CHAPTER XI

ROOSEVELT’S order that the fences around all government land in the nation must come down was spread across all the larger newspapers of the country and condemned as persecution, the Cattleman Inquisition. But to the land-hungry of all the world it was the opening of a new continent, the discovery of a new America. They talked of it in crossroad post offices, in village streets, in smoky saloons, in metropolitan flop houses, and in the desolate queues of the unemployed. In far lands they talked of it as they straightened their weary backs in the fields or the forests of others and as they sat over the black bread and coffee, over the spaghetti, the cabbage soup, or the watered vin rouge. More than a hundred townships controlled by one man, eighty by another—these figures meant little, but here and there these cattle empires were translated into acres. Then the forty-nine townships controlled by Pomroy of the Diamond B with his home ranch in a place called Dumur County became approximately one million acres of the earth’s surface. Greater than a barony or a duchy, greater perhaps than the Fatherland itself. Ach, yes, such a thing was possible only in that far world of wonders, America.

So the land-hungry rushed out to borrow money of maternal uncles, perhaps to sell the two-hundred-year-old clock or to waylay a neighbor with a club, and then to figure passage, look at time-tables. All over the country old wagons were being greased up for the long trails to the free land. And while the boomers sang “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night,” on their way West, once more, “Amerika ’s’ ein schönea Land” rose lustily from optimistic throats across the long sea.

With the news fresh in her hand, Gulla figured late at her little desk. One third of the Diamond B was in Dumur County, much of it free land and well grassed. She would have more of that grass for the Slogums.

But while the cattlemen were pleading in futile eloquence before the President that the removal of the fences meant range wars, it was reported that their financial connections used less public but more effective methods. Just when Gulla Slogum was ready to throw ten armed punchers and four thousand head of young stock into south Dumur County, the ranchers obtained a stay of a year and a half on the fence-removal order.

Platt and his kind saw the delay coming, and anticipated the next fight, to keep the land from permanent leasing to the ranchers. Although the cattlemen had the money and the pull, the settlers had the votes, and so they carried petitions against the lease bill all over the fringe of the cattle country, sent them to Washington in rolls like rounds sawed off log ends, stitched tight in grain sacking and addressed on old fur-company tags. The bill was killed and the Kinkaid Act, sponsored by a range-district Congressman, permitting homesteads of six hundred forty acres, was passed. Platt brought the news to Spring Branch Canyon. With the fences coming down and the filings all four times as large as before, still at a fee of fourteen dollars, there would be a real boom, and probably more trouble with the ranchers.

Because nothing much had come of all the excitement about the fraudulent filings, the cattlemen prepared to use the enlarged homestead to cover the range country like drying soogans spread out around a sheep camp after a gullywasher. This time they planned what Gulla had been trying for years, to get the land patented as fast as possible and out of the hands of the government for all times. Cattleman land agents scoured the country for old soldiers’ widows whose husbands saw long military service, the whole time legally deductible from the required five-year residence period. Filing papers were made out at five dollars apiece for the widow, and twenty-five dollars or more for the land agent. The entryman’s oath of actual sight of the land and intention to establish a home was dismissed as a mere formality.

But it was not a mere formality to the serious homeseekers, who wanted to see what they were getting for their land rights. Weeks before the Kinkaid opening the sandhill region was busy as a new anthill. They came in by train and livery team, by covered wagon and afoot; they hooted up locators or fell into the hands of those who passed as locators, often cattleman tools. The oilcloth-covered table at Slogum House doubled in length, with a sign, MEALS 50 CENTS, PAYABLE IN ADVANCE to all strangers. In addition Gulla kept three men with buggy teams ready to take the land seekers into the fringe of the hills, never far enough to catch a glimpse of the wide valleys where the horses’ hoofs resounded on the hard trails, or the meadows where the grass stood belly-deep by middle June. Instead the boomers saw only the deep sand, panting lizards, and the tall sparse bluestem shaking on the windy slopes that were too loose for bunchgrass. Before them stretched chophills warted with soapweeds and pitted by the deep cups of the blowouts spreading yellow sand southeastward in the wind. They discovered that the soft, blurred hills moved aside as the buggy approached; they heard stories of men lost for weeks and found starving, crazy from the heat, or with hands and feet frozen. The homeseekers got these things at five dollars a day, also payable in advance. And three times a week Dodie made the round trip to the railroad with the double-seated spring wagon, taking the disappointed back to the depot at Fairhope and picking up a new supply of boomers at the station at Dumur.

A week before the opening day Gulla let her two upstairs girls go to the little land-office town. They were going to fill out one of their homesteads apiece with three quarters more Kinkaid land anyway, and might as well make their expenses and have a little fun. Cellie and Annette went up too, in the red-wheeled buggy that had been Lancaster’s, to expand their filings and their acquaintance.

By opening day the sprawling little cow town was booming, with packed saloons, gambling houses, and women everywhere, a few with the downy faces and tired hands of refinement and a queer faith in their adequacy to life on a dry-land government claim. But most of the women, by far the most, were those who gather in the strange and far places where men go to escape life as it must be lived at home.

Every foot of space was taken up by beds, cots, and floor pallets, and still there was not enough sleeping room under cover. Tents were pitched everywhere, and far out on the prairie the cool night was clotted with wagons and tipis and knots of men smoking about campfires; here and there a woman with a crying baby on her arm, calling her straying brood loudly together or just standing back from the fire listening to the men, weary for a place to set her belongings down.

The evening before the opening a long queue began to form outside the land office; it lengthened all the night and into the bright, shimmering heat of the morning. Here and there along the weary line of the night a calicoed woman brought her man a sandwich and a can of coffee, and, as he ate, those around him clamored for food to be brought from the restaurants or hamburger stands. Here and there another dug into his overalls for a dry, newspaper-wrapped slice of bread and meat; some made tobacco do, adding to the line of drying splatters of brown beside them in the dust. Still others, with little over the fourteen-dollar filing fee, clung doggedly to their places, without food or water, against all offers to sell out, through the long night and the heat of the summer morning on the shimmering prairie.

Just before the opening hour another line formed beside the first, ex-soldiers in uniform with their equipment and their discharge papers, rested, unhurried, joking, safe in the service man’s priority right.

And when the land office finally opened, word got around that all the good claims were gone. Even the ex-soldiers, with their priority rights, seemed to be too late. They told the land officials that they were a bunch of dirty, crooked bastards and only got a sound of laughing from the clerks until one little fellow in a ragged uniform and with a black patch over an eye took to waving his gun around. Then they were all rushed out and away by the deputies.

All through the town the angry men told their story. So?—And, by golly, it must be true or the government officials would n’t ’ve run the soldiers out like they did. Wiping their wind-cracked mouths on the backs of their hands, the home seekers saw what this meant. A few cursed themselves dry, damning the government, the cattlemen, the whole country, as graft-rotten. But most of them stood dark and silent, helpless in this lost hope of a livelihood, a home of their own, a piece of the earth at last.

No one slept until after daylight. All night the saloons were packed with sullen men who threw their whiskey down anger-dusty throats, the light-squared street outside stirred by moving feet, with not a cowman or a Stetson in sight anywhere. The next morning the women of the tents end the covered wagons kept their children in and looked anxiously after their menfolks as they gathered in low-talking knots on the main street.

By now the homeseekers were certain they had been rimmed, those who had been in the country for ten years rimmed as surely if not as completely as the Eastern tenderfoot and the greenhorn from the Old Country who had sunk all they had in the long trip to the free land.

For a long time no one could see how it had been done. Yesterday was the opening day. Everybody had been there since the night before. Then more rumors got around, rumors of baskets of cattleman filings entered weeks before the opening, all dated ahead. And as the rumor spread the men came to life as long still grass with a sudden wind upon it. They pushed their hats back and began to move upon the land-office building, one group after another, until the street was packed as a water lane full of thirst-maddened cattle. Here and there they jerked up loose sidewalk boards, pulled up hitch racks and tight posts. And as they moved on a low rumble of sound rose and spread over all the border town.

Platt and several other locators from the south country were talking over yesterday’s discovery, trying to plan for their homeseekers, when the rising noise of the mob reached them. Jumping on the handiest horses, they cut up a side street to head them off, get between the armed deputies inside the land-office building and the push of the angry, land-hungry men, with nothing much but a few clubs and posts and empty fists against six-shooters and sawed-off shotguns.

When the mounted locators appeared in the street before the roaring mob, those in front stopped in surprise and were jammed up against the horses by those behind. In that one moment of hesitation Leo Platt called upon old settlers among them, men he had known for years, some who got their first quarter of land through him, ten, fifteen years before.

This was damn foolishness. Mobbing the land office would n’t cure anything, only give the cattlemen a chance to report that the homeseekers were hoodlums, lawless, unfit to own land. Soldiers would come, not poor devils like those kicked out yesterday, their guns empty, honorable discharges useless in their pockets, but soldiers with loaded rifles and Gatling guns, martial law.

Grudging agreement arose here and there, with loud protests from strange throats:—

“Pull him down!”

“He a sonabitch too, American sonabitch—”

“Let me at the stinkin’ crook! I ’ll slough him!”

“Give him what the rest ’ll get—He sold me out, sold us all out—”

“Clean out the whole damn nest of rats—”

Once more Platt held up his hand for silence, the other locators drawing their horses closer. And as he began to talk, his voice scarcely audible in the noise, somebody bawled out over it all, over all the town.

“The bastard runs with them whorin’ Slogum women himself—”

Platt dropped his hand, his face gray-white with anger. So, this was what they could say—and him busting a tug to help the damned fools. Well, let them go, let them get a bellyful of lead.

But as he moved to rein away, he saw Pastor Zug in the crowd, a post held high in his two hands, the big man towering out above all the rest, a ready target for the bullets from the waiting deputies. And only a cedar post in his hands.

Once more the locator had to try to quiet the mob, urging his rearing horse forward for attention.

“There’s one man who won’t sell the settler out—” he told them. “Old T. R. Petition him, let him know what’s going on here, and he’ll tear up the earth—”

“We want Debs—he’s our man—”

“Hell, yes, T. R. ’s in cahoots with the crooks—”

“Then why did he get the fences torn down—get all the big bugs of the country against him? The cattlemen had the land once, didn’t they?” Platt challenged them.

Here and there face turned to face. Yes, that was right, damn right.

But some were not yet content. “We’re here,” they yelled. “We want our land now—”

“An’ by God we’ll have it—” pushing forward once more, one or two waving old guns.

But Platt stood against them now, firmly. “Keep straight on and you’ll get lead in your guts. There’s a dozen armed deputies inside the windows there, and cases of shells. They’ll mow you down like grass before new sickle. Forty, fifty of you’ll be kicking in the dust.”

Kicking in the dust—

That stopped them, made the mob waver, begin to crumble, to scatter, here and there a man looking back, not sure. Finally even the hot-headed Pastor Zug threw his post away. Only a handful of the more violent hung about the land-office building. But the deputies kept out of sight and at last these, too, went away to Platt’s wagon, where he was taking signers to a petition of complaint. A recorded entry was a recorded entry, he explained. All they could do now was to protest to Washington, demand an investigation, contest the cattleman filings at the end of the six months’ residence period.

“The poor man shore catches nothing but hell in this world,” one homeseeker said sadly, as he made his mark.

“Yes. Like eel fishers. In still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is sometimes very good—” a gray-haired man answered him as he signed the petition in a fine Spencerian hand.

“A kicking mule gets attention,” said Old Moll.

 

From her hotel room overlooking the main street, Gulla Slogum saw the scattering of the ex-soldiers, the gathering of the other homeseekers in knots about them, the defiance that grew among them as they heard the story. Here and there an old-timer leaned on his gun and spit into the furry dust at his feet. The goddamn, thieving cattleman tools!

All the night Gulla heard the unrest in the street, the noise of the saloons along the board walks, and in the hot yellow sun of morning she saw the swift gathering of the mob.

And as the men pushed toward the land-office building, tearing up weapons as they went, she pulled at her loosening dewlap, satisfaction sitting in the comers of her wide, slitted mouth. Any trouble down there was just so many good eggs in her checkered apron.

Then the locator from the Niobrara rode into eye-shot of the woman of Slogum House. Once more anger rose against him through all her thick body, and regret too, as she saw him scatter the muttering crowd. What could n’t she do with a son like that?

Gulla’s entries seemed safe enough from all of Platt’s protests and petitionings. With the government prosecutions for fraudulent filings lagging, Lancaster had come back from Mexico to help the Diamond B prepare for the big land opening. Through Annette, Gulla got her filings in early too, and properly post-dated. Otherwise they were legal enough, mostly the three quarter section entries of the family, filling out their Kinkaids. Characteristically, Ruedy took up the rest of Spring Branch Canyon, giving him the stream and the bald bluffs to Cedar Creek.

Back at Slogum House from the Kinkaid opening, Gulla marked the better sections not too far beyond her south line fence with small red check marks. The petitions of Platt and the disappointed homeseekers would bring an investigation, probably wholesale cancellation of the fraudulent filings. Anyway, six months from now, when the Big Jackson and the rest of her early filings were safely patented, Gulla intended to begin contesting. She would have little to lose by then and a great deal of good land to gain.

And over in Spring Branch Canyon Ruedy was telling Libby of the trouble at the land office, and the part Leo took in it.

“He is a fine man,” the father said, pulling at the frayed bottoms of his overalls.

 

All this time Gulla was not without concern for Fanny. It was fourteen years since she went from Oxbow Flat, three years since she finished at the conservatory, with a piano recital and an exhibition of her art: water colors, painted satins, brass trays, and burnt wood. Long before this, the mother began to give the girl a picture of the Slogums of Dumur County. She felt it her painful mother’s duty, she wrote, to prepare this delicatedly reared daughter for the shocking difference between herself and her family, which existed in poverty, in an unpainted shack. She must be prepared to find her brothers day laborers, one sister a common cook, her father a shiftless failure who had to be kept by the rest and no comfort whatever to his wife. She, Fanny, was the one flower of the thorny plant, the flower the mother had so carefully brought up to bear the name of Slogum in the high position it still held in Ohio. She had hoped to elevate the family for her beloved daughter, but it was n’t to be just yet. Until then her poor mother was making such preparations for her dear daughter’s future among her kind as she could.

Gulla marshaled the more pathetic points of life in the West, with drouth and depression, into a letter to Miss Deane, asking her kind assistance to placing Miss Fanny in a fitting position for the present. Was it not possible for a young lady of her accomplishments to be placed with people of culture?

Evidently it was, because the next time Fanny wrote she was sailing for Europe as companion to a widow and teacher for her two daughters, twelve and fourteen. Several letters came from Europe, then nothing but notes for six months, and finally a hurried request for money, two hundred dollars, to be sent general delivery to a little town in Vermont. After that there was another lapse and then a contrite note, saying she had been out of work and ill but everything was all right again. She had a better position and by way of evidence she sent Gulla a garnet brooch.

For the last year the letters were regular enough, although the address was always changing. “Mrs. Easterson travels a great deal,” Fanny explained. And so it seemed. Miss Fanny Slogum, care of Mrs. W. K. Easterson, the letters postmarked New York, Atlantic City, Chicago, St. Louis for the World’s Fair, once even Niagara Falls. Gulla opened that one with clumsy fingers. Perhaps Fanny was married, had made a good match. But it was only another note with a forwarding address at Toronto. Now nothing for almost two months.

And then one day a livery team stopped in the Slogum yard with a slender woman whose waist measured no more than two good hand spans. She wore a modish dress of black and the long plume of her Merry-Widow hat swept from her forehead around the back and drooped over the opposite shoulder in a full, soft, curling tip. The livery man cramped the wheels, helped the woman down carefully, and while she stood a moment, uncertain, he turned around and drove away out across Oxbow Flat.

The young woman lifted her heavy veil to consider the place, dropped it quickly, and, gathering up the rolling swirl of her braided skirt, swept up to the front entrance of Slogum House, although there was no longer even a path through the weeds. Gulla saw her come. Another straying woman who needed help. She patted her forearms and thought of the fee she would get now, with perhaps more, if there were good connections….

After several knocks, each more timid, Gulla finally sent the stammering Corrie out to bring the woman to the porch door, where she stood against her entrance with folded arms. And before her robust breadth the stranger, who seemed only a girl now, tried to speak in a low, hoarse, embarrassed voice, choked into a fit of coughing, and finally gave up to it. Squeezing her lace handkerchief to her lips, she held to the door casing until the coughing was done, leaving her shaken and exhausted. The handkerchief she took from her lips and folded so quickly into her hand was flecked with clear, bright blood.

So Fanny, youngest daughter of the Slogums, came home, and Dodie rode to Dumur for Dr. Hamlin, for much as Gulla hated him he was the nearest, and there seemed little time now.

While the doctor was with the girl in Gulla’s room, the mother stalked up and down the dark hall, pulling at her drooping, grayish lip and folding and unfolding her arms on her stomach. When the doctor finally came out he was wiping his hands in cold disapproval. “Mrs. Slogum,” he said, “your place is a public menace. This is the fifth case of gonorrhea I’ve treated from here during the last six months—”

The stocky woman did not retreat. “She—” pointing toward her own room—“she can’t have it—why, she just came here. She never saw this house before to-day!”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Then you do indeed draw the dregs of humanity. And regardless of when she came or how, she may never leave here alive. Her health has been seriously impaired by frequent abortions and venereal disease until now it’s advanced consumption.”

In the kitchen he gave Libby instructions about the pills and powders he was leaving and the food the patient should have—milk, meat, fruit, and especially eggnog, plenty of eggnog, made with whiskey. When Libby told him of Gulla’s specific orders against intoxicating liquor in the house the doctor yanked at his beard. “She’s a fine one to moralize! I’m sending it out to-morrow by the mail carrier. You have my instructions.”

Before he left the yard he went to the windmill to wash his hands again. A long time he let the cold stream of water run over them, over the backs and the palms and well between the fingers.

Fanny spoke even less than Libby, and only gradually did the rest of Slogum House discover that the youngest daughter was there at all. When Annette saw the fragile hands, the transparent whiteness of the narrow, childish face, and the soft, light brown curls about the girl’s damp forehead, she saw herself for what she was, thirty and coarsening and faded.

Something of the hundred vigorous years of the Grossmutter ran like a fine steel wire through all the children of Ruedy. Despite the doctor’s angry pessimism, in a month Fanny was hungry and wanting to get up. So after supper Libby climbed the path over the hogback to Spring Branch Canyon. René was there and she let him talk of his horses, each one as complex as any human being to him and worth many more words. Now he was adding a Morgan stud to cross with the range mares, produce fine all-around light horses, tough animals, with spirit and beauty. It was good to see him so.

Finally René lifted his thickening body and went away into the darkness, leaving Libby and Ruedy alone. A long time the eldest daughter of the Slogums considered her father, but covertly, so the man could not know. He was sitting under the old Swiss clock that had passed down through the Ruedy sons so long as there were any, and from them to the Slogums. It had come to Spring Branch a month ago, the only notice, besides the black-bordered card, that the last William Penn Slogum was dead.

Libby watched her father, seeing, always with a new shock, how thin and stooped Ruedy’s shoulders were, how gray the stubbles on his lean and seamed face. And yet, for all the years and the humiliation of his life, there was peace somewhere within him. Like the quiet of Spring Branch Canyon, somehow there was still peace deep in the tortured fissures of his life.

But she had come to tell him of Fanny. He listened gravely, without a word, and when she was done he still sat silent, his hands hanging limp between his knees, remembering the light-haired little girl who went away. Finally he got up, tramped heavily in his cowhide shoes to look out of the door into the unleavened darkness where a prairie-dog owl called far off in the hills and the windmill at Slogum House squeaked for grease. At last he returned to his chair.

“You’d think,” he said, “that a man would use as much sense with his family as René does with his stock. If a stud horse gets poor colts, he don’t let him go on indefinitely—”

 

Since Gulla showed her ranching ambitions so plainly her freighting trade had fallen off until there was only business enough for one girl, and that only by working the community on the side. Not that Gulla, even now, let her bring outside customers to the house, but there were always buggies and buggy robes. Libby complained a little to her father. Gulla was getting old. Even with her disappointment in Fanny it was n’t like her to be so careless, letting her upstairs girls layout. What was the difference in places? Ruedy asked. The race had long found the earth a convenient couch— He stopped, and for the first time he left Libby sitting while he went out to dig at the wheat grass creeping in at the gardens, chopping at the tough roots as long as there was any light at all. And still he had to think of the boy that let one of River Haber’s daughters lead him into the bushes.

 

With business permanently slack, Gulla told Eulie, the less profitable one of the upstairs girls, to go. But Eulie did n’t want to. She had been with the Slogums for years. It was the nearest thing to home she had ever known. Could n’t she just help around the place for a while, for her keep? To learn a few things, she said, shaking her bushy yellow head and giggling. She might want to set up housekeeping some day. Lots of young fellows in the country looking for a cook.

Libby laughed. That yellow fuzz-top learn anything? She did n’t want her in the kitchen at all, falling into the first pail set on the floor, knocking all the handles off the cups, hair in the butter. Anyway, Libby said she was particular whose hands went into her food. That Eulie was probably rotten with disease.

But the girl cried and so Gulla told her she could wait. When Dr. Hamlin came through the yard on his way to set the leg of one of the Diamond B’s dude cowpunchers, she let Eulie run out to talk to the doctor. Quitting business and wanted to get out even with the board, the girl told the doctor. So he came in. When he was leaving Libby stopped him.

“I ’ll have to look her over again in a few weeks; nothing now,” he told her.

“Nothing at all?” Libby asked, with the skepticism of her kind for all the Eulies. But finally she let the girl come into the kitchen so long as she wore a crocheted cap over her frizzy hair. That chippy ’d get tired of working soon enough, she told the worried and jealous little Corrie.

But in a short time Eulie could bake pies that were almost as flaky as Libby’s. She had a light touch with the biscuits and could even, come butchering time, boil up a batch of lye soap the color of ivory and-light enough to float. She got up at the first clink of her bell and did whatever was set out for her. Sometimes Libby wondered at the change in this girl who used to sleep until noon and could scarcely be made to wash out her own pants. Then gradually she saw what the girl was after. Cash Slogum. Not just Cash to sleep with, but to marry.

The day after Gulla saw it Eulie of the yellow hair was gone. It happened easy enough, without fuss. Gulla asked her along to Dumur to open the gates. In town she gave the girl a letter to one of Dolly’s friends, married and living in a fine, big house overlooking Rapid City. The woman was easy-going, soft as a rabbit, and would be mighty glad to get such a good cook. The twenty dollars inside would get Eulie there and quite a little over for clothes.

But the girl threw the whole thing to the walk at Gulla’s broad feet, much as she herself once threw ten dollars through a Slogum window. To hell with her dirty money, got by murder and worse! Little Eulie had plenty, she bragged, lifting her skirt and showing a thick, fat roll in her stocking.

And when there was only the lean, grinning mouth of Gulla the girl began to cry, the white powder of her face wrinkling, her eyelashes running.

“Oh, you can throw me out, you old mud-faced heifer, you!” she bawled for all the street to hear. “But you can’t keep me out. Cash ’ll be after me and you’ll be damn glad to have me back.”

But Gulla was already at her buggy. Unwrapping the lines from the whipstock, she drove away, out of town, leaving the money on the walk. From the rear glass she saw the girl lift her skirt and tuck it in with the rest.

 

That evening Cash came in early and looked all around the kitchen and the dining rooms. But he did n’t say anything, not until he sat down beside his mother at the supper table. Then he leaned over her shoulder, his little yellow-gray eyes scared and mean. “What did you do with her?” he demanded.

But the mother was talking to Hab on the other side and so Cash had to wait until the house was still and Gulla was in her room.

“You got to get her back—I tell you, you got to get her back.”

The woman looked up from the twenty-dollar deduction in her black book to the broad, sullen face of her son standing in the door. Then she dipped her pen and went on writing, adding the few receipts of the day. But when Cash still did n’t go she put her pen down, locked the desk door on the book, and came toward him, a thick, squat figure with the light behind her.

“I’ve put up with enough foolishness from you, Cash Slogum, with your rascally goings-on. And now you’re trying to tell me what to do, you whore chaser, rotten with the clap this very minute!”

But it was only a checked apron in the face of an angry longhorn to Cash. The Haber in his wide jaw came out. “By God, you can’t run me all my life like you do the rest—”

“I ’ll run you because you can’t run yourself; because you’re a fool and a sneaking coward—”

“Like hell I ’m a coward—I ain’t afraid of you!” he roared, his voice loud in the still house as he pulled a revolver from his pocket and, waving it before her, was big with courage.

For a moment Gulla hesitated, a sagging and a grayness in her heavy face. And then it was gone. Cash was only a Slogum, a damned, white-gutted, yellow-livered Slogum. And he thought she had done away with Butch. He even threw it up to her, when he was drunk, staggering home from the Willow.

“No, you ain’t afraid,” the woman said softly, her eyes almost lost under the dark-fleshed rolls of her brows, “and Butch was n’t afraid—and where is he now?” Slowly she moved toward this son, and before her heavy approach he let the gun waver, drop, let the woman take it, break it, spill the shells into her palm and hold the empty weapon out to him, as she might the club to a whipped dog to lick.

Two weeks later the deputy sheriff stopped in on his way back to Dumur from the hills. County Attorney Cudder wanted to see Gulla and Cash about the disappearance of a man named Butch. Nothing serious; just a little questioning.

 

The mother and son sat dark and strange beside each other all the way up to Dumur. Cash drove, handing the lines to Gulla at the gates, opening them, and, when they were through, driving on again. Several times he tried to speak, not of the day’s difficulties, but a friendly word, about ordinary things, like the field of golden Susans along the road where a strip of ploughing was going back to grass, a coyotey team of bronchs hitched to an old top buggy they passed, the box-elder bugs that dropped into their laps somewhere in the Niobrara Valley. But when he turned to speak the stoniness of the woman beside him stopped his tongue. So he touched up the horses, and as they quickened their pace the saddle horse of the deputy sheriff beside them lifted his tail, let go a little wind, and trotted faster too.

In the county attorney’s office they found Eulie waiting in a new red dress with bandings of black ribbon, her yellow hair more burnt and frizzy. When Cash came in she started up towards him, but before Gulla’s cold black eyes she got only a mumbled “Hello.”

County Attorney Cudder, a new man from the East somewhere, sat behind his desk, swivel chair tilted back, his smooth face pink, his plump finger tips together before him. To one side was the deputy sheriff, and before him in a semicircle he had Eulie, Cash, and Gulla; only the girl confident, her knees crossed, snapping and unsnapping the top of her black silk bag.

From the moment of the Slogums’ entry the man played them against each other. Gulla’s cunning little eyes saw much of how it was and pretended the slow stolidity of her appearance, leaving the part of uneasiness to Cash and the sharpness of tongue to Eulie. Sitting behind her high, corset-propped bust, she watched, not sure how much the man knew besides the things this second-floor girl from Slogum House could tell.

At the county attorney’s prompting Eulie began her story, defiantly, patting the yellow switch under her black hat with two ringed fingers. She knew Gulla Slogum killed a man named Butch because Cash had told her so. His mother had given him hell for going to a road house and getting happy—not drunk, just happy-happy, as who would n’t—living at Slogum House?

The county attorney smiled a little, friendly-like, and led Eulie into the story as Cash had told it to her. How everybody left Slogum House one afternoon but the upstairs girls and Mrs. Slogum, and that this Butch never came back and Cash said his mother killed him.

The man nodded the girl into a pause of waiting, but Gulla did not fill it with any protest; offered no word at all. And SO the county attorney went on himself. How could that be, he wondered—this woman killing a man while she was home and the man away—

The girl showed her short, scalloped teeth in a sly grin as she pulled at her gold-washed extension bracelet. The old woman of Slogum House had ways of getting her dirty work done, lots of ways and piles of dirty work.

Ah, so?—Attorney Cudder drew his words out slowly, his eyes on Gulla. Still getting no response, he tapped his fingers together and changed his attack, speaking more rapidly, in a crisper tone. Now this Cash Slogum, who presumably told this story, how could he know, unless—?

Yes, how could he know, the county attorney asked himself aloud and thoughtfully, watching the mother under his pinkish lids.

But still there was nothing, only Cash upsetting his chair and backing away from them all, crying down upon Gulla, “I see your game—it’s all your doing, you dirty bitch—trying to put me out of the way!”

A slight twitching came into the county attorney’s round cheek, but he went on as though there had been no interruption at all, and Cash, putty-gray under his tan, straightened his chair and settled slowly back into it.

About this story now, Cudder proceeded. Had Miss Jones been told this in Slogum House? Just where in the house; under what circumstances?

When Eulie started to object the man made a patting motion in the air with his hand. There, there, smacking his full lips. Nothing to be disturbed about. Of course not. But just where did Cash Slogum ten her his mother killed this Butch?

And so the girl admitted that it was in her room. And where—? In—? The man’s fingers tapping again.

Yes, defiantly tossing her fuzzy head, in her bed.

This man in her bed at the home of his mother and accusing her of murder?

And what had such a son to say for himself?

“It’s a put-up job!” Cash cried. “I tell you I never had nothing to do with her, the chippie, the whore!” But he was so obviously lying that the county attorney and the deputy both laughed out loud and even Eulie smiled a little, ruefully at first, and, when she was certain of the officers’ approval, more confidently. The son’s eyes moved from one face to another and finally to his mother’s. The thin, hard line of her mouth broke him into a sweating.

But the county attorney did n’t seem to notice. He was questioning Eulie again. What proof had she that there was such a person as this Butch?

Why, everybody knew about him, she said, giggling a little. From the trial; did n’t the attorney remember? The Maxon trial.

Oh, yes, Cudder recalled, spiring his finger tips again. He guessed that was true; a little before his time, but, if he had been correctly informed, the confessed accomplice to a foul murder was sent over the road, and this Butch, alleged accomplice, was not found and so the Slogums were fortunately acquitted.

Now it was Gulla watching, hearing the man’s voice drone away into silence, holding herself unmoving, all except her hands, which pulled back a little deeper into her lap.

Then, as though by a sudden decision, the county attorney turned to her with a most generous smile, bowed a little, and said, “Since you are accused by this woman, and I should like to know as much as possible before I take any irrevocable steps, tell me anything you wish—and not one word mote.”

Gulla looked at him, at the smooth, shiny forehead, the moist pink skin, and she knew that she would be expected to pay for this generosity, pay big. Suddenly she saw that money was at the bottom of the whole game.

A moment she fussed in her handbag, as though putting the man off, as though trying to think. And all the time the county attorney was beaming his generosity upon her.

Finally she brought up an envelope, shook a letter from it, and began to read, slowly, the waits between her words like stones rolling far down into a mudhole:—

GULLA SLOGUM

DEAR MADAM

If you don’t want me to go to the judge and tell what I know about you killing a man named Butch you better send Cash up town for me and oblige.

EULIE JONES

—stopping a little longer before she read the signature.

By now the attorney’s fingers were no longer folded. He was halfway up in his chair, his hands on the arms, his face red, his anger hot upon the hair-patting, self-satisfied Eulie.

But Gulla was not done. Tapping the postmark with her stubby finger, she looked to Cudder. “A threat, through the U.S. mails—why, that’s a penitentiary offense, ain’t it?” her mouth spreading suddenly in the delight of a discovery.

A moment Eulie’s mascaraed eyes were round as a scared chicken’s. Then she jumped up, scattering her gloves, handkerchief, and the black bag over the floor. But nobody paid any attention to her at all.

Cudder was no longer the ambitious county attorney with an influential woman in his soft, persuasive palm, but a public servant facing the shrewd and powerful Gulla Slogum. He took refuge in the impersonality of an honest county attorney. “I think,” he said politely, “we all see that this is a complete farce, and enough damage has been done to a fine, upstanding woman by this ignorant and malicious girl. If you’ll just give me the letter I’ll promise that you will never be troubled by her in the future.”

But Gulla had already stuffed everything away and was pushing Cash out of the office ahead of her to Annette’s buggy. Jauntily the matched blaze-faces whirled the red wheels down the one dusty street and homeward, mother and son both silent as they came. Only this time the mother drove, and as the horses held the road and their steady trot, she wondered where this Butch business would end. But after a while she shook the lines, the horses switched their tails and stepped out, and the woman fell to amusing herself by counting the places she could see from the road, places that would be hers some day because she already had mortgages on them.