the boy’s tanned cheeks. As soon as she could Libby slipped out to see to her father’s supper, leaving Cellie to talk idly with the cowboys from the organ stool, being only just pleasant, for they were unimportant.

Now and then a newcomer sneaked a look around for the extra girls, not knowing that the second-floor help were never to enter a Slogum parlor.

 

In the evening, as in the morning SUD, Ruedy stopped a moment on the hogback, lost against the dark sky of night. He looked down upon the lights that were the windows of Slogum House, vertical rectangles on the south, horizontal on the east. Far off, on Oxbow Flat somewhere, a prairie-dog owl hooted. Behind him, down in the blackness of Spring Branch Canyon, early fireflies laced his trees and a chuckle of water on stones and the smell of cress and wild roses came up the bluff on the light wind of evening. Ruedy hesitated, but finally he pushed on, down the sandy pitch toward Slogum House, to help Dodie with the puttering chores. Ward’s dog would follow close upon his heels, and with the chores done there would be supper and perhaps a minute or two with Libby in the kitchen.

At last he hung up his choring lantern on the porch, washed, and, slipping into a black sateen shirt that smelled of the outdoors and of silver showers in the SUD, he came into the kitchen that Babbie had cleared up. He stopped a moment in the doorway, blinking at the light from the tin reflector, his hand on the small of his back.

“Tired?” Libby asked, looking up, as she pulled a covered bread pan with his supper warm from the oven. Only to him did she speak so, kindly and without the wall of half-veiled contempt.

The man looked at her in the glass as he soaked the last remaining curl from his thinning mouse-blond hair. His gray eyes smiled a little to her, slowly, and the daughter required no more. Humming a bit of a song of his childhood that the father had taught her, “Amerika ’s’ ein schönes Land,” she spread a clean dish towel across the end of the kitchen table and set him a plate of fried beef and mashed potatoes with red gravy, lettuce with cream dressing, biscuits, and chokecherry jam. Ruedy looked around the kitchen, at the black tom blinking on his shelf, at the food laid out and the tall young woman who was his daughter. Yes, a fine land, this America, as his Grossmutter had learned to sing of it on her way from the Old Country. A fine, a beautiful land.

Libby poured out coffee for both of them, with the cream pitcher handy. The father sat down to eat, drinking deep from the thick, yellowed cup. Now and then he looked up at the girl and dropped his eyes to his plate. When she caught him watching her lean, strong fingers slicing a round of fresh bread because the biscuits were gone, he took refuge in teasing.

“Na, not so much like either side of the house,” he said, tapping a hand with his inverted knife.

But the girl paid no attention, her mind on other things.

“They came,” she finally said.

The father laid his fork down. “How far’!”

“To the line fence.”

“Hm-mm-and with guns’!”

“With rifles, I think,” Libby said, taking the empty plate and setting out a wedge of pie. But the man pushed it away and picked at the threads of his black sateen cuff. “Yah, and one of these days they will come—all the way.”

Libby was up for the coffeepot. She considered Ruedy over her shoulder, watching his face. This father was not the man for such a life, with frightened, begging hide-outs in the crow’s nest, Slogum lumber under a tarp, a fresh beef in the cellar and the hide buried with only a hole where the brand had once been, his pretty daughters sleeping with county officials. Ruedy Slogum liked his books, his violin, his gardens, and peace and the Old Country songs he learned long ago from the Swiss grandmother.

The daughter refilled the cups and set the pot back on the stove. Yes, they would come one of these days, and then she might never hear any more of the things this father used to tell her, long ago: stories of his childhood and his grandmother, the songs she played in the twilight and on Sundays on her little square piano, and of her cherry-wood music box that tinkled gay tunes so long as she let him wind it. Once he told Libby a little of his father who worked on the genealogy of his dead wife in the gloomy library in Columbus. And sometimes Ruedy spoke of his two sisters, older, soft-voiced, with the delicate hands and narrow feet of ladies, and of the long slope of lawn in back of their home where the linen was bleached.

But Libby knew more: that the eighteen-year-old boy must have been trapped by Regula Haber, Gulla, she who was trusted with the laundering and bleaching of the Slogum Old Country linens, hand-spun and—loomed. And when Gulla went to see her new sisters-in-law they had her directed to the back, had the cook brew her a cup of tea and fetch out a ten-dollar bill in an envelope for her. Libby knew, too, that Gulla sent the cup and the money crashing through the window and swore that some day they would be glad to welcome her at the front door. With good luck she might even reverse the matter of the tea and the back door. She might, with luck and enough of her brother Butch in her-Butch Haber, who amused himself blowing up puppies’ ears by filling them with black powder and touching them off with a match.

And now Ruedy Slogum sat before his daughter, his kind, weary face between his hands.

“Eat,” Libby said gently, pushing the pie to him again.

But the father rose, took his old rush hat from the hook, and went out into the night, toward the path that led over the hogback. At first Libby decided to let him go, but then she ran after him, out past the wood block where Dodie was sitting for a little music before he slipped away to his bunk in the grainery.

“They are in the parlor,” the girl called softly. The steps in the darkness before her stopped, came back.

“Ach, always in the parlor—” But the annoyance was forgotten in more urgent things. “Leo Platt came this evening,” he told the girl. “He is determined to protect his settlers. What could I say? Only that I could do nothing—”

Still Libby had to push her father into the house, into the parlor.

As her husband came through the door, Gulla Slogum bustled up to fluff out the pillow in the chair saved for the man of the house, as she told them all. “He works night and day,” she scolded to the new cowboys from Wyoming.

Ruedy made no acknowledgment, only looked with a slow smile to his pipe filling, as he always did, partly to avoid facing the crayon enlargements of his two sisters, whose discreet skirts were never to enter Slogum House, but who could not prevent Marcella and Annette, the twin daughters of Slogum House, from bearing their names. Deliberately he tamped the tobacco with his thumb. By the time his light was going good, Libby was back at the organ to play a few Old Country tunes for him. Now and then the father pulled the stem from under his clipped mustache and hummed a snatch. But the girl was not thinking of her playing to-night. She did n’t even see Gulla’s signal that it was enough.

By now the cowboys on the floor were nodding on their heels and the freighters along the wall moving their chairs uneasily. At last Hab got up and, yawning, pulled the young Ward to his feet, said good-night, and stomped upstairs behind the boy. After a while Cash followed, stopping to show the new men to their beds in the bunk room along the east, between the rooms of the extra girls and the comer one where he slept with Hab, the door commanding the stairs, the only exit from the second floor.

At the jack in the hall Hab pulled off his tight boots and left them standing beside the open door for the morning, his hat adorned with snake rattles, against headache, on a peg above.

In the bunk room the last of the newcomers unhooked his spurs and threw them with the others in the pile like a nest of cactus behind the door, where no night wanderer would step on the sharp rowels. Then he looked all around the bare floor, the pine table, and the double-tiered bunks, scratching the back of his neck. “Tie me fer a gant-gutted longhorn if I can figger this dump out. It smells like the other damned hog ranches and that old heifer looks it, but dogged if I kin fit in that air pious hymn singin’ and them purty gals ahem.”

Hank Short lifted his graying walrus mustache over the edge of one of the bunks and blinked out at the curly-headed young cow hand.

“That gal Annette got you bogged down already?”

“Scratchin’ dirt like a hoe man,” the newcomer admitted. “Danged if she don’t make a man’s balls crawl right up in his belly, just to look at her.”

Hank spit under his palm toward the sandbox and thumbed down the hall over his shoulder. “Where it says ‘Flossie’ on the door,” he advised. “She’ll fix you up.”

Downstairs Annette came in with Tad Green, the sheriff bulky and heavy-footed beside her, his voice high-pitched with years of talking, electioneering against the wind. But instead of taking him to her room, she led him, her arm through his, to the private parlor, despite all his grumblings. During the low commotion of their voices and the bed settlings in the bunk room overhead, Gulla slipped off her corset, hung it over a chair, and, putting on her creepers, went noiselessly into her closet, closing the door.

On both floors of Slogum House most of the east windows and those of the north were horizontal, chest high, set deep into the walls, with what looked like drawer and closet space all around them, but what was really a three-foot secret passageway opening from Gulla’s closet. Because of this not the bunk-room talk of the freighters, the snores of the tired men, the urgent love-making in the rooms of the extra girls, or the more tender approach with Cellie and the fragile-waisted Annette, was secure from the spying ears of the woman of Slogum House as she moved through the dark passage on her felt soles, upstairs and down. She heard the complainings of the sheriff. “And after me drivin’ like hell all the way down here—” and the soft, persuasive comfortings of Annette. On the second floor she heard the good-natured banter endured by Hank Short and Pete, heard one of the Wyoming cowboys slip in sock feet over to Flossie and back in a little while, to fall into his bunk, weary, and two others, whispering a little between them, go out and to the doors down the hall.

Only the two rooms of Ward and Libby, along the south wall, were safe from the ears of the mother. But nothing of importance could occur there, with Ward only fourteen and Libby as she was.

 

At last everything was quiet upstairs with the heavy silence of first sleep. Everyone was in except Babbie, out somewhere with Montana. Downstairs the sheriff was leaving, without his usual caution, letting his impatient team start out of the yard in a loud splatter of hoofs and a whirling of buggy wheels. When he was gone toward Dumur and his wife, Slogum House was still again. And softly, so softly that the mother should not hear her at all, Annette slipped out of the door and vanished into the darkness toward the hogback.

After a while Gulla came down the ladder steps in the passageway and out of her closet to sit in the rocker at her desk, where she could see the hall entrance with the dim little lamp above it, the only unlocked door to Slogum House. Here she dipped her pen into the blue glass inkwell, so exactly like the one used by the Slogum sisters in Ohio, and put down all the items of the day in the black book in which she kept trace of every increase in Slogum House and its possessions. Lumber for the second-story west end; the herd money for the cattle from Wyoming; a dollar a night for every man and horse—two meals and a clean bed, cheap enough, even in hard times—the upstairs girls extra, cash down, or stock delivered beforehand, with bill of sale to clear the Slogums. And only the fact that a weaning calf was hard as a coyote to drive alone made it necessary for the Slogums to rustle by night at all.

When Babbie came sneaking in, Gulla called to her from the darkness. Smoothing her dress, the little thing came slowly forward.

“My girls here don’t layout on the grass,” Gulla told her coldly. “That’s what your room’s for—and see you get yourself to it!”

Dumbly Babbie escaped up the stairs, sobbing. Later the man came in and Gulla watched him go through the hall as though the house were asleep.

Once she got up from her chair and went to the bathroom under the stairs opposite the bedroom the twins used when they were alone. She heard Cellie speaking low and what seemed to be Annette’s sleepy mumble. Then she went back to her desk and wrote her weekly letter to Fanny, Ward’s twin, away in boarding school to learn to be a lady, to know nothing of Slogum House and its ways. She sealed it with red wax and put the letter away to mail just as Hab and Cash, their night boots in their hands, came noiselessly down the carpeted steps and out through the hallway.

Gulla looked after the two sons as she laid the cards of a woolly old deck in a circle about her on the floor. From the queen of clubs she told off every seventh card, pushing it up half out of the circle, like sprockets in a wheel of which she was the hub. As the ten of spades came up she pulled at her lip, again at the seven. But at the black ace her hand faltered. She returned to the queen, counting again, her short, plump finger touching each card. Seven. Seven. Seven. And again the ace of spades, the death card, and with two other spades.

Scrambling up from the floor and stepping carefully out of the circle, she waddled to the outside door, her loose buttocks shaking in her hurry. But already there was a far sound as of colts running somewhere in play beyond the lower corral. A long time the woman looked out into the reluctant light of the waning slice of moon just rising over the hogback, ends upward; a dry moon, holding its water like a bowl. And as she stood there a dark shadow slipped silently between her feet and out into the night. She started, clapped her palm over her mouth. Libby’s black cat. She hurried back to her room, took three hairs from her first-born son out of an envelope, put them on the old fire shovel, and, touching a match to them, carried the bit of pungent ashes three times around the house to break the spell of bad luck. Then she buried the shovel in the yard, where the feet of many passed over it every day.

And from the doorstep the black cat watched, eyes glowing softly in the weak light of the moon, and barely moved to let her pass.

Back in her room, Gulla studied the cards carefully, going over and over the circle before she gathered it up at last and put the pack away under her pillow.

When she was undressed, she held her gown up from her feet with one hand and tiptoed to the curtain that shut off Ruedy’s cot. He was sleeping heavily, dead to all around him. She made another, an uneasy, round of the passageway of both floors, stopping long outside the room of Annette and Cellie, thinking of Tad Green as he passed her door that evening, a scowl sitting on the loosening fat of his face. She did n’t like the dark run of cards, the ace of spades coming up with the ten and the seven that way, and wished that Annette had picked another time to play “Pussy Want a Comer” with the sheriff. To-morrow the young lady would get a piece of her mind.

Not until the mother moved down the passageway toward her own room did Cellie relax upon her lace-trimmed pillow, still afraid that the mother might come to the room, holding the lamp over her head, her little eyes seeing the empty place of Annette.

But Gulla was considering the large Peruna calendar on her wall, with its little flags, to-morrow’s half black and half white, predicting unsettled weather.

Finally she listened outside once more and, hearing nothing, blew out the lamp and went to bed, leaving only the little vigil light on her desk burning, shining softly on the large, five-foot map of Dumur County above it, with Oxbow Flat and the Slogum buildings located in red ink. A faint red line marked a semicircle twenty miles south and east of Slogum House, taking in the hay flats towards the headwaters of both Willow and Cedar creeks—hay and range enough for fifteen, maybe twenty thousand head of cattle. Then Gulla could turn her face once more toward Ohio and the Slogum sisters and their kitchen cup of tea. Untl then, all the ranches that remained inside the semicircle of red on Gulla’s map were written in in pencil, and from a string nailed to the wall beside the map hung a large eraser.