THE NEWS THAT BLUE WAS IN TOWN WAS NOT LONG IN reaching the Hotel Hope. One could look out any window and see most of what was happening in Belle Fourche. Doosie looked out the kitchen window and saw a familiar-looking buckskin mare hitched in front of a saloon a little way up the street. The sight depressed her so much she could scarcely go on with her cooking. When the whorehouse closed and business fell off in the saloon, it seemed she might get some rest from her cooking, but then along came Ogden, who ate more at one meal than all the whores and customers in a normal day. The rest Doosie had hoped to get was one of those things that were mainly nice things to think about—in practice they never quite came.
Though Doosie had predicted that Blue would come, she hadn’t predicted he’d come immediately; but he had. The fact disturbed her so that she did stop cooking; she sat down in a chair with a big tin cup of coffee. She liked drinking coffee from a tin-miner’s cup—a few cups of coffee might help her get a grip on her feelings. The virtue of the tin cups was that they kept the coffee at a scalding temperature for quite a while, and Doosie liked it scalding. When she was low—and she was certainly low at the moment—scalding coffee was her comfort.
Doosie thought gloomily of all the years she had attended to Dora and Blue; how careful she had been to nurse them through their many quarrels and disputes, the separations and disappointments; she had also tried to keep them behaving decently during their ecstatic reunions. At times Dora was even more of a problem than Blue; she was so glad to see him that she made little effort to control herself. Doosie had always hoped that someday they would settle down together and stop fighting so much. When T. Blue was around, Dora was happy; so was he. Why people who were only happy in one another’s company contrived to stay apart so much was puzzling to Doosie. She herself didn’t like men, on the whole, and had usually been content to see the last of the many who pestered her when she was younger.
But Dora, her kind boss, was far less critical of men than she was. Over the years, Doosie had seen Dora take fancies, usually brief, to any number of men, including some Doosie had been reluctant to let in the door. Dora wasn’t as hard on men as she should be, Doosie felt—anyone who would compliment her, dance with her, or just make her laugh would be welcomed for a while. Of course, Blue did all those things better than anyone else; little wonder Dora had kept on loving him through the years.
However, he had married—it had been a blow to Dora—but then, he was stuck off on a remote ranch most of the time and could not be blamed for wanting company. It was hard for Doosie to imagine Dora living on a ranch; also hard to imagine T. Blue staying any place for very long. Dora didn’t even like horses—the only pet she could tolerate was her bossy parrot, Fred.
Now, however, things were really in a fine mess; both old lovers were married, and not to one another. The confusion, the anger, the tears the situation would produce made Doosie wonder if the whole business—romance—could possibly be worth it. She herself had long since reached negative conclusions on the matter of the worth of romance, but the only person she could find who shared her view was Calamity. They had discussed the subject several times and agreed that no pleasure men brought was worth the havoc they wreaked through selfish and contrary behavior.
Doosie drank two scalding cups of coffee, felt a little better, and went upstairs to inform Dora that her old boyfriend was in town. Maybe being a married woman for the first time in her life would have brought her finally to her senses. Maybe she’d refuse to see Blue. On the other hand, it might go the other way; she might run off with him, in which case Doosie would be stuck with Ogden to feed—and Ogden took a lot of feeding.
“I know, I see his horse,” Dora said, when Doosie came in. “He must have found out, else he wouldn’t have come here. Do you think he found out?”
“I ain’t no mind reader, you need Skeedle if you want to know what he found out,” Doosie said.
“Anyway, he’s across the street getting drunk,” Dora said. “What am I going to do?”
“It wasn’t two days ago you said you hoped he’d come,” Doosie reminded her—she loved to catch Dora in contradictions, and had caught her in thousands over the years. It surprised her to find Dora looking so frantic, though—she looked nervous enough to fall out the window.
“Why do you always remind me when I say something foolish?” Dora said. “I felt that way then, but now I just wish he’d go. What if he shoots Ogden?”
“He better shoot him hard if he shoots him,” Doosie remarked. “Ogden’s big.”
Dora hadn’t expected Blue to arrive so quickly, nor did she suppose she would feel so upset when he did. Yet the moment she saw his horse, an anxiety gripped her as powerful as any she had ever felt. Part of her yearned to see him—the same old yearning to see him that had never diminished in all those years—but another and newer part wanted him to go. What if he and Ogden fought? What if Ogden found out how long she had loved Blue, and as a result ceased to want her himself? After all, Ogden was very young—how could he be expected to understand what she herself scarcely understood: her love for T. Blue, and her need for his love in return?
With a shock Dora realized Doosie had been right to wear a long face: for she had acted against her own heart—at least she had divided her own heart. She did still want to see Blue; she did still love him and want his love. But that need and that feeling didn’t cancel Ogden, her young husband. What if both men condemned her—she knew the sex well enough to be fully aware of that possibility. What if they both left her?
“I don’t know what to do,” Dora admitted, throwing herself on Doosie’s mercy. “What should I do?”
Doosie liked it when Dora appealed to her; it confirmed what she had always been convinced of—that she, not Dora, was the one with good sense. She wasn’t the one looking distraught and half crazy, with her hair uncombed.
“You bought Ogden that new gun,” Doosie said, thinking quickly. “Tell him to go shoot us a deer, or an elk if he can find one. He’d be gone for a while, and we might get some elk meat, too.”
Dora adopted the suggestion at once. In twenty minutes a slightly bewildered but willing Ogden, relieved of his paint bucket and armed with his brand-new Winchester, was trotting out of town on a mule named Charley, an animal Dora had taken in settlement of a debt. Dora had seemed a little upset when she sent him off, but she had also given him a nice kiss and squeezed him hard, so he didn’t feel that her upset reflected any dissatisfaction with his whitewashing. Although Charley was a tall mule with a rough trot, Ogden felt that was a small price to pay for the opportunity to go elk hunting on a day when he had expected to work. He had been so surprised that he couldn’t speak when, a few days earlier, Dora had presented him with a Winchester—it was still a daily wonder to Ogden that Dora liked him. He meant to waste no time in showing her he was worthy of her liking; he meant to kill the first elk he saw. Of course, if it was a fat elk calf, that: would be so much the better.
The bartender in the Moosefoot Saloon—the saloon Blue had chosen to drink in while he absorbed the shock he had just received—was an old friend from Texas days. His name was Restless Frank, and he answered to Restless rather than Frank. Blue had first met him in Tascosa, many miles and many years back down the trail.
Restless knew T. Blue was disturbed the moment he saw him. If he had known Blue was in town, he would have known he was disturbed without even seeing him; T. usually strode in like a lord of the prairie, but this morning his carriage was that of a whipped dog.
“If that unfriendly blacksmith has lied to me I’ll kill him,” Blue said, to open the conversation.
“I don’t find Jones unfriendly,” Restless remarked, hoping not to have to address any painful subjects before lunch, or after lunch, or any time.
“Friendly or not, I might shoot him,” Blue said, thinking what a relief to his feelings it would be to pop a few shots at the blacksmith. He and Calamity had often relieved pent-up distress by shooting at rocks for an hour or two.
“Now, Blue, I hope you won’t disturb the peace,” Restless counseled. “The jail ain’t up to your standards. Besides, we need Jones. He’s far more reliable than the other blacksmith we’ve got.”
“Well, you’re free to move to a town with better blacksmiths,” Blue said irritably. “There’s plenty of communities with fine blacksmiths. You’ve spent most of your time moving anyway, or you’d still be in Tascosa. What’s keeping you in Belle Fourche?”
“The pleasant company,” Restless said dryly.
As he turned from setting a nicely polished glass on the bar, he happened to see Ogden trot past on Charley; the mule, though large by local standards, looked as if it should have been riding Ogden. Restless stood in the door and watched Ogden ride away; the news that he was leaving might provide just the lift Blue’s spirits needed.
“She must still like you,” he said. “There goes Ogden. Your old girlfriend must have coaxed him off on a hunt.”
Blue jumped to his feet and went outside to watch Ogden go. He then came back in, feeling slightly better, and finished his whiskey.
“I doubt one whorehouse will keep that youngster in mules,” he said.
“That’s a new rifle he’s carrying,” Restless remarked. “Maybe he’ll waste up all his ammunition shooting at buzzards or something and not have any left to kill you with when he comes back and finds you with his wife.”
“Buzzards could feast a long time on a carcass as big as his,” Blue said moodily.
“Oh, can that talk,” Restless said. “You’re a cowboy, not a killer. You never scared nobody much in your Tascosa days, and you were tougher then.”
Blue let that pass—Restless Frank had always been hard to impress. “Anyway, he ain’t gonna catch me with his wife,” he said. “I just come to Belle Fourche for the ride.”
“I’m the one who’s named Restless,” Restless said. “I doubt you’d ride all the way from the Musselshell just to listen to your horse grunt.
“You always have an excuse when you show up to see Dora,” he added. “This has been going on for twenty years, which is as far back as I can remember. Why do you still think you need an excuse?”
“If I were you I’d polish them glasses, and mind your own business while you’re doing it,” Blue said.
“Anyway, you should have had her roped and branded years ago, if that was your plan,” Restless said.
“I guess you consider yourself an expert on marriage, is that right?” Blue said, irked by the man’s effrontery—he was even more casual than the blacksmith.
“Personally, I prefer just to bartend,” Restless said. “If there wasn’t nice saloons to go to, I doubt many marriages would hold. I tried a couple when I was younger. Give me saloons any day.”
Blue plunked down his fifty cents and strode off without saying goodbye. He had decided to leave at once—mount up, ride directly out of town, and make an attempt to put the past behind him. If Dora DuFran wanted to communicate with him, she could post a letter.
As he passed the Hotel Hope he happened to glance up. For a second he glimpsed Dora’s face in the window. It was only a glimpse, but it stopped him dead: How many times, as the two of them climbed the ladder of years, had he raced up to some rough house in some rough town, and looked up to see that face in a window, waiting for him to race up? He stopped his horse; the window was empty for a bit, then Dora came back and looked down at him. She didn’t smile; neither did he. But in a bit he rode around the house and hitched his buckskin mare by the back door.