Up for Grabs

Chapter 3

At seven-thirty the next morning a big iron triangle clanged out a summons. At seven-forty-five an Indian lad in a white coat brought orange juice. At eight o’clock there was coffee. Dolores knocked on my door.

“Good morning, Donald. How did you sleep?”

“Dead to the world,” I told her.

“A breakfast ride leaves at eight-thirty, or you can have breakfast in the dining room at any time now.”

“How far is the breakfast ride?”

“About twenty minutes,” she said. “It will sharpen your appetite. The chuck wagon is already up there with a fire going and coffee ready. When the gang shows up, they’ll scramble eggs and have bacon and toast, Dutch oven biscuits, broiled ham, sausages, anything you want.”

“Rather hard on the horses, isn’t it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Having guests put on so much weight.”

She laughed. “The horses love it. They get to stand around while the dudes — I mean the guests are feeding.”

“Not dudes?” I asked.

“Heavens no,” she said, “only among the help. Otherwise, they’re invariably guests.”

“I’m all ready to go,” I said. “I’ll take the breakfast ride.”

“I thought you would.”

I walked down to where the horses were being saddled. She walked beside me. A couple of times her hip brushed against mine. She gave me sidelong glances and said, “We’re going to see a lot of each other during the season, Donald. This is a steady job, you know. After Helmann Bruno, there’ll be others.”

“Many others?”

“I think so. I think a whole procession.”

“Perhaps I’ll learn to ride.”

Again she looked at me with a sidelong glance. “You might learn lots of things,” she said. “It will be an opportunity for a liberal education.”

We walked out to the horses. Buck Kramer sized me up. “What kind of a horse do you want, Donald?”

“Anything you have left over,” I told him.

“You want a spirited one?”

“Fix up the other guests,” I said. “I’ll take anything that’s left over.”

“We have all kinds.”

“Suit yourself.”

“There’s a bay over there that’s all saddled. Get on and try the stirrups.”

I swung into the saddle and put weight on the balls of my feet, shifted my position from right to left, back left to right, then sat in the middle of the horse. I put gentle neck pressure on the reins, swung the horse to the left, then to the right and got off. “Perfectly all right,” I said. “Those stirrups fit me swell.”

“The stirrups fit you but the horse doesn’t,” Kramer said.

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re entitled to a better horse.”

He nodded his head to a stable boy, held up one finger, and in a minute the boy came out leading a horse that was walking on eggs.

Kramer threw the saddle and bridle on him said “You’ll take him, Lam... Where did you learn to ride?”

“I don’t ride,” I said. “I just sit in the saddle.”

“The hell you don’t,” he said. “You’re tall in the saddle. This horse is inclined to shy a little bit. He doesn’t do it because he’s really afraid, he just does it to be sociable and give his rider a thrill. Pick him up when he does it but not too much.”

“Okay,” I said.

Dudes came straggling in and most of them were helped into the saddle. At eight-thirty, we took off.

We were riding along a jeep road, but there were marks of horses in the center and wagon wheels on the side. We went up a canyon, out of the sunlight into the shadows. Buck, in the lead, put his horse in a slow canter.

The dudes bounced around behind, some of them trying to grip the barrel of the horse with their knees and heels, others hanging on to the saddle horn, others just bouncing. Very few of them sat relaxed in the saddle.

Buck looked back a couple of times and I saw him watching me carefully.

My horse was light on his feet. You could sit in the middle of him and it was like being in a rocking chair.

We jogged along for ten or fifteen minutes, winding along the banks of a dry arroyo, then came to a sage-covered flat. There were hitching racks around the edges of the flat and, in the center, a backboard was drawn up with the tailgate down, a rather elderly, grizzled Mexican with a cook’s hat and a white coat presiding over a bed of coals and a barbecue grate. There were dozens of frying pans and three or four young Mexican boys acting as helpers.

The dudes swung out of their saddles with various groans and heaves and walked stiff-legged over to the barbecue grate, stood around interfering with the cook, holding their hands out to the warmth of the coals, then moving over to a big picnic table and benches on the other side of the buckboard.

They drank coffee out of enameled mugs; ate eggs, bacon, sausage and ham out of enamelware plates; had biscuits and honey, brown toast, lots of marmalade and jelly. Then they sat around smoking cigarettes and relaxing until the sun came over the ridge and flooded the flat with brilliant sunlight.

Buck called for riders on the upper trail and about half of the crowd elected to go back to the ranch; the other half swung on the upper trail.

I took the upper trail with Kramer.

“You sit that horse pretty good,” he said. “You’ve got a nice hand. He has a tender mouth.”

“I like horses.”

“That’s nothing,” he said, “horses like you... How did you happen to come here?”

I said, “Somebody told me about it, a friend of mine.”

“Who was it?” Buck asked. “I remember virtually everybody who is here.”

“Fellow by the name of Smith,” I said. “I didn’t know him too well, met him in a bar one night. He was just back from here, had quite a sunburn, and told me about the wonderful times he’d had here.”

“I see,” Kramer said, and didn’t say anything more.

The upper trail was one that went up out of the canyon, around a high mesa, forked to the left, came out on a point where we could look down over the desert to the south and west, along the mountains to the north; then the trail went down a steep incline which brought a lot of squeals from the women, and occasionally a masculine voice would boom out, “Whoa, now! Whoa! Take it easy, boy! Whoa!”

Kramer turned in the saddle to look at me and winked.

I gave the horse his head and he picked his sure-footed way on down the steep trail, down to the bottom of the canyon through sagebrush, and about eleven o’clock we came to the ranch house.

We unsaddled and went out to the swimming pool. They served coffee.

Most of the guests went swimming.

Dolores showed up in an elastic bathing suit that clung to her like the skin to a sausage.

“Coming in, Donald?” she asked.

“Perhaps later.”

She leaned over, dipped her hand into the water, held up slim fingers, snapped them at me, throwing a tantalizing spray of drops in my face. “Come on in now,” she said, and ran down the ramp as lightly as a deer.

I went into my cabin, put on a bathing suit, came out and jumped in the water.

Dolores was over at the other end of the pool but, after a moment, she came over to me.

“You aren’t big, but you’re certainly well built, Donald,” she said, her right hand rested lightly on my bare shoulder.

“Talk about being built,” I said, looking her over.

“Yes?” she asked, and the fingers of her right hand left a trail of fire down my bare back; then she was swimming away and talking to a bulging woman in her fifties who was splashing around in the pool; then she was over batting her eyelashes at one of the men and, almost immediately, swam over to his wife and spent a few minutes with her.

I did a couple of dives from the springboard, went out on one of the fiber mats and let the sun soak into my skin, then I went in, took a shower, came out and sat at one of the tables.

Dolores came over and said, “Melita Doon will be here for lunch. She came in on the morning plane. Buck’s gone to pick her up.”

“Know anything about her?” I asked.

“Only that she’s a nurse, in her late twenties. She should be okay.”

A man’s voice said, “Hey, Dolores, show my wife how to do that backstroke, will you?”

“I certainly will,” she said and leaned intimately forward to hold my eyes for a minute. “See you later, Donald,” she said, and was gone.

After that, she was a perfect swimming instructor, then she supervised exercises with some of the women who wanted to take off a few pounds where it counted, and then the guests straggled away to the showers to get ready for lunch.

Melita Doon arrived about twelve-thirty. Dolores Ferrol went out to meet her while Buck Kramer took her things into her cabin. She had Cabin number 2, right next to mine.

As they walked past where I was sitting, Dolores gave me a purposeful glance, then looked back to Melita Doon and let her eyes run up and down Melita’s figure, the way one woman will when she’s sizing up another.

Melita was a blonde, about twenty-six or — seven, not over five feet two or three, and perfectly proportioned. There wasn’t an ounce of weight on her that didn’t belong, but she had all the things that did belong, although on a small scale. She walked with an easy grace, her legs slender and aristocratic.

The thing that caught my eye was her eyes.

She flashed me one swift look then glanced away, but I could see that her eyes were hazel and uneasy. She looked frightened.

Then the girls went on past me toward the cabin.

Dolores knew that I would be watching them from the rear and exaggerated the swing of her hips just slightly so that I’d know she knew I was watching.

They were still in Cabin number 2 when the luncheon bell rang.

Lunch was out by the pool. It was fruit salad, consomme, with hot biscuit and chipped beef in creamed gravy.

Buck Kramer sauntered over while I was eating. “All alone?” he asked.

I nodded.

Kramer sank into the chair on the opposite side of the table.

This wasn’t what I had in mind. I was hoping that Dolores would bring Melita out and we’d have a chance to get acquainted, but there was no way I could turn Buck down without being rude him.

“Lunch?” I asked.

“Not this stuff,” Buck said, waving his hand in an inclusive gesture. “I eat in the kitchen. I like a little more meat and a little less fruit. How did you like that horse?”

“Fine.”

“He’s a nice horse. We don’t let everybody ride him.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. He needs the exercise; but you know how it is, you let a good horse out to a poor rider and in no time at all the rider is just as bad as he ever was and the horse is just as bad as the rider.

“People don’t realize it, but horses are very sensitive to a rider. They know people. The minute you put your foot in a stirrup and pick up the reins, the horse knows just about all you know about riding. By the time you’ve settled yourself in the saddle and give him the first turn signal, he can tell all about you, whether you take your coffee black or with cream and sugar.”

Kramer grinned.

“You seem to be a pretty good judge of riders,” I said.

“You have to be in this business... Take the guy that comes out with a new pair of cowboy boots, a tailor-made Pendleton out: fit, a five-gallon hat and a silk scarf around his neck. He swaggers over and says he’d like to have a horse that is a little better than the average dude horse. He hates to be at the tail end of the procession.

“You look the guy over and if he’s wearing spurs the first thing you do is to tell him that it’s one of the regulations of the ranch that guests can’t wear spurs. Then you watch how he takes the spurs off, and by that time you know enough about him to give him one of the oldest, safest plugs on the place.

“That day he’ll give you a ten-dollar tip and tell you he’d like a better horse for the next day. He has a girl friend that he wants to impress. He tells you about the riding he’s done in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Texas.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Take the ten bucks and give him another plug the next day. If you gave the guy a real horse, he’d have a runaway and wind up either falling off or getting bucked off.”

“Doesn’t he resent getting a plug after he’s given you ten bucks?”

“In a way,” Kramer said, “but you have a line that goes with It. You tell him he’ll have to be alert; that that horse is usually very demure but if he could take advantage of a rider he would. You say that he spilled a couple of people last year and since that time you’ve never dared to put anyone on him except an expert rider.

“The guy goes and tells his girl all about that, gives you ten bucks more, and tells you it’s a good horse and he wants to have him all the time he’s here.”

Kramer yawned.

Dolores came out of Cabin number 2, stood in the door waiting, caught my eye, saw Buck sitting there and went back into the cabin.

“You’ve eaten already?” I asked Buck.

“No, I’m going to eat now.”

He scraped back his chair, looked down at me and said, “You know, Lam, if you don’t mind my saying so, there’s something a little peculiar about you.”

“How come?”

He said, “You’re not talking.”

“Am I supposed to talk?”

“Hell,” he said, “people come out here and spill their guts, particularly the people who can ride. They tell me about the dude ranches they’ve been at, the camping trips they’ve been on, the hours they’ve spent in the saddle... Where the hell did you learn to ride?”

“I don’t ride,” I said. “I just sit on the horse.”

He snorted and walked away.

No sooner had he left than Dolores came out of the cabin bringing Melita Doon with her. They walked over toward the main house, then abruptly Dolores swung over my way and said, “Miss Doon, let me present my friend, Donald Lam.”

I rose and bowed. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

Hazel eyes surveyed me with a frankness that I found embarrassing.

“Hello,” she said, and gave me her hand.

It was a cool hand with slender but strong fingers.

She had changed to riding clothes now, a tailored outfit showed her slender figure to advantage.

“It’s just at the lunch hour,” Dolores said to Melita Doon, “and I’m famished... Look, Donald, why don’t we sit here with you? You seem to be all alone.”

“That,” I said, “would be wonderful.”

Dolores caught the eye of one of the waiters and beckoned him. I drew up some chairs for the two girls. They seated themselves.

Dolores said, “Donald and I are buddies... He’s nice.”

Melita smiled at me.

A waiter came and took orders.

Melita studied me with a certain frank curiosity that was far from the casual scrutiny a girl on vacation would give a stranger.

I had a sudden flash of panic as I wondered if Dolores had been a little too obvious in plugging me to Melita. Dolores was a girl who didn’t waste time, and Melita was a girl who didn’t overlook the obvious — and there were times when Dolores could be pretty darned obvious.

We were halfway through the meal when Buck Kramer came over with a telephone message for Dolores. “Helmann Bruno is going to be in on the three-thirty plane,” he said.

“Well, that’s fine,” Dolores said. “Will you meet him, Buck?”

“I’ll meet him,” Buck said.

I was watching Melita’s face when Buck gave Dolores the message. I could have sworn that there was a sudden flash of sheer panic in her eyes, then she lowered her eyes demurely to her plate and managed to toy with the coffee cup until she either had herself under control or until my imagination had quit playing tricks on me.

“Another guest?” she asked, raising her eyes to Dolores.

“Another guest,” Dolores said cheerfully. “They come and go all the time.”

“Bruno,” Melita said, “that’s an unusual name. Helmann Bruno — the name sort of rings a bell someway. Is he an author? Did he write a book or something?”

“No,” Dolores said, “he’s some sort of a prize winner. He won a contest which entitles him to two weeks’ stay at the guest ranch here. I imagine he must have something on the ball or he wouldn’t have won a contest over a whole flock of contestants.”

“Perhaps that’s where I’ve heard the name,” Melita said, “in connection with winning some sort of a contest. It must have been advertised in the magazines or something.”

Dolores was elaborately casual. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I just try to keep people happy here and don’t pry into their backgrounds.”

She emphasized, subtly, the words “don’t pry into their backgrounds.”

Melita flashed her a quick glance, then again looked down at her coffee.

Dolores looked at me. There was a puzzled look in her eyes.

We finished the meal, and Dolores said, “Well, this is the time of the siesta. Everybody relaxes for a while after lunch, then we have some golf games in the afternoon, some more swimming, and we have a nice tennis court and some tennis matches. Do you like tennis, Melita?”

“No,” she said, “I like to swim and I love horseback riding, but aside from that I’m pretty awkward when it comes to athletics.”

I let it go at that and went to my cabin, ostensibly to take a siesta.