CHAPTER VI

THE quiet shadows of evening crept up from the depths of Spring Branch Canyon until only the highest tips of the cottonwoods and the sandstone capping of the far bluffs were touched by the bright sun. Somewhere a woodpecker hammered, and far down the little stream a thunderpump complained and then was silent.

Deep in the cooling shadows Ruedy Slogum sat on his doorstep, his violin waiting across his thin knees. Several times he picked it up and stroked the strings with his callused fingers. But he knew there could be no music this evening, nothing to help drive away the things of the long day and of the night on the hogback. Once he thought he might try, very softly, a Schnaderhüpfel he recalled from his childhood, one the Grossmutter used to dance with her fine young Schatz in her mountain-village home. But he knew it could not lilt and whirl and be gay in the still, dead air of the canyon, not on this day.

And so Ruedy put the violin away and tried to weave a soporific pattern of household duties for his hands, but when a soapy plate slipped from his fingers to the floor he tiptoed over the pieces and fled to his garden. Even there he could see nothing better than replacing a few rocks that the little antelope had kicked loose as it leaped the ditches and cascades. And as he stooped over his task the gentle animal came trotting from the brush to nozzle his cheek. Stiffly Ruedy straightened himself and put his arm over the tawny neck. But as he scratched the clean, bristly hair between the young prongs, his weary eyes still turned toward the house and the gable window, and so he had to give up to the knowledge of the things of the night before on the hogback.

Leaving the little antelope to follow him sadly to the door, Ruedy climbed the ladder to the low loft and went to stand over the cot at the window. Even in the duskiness young René’s face was bleached of all the tawny color of wind and sun—putty white. His tongue was silent, drained of its bitterness at last, and his unblinking eyes turned toward the bare rafters, their stare empty as the future before him.

Once more Ruedy knew that a doctor should be brought, but he could not make the words. “Promise,” René had begged of him the night before, “promise you won’t let anybody get at me, not anybody.” And his horror-whitened face had been so stripped of all human defense, so pitifully naked, that Ruedy had to agree; even if the boy died he had to agree.

Slowly the man went down the ladder and out to the doorstep to set up a tardy and futile sort of guarding. Several times he stirred vaguely in the growing darkness, as though to do something, something drastic and violent. Once he even got up and struck a match to look at his shotgun inside the door. But he hung it back and went to the step again, letting his corded hands drop to his knees.

The latening moon came up red over the eagles’ nest at the head of the canyon. Tongues of light pushed down between the slim cottonwoods, searching out the little house, the gardens and the pools, the little antelope sleeping in a plot of fragrant clover. But Ruedy was still hunched in the shadows, heavy as a waterlogged stone.

And up in the loft young René Dumur lay alone in the black darkness, his hands gripping the edges of the cot, his nails cutting the wood as though they were claws of iron.

 

At Slogum House the day was quiet enough. Butch was still there, up early in the morning, scattering peanut shells freely through the halls, making no pretense of illness this time, not even the trots, to delay his going. And Gulla could only plod up and down behind the closed door of her room, the broad felt soles like the padded feet of some large animal.

Yet she knew they had not failed her last night She had seen Annette come running, her face like wet calcimine, her eyes round and dark and miserable in the dim light of the hall. And almost before Gulla could gather up the circle of cards from the floor, the ace of diamonds, the success card, last of all, Hab had come in alone, the first time in five years of night work at Slogum House. Without any sign at all to the mother, he hurried up the stairs and drew back into the darkness, waiting.

Not far behind him Cash looked cautiously in at the door. His boots under one arm, hand on his holster, he tiptoed up the steps. But as he turned down the hall, Hab Was against him, his gun in his brother’s stomach.

And for the mother, watching below, there was nothing but the boots bumping down the stairs, the empty legs swaying a little as Cash fled to his own room.

Almost immediately the screen door banged and Butch came stomping in, making no bones of his return at all. Gulla stood like a broad, dark hogshead in his way, but he only pushed his thick palm in her face, kicked a boot aside, and stalked away along the upper hall, his spurs clinking.

Moving her loose, quivering body as fast as she could, Gulla hurried through the dark passageway to the sons’ room to smell out this new thing between the brothers—and just when she needed them together the most. She listened long and straining, the silence pounding in her ears, and so she did not hear Annette rise with sudden urgency from her place beside the frightened Cellie and go out again, with bandages and pins and a jar of clover-leaf salve.

But there was only the tom earth of the hogback, and the dark splotches of blood on the moonlit grass, to show that anything had happened at all.

A moment the girl was paralyzed, her mouth like a drying wire cut in her white face, and then once more she fled from the place, stumbling over bunchgrass and into the sharp spears of the soapweeds as she ran.

 

And so the yellow sun of a quiet morning rose on a dull day at Slogum House. Two freighters stopped for the nooning and a dusty cowboy or two loped through. That was all, except that when the yard was empty a hawk swooped down on one of Libby’s white pullets. Dodie heard the squawking and came running out of the barn, waving the manure fork, making a loud whooping without any words. But the hawk moved away heavily and unhurried, out on Oxbow Flat, the pullet hanging limp in his claws.

Cellie was up early, hovering in the hall for a word with Gulla. But even as the girl waited she held her trailing ruffles in her small, plump hand for flight if the mother’s door should open. At last she got into her corduroy pants and rode out across the burning heat of Oxbow Flat toward the Niobrara, slowly, knowing she could not have faced the mother with even a word of protest against whatever horrible thing had been done in the night.

All day Annette lay on her side of the bed, staring into the green-blinded gloom. Several times Gulla sent Babbie to her door with a tray or a glass of lemonade, but the sound of her knocking always echoed as from an empty room and so the girl took everything back to the kitchen, until she had a row of stale trays across the back of the work table, not knowing what else to do. Once or twice Gulla stopped her heavy plodding to wonder at this daughter. No more pride or spunk than a mangy pup—or an Ohio Slogum. Pouting all day over a little begging and slobbering from that René, and him nothing but a worthless river rat who’d never have a cent to buy the pretty things a girl like Annette had a right to have.

Finally it was night again, and another Slogum supper over, this time with only Gulla and the two sons at the table for the freighters to see. Although the mother tried to make talk, not even Cash pretended to listen, and once she noticed that Hab’s hand slopped the coffee he was sipping from his spoon.

“Too much tobacco,” she told him, trying to have it sound like joshing. Cash threw back his head to make a laugh, a loud noise over the empty table. When he heard it he fell to his food again, his face dark-flooded under the tan and the week’s crop of reddish stubble.

All the evening the parlor door was closed. The freighters played seven-up and pitch on the oilcloth of their dining table a while and finally dragged away upstairs to their bunks, talking low among themselves, without laughing or horseplay, and no business for the extra girls at all. It was late when Cellie came in, without stopping to explain where she had been, and Gulla in her still rocker did n’t ask. But she turned to look after the girl, wondering what had got into mush-headed little Cellie, into all those around her. Once more she made the rounds of the upstairs. From the freighters’ bunks came the comfortable little sighs and snorings of honest hours in the saddle and on the post wagon, and from the sewing room the buzz and roar and snarl of Butch asleep, the old couch creaking under the regular rise and fall of his heavy chest. Only in the room of the sons was there silence, the dead silence of guarded wakefulness.

The next morning Annette managed to get out of the house while Gulla napped for the night’s vigilance. Veil ends blowing from her little brown hat, she rode down Spring Slough and along the Niobrara to the little meadow where once a summer shower ran in waves over the windrows of drying hay while René held her in his arms. But to-day the meadow was bare and the house above it empty—with one lone wasp droning in a window closed tight as for a long leaving. René was not here, had not been here at the house at all. Then, because she could not help it, Annette thought of Bullard, buried face down on the bank of the Willow, and for a moment the veil clung to her wet cheek. When it blew free again in the hot wind she got on her horse and rode hard for Leo Platt’s. But the locator’s little house was empty too, and so there was only Ruedy left.

 

After a week Annette was still riding up Cedar Creek to Spring Branch Canyon, keeping up well along the bluff so her voice would not carry to the little loft of Ruedy’s house, and where she could not be seen. The father, knowing it was best so, watched for her coming every day, telling her honestly how it was, with high fever in the night and wild talking. But finally he could say that René was recovering, much as a healthy colt recovers, hidden away alone in a deep draw, far from his kind.

Because the girl could not bear this thing her father pictured, she let her eyes escape to the refuge of the bluffs.

“It is quiet here in your canyon,” she said at last. “Quiet as in a church.”

Ruedy saw her discomfiture and licked his sun-cracked lips in embarrassment. “Yes,” he agreed, hoping to make some light, some not too stupid words between them. “Yes, but I think my garden is better for the nose than the dead air of the churches.”

Without answering, the girl touched her stockinged black that Tad Green had given her and galloped away, Ruedy climbing the side of the bluff to look after his daughter, riding fine and free with the easy running of the horse. At the bend that led toward Spring Slough the girl membered to lift a fringed gauntlet to the father she knew would be watching.

As she waved, the horse shied and out of the willows below her came Butch, spurring hard, his hair flopping under his hat. Annette saw him almost as soon as the father did and, using the quirt she carried lately, was away amid flying gravel. By the time Ruedy got to the top of the ridge, panting with his running, she was out of the canyon in sight of Slogum House, riding quietly homeward, the only moving thing on all of Oxbow Flat.

This time Ruedy walked boldly, without knocking, through Gulla’s door, his hat not in his hand but pushed far back from the anger in his pale eyes. At last it was enough. These things that were happening here he could not prevent, but neither would he remain to look upon them any longer. Either Butch went now or he, Ruedy, would go and take Annette with him—go as Ward and Libby had gone.

Before he was done Gulla rose against him, cutting off his retreat, standing wide as the door and seeming as high, her face gray as a pan of cold oatmeal. So—now he, too, was coming to plague her like the rest—like blowflies at the shoulder of a plough-galled horse, biting, laying maggots to rot and fester and eat. She had borne his children, fed them, kept their skinny butts warm, and his too. And after giving him the best years of her life all he could do was encourage the bunch-quitting bastards, come sneaking in himself to tell her she could kiss his ass. He was going with the rest. Well, he’d see she had ways of stopping him and his father-loving daughter….

Slowly Ruedy lifted his hand, brought his open palm across her mouth. He did it wearily, without surprise, as a thing made habitual by the half-conscious desire of long years. Then he pushed past the gasping woman and went away up the hogback, wondering how far he would get before a bullet from Slogum House found his back. Toe tall, sparse grass made little swishing sounds against his legs, and the clean, wind-rippled sand yielded kindly to the prints of his feet. A late-singing bobolink rose high into the air from a purple thistle and, folding his neat wings, came down in slants and runs, scattering his song over all of Oxbow Flat. But the impact of the bullet and the tardy echo of a rifle shot never came.

 

Late that night Gulla watched for Butch, and when he came down the deserted stairs she called him into her room, held out five gold pieces to him on the thick of her palm.

“Here’s the money again, and there’s a good horse down in the back shed to get you over the border.”

“Aw, Sis, what’s the hurry’!” he argued, his cupped hand of peanuts poised halfway to his mouth.

“The sheriff ’ll be along looking for you about to-morrow. I ’d hate to have him find my good brother here.”

Butch crunched the kernels, dug up another handful, and, dropping the shells to the floor, filled his trap of a mouth again, not bothering to slip off the bitter brown skin.

“Well,” he said at last, through his munching, “if they get me they’ll take those two poop-house stinkers a yourn along with me.”

“My boys did n’t have nothing to do with that—”

“But who’ll believe ’em when I get through tellin’ my story’! And then there’s the geldin’ the other night—”

“The what’!” Gulla demanded, her wide mouth hanging loose.

“The—Oh, hell, did n’t you want your fine Annette’s feller scairt out’! Well, he’s scairt out—for good.”

Slowly Gulla was up, her shadow moving ponderously along the wall toward the man. “You dirty dog!” she shouted against him, forgetting the sleeping freighters, the second-floor girls, everybody. “You dirty Haber bastard!”

But Butch only fished another peanut from his pocket, popped it, threw the shells at the woman’s feet, and stomped boldly upstairs, to sprawl his boots across Libby’s ruffled bedspread, flop his greasy hair across her lace pillow shams.

A long time Gulla stood, her arms helpless and heavy as sand. Finally she began a noiseless walking up and down the rag runner of her room, her hands folded across her stomach, the money wet in her palm. So, that was what was behind the things she had seen in Slogum House the last week: Annette dead as tallow, Ruedy’s callused hand on the mouth of his wife, Hab and Cash with guns between them. And she could n’t say that it had n’t been her plan—could n’t admit that she had lost the whip hand over Butch.

Suddenly she thought beyond Slogum House, to the night on the hogback; to René himself. Running her finger up the almanac, she saw that the night this thing had been done the moon was in the Secrets. That meant trouble: bleeding, swelling, rotting sores in calves or colts. Why not in men? And if René died, everybody would know how he’d been fixed. There would n’t be any counting on Ruedy in court, nor on the lovesick Annette. And with that Bullard stink still fresh, Platt and the preacher and his mob would n’t let it get to court. The whole country would come tearing up around Slogum House like hungry wolves, yelling, “Burn the sonsabitches out! Shoot them down like dogs!”

With the breath coming hard in her thick chest, Gulla went out into the yard, but there it was as close as in her passageway. The windmill stood silent; no air stirred anywhere. Up beyond the hogback a young coyote yipped, and then another, trying their new voices, and far out on Oxbow Flat a prairie-dog owl hooted. At the sound of the night bird the woman crossed her fingers and hurried back into the house. Putting the money that she still clutched in her palm carefully away, she took out her cards. Several times she shuffled them, her fingers awkward, half a dozen slipping out upon the floor, clubs for tears. When she let the ace of spades escape her and lie face up, black and foreboding, she threw the whole pack against the wall, scattering them like speckled, red-backed leaves in the wind.

Toward morning she tucked a letter of tablet paper into her hand satchel, spread her black wool voile over a chair back, and set out her good shoes, with a nightgown and soap and towel ready to pack. Then she pulled the wire to Dodie’s bell and slipped in to call Annette. “Don’t forget to eat hearty,” she said matter-of-factly, as though all the things of the last few days had never been.

Soon after daylight the yellow-wheeled buggy moved quietly down behind the sheds into Spring Slough and on southward into the hills. The air was still with morning; the sky empty of everything except the eagles from the crag above Ruedy’s place, hanging in far black splashes against the brightening rose of another day. Around two o’clock Gulla pulled up behind the livery stable at Brockley, a cow station on the south road, and lifted her veil for the liveryman’s recognition.

“Keep the rig out of sight until you get word from me—and you ain’t seen any of us if you’re asked. Woman’s business, you know,” she said, and winked to him.

The liveryman nodded, spit into the empty dust of the road, and stood looking after the two, the stocky, heavy-footed, mustached woman and the handsome, rustling figure of Annette, shadow-eyed and listless behind her heavy veil, yet moving with a fashionable switching of her lifted, flaring skirts toward the little red depot. Scratching under his greasy hat, he pulled it down again, unhooked the horses, and backed the buggy into the farther shed.

 

In three days they were back. They had Ward with them, so weak and sick he had to be taken from the train on a cot and put in the back of a spring wagon. With Gulla hunched beside him on a box holding an umbrella over his face and swishing the flies away with her handkerchief, they started for Slogum House. The boy never spoke all the way, only lay with his white face turned from his mother, now and then a drop of clear water slipping across the bridge of his nose to the pillow.

When they got home the yard was empty, not even Dodie loping out to take the bits of the horses. But when the little hunchback saw who it was he came sneaking from the back shed, his lip cut and a gash down his cheek. Knowing that it was for his loyalty, Gulla thanked him with a pat on the high shoulder and brought a foolish stuttering to his tongue as he led the horses away.

Inside the house Ruedy and Cellie were eating at the center places of the long table, quietly, for those beyond the archway to see. In the freighters’ dining room there was a strange attention to food chewing, with no joking or horseplay and no looking up at all at the booming man-laughs that rolled through Slogum House. And at the dusky bend of the hall, watching the door of the twins’ private parlor, stood Hab, his hand on his gun.

Without a sign to him Gulla kicked the door open. The pretty little room was tom up: the lace curtains ripped from the windows; the embroidered pillows scattered; the center table upset, its tall wild-rose lamp shattered, its seashells, souvenirs, photographs, and doilies all over the floor, tracked into tobacco spit. On the rose silk settee lay Cash, his boots up on the back, his face purple-red, a whiskey bottle on the floor beside his dangling hand. Butch, in sock feet, was astride a little gold chair, telling dirty stories.

When Cash saw his mother he tried to get up and slipped sprawling to the floor, his gun flying from his holster, his elbow sending the whiskey bottle rolling in a pooling half-circle.

“Whiskey-swilling hog,” Gulla called him, her arms folded over her dusty black voile. “And you—” to her brother—“you make me sick to look at you, with your tit-ear sticking out—”

Butch, stooping to pull his boots on, clapped his hands to his hair, holding it close. And by the time Cash was on his feet the woman had slammed the door on them and pushed the heavy bolt in place. Nodding to Hab, she hung up her hat, and together she and Annette went to the Slogum table while Ruedy helped Hab and Dodie carry Ward up the steps.

A long time the father sat beside the bed of this youngest son, his dry leathery hands seeking hopeless refuge in each other. He looked at the fever-thin face of the boy, the gray lips, the faint, shallow stirring of his chest—and was broken by the misfortune that fell upon this first one with the courage to depart from Slogum House. Typhoid, the doctor at Cheyenne had said—a long, slow recovery at the best, depending mostly upon skillful nursing.

As the father watched, the boy opened his sunken, yellowed eyes and let them move slowly all around until he saw his own collection of arrowheads on the wall. Then he knew where he was, and the thin fingers gripped the sheet and a sob came from deep within his bony breast. Just one, and then there was only the buzz of a belated wasp against the screen, and the bowed head of the father, his face lined and scarred as the frost-checked sandstone bluff above his home.

 

Before the week was up Gulla had Libby back at Slogum House. The day the girl returned she slipped to Ward’s room before touching the pins of her hat. The blind was partly down, but even in the half light of the afternoon the boy was restless and yellowed and gaunt, with the dead skin of a sick old man pulled tight over the bones of a child. Libby jerked the blind high and looked down upon this luckless brother who was a helpless little boy again. When Ward saw who it was he smiled a bit and lifted a hand vaguely in greeting and was off in a light sleep. The girl touched his forehead very gently, the skin like hot, dry paper.

That night, when the kitchen work was done and Ward sleeping quietly, with a moistness to his temples, Libby walked out across the yard. Refusing the horse Cash offered her, with Hab looking darkly on, she climbed the hogback standing against the purple of evening and went down into Spring Branch Canyon.

A long time she sat on the doorstep, her arms folded on her thighs, the father on the chopping block, his pipe red in the light of the new moon that was pale as a sliver of tin. There was no talking. Everything seemed much as always, even as it was the night this eldest daughter came running to say good-by. Only then the boy Ward was three hundred miles away, and Libby had never walked through wind-singing pines beside Leo Platt.

“Well, she got us back—” the daughter said at last, as from a long, deep weariness.

“Yes—” Ruedy spoke sadly over the dead pipe in his hand. “She sent me away—said I was babying the boy—”

She would say that—anything to keep him from having the father.

“But that is not all—” he said, rising to tread the gravel with his heavy work shoes. “There is more—”

“Butch?”

“Yes—yes—” he ended lamely. He could not tell her about René to-night.

 

But on her way home a slight figure rose uncertainly from the grass along the path, whispering a frightened, “Libby, Libby—I have to talk to you—I have to—”

It was Annette. With foreboding Libby followed her from the path into the vague darkness of the ridge. On a bare place the girl crumpled down, crying. “They—they did that to René—” her mother’s prudish tongue standing in her way.

“Who—what?”

“They—Hab roped him and—Butch, he—Butch, he gelded René.”

Libby stepped back, the sharp spears of a soapweed against her calf.

So, they would do even this to keep Annette. There was, then, nothing beyond them, beyond Gulla and these tools of hers. The day the telegram came to Hot Springs luck had seemed against Ward, against both of them. The boy sick and the mother finding it out first, getting him home, tolling her daughter, her cook and watchdog, back to Slogum House like tolling a wild cow into a corral by her calf. But Old Gulla would have caught them somehow, even if Ward had n’t taken typhoid; caught them as Hab brought back unruly critters who broke away from the herd, a rope around the horns, dragged until the hide was bare and bleeding.

Yes, it was well to know that there was nothing at all beyond this woman who was their mother.

Taking Annette’s soft hand as she used to when they were little girls, Libby led her to the path and back to Slogum House, letting her whisper out her misery all the way, answering only by the pressure of her fingers. In the house she pushed the girl toward her bed. When she was gone through her own door, Libby walked deliberately, and without knocking, into Gulla’s room.

“What sort of monster have I for a mother?” she demanded of the woman who rose at this intrusion, a dark, angry bulk before her little desk lamp.

“It was n’t my doings,” Gulla defended, knowing well what the girl meant, nor pretending. “It was the work of you yellow-gut Slogums—”

“Oh, no. It was you Habers, you and that dirty Butch,” the girl told her, the words coming slowly as deep ice breaking in the spring, and then faster. “Nothing is too bad for you, you low-down, dirty, scheming, murdering Haber trash!”

“Get out, get out of here!” Gulla yelled, reached for Ward’s twenty-two on the wall, her loose fat gray and shaking.

But this one time a daughter of the Ruedys and the Habers stood unmoved by command or gun. A long time she looked down upon the mother. “You’re done,” she said, at last, and sadly. “You can’t hurt me or any of us more than now. We’ll have to live long to eat up the soup you’ve cooked for us this summer—”

Calmly she took the rifle from the woman’s lax hands, ejected the shell to spin on the floor before her, and, setting the gun against the wall, slammed the door and was out in the night, her long skirts lifted, walking fast toward the sandhills.

 

Long after the sliver of flint-gray moon was lost in the mists of the western horizon, her ankles scratched to bleeding by the soapweeds, the sand-cherry bushes, and the prairie roses that perfumed the low pockets of the hills, Libby remembered Ward and his need. Afraid, she came into the boy’s room and saw that it was time. He was alone, his skin hot and dry, his tongue delirious. Several times he talked of his sister Fanny, crying that she was gone and would never come back, his sister, his twin sister. Again he caught the little rabbits of his childhood, held them in his hands, their hearts pounding against his palms, and wept for their fright and because he had to let them go. He chased the old dog Wolf through the yard again, his boy eyes fever-old and wild, all the violence and fear and hatred of his life upon his tongue. And then he became sly, drawing away from Libby’s hand, mumbling of the wooden plug he drove into the rifle of his brother Hab, to blow him to hell-an’-gone, hell-an’-gone, hell—

The next hour Libby worked to get the fever down with camomile tea and long sponging of the boy’s body, the skin dried tight to the bones as on the carcass of the buckskin colt killed by lightning in the horse pasture two years ago. Once Gulla came to the door with three black chicken feathers in a pie pan to burn under the bed for the fever, but the daughter who had taken the rifle from her so recently stood against her, and so the mother lumbered away, the stairs creaking under her hastening weight. After a while Libby sent Dodie through the darkness for Ruedy, and then to ride hard to Dumur for the doctor. The father came panting, his hand to his aching side.

“You should have stopped to spit under a stone,” the daughter whispered to him, pretending lightness. Without replying, Ruedy let himself down on a stool beside the bed, the shadows from the screened lamp sharp on his cheekbones as he watched.

By dawn Ward was quiet and asleep, his forehead moist, his blistered, twitching lips silent at last. When the doctor rode into the yard Libby went to the father. Slowly he lifted his vague, reddened eyes to his daughter.

“It is day,” she told him.

 

Although Libby spoke seldom enough to the others of Slogum House, things ran smoother from the moment she tied her checkered, cross-stitched apron on again. After the first night Ward’s fever rose less alarmingly, until it was almost gone and he ate his fat hen broth without complaint. The freighters, well-fed, were good-natured again, and after a big washing that spread in six long lines down the Slogum yard, the bluing streaks disappeared from the swirling petticoats of the twins.

And the first time Hab was safely away from the house Libby went up to pound the wooden plug from his rifle with the ramrod and carried it away to keep. If anything happened to this dark Haber among them, she preferred to save Ward self-blame.

While the eldest of the Slogum sons kept close to his room as a hunted animal to its burrow, riding out only for short lopes as a coyote forages, Cash spent most of his time with Butch in the crow’s nest, where Libby had moved Old Tit-Ear the evening she carne home and found him sprawled across her bed, peanut shells all over her floor. Although Butch grumbled, he went Nor did he go to the sewing room. With a screw driver in the brace, Libby took off the binges and, carrying the door out into the yard, chopped it into kindling for the cookstove, leaving the room open and public as the hall. And because Gulla had seen the daughter stand at the window and thoughtfully swish the water over the poisoned fly paper many a time, she put up the tray for the crow’s nest herself. Nor was her uneasiness lessened when, two days after Libby followed Ward to Slogum House, Leo Platt loped openly into the yard, and with the reins over his arm carne to the porch.

Without a word to anyone except to Babbie about the bread sponge, the girl hung up her apron, and swinging her hat by its green ribbon strings went out into the hot sunlight beside this enemy of her people—through the yard gate and away toward Ruedy’s place. Behind them all of Slogum House watched: Hab and Cash at separate windows upstairs, their guns heavy in their holsters, the older brother with his sly smile under the drooping mustache; Butch at the peephole of the crow’s nest, and Gulla at the hall door, her hands wrapping and unwrapping themselves in their apron. From the kitchen window Babbie saw the two go with a watering simple and happy as spring rain in her eyes, and at the sheds Dodie straightened up on the handle of his manure fork and looked after the girl with her green-sprigged flounces blowing. Only the twins, napping in their room, didn’t see Libby walk openly away from Slogum House beside the tall browned locator, his hair strong and black and free, a loose-knotted red bandanna blowing at his throat.

But as the two went up the sandy path of the hogback, the eager hoofs of the blue-roan horse close at their heels, they found only dull things to say to each other, stupid things, public as the wagon roads of the prairie. At the crest the man looked back upon Slogum House, like a nest of gray toadstools below them.

“And this was to have been the day,” he said, the words like nettle dust to his tongue as he recalled the plans left behind at Hot Springs and acknowledged the Slogum woman’s cunning, her power over them all. Then revolt against everything she represented swelled in the man’s throat, burst in a flood of protest.

“I won’t let that woman break us like a stick of diamond willow across her knee—”

But the girl from Slogum House dared not listen, for she had seen distance in this man’s eyes, distance and the long, straight road. And so she had to shrug his gentle hand from her shoulder, gaily, lightly, as she had seen Annette do so often, and swing her hat as she laughed at him, even though her strong fingers crushed the good straw of its brim.

Leo Platt saw only the laughing, and the lightness, so like the twins, and he knew that down below there Gulla was watching, probably watching to see that fool of a locator from the Niobrara brought in by one of the daughters of Slogum House.

Slowly he put his hat on, pulled the brim straight and even across his dark brows.

“So that is what you are,” he said quietly. “What that hairy-eyed hell-cat down there has made of you, too—”

Turning, he threw a rein over the neck of his horse and thrust a foot into the stirrup. But the girl could not give him the one light word needed now, could only hold her eyes to the far safety of Sundance Table, not over this man’s place, but over, René’s deserted little house, where no one would ever live again. She held herself firm enough, her head steady and her eyes, but still the man did not go. Stupidly he stood with one foot up in the stirrup, a hand on the horn that was solid and firm, seeing finally that the stillness was gone from Libby’s fingers, the golden sheen of sun on bunchgrass from her face.

At last the girl spoke, her voice quiet and remote as the sandhills that blurred away behind her to the far horizon.

“You see how it is between us,” she said. “And how can it ever be otherwise now—ever be otherwise?”