Welcome to Hard Times

5

That was the way it ended and began again. From the day I returned Molly wore the wedding dress like she was born to it, she walked stiffly with her shoulders thrown back and her mouth grim against the pain. And when the pain was gone the set of it remained, the healed burns pulled her up tight, her chin was always in the air and the chain and cross was always plain to see around her neck. So that whenever I looked at her I was looking at rebuke.

The day Zar and I started to put up our buildings Molly took John Bear’s buffalo robe out of the dugout and went to return it to the Indian. Over to his shack she marched, stirred him out of the dumps and gave him back the lice-ridden fur with what must have been proud apology. I could see by her manner when she came back, it was as if the Indian’s property had been stolen by some no-account thief and she had squared the scales by returning it.

Molly was plentiful in her moods, unspeaking for days at a time, smiling with plans maybe or weeping for no clear reason but her memories. But when she had a mind to she could make anything in the world seem a taint on me. One morning Jimmy was helping me mix up some sod for chinking. Mae, the dumpity girl, came by with nothing much on her mind and started to talk to the boy and tease him a bit. Jimmy always watched Zar’s women with great attention and that gave them pleasure.

“Y’all sweet on me, li’l ol’ Jimmy?” the girl asked.

He blushed.

“Y’all take a fancy to Mae, don’t yuh?”

“No ma’am.”

“Here put yo’ hand here, now ain’t that soft as soft?”

She was holding Jimmy’s hand on her bosom and that’s when Molly showed up to give her a cuff on the ear. Mae was so shocked she had no anger but just bit her lip and ran off; Jimmy was suddenly back to the sod; and Molly stood regarding me as she would a lizard.

It was no pain I felt but a steady ache, like some hand was gently squeezing my heart. It never left me. I would look out to the graves in the flats or look up to the rocks or over at the scar of the old street and always I saw the face of the Man from Bodie. That was the trouble, I know now, that was my failing, that I couldn’t see past my own feelings, I had no thoughts beyond myself. The day came when I had a sturdy clapboard cabin affixed to the dugout so that altogether we had two rooms to live in. I knocked together a table using pieces of the balustrade from the old Silver Sun, and some boards, and Jimmy and I fell into the habit of saving whatever food we had for that table each evening. Molly would serve it up and then take her portion and step down into the dugout to eat alone, leaving the boy and me to taste what sweetness we could while not looking into each other’s eyes.

There was the business with Jenks. It was Jenks who brought Hausenfield’s wagon in off the plains, so pleased with his booty that he hadn’t smelled Hausenfield inside. His head was not much thicker than a broom handle and he had no chin to speak of; the way his sly yellowed eyes looked at you made you think of a wolf’s cunning, but really he was a stupid man. Before he managed to bury the German I had to show him where to do it and to point out how he could turn up the ground with the pickaxe lying across the door, and I had to tell him how deep he’d best dig and finally I ended up doing as much as he did. Then, with Hausenfield laid away this Jenks didn’t do another thing for a week but just sat around in the shade of his new wagon, eyeing the ladies or oiling his gun and his gunbelt.

Well he looked so deliberate toying with those arms day after day it took me some time to understand he was trying all the while to make up his mind for staying or moving on. He was just a poky, traveling where the trail took him, he had himself a black coach and he didn’t know how best to gain from it. Zar was angry because I let the fellow draw free water for the mule and grey and for his own horse, a patch-bald sorrel, while he did nothing in exchange. And I began to be tried too. We neither of us figured there was much good in Leo Jenks.

But one morning Molly approached him and with a loud, throaty voice, said to him: “Mr. Jenks, you find any use for that gun except in oiling it?”

He was sitting with his back to a wheel and he sprang up fast when she spoke and took his hat off.

“Well yes’m, ah kin shoot whur yew kin see.”

“Is that right?”

“It is, yes’m.”

“Well I see a windmill over there, and on top of that windmill is eight stubby blades and I’m looking at the one wavin’ straight up at heaven.”

Jenks put on his hat and cocked his pistol, aimed, and sent off a shot which splintered the topmost blade. The horses shied. Over by his shack John Bear stopped hoeing his rows and stood up to watch.

“I see the neck of a bottle,” cried Molly, “sticking up out of that rubble there.”

Jenks turned, took aim where she pointed, and the piece of glass sprayed into the air. Three more times Molly fixed her eye on things — a stone, a hump of dirt, a stick of wood — and each time this Jenks placed his round where she called it. The shots echoed off the rock hills and came back to us. Everyone was watching now, the women over by their tent, Zar from a corner of his new corral, and Jimmy squatting on the back of the Major’s buckboard. I was close enough to Jenks to see that when he took his aim those shifty wolf eyes of his squinted with some true knowledge.

He finally holstered his pistol and took his hat off again.

“I thank you, Mr. Jenks,” Molly said looking my way, “it’s good to find a man in these parts. I wish the Lord my husband knew the gun the way you do!”

After that Jenks had no trouble deciding what was his aim in life. He rode the wagon off east one dawn and at night came back with a half a dozen prairie dogs slung from the box. You have to be quick to hit a prairie dog while he’s diving for his hole — I learned later Jenks parked the stage in the middle of a dog town and lay atop of it for hours till the animals forgot he was there and came up out of their burrows.

Jenks turned out to be a good hunter and he bartered his kills for my water or for Zar’s liquor or for one of the girls. Fresh meat is a luxury and there is nothing will go down easier than a well-roasted haunch of dog or a good rabbit stew. But when Molly cooked up some of Jenks’s meat she always spiced it with her scorn, which made it hard to swallow.

By the time the stage came we were seeing the last of summer. The sun was getting white and it was setting earlier. The winds were lasting and they put out more of a bite. Each day they blew off more of the old town dust and ate away the char of the old street. Zar had his place built, a long low public house of clapboard and sod, it stood where his tent had stood — on the north side of the windmill — and its door, like the door of my new shack, faced to the southeast. When the stage drove in it was in front of Zar’s that the driver reined his horses.

We were all there to meet it, even John Bear. The stage was run by the Territory Express Company and the name was painted in red letters along the side. The letters were well covered with dust and grime, the tails of the horses were caked with mudballs. Our town was a good trip from the last stop.

The driver was Alf Moffet; I knew him. He sat up on his box leaning forward with his arms on his knees and the reins loose in his hand. He was looking for a face he knew and the first one he saw was Molly.

“Why Miss Molly,” he said, “I heard you and Flo was dead.”

Molly frowned but she said nothing. The Russian and his ladies were right there and I feared Alf would say too much. I had not had trouble with any of the miners that way. Molly was hid the first few Saturdays they came and after that they did not think to question her. But I knew Alf for a fun-loving man, he had a voice full of gravel and he liked to talk.

“Well Alf,” I said stepping up and clearing my throat, “we had a fire here as you can see but we’re not all dead. These here are some of our new citizens”—I pointed to Mae and Jessie and Adah—“and if you’ll step down and come into the new saloon I’ll buy you a drink and maybe introduce you to them.”

“I can’t be stopping long, Blue,” Alf said, but he allowed me to take his arm while he jumped down. He grabbed his mail pouch and told the other man on the box, an old man I did not know, to unload. There were two barrels lashed to the back of the stage and a pile of boxes on the roof as well as what was inside. The Express took on freight if there was any room left after passengers. We always got supplies in plenty when it came and I had been counting on that since the day of the fire.

Inside Zar’s place there were lamps burning. It was afternoon but the Russian had not built any windows. I sat Alf down on a camp chair at a wooden table and after our eyes were accustomed to the shadow I motioned to Zar and he smilingly brought over a full bottle of whiskey and two glasses — just the way I had told him to do it. The glassware was Avery’s old stock Jimmy and I had recovered the day after the fire. I wanted to be careful with Alf.

He was a big square-faced man, grey underneath his hat. He tossed off three drinks neat and when the dust was washed from his throat we began talking.

“We got some orders to put in with you Alf,” I said.

“Well Blue I don’t know. Company wants me to tell ’em when I get back if’n Hard Times is worth the trip any more.”

“Miners are showing up more than ever, Alf. The Russian here is doing a good trade. People comin’ every day. This Mr. Jenks — I don’t know whether you saw him put there — he’s all the way from Kentucky.”

Alf tilted his head to one side and smiled at me.

“That was just a little accident, that fire,” I said. “The town will be up like a weed before you know it, Alf.”

“Well now Blue I always liked you, yessir. If you was hanging by your fingers from a cliff you’d call it climbin’ a mountain.”

Alf had heard about the fire from one of the people from the town — he didn’t say who. I couldn’t tell him any lies. “Same thing happened just a few years back to the town of Kingsville. Kingsville, Kansas. Did you know it?”

“Never heard of it.”

Alf poured another drink: “Well sir it was a good town, a railroad head. They had two, three livery stables, couple of stores, lots of nice frame houses, a jail made of brick, some dandy saloons and a two-story hotel. Bunch of these Bad Men come along one spring, stayed three days. Killed twenty people. Broke up the hotel, wrecked the stores. Bricked up the doors and windows of the jailhouse, made of it an oven and roasted the Sheriff alive. Town never came back.”

“What about the railroad?”

“Catcher come along the following summer and they laid track right on through for another thirty miles. Pass by today you can wave at the prairie grass.”

“Them Bad Men are sure a plague, Alf. It’s no use denying. Let’s have another drink.”

When his head went back to receive the liquor I motioned to Zar who had been standing by the door. A moment later Mae and Jessie came in and sat down at the table. After I made the introduction I went out into the light.

Bear was helping the old man unload the back of the wagon. Jimmy was on top of the stage untying the lashings. Jenks was fingering the rifle sticking out of the boot by the driver’s seat. But what made me really stand up was the sight of Ezra Maple. I hadn’t stopped to look for passengers, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was standing there in an Eastern suit, a carpetbag was on the ground beside him. Lord if it wasn’t him!

“Ezra!” I called.

But Molly was talking to him and as I walked up she said: “Mister I told you he ain’t here, he couldn’t take the climate. Blue,” Molly said to me, “this is Ezra Maple’s brother Isaac. He’s a doubtin’ man, he’s looking all around for the General Store.”

Of course, looking closer I saw it couldn’t have been Ezra: this fellow wasn’t as tall, nor did he have as much of a stoop in his shoulders. He was younger, fairer-skinned. But he had that same sad-eyed long beagle’s face. “Well you sure fooled me,” I said. Molly went off with a short laugh and I took the man for a walk over to the spot where Ezra’s store had been. I told him what had happened.

He shook his head and looked at the ground: “He shouldn’t a run off knowin’ I was comin’—it ain’t like Ezra. Wrote a letter to him six months ago. Wrote it down plain as day!”

“Well now, Mr. Maple once a letter is west of the States it might light down anywhere. I never saw Ezra get a letter, likely it never even reached him.”

He took a big curved pipe from his pocket, filled it and lighted it with a box match. He puffed and frowned and stared at the dusty rubble and shook his head: “It don’t seem right at all.”

I could understand his feelings. A man doesn’t go West for nothing. He’d been traveling four or five weeks, by train, by steamer, by stage, thinking all the while to find his brother when he got here. And probably to make a life.

“‘Come along when ye can.’ Those were his words to me when he left.”

“That so?”

“‘Come along when ye can, there’s room out there fer two.’”

“That’s true enough.”

“I wrote out a letter when Ma died sayin’ I had only to sell the store and then I’d come. Jes the pair of us, seemed like we ought to try our fortune together. And now here I be”—he took a good look around—“and Ezra ain’t, and it’s a bad bargain I made.”

“Well now, Mr. Maple I don’t know. The water don’t flow from the rocks and the game don’t nibble at your back door. But the place has what they call possibilities.”

He gave me a sharp, trader’s look. “Well I haven’t seen a tree in seven days.”

“That’s what they mean: look at all the possible trees could grow if they’d a mind to.”

He didn’t laugh but I had his attention away from Ezra for the moment. I walked him back to the well.

“I’d like you to taste this water,” I said. “It’s as good as any and better than most. Dip into that pail and refresh yourself. Help you to think clear on what to do.”

At that moment I had no plan in my mind. But when I walked over to the stage and looked at the freight standing on the ground I had some forward-thinking thoughts. These were the store supplies Ezra Maple had ordered. There was a barrel of flour, a barrel of beef in brine, sacks of coffee, cartons of tinned sardines, crackers — a whole lot of stuff.

Molly came up at my back: “Mayor,” she said softly, “I know what you’re fixing to do, but I’ll tell you we don’t need another Ezra Maple here. Let this man go look for his brother and may he find him in Hell.”

I said nothing but went back to Zar’s. Alfs hat was on the table, Mae was sitting on his lap and Jessie was standing in back of him holding his ears, and they all three were laughing.

“Blue!” Alf called throwing his head back. “I begin to see your way of thinking’, there sure is a spirit of life hereabouts, yes sir, a spirit of life!”

“Alright then Alf supposing we talk business.”

Zar brought over a lamp and put it on the table. Alf excused himself to the ladies and while they stood watching he took some bills out of his pouch and spread them on the table. They were bills of transit for the goods outside and they were all marked paid.

“It adds to forty dollars Blue.”

“Bot the stamp is there,” Zar said examining the bills, “these goods are already paid. He wants us to pay again!”

“Tha’s right,” said Alf. “This provender was for Ezra Maple and Ezra ain’t here. Course if you like I’ll load it back on and be on my way.”

“Zar,” I said, “it’s a fair price for the goods received. Alf here drives the best stage this side of the Platte, he’s thought of highly by the Territory Express. They listen to what he says.” In my own mind I had expected Alf to ask for more than forty dollars; and that he put his demands in the form he did I found to be a mark of manners. He could always have charged separate for the supplies.

“I’ll give you my hand on it, Alf,” I said, and we shook across the table.

Then we exchanged letters: I gave him two — the pimply boy’s and another I had taken since — along with four dollars. Alf gave me one letter. “It’s meant for Ezra,” he said, “nail it up somewhere if he ever comes back.”

Then Alf had the idea that I would like to handle the Express business for the town. I allowed I would. He gave me a printed pad for writing all orders and tickets and the terms were three percentages on all monies I garnered excepting mail. We shook on that, too, and then I left Alf to enjoy the women while I went back outside to find forty dollars.

Zar followed me: “What kind of business is this? Women we give him and whiskey and we must pay for goods already paid!”

I said: “You want him to come back don’t you? We got to stay on the Company’s route or all the miners on the mountain won’t do us any good.”

“Forty dollars!”

In the daylight I was looking at the letter Alf had given me for Ezra Maple — and it was the one Isaac himself had written from Vermont.

“Maybe it won’t be your forty dollars,” I said to Zar.

I walked over to the well and held out the letter to Maple, saying: “It was right along with you on the stage.”

I remember he stared at that letter for a long time. He bit down on his pipe and his face got redder and redder. He was angry but there was a confusion of feeling in his face, I could tell he was glad because his brother had not run off knowing he was coming.

“What are you going to do now?” I said to him.

“Don’t know. Look for Ezra. I s’pose. Hunt him up.”

I did some powerful talking then. I told Isaac Maple he could go looking for his brother on a thousand different trails and he still might miss him. I told him there were mountains one way and deserts another, high enough and wide enough for armies to lose themselves in. I told him a man could use up all his money and most of his life looking for something in the West. But, I said, if he were to stake out in one place, make his name in the country, the word would travel surer than any letter that Isaac Maple was keeping a store in Hard Times. And one day the word would reach Ezra and he’d know where to come.

“Mr. Maple,” I said taking him by the arm, “those goods standing on the ground over there were meant for Ezra’s store. You can buy them from Alf Moffet for forty dollars. And you can sell them to the rest of us for twice that amount in water and shelter and cash together. We’ve a need for a store and no doubt the need will grow as more people settle here.”

I talked to the man for the best part of an hour; and at the end of that time, with all of us in a circle around him, he reached in his money belt and counted out forty dollars in greenbacks, licking his thumb and feeling the texture of each bill before he gave it into my hand.

Well the minute he did that I had Zar step up and meet him, and Miss Adah, who shook his hand and made him blush, and Jenks, who nodded and blinked his wolfy eyes, and the Chinese girl and Jimmy. Bear had gone back to his shack and Molly stood straight by the door of the cabin and would not come over. But it was a proper welcome Isaac Maple got even so.

A few minutes later the tall girl, Jessie, came out of Zar’s place smoothing down her hair. Then Mae followed supporting Alf who was laughing and blinking in the light. Alf had consumed a good amount of whiskey, he looked us all over standing around the stage and said: “Yessir, the spirit o’ life, spirit o’ life, yessir.”

The old man on the box moved over to the driver’s side and took up the reins and we helped Alf to sit up next to him. I gave Alf the forty dollars and the ordering list I had worked up for Zar and Isaac which he stuck in his vest.

“See you again Alf?”

“Tha’s right Blue, tha’s right!” He lifted his hat and his head went back as the old man flung his whip out and the wheels spun up dirt.

I felt pretty fair watching that wagon line out its dust over the flats — like I had done a good day’s work. But in the evening, over our supper of salted beef newly bought from Isaac Maple’s barrel, Molly couldn’t see I had done anything to be satisfied of.

“We’ll have to pay for this meat ten times what we could have by buying it ourselves,” she said.

“Well Molly I don’t favor keeping a store. Settling Ezra’s brother here puts money in the town.”

She looked at me. “The town! Oh Mayor you don’t fool me one bit—”

“What?”

“You’ll rope in every damn fool you can just to make up a herd. There’s surety in numbers, ain’t that what you think?”

“I don’t think that.”

“I know you Blue,” she giggled, and Jimmy watching her laughed too. But then Molly’s face went cold and she gazed at me: “Mayor, all the soft yellow spines in the world stack up to nothing when the Bad Man comes. I’ll tell you that, I know it.”

After that it was a race against the weather. Jenks began to build something with what lumber he could reclaim from the old street and it was clear to me whatever it was he was having a bad time. He finally admitted he wanted to raise a barn for his wagon and three animals. When Zar and I heard that we told him we would fetch wood from Fountain Creek and help him build a good enough stable if he would put up our horses without charge. He agreed, and we made two trips with both wagons — Zar’s and the black stage — and we weren’t choosy about the wood. I thought we could use every hand we had to advantage, it was a lot of work what with stalls and all; but Isaac Maple, who had rented Zar’s big tent for his own shelter, had no horse of his own and he saw no reason to join in; and Bear the Indian would have nothing to do with any of us while Zar was in our company — he spent most of his time away in the rocks, preparing traps I suppose and bringing down all the brush he could find.

All during these days Jimmy worked close by me in everything. He took care of the pony, he cut roots and gathered manure for fire, he cleaned the stove and helped with the chinking of the barn walls. He was always at my side and heeding whatever I told him to do. But I remember the way he watched her when Molly one morning went over to the old street and poked around in the rubble till she found the stiletto she had dropped the day of the fire and came back to nail it, teary-eyed, above our door.

And each morning the sun came up weaker and whiter, like an old man rising from his bed, and each morning’s chill was slower giving up the ground. Till finally I stood one day with the sun at its height and there was no warmth at all, but a shuddering breeze running down the neck and up the legs and lifting the clothes from the body. The winds were light but they brazed the flats with their cool blow and we hadn’t much time till winter.

6

The stable was not roofed before the true cold came, we drove the horses into the enclosure of the four high walls and while they snorted so you could see their breath and turned from one corner to another we took the corral apart and got some of the shaven logs up for joists. There was no good way of keeping warm except by moving. When the roof was up tolerably we made a railing of the remaining corral poles to go along in front of all the buildings — from the doors of the stable past Isaac Maple’s tent and past Zar’s place and the windmill to the door of the cabin I had built for Molly and Jimmy and me. A Dakota blizzard will freeze your eyes shut and drive you from your direction faster than your senses realize. I have known men to die in a drift a few feet from their doors because they had no rail to go by.

All during this hurried-up preparation against the winter I kept thinking how much we could use a good carpenter like Fee. A skilled man like that and it would not matter so much that the nails we had were soft and the lumber rotten. I worried what a blizzard might do to the stable roof. I took down the blades of the windmill to keep the water in the ground. Winter is a worrying time, you have to tuck your chin in and burrow down somewhere and hope there will still be something when the spring comes.

I had no clothes but the ones I wore, Molly had only her white dress and Jimmy had not even a hat. His pants didn’t cover his ankles and I had to tie a bit of rawhide around one of his shoes to keep the sole from flapping. We were not fit to meet the winter out of doors, and I knew when it set in in earnest we would have just our roof and each other to keep us from freezing. And that would be no comfort in a real blow.

For one week running the sun didn’t show through at all, the skies filled up grey and then snow began to sweep in on the wind. If you stood the bite long enough to take a look there was no more line between earth and sky. The flats were grey, the rock hills were grey and the wind, thick with snow, flew around your face in gusts so that you could even doubt your own balance, you could not be sure you were standing on ground or rising, without breath, in the sky.

The cabin I had built onto the dugout was not good against such weather. The door shook against its latch and snow came through the wall and settled in the corners. I moved the stove back to the dugout and we retreated there to sit with blankets around our shoulders and watch the glow of the fire in each other’s faces.

These were strange quiet moments. We didn’t have much to be proud of but I had to allow we were better off than we might have been. I could take satisfaction from the thought that bitter as she was, Molly had never made to leave the place I offered her; and that Jimmy might have done otherwise than jump to work at my side and heed every word I told him. A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.

But I looked at Molly sitting near the stove, her head was turned to the side and her hands were folded in her lap and she was gazing at nothing and her eyes were lost listening to the wind and snow outside — and in that quiet moment it was plain to me if she didn’t up and leave the first chance she had it was because no other place could she so savor the discouragement of her life. And Jimmy, who worked so willingly, the first day I came to the old town I saw Fee planing a board and his son holding one end for him. I had never once seen the boy linger at something useless the way most children will. He had watched his Pa stumble out of the Silver Sun and he had taken him by the belt — and that was work too. Jimmy was a child fitted to the land, using all his senses to live with what it gave him, and if he did his share and did as I told him why it was because he knew no other way.

Therefore where were my good signs? This green-eyed woman and brown-eyed boy sitting here had never done but the only thing they could do. And if I felt like believing we were growing into a true family that was alright: if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.

I remembered that half-burnt old almanac we had and I thought it might be the right weather for teaching the boy to read. I could put a point on a stick and show the letters by scratching them in the floor. So we began to do that, working at it a little each day, I would have him study a letter as it was printed and then say its name and then watch me write it with the stick. Sometimes Molly watched, no expression on her face, maybe she was learning something too.

But the weather was ornery. A storm would blow up for a few days until the snow was banked high enough to keep the inside of the cabin warm. Then the sun would break through for a morning, warm winds would come down from the rocks, and soon everything was melting like a sound of crickets and water was running off everywhere. At night the ground iced up, every roof was hung with ice and the cabin walls were exposed again to the cold winds. It went on like that, every snow bringing its chinook to devil the skin, one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.

Molly said one evening: “Here you’re going on and on with those damn letters and you don’t even see the boy is sick.”

Jimmy had coughed once or twice that I’d heard, but I hadn’t thought about it. I said: “You’re alright aren’t you Jimmy?”

“I’m alright.”

But the next day he was coughing a lot. Even in the dugout the ground was damp, at night I folded my blanket and put it under him and then sat up listening to him cough and shiver in his sleep. Molly lay on her side on the other side of the stove, I could tell by her back she was wide awake and listening each time the boy coughed.

The next morning Jimmy couldn’t get up. He was shuddering under his blanket, his teeth chattered and there was a wheeze to his breath. His face was flushed and his eyes glittery. Molly looked at me like it was my fault he had come up sick.

Straightaway I went to the Russian’s. It was a grey cold morning and there was ice all along the railing and a muddy crust of snow on the ground. Inside his place Zar was pacing up and down and Adah and the three girls were sitting on the meeting chairs and making a breakfast of flour-cakes and sardines. It was cold in there but they all had coats.

“Zar,” I said, “I’ll trouble you for some whiskey, the boy has caught something on his chest.”

“So?” He waved his hand as he paced. “Take, take, there will be no miners again this week, what for do I need whiskey?”

Adah wanted to know what Jimmy’s symptoms were like. I told her he had a powerful cough and the chills and fever.

“Well it’s the weather for it,” the tall girl, Jessie, said, “I’m feeling poorly myself.”

“Ain’t the weather’s your trouble, honey,” Mae said to her, “jes the moon.”

Adah told me to wait a bit and she went into another room. Zar had built this place not much wider than a railroad car, and there were two rooms at the end of the public room, one in back of the other.

“No customers, only that deadhead Jenks,” Zar was saying. He was vexed the way the weather closed off the trail to the mining camp.

“Hey Blue,” Mae got up from the table, “that’s a mighty fine beard y’ workin’ up there, you come over of an evenin’ and we’ll comb it for yuh.”

The Chinese had her mouth full and she had to put her hand up while she giggled.

“God’s truth,” Mae said, “all we ever see now is that Jenks and he ain’t good for much more’n polishin’ his damn guns. Beard like that’d keep a girl warm these nights.”

“And that New Englander Maple,” Zar said, “he does not drink, he does not use the women, he stays there in my tent. I buy from him I must pay money, a fine way to trade.”

Adah came out carrying two bottles. She told me there was turpentine in the little one for rubbing on the boy’s legs. In the big bottle was rum, which was better than whiskey, I was to mix it with some hot water and make him swallow as much as he could take. “Nothing like rum for the chest,” she told me.

Well I thanked her and went back and did as she said. And for a while it seemed to help. But in the afternoon Jimmy began to shiver again and he wouldn’t take any more rum. Each time he coughed his whole body shuddered. Molly fixed up some flour soup with bits of salt beef for supper but he wouldn’t eat it.

It began to frighten me hearing that boy cough away like a man, the sound came up from his bowels and pushed his tongue and eyes out and turned his face crimson. We had him wrapped in all the blankets and the fire built up high but he couldn’t stop his shivering. I began to feel the awful helpless rage. We fussed with him hour after hour — sitting him up to ease his breathing, laying him down again — but nothing comforted him and he couldn’t get to sleep.

It must have been close on midnight and Jimmy began to whimper and look up from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know what else to do. There was an unnatural burning in his eyes and his cheeks drew in with each wheezing breath. Molly couldn’t look at him any more, she walked back and forth fingering the cross at her throat. When the boy was taken with a heavy fit of coughing she stepped up into the cabin and walked away in the dark.

Then I felt a breeze at my feet and I went into the cabin after her. She had the door partly open and she was looking across the windy moonlit reach to the Indian’s shack. “Mayor,” she said, “what will you do if the boy dies, will you bury him beside his Pa?”

She didn’t wait for any answer I might have had but went out just in that dress and headed across for John Bear’s place, walking that stiff walk of hers, hugging herself against the bite. A great anger rose in me as I closed the door, I could have struck her right then, I was distressed for the boy’s illness, I damned her for the grip she had on my life, this unrelenting whore.

A few minutes later the Indian was standing in the dugout looking down at Jimmy. The boy stared back in fear, Bear wore his buffalo robe over his shirt and his black hair hung from under his hat down to his shoulders. They regarded each other and no word was spoken — and then the Indian bent down and tore the top blanket off Jimmy with such suddenness that he cried out and began to cough.

Bear went into his doctoring with a speed that was like solace. He hung the blanket across the doorway leading to the cabin. He put a pot of water on the stove and poked up the fire. When the water was boiling he threw in some herbs he had and in a few minutes the air in the dugout was sweet and steamy. We all watched his moves transfixed: he drew a tin out of his pocket and poured a handful of seed in his palm. Then he kneeled down and looked around the dugout.

“He wants a stone,” Molly said to me.

I ran outside and found a flat piece of rock and brought it to him. He began to pound the seed into a powder, when it was well ground it made the sharp odor of mustard. He took some water from our pail and spilled it over the powder till he had a thick paste of earth and mustard. Then, cupping it in one hand he went over to Jimmy and went down on his knees, straddling the boy.

Jimmy began to struggle then, kicking and throwing his arms up, but the Indian just drew back and looked at him until he quietened and turned his face away. Holding the mustard paste in one hand, Bear exposed the boy’s chest. Seeing that small white ribbed body made my heart hurt. Bear spread the medicine across from under one arm to the other, up to the throat, down as far as the stomach. Then he pulled down Jimmy’s shirt and bound the blanket tight around him.

I will say this, whatever else was to happen John Bear was the best doctor I ever saw, white or red; he had a true talent for healing and it must be owned him.

Before he left he stepped up to Molly and while she stood startled, unwound the thin chain from her throat and dropped the cross at Jimmy’s head. He was no Christian but a modest man; Molly had clutched the cross during her healing and he was no one to deny the power of a charm.

Then came that long day and night with the wind whipping snow down from the rocks, and inside the dugout, droplets of water prickling the sod walls as the steam rose from the pot on the stove. I kept feeding the fire and filling the pot. Molly sat with the boy propped against her, he was coughing up matter and spitting it into a rag she held to his face. His eyes were smarting from the mustard, his chest ached with the coughing and burned from the poultice, he was in thorough misery. Whenever he made as if to tear the blanket away she held his hands and whispered: “Let it burn, let it burn deep!”

Sometime during that siege Miss Adah came pounding on the door wanting to know how the boy was doing. She wouldn’t come in so I had to step outside and we shouted to each other a few moments before she scurried back to the saloon.

Jimmy didn’t take anything for supper but during the night, after the snow let up, I thought he was breathing easier. Still he couldn’t close his eyes and Molly, laying his head against her breast, put her arms around him. It was an effort for her, she was blushing, she kept looking at me as if she expected me to laugh at her.

There was a panic in her eyes for a moment, she wanted to talk to the boy, to soothe him, but she had trouble with the words. She had to go back a long way to find them:

“I bet you never seen a big city. Molly used to live in New York, did you know that? Oh it’s a grand place with stone houses all in rows, and cobbled streets and lamps on each corner that the man comes to light each evening with a long taper. And the carriage buses you see, so shiny and clean, with horses pulling them that are braided in the mane, high stepping. Did you know that …?”

I was sitting with my back to the wall and chewing on a prairie cake and as Molly went on talking I watched her close. The more she talked the easier the words came. The boy’s eyes were open and listening and he was breathing heavily, and Molly sat with her own eyes closed as she summoned up her pictures.

“… and each morning I would have a fresh black frock to put on and a white linen apron and a little starched cap to pin to my hair, as clean and starched as a nun I was. And that house! Well you’ve never seen the likes, a good fifteen rooms, each room fitted out with its own set of furniture and its polished floor of wood and its fancy rug. Why you could disappear into one of those big soft beds. And in the dining room, that was a room just used for eating, can you see that? the table would be covered with a fine cloth tasseled at the edges, and maybe ten settings of pure silver forks and knives and spoons, with three or four glasses at each place for the different waters or wines. And with the people all talking and laughing and the room lit up with candles, in we would come from the kitchen, three or four of us, carrying trays of hot vegetables and buns and a hen, maybe, and a roasted ham to serve to all the ladies and gentlemen. All the ladies and gentlemen …”

I will never forget her words. Even after the boy’s eyes were closed she sat holding him around, whispering these remembrances. It was the most she ever said about herself, it was the most I ever learned about her. She was speaking the brogue. I had never heard her use it before, and I wouldn’t again.

“All the lovely ladies, all the fine gentlemen …”

Then her eyes opened and she saw me looking and “Turn away!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Don’t you dare look at me, turn away!” Even without her telling me I would have had to, such terrible pride was blinding.

Later Molly slipped away from the boy and laid him down in his sleep which was so long in coming. And we each stretched out to get some sleep too. But all the blankets were on Jimmy and after the fire went down it was cold lying there, there was a chill in my bones that made them ache. I couldn’t sleep and neither could Molly. I heard her shivering. I moved near her and touched her shoulder and with a cry she rolled over and bundled up to me. “Damn you Mayor,” she whispered in my ear, “I swear I can’t bear the sight of you!” And I held her as tight as I could, feeling her breast on mine, feeling her breathing, and then the warmth came and I didn’t move until she was asleep. I think I had wanted to hold her ever since the fire. My hands were on her back and I could feel the scars under her dress. She was small, so much smaller than she looked. I held her around, pressing her to me and I thought well we’re both suffering our lives, only how we do it is different. If it replenishes her to hate me then let her hate me. At the worst her hate is something between herself and herself. And knowing it I was ashamed I had ever felt poorly of her.

7

Jimmy was slow to get better, his cough lingered for weeks. Molly tended to him each minute of the time and didn’t ask any help from me. She cooked him soups, she kept him well wrapped; and on his walking day she held him under the elbows while he slowly stepped around the cabin. On occasion she went to consult with John Bear, bringing the Indian her portion of food. And if she returned with some more treatment Jimmy might have wanted to squawk but he submitted to it without a word. There was something about Molly that commanded him: she went about her ministering shortly, with never a smile, as if in one moment of a too tried patience she would just give him up and leave him to himself.

She had already left me to myself. Our bundling had warmed her only to the point where she hardly acknowledged that I was there in the cabin. She kept busy with the boy and with the steady cold now I was fairly locked in; so that there was not much I could do but take away the slops, or worry would we have fire to last the winter. When Jimmy was on his feet I thought he might want to take up our reading lessons once more. But he didn’t seem keen on it, his eyes always wandered to the woman, and what use there was to the almanac; even that I had to myself.

I spent a lot of time studying the almanac. It kept me from brooding or wondering where the Bad Man might be enjoying his winter. It had census figures for the different states and their counties, and the dates they were brought into the Union. I have always been one for that kind of reading. Before I got the fever to go West I was bound out to a lawyer for some months, and it pleasured me to feel the legal cap or read the briefs all salted down with Latin. In all my traveling, whenever I came across a Warrant or a Notice of any kind I never failed to read it through. Some people have a weakness for cards, or whittling, my weakness has always been for documents and deeds and such like.

When I first came to Hard Times it was nothing posted that stopped me, I had a small stake in my money belt and I was riding up to the lodes to earn some more. But there was Fee putting the finishing boards on Avery’s two-story saloon, and the sight of him building this place right up off the flat ground struck me somehow. I could think of better places for a carpenter to make his living; not the poorest townsite I’d seen it still didn’t look worth his labor, yet Fee was working with an assurance that made me feel ashamed even to question him. In my forty-eighth year, tired out with looking, looking, moving always and wanting I don’t know what, I was ready to grant it wasn’t the site but the settling of it that mattered. I bought a room off the porch from Hausenfield and I stayed. Later, without much thinking about it, I got a ledger from a traveling notions man; and after I acquired that lawyer’s desk and belongings who was going up to work in the lodes, I put the ledger on the desk and in my spare time I began to put down everyone’s name and the land they claimed and what properties they owned. I never enjoyed anything more. The town hadn’t a promoter, you see, and there were no records for anything. If it ever got big enough to be listed or if the Territory ever needed names for a statehood petition, why I had these documents. A few people like Avery laughed when it went about what I was doing; later, Avery was one of the first to call me Mayor—

But just thinking about it just made the days longer.

One cold afternoon there was a banging on our door and it was Isaac Maple. He came in begging our pardon, he said he’d tried to see Jenks and Zar both, but Jenks was asleep in the stable and Zar was in a mood and wouldn’t speak to him.

“See them about what, Isaac?” I said.

He took something from his pocket which I saw to be a small printed calendar. Standing there, with water hanging from his nose, he said: “I mark off the days with this, and s’far as I know it’s December the twenty-fifth, Christmas.”

Molly and I looked at him. He was waiting for something by way of reply, but all I could think to say was: “Well if that’s so Isaac take off your coat and drink some coffee with us.” At the same time Molly looked from him to me and walked away without a word.

It was clear in his eyes we were as bad as Jenks or the Russian. His sad hound’s face fell: “Thank ye, no,” he said and turned and went out.

That put him in my mind for the rest of the day. Isaac Maple stayed alone in his tent most of the time, thinking I suppose of his brother Ezra. He was a shy man and he was new to the West and it must have been a powerful need for comfort which brought him to our door. I don’t often honor holidays but I wanted to understand Isaac’s feelings. In the evening I went over to Zar’s place and demanded a drink on the house.

Zar was leaning with his elbows on his sawhorse bar: “For what,” he scowled at me.

“It’s Christmas, Zar,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Wal wal, I tell you — only the spring shall I celebrate.”

But Miss Adah was properly moved. She ran to wake up the girls sleeping in the back rooms. I thought she had just the spirit Isaac wanted and when she came back I said, “Isaac Maple’s the one who told me.”

“I’ll go get him,” she said putting a shawl over her. “Poor man’s all alone.”

“Save yourself, Adah,” Zar said, but she was gone.

Zar had no use for the man and couldn’t see going to any trouble over him; when Adah returned, leading Isaac Maple, she had to set up the drinks herself — the Russian had sat down, grumbling, on one of his camp chairs.

Then Jenks wandered in, he was wearing a hat he’d made out of prairie dog fur, it came down to his eyes and went around his head to a point in back. You could just about make out his wolfy smile under that cap.

“The customer,” Zar said folding his arms.

Well I saw it was going to be a true enough gathering so I took myself back to the cabin to get Molly and the boy. Molly wanted no part of it. She said it wouldn’t do for Jimmy to go out at night with the wind so cold and snow blowing along the ground. I said we could wrap a blanket around him and I’d carry him over. That didn’t please either of them too much, but then we heard, coming across the wind, the sounds of Miss Adah’s voice singing a hymn with her melodeon, and I did as I wanted — wrapping the boy up — and we all went over.

When we came in Adah stopped her singing and got up to greet Molly. Everyone was very polite — Jenks pulled at his cap when he said hello and the ladies gave Jimmy a greeting although, since he stood by Molly’s side, they stayed their distance. There was only one lantern on the table and the room was in shadows, but Zar got up to light another and at Adah’s signal he started to pour out a drink for Molly. She held up her hand, very ladylike, and smiled and shook her head. She had drunk her share in the old days and it wouldn’t have hurt her now, but it gave her more pleasure to refuse, it set her apart from the ladies although she knew them better than they thought she did.

All at once, as we were standing around, nobody had anything to say, we were all embarrassed we’d made an occasion. I lifted my cup: “Well here’s to Christmas and better times for the world.”

“Amen,” said Miss Adah. Then she sat down at the melodeon and began her hymn again. Everyone was quiet and drinking listening to her sing it through. She had a deep voice but she meant what she sang. When she finished she started another and it was one Isaac recognized, he stepped up in back of her and looking straight at the wall he joined right in, tenor.

Well the whiskey was warm going down and it spread over me like sun. There was this churchly music going; Molly, with Jimmy at her side, was sitting on a chair listening; Zar was stepping around offering the bottle; and I thought why this is what Isaac Maple had in mind, just to celebrate the fact that all of us are here. And I asked myself whether these weren’t already better times: here was some people and we had a root on the land where there was nothing but graves a few months before.

After a while the liquor began to have its effect on everyone. Jessie and Mae, who had been cowed by Molly’s presence, made a show of forgetting she was there and began to enjoy themselves. Jessie went over to Jenks, sitting in a chair, and stuck her thumb under his fur cap.

“Is that you under there, Dead-Eye?” she said.

Jenks slapped her hand away, stealing a glance at Molly at the same time: “Get on!”

“Why Jenksy!” said Mae plunking herself down on his lap. “Ah’ve never seen you so outdone. Didn’t you get yore sleep t’day?”

“If’n hew please, ladies,” Jenks said pushing Mae off. Holding his drink high he walked away to the bar. Jessie and Mae giggled. Jenks was being uncommon dignified but pieces of dry dung were stuck to the seat of his pants.

When the hymn was ended Adah turned in her seat and put her hand on Isaac’s arm: “You sing right nice, Mr. Maple,” she said.

“Thank ye, I like a good hymn,” said Isaac.

Zar was clapping his hands: “Holy, holy, holy! That’s vary good.”

“Ye have a true gift Miss Adah,” Isaac said.

“A gift?” said Zar. “Together you and she — two coyotes howling at moon.”

Isaac turned to him: “Say what?”

“Sure!” Zar began to laugh. “Such music I have heard on the steppe at night. Just the same as that: Howly, howly howly!” He doubled up with his own joke. “Jassie, Mae, you hear?” And he repeated what he’d said.

But the girls were busy working on Jenks, they had followed him to the bar.

“What’s botherin’ your friend tonight, Mae,” said Jessie.

“He’s jes shy,” Mae said digging Jenks in the ribs.

“I smelled o’ horseshit I’d be shy too,” Jessie said.

“I’ll tell you frand,” Zar walked up to Isaac. “Not only your singing is not human, but your way of doing business. A man would trade for my liquor. A man would have need for my girls.”

“Ain’t nobody can tell me how to run my business,” Isaac said turning red in the face.

“Cash cash!” Zar threw his head back: “Caaash!”

“Nobody forcing ye to buy!” Isaac shouted over the Russian’s roar.

Adah thought things were getting out of hand, she glanced once at Molly and turned around to play another hymn. But it only added to the noise. Zar walked away from Isaac with a gesture of disgust and poured himself another drink from the bottle on the table. The storekeep was following him, well aroused.

“Did I not pay ye cash for the use of yer tent? I deal fair and square, always have, always will. All’s I look fer is an honest profit and that’s more’n some can say!”

“Who needs you,” said Zar.

“God knows I didn’t ask to stay here, I was asked!” By this time the smiles were gone from Mae’s and Jessie’s faces.

“I b’lieve Mr. Jenks here has gone fancy on us Mae.”

“Listen you no-chinned, gun-polishing deadhead,” said Mae, “the next time you come along with yo’ tongue hangin’ out don’t look for us. Jes keep agoin’ down to her place and see what she’ll give you.”

“You bucktooth son of a bitch,” said Jessie pushing her face up to Jenks. For a second I thought Molly had heard, but the melodeon was blowing loud and Isaac Maple was shouting over it.

“I was horse-traded! Yessir,” he looked right at me, “I’ll say it. Horse-traded! Paid out good money to settle in this Hell. ’Tweren’t fit country fer Ezra and ’tain’t fit fer me!”

“Didn’t it never snow in Vermont, Isaac?”

“It did, yes it did. But you could reckon it, you didn’t spend yer days and nights beatin’ the sag out of a tent to keep from bein’ buried!”

“Why this is a gentle winter, Isaac,” I said.

“That may be but it’s m’ first and last in this hole, I’ll tell ye.”

“Than go and farewell,” Zar screamed.

“I’ll go, I will, don’t ye fret. When that stage comes I’ll be on it when it goes—”

At that moment Miss Adah stopped her song. And in the sudden silence Isaac looked around and cried: “But that stage’ll never come. We’ll all be dead before that stage comes again!”

Those were the lonesomest words I nearly ever heard. Not a night had passed lately when I hadn’t thought the same thing; but I’d never said it out loud and neither had anyone else. Isaac took the fear in all our minds and put it in the air. A chill ran through the room and in the quiet we heard the wind outside blowing desolate across the earth. I saw a wilderness of snow-crusted flats between us and the rest of the world, and not a track on it.

A moment later Isaac left. Then Molly got up and went off quickly. Mae leaned against the bar and fingering her hair said: “See you next Christmas, honey,” softly, as to herself. Zar slumped down at a table and put his head on his hand. Our gathering didn’t make any more sense, each of us was alone as himself, I wrapped up the boy and we left too.

The forlorn feeling of that Christmas night grew as time went on. There were days of such pure cold that it was like swallowing frost to take a breath out of doors. The weather had us holed up good, almost in spite it seemed like, and if I thought about the spring it was as a lost possibility. How could you remember the warmth of the sun when through one bleak day after another the winter danced around you with every fancy step it knew? We huddled in that cabin, bent grey sticks with eyes in them, I couldn’t even worry that one day we might not have what to eat or make a fire with: it was a worse dread to feel so lost on the earth, a live creature in a lifeless land.

What I’m trying to do now is account for the way things went, this winter had a lot to do with it. Under such conditions even the plain doings of a day had no reason. It was foolishness to eat just to stay alive inside that room; it was foolishness to lie down for the night since you would only wake up to the same day again. Once Molly looked at the door and said: “We’re buried as sure as those people frozen in the ground out there! Oh Christ but we know it, that’s all the difference.” And Jimmy, with that picture of his father, jumped up hugging her and crying as if to make it not true.

Sometimes we could hear through the wind the awful rows Zar made with his ladies. It sounded like murder. The Russian was drinking up his own stock and it made him mean. He knocked a tooth out of the tall girl Jessie’s mouth and on one occasion Miss Adah had to put him to sleep with a stick, he was going at the Chinagirl so.

Leo Jenks took to walking out in the storms and firing his guns into the wind. Once he stayed out too long, claiming he had seen a pronghorn; he may have or he may not, but his fingers froze to his rifle and when he stumbled into Zar’s place they pried it loose and the skin went with it.

And Isaac Maple kept to himself in that tent, marking off each day as a mistake on his pocket calendar. He never talked when you went to buy something from him, not trusting in any exchange of words, but got you out again as quick as he could. On an especially bitter day, when the wind made your teeth ache and froze your lashes, he went around to each of us in turn — Zar, Jenks, me, and then over to the Indian — offering to sell a partner’s half of what he had on order with Alf Moffet Nobody would buy and this convinced him that he was right, that he’d been horse-traded and that Alf would not show up again. From then on he charged us double his price for flour and sardines — which is all he had left — and finally he refused to sell altogether, claiming he needed the food for himself.

When this happened Zar came to see me with his shotgun, saying: “Let’s kill him.” Zar meant what he said, but I did some talking and instead we trudged over to the stable, where Jenks was nursing his sore hands, and we took a look at the horses. They all had loose hides and hanging heads. What feed there was they had eaten up, where there was bark on the stalls they had chewed it off. The Major’s pony seemed worse than the rest, his eyes were dull, his bones stuck out and he had ulcers all over his legs. I borrowed Jenks’s pistol and shot the pony behind the ear.

Not one of the other animals stirred with the sound. Zar took the gun and killed one of his team; and we spent the afternoon dressing down the carcasses. It was something we would have had to do sooner or later, what Isaac did was just as well, another week and there wouldn’t have been any meat to dress down. I got back to the cabin, my hands and feet were numb and my clothes were stiff with blood, but there was a cache in the snow outside the door that would keep us awhile.

We used everything of that poor thin pony, a splinter from his ribs made a needle and his sinew made thread. There was no bark to tan with, but Molly fleshed the hide with the stiletto and for days she beat it with a stone, rubbed it with dirt. She finally got it soft, although she didn’t think she would, and she sewed up a rough jacket for the boy. And I made us covers for our shoes. I will say here that all this — even the slaughtering — helped my spirits. It was doing something purposeful. Molly too worked with a will. But I suppose Jimmy had an attachment for that pony, and although he wore the jacket when it was done, and ate the soup Molly cooked from the bones, he didn’t bother to look at me any more.

Of all the miseries of that winter not the least was waking up to Jimmy’s dislike. I don’t believe in the human intelligence of animals, or that they are to be used in any way but the most useful; I didn’t think when I shot that pony but that it was something that had to be done. However the boy made me regret it. You see once I saw how he felt it made me realize that his feeling was nothing sudden, but like a divide that had risen between us as time went on. I felt less close to him now than the night I sat up with him when his Daddy died. How many ponies had I killed besides this one?

Molly had no such trouble with the boy’s affections, many times she would say something to him that I thought cruel, or she would look at him like he was nothing but the orphan boy he was — but her treatment only made him doggish. Since his illness he had gotten this way, following her with his eyes and waiting patiently for whatever morsel of attention she might throw him. Now I could see in Molly’s face a shadow like she didn’t want him so. It unsettled her, it was nothing she asked for. If I regretted some of the love he gave her I’m sure she did too. I can’t be too clear about that, it makes me sad to remember. It wasn’t until a night about two weeks after the horse killings that I felt properly frozen for the winter.

In the dugout something brought us all awake. It was an unearthly scratching sound. I turned up the lamp and we followed it with our eyes. There was an animal on the roof, scratching at the warmth. I grabbed my gun and just as I did a slat was pushed away, and in a fine sift of snow a thick tawny paw slipped in from the night and clawed at the air above Molly’s head. She screamed. I shot once, twice, not at the paw but through the wood where the heart would be. The paw was gone before my second shot. I thought of the meat we had left outside the door and ran to it, holding the lamp, and from the open door I saw in the dim cast of lamplight a shadow bounding off through the snow. Well the crash was still in my ears and my heart was banging hard when I went around to put the board back in place; and I can’t forget the sight, looking down through there, Molly and Jimmy were hugging each other for all their lives, they were fastened in their terror. After that she got to be as doggish to him as he was to her. She was no longer put out by his regard, but took care of him warmly, often giving him kisses. And I don’t think any of us but me kept remembering, always with a banging heart, the sight of those claws, sharp as scythes, swiping at us from the night.

There had to be an end to winter or an end to us. By the time March came in I was ready, like Isaac Maple, to bet with the winter. Hard dry winds blew day after day, sweeping the snow, skimming the top of the bared frozen ground and blowing up circly storms of sand. But one afternoon I thought I smelled rain. I went outside: John Bear was standing over by his shack, he was facing west and looking into the dusty bleak sky — he had smelled it too. The air was cold but the wind was just a murmur of what it had been, and if you stood very still you could feel now and then a warmth in it, a dampness. I kept my hopes to myself but that night I woke up and heard it, a soft fall on the roof, not a shower but a small steady rain. And at dawn the sun spread over the flats with a rush.

I stepped outside into that new morning and I couldn’t believe it. The sun filled my eyes with a warmth of hazes, pink, pale green and yellow, and all over the flats white mists were rising like winter being steamed out of the ground. I swore I could feel the earth turning. Everything was new in my sight, I looked around at the short street of buildings — cabin, windmill, saloon, tent and stable — and it seemed like a row of plants just sprung. The Chinese girl peeked out of the saloon, holding her hand up against the brilliance, and I waved to her. A few minutes later everyone was out of doors, blinking in the sunlight, standing silent in the face of something that was hard to remember. Then Jenks gave a hoot and threw his hat into the air and all of a sudden everyone was stretching, calling out, Zar went around hugging everybody, Adah was shaking Isaac Maple’s hand, the girls were kissing each other, Jimmy was holding Molly’s arm and pulling her this way and that. Jenks went into his stable and drove the horses out, there was much mingling, we were all smiling like fools, we were all pasty and thin in the fresh light but alive even so.

8

Now I would write about that spring in its every minute if I could, using up my strength and time and going no further through the pain of seasons. But it is no pleasure to me now; and it is all I can do to remember it for my purposes which is to tell the way things happened.

This was the time when Swede settled and Bert Albany came down, the hurts were healing in the warm sun and the expectations were nourished into life. A greenness of hopes grew up like the scrub along the rocks coming up green.

I remember another spring, much before, when I repped with an outfit that ranged along the Big Mo: how the river thawed with great groans and cracks, and the ice broke and rose in the air to be carried off in the surge, until the water had its full bed and was running swiftly from one bank to the other. It was a grand rout of winter. Well the change was just as sudden here, a bit of sun drew all the frost from our bones and the blood ran swift in our veins. Alf Moffet pulled in with his coach low on its springs for all the freight it carried, and the miners began to ride down again. They had been working most of the winter and they all had a hankering to spend some of their pay somewhere besides the company stores. In a couple of Saturday nights Isaac Maple forgot he’d been horse-traded, he and Zar, too, made enough to start bringing Alf back regular every two weeks. With my commission on their orders I made enough to buy up a stock of tinned food, coffee, sugar, flour, saleratus, beans and salt pork. And I’ll tell you we commenced to eat good.

Each morning and night Molly would do up a batch of pancakes and we dipped them in sugar and ate them rolled. We had beans and pork and maybe whole tomatoes from a can, and good black coffee to wash it all down. We ate till we couldn’t remember the taste of that horse, and it wasn’t long before the flesh filled in between the bones and we began to look human once more.

We were still ragged as Indians but with the sun rising higher each day the need for Hausenfield’s well rose too; and I fixed a price of a dollar a day for every person who drew from it. I was lucky with the windmill, I nailed the blades back up and fixed some loose boards in the scaffold and it worked fine, bringing the water up fresh and cool, bringing up the dollars. I went into Isaac’s tent one day and I walked out with a miner’s jacket and small-sized boots for Jimmy, laced shoes and calico for Molly, and a razor for myself.

I remember that alright. Straightaway I went over to the well, put those things down and found a rock to hone my new razor, and with the piece of lye soap there I shaved off my beard right down to the skin. I had not shaved since I lost my old razor in the fire, and it was something I had been itching to do ever since. Although like most I favor mustaches, I am not given to beards, I don’t like their feel nor the way the lice will take to them. When I was done — feeling slick as a calf — I took those things into the cabin and you should have seen the looks on their faces. Molly and the boy went into a proper reverence, I don’t know whether it was the new things or me. “Well look at that,” said Molly, smiling, and I think she meant me.

Jimmy was all smiles too — until Molly made up her mind he would have to wash himself before he could put the jacket and boots on. So he had to go outside and sit in the tub and while he did Molly took his pants and shirt and scrubbed them down in a pail of water. Later Miss Adah, always of a generous turn of mind, came out of the saloon and offered Molly a scissors. What surprised me was Molly took it, what surprised Jimmy was that she put it to his head. When he was all done, dressed in new boots and a jacket, and a clean dry shirt and pants, with some of his hair trimmed — well he was angry but he looked fine. “A proper boy,” Molly said, gazing at him.

Molly was fair to look on as she said that. Just the day before she had washed her hair and gone to sit up in the rocks aways to let the breeze dry it. She had handsome features for all the pockings, the frown was gone from her forehead and there was a softness in her face, a measure of joy in her eyes. I couldn’t grudge her hold on Jimmy, they were doing each other good, maybe giving each other a rest from the past, why should I have felt anything but glad?

All I am describing happened on an afternoon of deep gold sunlight over everything, with air that was sweet to breathe. Over by his shack John Bear was fooling with his garden. Jessie was working one too, she didn’t know and I wasn’t going to tell her that only the Indian could raise anything out of this ground. Smoke was coming up from Zar’s still behind his saloon. Away in the distance Zar and Jenks were running out their horses in big circles over the flats. There was a feeling of celebration in everything that was going on.

I went over to Jenks’s stable and looked over his horses one morning, it was not the boy’s feelings I had in mind, you just don’t like to be without something to ride. I liked the looks of the mule best of all, his ribs showed through his hide but he’d wintered better than the grey or the sorrel. Knowing my man I went to Jenks and told him I wanted to buy one of his horses. A sly look came into eyes and he told me he’d deal only for the mule. We settled on the sum of seventy-five dollars, to be paid in water rights at a dollar a day not including days of rain, if any. I took out the mule and brought him around to the cabin and hitched him to the buckboard. He stood there the best part of a day until Jimmy wandered over like he didn’t care, and hefted the reins like it didn’t mean anything and finally stepped up on the seat and gave him a try in the flats.

It gladdened me to see him romp off that way. Pretty soon he came back in but it was just to pull Molly, protesting, up on the seat; and then there they were spinning away, she laughing and holding on tight and Jimmy shouting in a cracked voice, standing up and flipping those reins and getting more and more run out of the mule. I went about my business and it seems now just a moment before I turned around and they were hardly in view. They had made circles further and further out but all I saw was a funnel of dust going down in a straight line. Where were they going? For a moment my breath stopped, I thought well goodbye to them, it serves me right, they’re gone and she’s still laughing.

But Jimmy had only seen something and gone to take a closer look. For a long time the rig was a black spot in my eye and finally it moved; and a while after they were back at the cabin.

“What’s out there Jimmy?” I said.

He looked at Molly. She got down and went inside and he followed her.

I went after. “I said what’s out there, boy, where’s your voice?”

“Wagon.” Another look at Molly. Her mouth was set tight.

“One wagon?”

“Yes.” And then with a rush: “It’s busted in the back and the man’s settin’ up there and she’s screamin’ at him.”

“Who is?”

“Why that woman, she’s—”

“Jimmy!” Molly said.

“Who are they?” I turned to her.

“How should I know who?”

“Well didn’t you speak to them?”

“Oh sure! I’ll go around greetin’ every lowlife on the prairie!”

I went out and found Zar and told him what they’d seen. He was busy with his still but he said I could take his team and wagon. I hitched up four and Jenks reckoned he’d come along and we got up and started off. Why was I taking Zar’s wagon and not the mule and rig? I guess Molly understood better than I: We passed the cabin and she came out of the door, Jenks tipped his hat to her but she cried: “I know what you’re doing! Go get ’em Mayor, more fools for your town!”

We found it due south, sitting on the trail that edged the flats: it was just as Jimmy said, an old Murphy wagon stuffed to its cover, a man was sitting on the box and the back wheels of the wagon were splayed out like a new colt’s legs. The man was yellow-haired and beardless, his hands hung down between his knees and he watched us with eyes as baleful as his oxen’s. No woman was screaming at him, but further off walking away through the scrub with a shawl over her head she was raising her arms and shouting at the sky.

The man said: “Ay ben looking for Svedes.”

I said: “Well there’s none hereabouts so far as I know.”

He nodded as if he didn’t expect otherwise. Jenks and I climbed down to take a look at the axle, and when we did the man stepped off his box and he was the tallest fellow I ever saw, he must have been six and a half feet. He walked clumsy like a big man; he was fair-complected with strawberry skin, on the side of his neck there was a wen the size of a cannonball.

The axletree was split clean through, each half was poking into the ground. “You carrying another one?” I said.

“No. No oder.”

Off aways the woman kept shouting, it was the only sound in our ears and the man got embarrassed. “My vife,” he said tapping his forehead and he smiled ruefully.

“You a nester?” Jenks said looking up at him.

“Ya, I vas.”

Jenks nodded: “Prairie’ll do hit—”

“Ya.” We all looked at the axle. “She beg me for tree yar go wit oder Svedes. Cry each night … But I hope rain vill come. But no rain. Now I look for Svedes, maybe her mind comes back.”

Swede’s voice was as deep as the lowing of a cow, but it was a gentle voice with no harshness to it. He didn’t cry about his misfortune but told it straight. I liked him right off. I told him there wasn’t much we could do about the axle but he could put up in the town awhile and maybe get hold of another by and by. He agreed to that so we started to unload his gear. We spent a good hour putting it on Zar’s wagon, these people were carting everything they’d ever owned. There was a frame bed, a bureau with four drawers, an oak table, a commode, bedding, chairs, stools, a churn, a kettle, a washtub, some iron pots, a plow with a steel share, a sack of corn — it was no wonder their old wagon gave out.

The woman had come back to peek at us while we worked and it unsettled Jenks to catch her staring around the side of the wagon. It didn’t bother me none. She was a stocky woman, when her shawl slipped it showed her hair which was light-colored and sparse, her face was honest enough but there was nothing to hold on to in her eyes.

I’d worked up a good thirst by the time we were through. There was about another hour of sun left in the sky. I said: “Your wagon should pull now with nothing on it. We’ll tote your things in, you follow us straight that way.”

“Good. Helga!” he called to the woman. He went over to her and began to talk to her as to a child, pointing to Jenks and me. Without any warning she started screaming at him and then hitting him. She barely came high as his chest but she swung up and slapped his face again and again and beat at his arms. He made no move to stop her but just stood waiting for her to spend herself.

“Godamighty,” Jenks said.

“Let’s get up on the wagon,” I said. It put our backs to the sight, I didn’t like to see something like that.

“Godamighty,” Jenks swore as we sat waiting, “a jahnt lahk thet a sufferin’ sich blows!”

After a while we didn’t hear anything and as I turned the man was lifting his wife to the back of our wagon, sitting her on a chair so that she faced rearwards. She made no protest and he said: “You vill see me, Helga, ya?” We started off, the horses pulling hard, and I didn’t have to hold them, the weight did that. Behind us the man snapped his quirt over the oxen and they began to draw the covered wagon. It wobbled but it went, the axle scratching a furrow in the ground.

When we were back at the town the man was still halfway across the flats. “Leave everything be until he gets here,” I told Jenks. He went into Zar’s place and in a moment Zar and his ladies came out to look, and Isaac Maple from his tent. Molly and Jimmy came over, everyone stared up at the woman on the wagon. The ladies went around to the side to look at all the furniture. Not one word was spoken and the woman sat still up on the chair keeping her gaze out to the flats where her husband was coming. I went to the well for a drink and when I looked back I saw the woman bend over with her hands on her knees, and she spat at Molly’s feet.

Well in a moment Molly was by me at the well. I thought it was anger giving her tremors but she was grey with fear. “Now Molly,” I said, and she allowed me to hold her arm, “that’s nothing but a poor old nester’s wife.”

And that was how Bergenstrohm came to settle. But we never called him anything but Swede.

It was Isaac Maple who took the couple under care. Everyone else was put off by the woman’s madness but Isaac said: “My mother had spells from her change of life, my grandmother ’fore her, I seen it since I was a boy it don’t bother me.” He offered his tent for storing their furniture. He had Swede pull his wagon alongside of the tent and the two of them propped up the back with rocks. They put the bed and bureau back in the wagon and Isaac said, “Ye kin keep a nice house in there fer the time bein’.”

He must have decided right off to give them credit. He paid me a dollar a day for their water although I told him there was no need. He thumbed through one of his catalogues and found a steel axle he could order that would fit the old Murphy wagon. He was taking care of the Swede like he was his own brother.

“Wal,” Zar said to me one day, “is no meestery. The man has wagon.” That was true as far as it went, Isaac needed something to fetch lumber in if he wanted to build himself a proper store; until now Zar’s wagon was the only one he might have had, and he would sooner have given up his plans than ask for it. But I have a feeling Isaac would have welcomed these people had they only a handcart. I think it was enough that they had come to the town after him. Isaac was the kind of chary person who’s always looking for someone to trust. He couldn’t trust any of us who’d been there before him; but the Swede came off the flats as he himself had the autumn before, and that was as good as a ticket from Vermont.

Whatever his feelings Isaac didn’t stand to lose much. You figure anyone who keeps a mad wife will pay his debts and do his share of work. Long before Alf delivered the axle it was clear that the man was worthy, gentle for all his size, he would ask no favors and do any asked of him. His woman seemed calmer with people around; and after one Saturday he didn’t again speak of looking for Swedes. What happened was one of the miners found Helga with her washtub and gave her fifty cents to wash his corduroys. The diggers were feeling the spring and they had a great wish to spiff up. It got to be a usual sight, a bunch of men standing around in back of Swede’s wagon in only their high lacers and union suits, smoking Isaac Maple’s imported Regalias or Cheroots and talking like members of a Society. Swede enjoyed their business and their talk. He would build a fire and hang a line of rope over it to dry the things his wife washed, and he’d stand trading words with the men, telling his story, nodding his big head as he listened to theirs …

I can’t deny how I felt seeing this farmer settle in the town. Molly was right, I would welcome an outlaw if he rode in. I felt anyone new helped bury the past. Swede’s coming even put in my mind a thought I wouldn’t have tolerated before — to keep a record again, to write things down. Alf had left me three ledgers and a steel-point pen to keep the Express accounts. But there was enough paper in the ledgers to write the Bible. It was an idea that I had to put away, I looked toward Molly as if I expected her to read my thoughts, and I almost set myself against the words of scorn that would come.

Actually, once Swede and his wife were here to stay Molly didn’t say a word against them. Something about Helga had scared her into gentleness, and it was like you find a drunkard who’s sworn off, having been cowed by the vision of Hell. Molly was never inclined to welcome a new face but for a long while she would not say so, her judgment was softened. When Bert Albany came down and I found out why, I told Molly and she even smiled.

Bert came walking down the trail in the middle of one week, his shoulders were hunched and he sighed like he was carrying the world with him. He was the same pimply boy who always posted his letters with me. He stood in front of Zar’s place, smoothing the ground with his boot and finally he made up his mind to go in. “Don’t you know this is working day?” Zar said to him.

The young fellow didn’t answer and he looked ashamed. He sat around in the saloon all day, sighing and nursing whiskeys, and he didn’t speak to anyone. Zar struggled to understand what the boy’s trouble was and he finally decided Bert had lost his job. “Poor boysik, he will not say bot I know he must have lost favor with the mine boss.”

Now how was that so? Bert was not more than twenty. As well as I could remember he always got drunk when he came to town — not because he seemed to enjoy it but because it put him in company with the rest of the diggers. That’s the way a young fellow does, doing twice as much of anything to make sure he keeps up with the rest. The mine boss wouldn’t let go someone like Bert. But Zar said, “Ah, I can afford him a few dollars, I will take him on as helper,” so I kept my views to myself.

When the Russian offered him the job Bert’s mouth dropped open. Then his face lit up and he laughed. Course he’d take it! A couple of days after this I spoke to him: “Well,” I said, “now you don’t have to travel but a few steps to post your letters.”

“Hell, Mr. Blue,” he said, “I given up writin’ letters. Never got no letters back.” He was cheerful saying this, he didn’t seem to mind. And each morning there was a new sound to hear, Bert whistling as he went about his chores.

On a Thursday evening I stepped into Zar’s place for a drink. Jenks was there, sitting at a table with Mae and Jessie. I could hear where Zar was — his snores were coming out of the side room like running cattle. Miss Adah served me from behind the bar. “Where’s the new man?” I said to her.

She looked over at the two girls and they looked back. Mae got up and went to the door to the side room and closed it carefully.

“Now listen Blue, please,” Adah said to me in a low tone, “you got to promise to keep this under your hat.”

Jessie and Mae came up on either side of me and I found myself hard put to raise the cup.

“What’s going on ladies?”

“That Bert is sparkin’ our little girl,” Adah said.

“Whut’s thet?” Jenks had followed. “The Chink?”

“Jenks I sweah,” Mae turned on him with a harsh whisper, “an you say one word I’ll have yo’ scalp!”

“Gwan back to your stable, deadhead,” said Jessie, “this don’t concern you.”

Jenks leaned back with his elbows on the bar and he grinned that sly grin of his: “Shit … Y’mean he’s cooin’ wif thet li’l yaller flopgal?”

“Hush damn you,” Adah said. She looked at me: “It’s no joke, Zar finds out and he’ll kill him.”

“He’s really stuck on her?” I said.

“Lord!” said Jessie. “You’ve never seen the like. You’d think she was white. You’d think she had a papa owned a railroad!”

“Saturday he didn’t give nobody else a chance to touch her,” Adah said. “Paid her the money and took her out by the well and held her hand.”

“I saw it,” Mae said nodding.

“Godamighty!” Jenks said.

“Then after a while she figures it’s time to come back in, and so in he follows and gives her the money again and out they go again.”

“Well what do you know!” I had to laugh. “Zar thought he was fired from his job.”

“No sir, he just up an’ quit it! That boy’s crazy, he’s wild! There’s no tellin’ what he’ll do why I never saw a person afflicted so.”

Jenks said: “Knew a feller oncet were bedded to a Piute. She sure did have a scent.”

“It don’t seem right,” Mae said biting on her fingernail.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Now Blue,” said Adah, “that little thing is besides herself. She was so scairt Saturday she couldn’t keep from shakin’ all over.”

“It scares her?”

“Why she’s been cryin’ ever since. He has her out there somewhere right now moonin’ like a sick calf over her, poor thing she don’t know what to do.”

“Well if he’s taken a fancy for her,” I said, “there are worse things.”

“Blue,” said Adah, “there are fancies and fancies. She’s just a child, she don’t understand that kind of business, he got no sense treating her like that.”

“When Zar finds out he’ll kill ’em both,” Mae said.

“Well Zar don’t own the girl. Any of you could take a beau if you really wanted,” I said.

“Maybe we could, maybe we couldn’t,” Jessie said. “But he bought her. Paid her Pa a hundred dollars.”

“That Chink weren’t even her Pa,” Mae said to Jessie. “He said he was but he didn’t look as he could sire a flea.”

“You won’t let on will you Blue?”

“I’m dumb ladies.”

“Poor child,” said Adah, “there’s no telling what’ll happen. What is it possesses that boy I don’t hope to guess.”

I downed the drink and there were these three glum faces around me — weary Miss Adah with her fine mustache, long-jawed Jessie, plump Mae, her cheeks going to fat … What Zar would do worried them, but I think they were more frightened by Bert himself. They were uneasy at such a feeling in someone, it was beyond them. For me it was a revelation that such a thing was happening here. It was like someone had come along to put up a flag. I made up my mind if Zar raised a ruckus like the ladies feared I would do what I could for the boy. I wanted to nurture something like that, keep it going.

The more I thought about Bert the better I liked him. You like to see desperation still in its pimples. I went to Isaac’s tent and the Swede was there, and I told them about Bert. They had a good laugh. When I went back to the cabin Molly was sitting outside. We’d been having some afternoons of sweet rain, some evenings of slow-dying skies, and she’d taken to sitting on a stool in front of the cabin door and she’d watch the night come on. I sat down near her and I could just feel the smile when I told her there was a true lover come to town.

Then there was silence between us and I see no reason now not to put down what happened: I found myself aware of Molly in a way that was pleasure and pain at the same time. I felt her closeness. I kept thinking I was older than she was and you see it was a too familiar thought to have, I had no right to it. I was not Bert Albany, I wasn’t free to respect my feelings, and so nothing was said as the darkness came down. And when she went inside I sat still and waited until she would be asleep before I followed.

But that following Saturday was the night it first appeared all our fortunes were changing. There was a big crowd of miners and they were feeling the season, their carryings-on was not just a bit of fun, it was liken to a shivaree. They brought mouth organs with them, one fellow came up with a banjo, there was a lot of dancing with the drinking and since the women were scarce among so many, the miners danced with each other, stomping out squares so as to make the ground shake. And insisting in all that noise was talk of a new stamping mill going up not far to the east. The Chinagirl had no worries about Zar that night. Bert kept her in sight of his bar all the time but the Russian wouldn’t have noticed if he had carried her around on his shoulders: Zar was blinded happy with the rumors, rushing around from one fellow to the next to hear every version. By midnight he’d decided the Company was going to lay a road down the trail from the mines so as to cart the ore to the new mill—

I didn’t trust myself to believe him. But it is true that the town was to be blessed with luck; and some of it was even to rub off on me.

9

I thought if Zar’s mind was a pony it would win the race. I wanted nothing to do with his happy expectations. But every time something else came up to justify them he would laugh at me, saying: “Wal, frand, am I crazy?” Until I had to go with the signs and tell him one day: “No, by God, Zar, you’re saner than me.”

Now you have to season the talk of a digger with a lot of salt. A digger’s a man who’ll look for pay dirt twenty years of days with just as much fervor and high hope the last day as the first. Why any time you’re near one you can hear his song: “I’m savin’ my money Jack, and as soon as I have me a grubstake, it’s goodbye to the Company. I’m off to Montany and find me that vugg of pure gold! I know where it is, I know the spot Jack, it’s jest a sittin’ and a waitin’ fer me …” And he buys Jack a drink on it; and they both believe it. I didn’t want to put stock in any rumor come down from the camp.

But there was a stamping mill gone up, that was a fact. Alf told me it too: a town called Number Six and it was maybe fifteen miles dead east. Angus Mcellhenny told me something else: the Company shipped on the toll roads leading west from the camp, so it didn’t pay them to cart anything but high-grade ore. But if they cut a road down to us they could get to the new mill across the flats and pay no toll to anyone. And they could make their low grade pay off as well.

The way Angus spoke the idea made sense. And then one morning, early, a man rode down from the lodes and he had a string of mules trailing him. I’d never seen him before but I knew who he was, I’d heard him cursed too many times not to know him, Archie D. Brogan, the mine boss. He had pale-blue eyes in a face of fat, he was much too beefy for the miner’s garb he wore. He sat around drinking and jittery until Alf Moffet drove in with the stage, and then we knew why Brogan had come: three men in black tailored suits and derby hats stepped out and he nearly fell all over himself giving them a proper welcome. They were small men and they stepped precisely in our dirt, but they were the directors from the East and their engineer; so we cheered as Brogan put them on the mules and took them, bouncing, up the trail to the lodes.

“I shall build a hotel!” Zar cried after them and he even hugged Isaac Maple in his joy.

A few days later the Company men came back down to meet a special coach. And while waiting they fanned themselves with their derbies. “I never seen men with such white hands,” Adah said in a whisper, “why it’s indecent!” They talked to nobody, only asking Zar, at one point, if he carried wine. Zar was anguished because he didn’t, and when they rode off he shook his fist after them: “I shall build a hotel!” It was a vow this time and somehow it made the prospect surer.

Not long afterwards we had a visit from a man owned a public house along the toll road leading west from the camp, and he looked us over carefully and measured out a lot for himself next to Swede’s wagon; and without my saying a word he put a ten-dollar gold piece in my hand — to hold it — and rode away saying he’d be back.

Well you see all this was a bloom in the heart, a springing of hope, and even when I tried to tell myself it was just like the afternoon sun — so cozying on the face, like a warm hand, that a man could dream of anything and expect it — even when I pressed myself with doubts, the hope squeezed out like a nectar. And as I sat with Molly another evening under the sky, with a new moon making us shadows to each other, I talked so easy I almost didn’t know myself; and she talked with me and it was as if we were two new people sprung from our old pains.

“Molly I swear I feel good times coming. The life here is working up. They’ll have to cut a road to get those Concord freighters through here. And to do that they’ll need lots of people, they’ll have lots of jobs!”

“I hated those three. Stepping around like they was afraid to get their feetsies dirty.”

“We don’t have ever to see ’em again, they just came out here to make up their minds—”

“Money for their flouncy city ladies—”

“Lord, what do we care! We’re going on the map!”

“You really think?”

“I know it. It’s our turn.”

“I am living better now than Avery ever gave me, I’ll say it Blue.”

“Molly I mean to make good for the three of us.”

“You always fancied Flo over me.”

“You were so forbidding—”

“I can’t forget him. I see him in my sleep.”

“If I can be alright in your eyes I’ll be alright in my own.”

“I keep hearing his voice: ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. It’s what he said to me.”

“Well then, if that’s so, I doubt it but if it’s so, if he does come back then we’ll be ready for him. We’ll all be ready.”

She was quiet for a minute. “We’ve both suffered,” she said. And I was holding her hand in my hands. It was enough to start me keeping the books again.

No, maybe I’m not telling it right. When I dipped my pen in the ink it was not just for celebration, it was something that had to be done. Zar and Isaac both came to me to claim frontage on the street once they saw Jonce Early’s ten-dollar gold piece. What other way was there to fix people’s rights? I don’t think I was such a fool as to be blinded by my feelings. We had bunks to sleep on and another room with a door, and they were good nights as we lay in one bunk, hugging like the two poor married creatures we were — she had the shyness of a bride, she was so becoming, I never knew such joy. But wasn’t this time of our conjunction the time of Jimmy’s dismay? And the sight of her smiles at me, like the closed door at night, a greater reason for his hate? She might waver and relent but it only fixed him more. He stayed out all the day long, I didn’t see him from one meal to the next. He wouldn’t talk to me and when I’d catch sight of him outside as I’d be going about my business he’d slip away fast like he hadn’t heard me call. How good could it have been for two of us when there were three?

The pages are full of dealings, I see the entries, all through the year the street grew up and you can see how right here on the lines. I wrote each person’s name and what he owned. I put down how Molly had all rights to me as wife and Jimmy as son. I wrote out the claims. Jonce Early came back to build a public house where he’d staked out. A smith named Roebuck figured there would be plenty of horses by and by and digging tools to fix, and so he set up his forge. Another man — I can’t read his name, I never did hear him called — rode in with a wagon of coal he would sell in sacks when the winter came. More names with each passing months, I remember I marveled at it; hearing of our prospects, these people were coming to settle, it was common enough sense, but I always had the feeling somebody had certified Hard Times as a place in the world and that’s why it was happening.

Here it shows how my commissions rose on the Express business. Here is the marriage notice of Bert and the little girl — he could write, but all she did was put a mark down. Now that tells a lot, the minute I began to keep the records I was the natural party to every complaint, legal or otherwise. I used to feel I was a horsebreaker and each day one of a remuda I had to cut down to size. For several Saturdays running Miss Adah, Mae and Jessie kept Bert happy by shunting only the drunkest and least able customers to the Chinese girl — so that all she had to do was lead them to a room, take their money and leave them sleeping there. Bert had a good length of wood near his hand while he tended the bar and he was ready to jump out and use it if he thought his sweetheart was having trouble. The ladies didn’t want that; and they suffered too whenever any of Bert’s digging friends made a joke of him for quitting his job at the lodes. “Like to be around the stuff, Bert?” someone would call out — and the strain just got to be too much for the ladies. They came to me as a delegation and elected me to break the news to Zar. “You can gentle him to it, Blue,” Miss Adah said, “it won’t be as bad as if he finds out for himself.”

So I did one day, while everyone else stayed out of sight. Well first I had to talk Zar out of killing Bert. And then out of firing him — that I did by convincing him Isaac Maple would hire the boy in his place. When I had him calmed down I said: “Look here Zar, what’s some little old Chinagirl matter when in just a few months you’ll have the finest saloon in these parts. A businessman like you can’t bother with such things.”

“Not a saloon, frand. An hotel. Two stories. Glass windows. A mirror. A polished wood bar.”

“Well there you are, that’s big time Zar, and big times are coming.”

“You are right.”

“Sure I’m right — hell you’ll be able to import a dozen Chinese if you want, this town grows up and you’ll have more girls than you can choose.”

“We will be a city!”

“Sure!”

“Alright Blue: you tell the boy I will not kill him.”

“That’s the decent thing, Zar.”

“He loffs her, he can have her.”

“Fine.”

“For three hundred dollars he can have her.”

Zar was a match for me, no question. When I took the news out to Bert and the others I looked at some long faces. But Molly came up with an idea: she said: “If Bert takes the girl, and brings in someone in her stead, maybe the Russian would make a trade.”

So I tried that and I guess Zar didn’t think there was a chance in Hell, he agreed readily. We sat there and it was like talking to some foreign king making a royal marriage for his daughter. If Bert got him another woman he wanted only one hundred dollars — which is what he’d paid for the Chinagirl — and he’d let the young fellow pay him in labor. That was all I could get out of him. He stuck to those terms for the best part of a week. Till finally Bert borrowed our mule and rig and rode off and was gone two days, and Lord! if he didn’t come back with a sad grey-haired woman, full of sags, and deliver her up with a flourish. That was Mrs. Clement and I never found out where Bert got her. You just didn’t look to find such enterprise in a boy like that, and part of it was the way he never told anyone how he did it.

The Russian hadn’t expected Bert to come up with anyone but it was to his credit he stuck to the terms. He might even have delighted in the boy’s wherewithal. But then the trouble was Mae and Jessie. They didn’t take to the new woman at all, they sniffed at her and found her wanting. When Zar offered her the same arrangement he had with them they went into a rage. It was an insult to them, there was a big fuss and they made up their minds then and there to quit Zar and leave the town.

That was a noisy morning in my cabin, Jessie and Mae coming in and tearfully ordering me to write out tickets for the next stage. Miss Adah was with them, wringing her hands, and Zar shouting and ranting; and things were all inside out now as the girls were put out with Bert for disrupting things and Zar was standing up for him. But when Mae and Jessie demanded their share of the profits which Zar had been holding in trust for them, the Russian stopped the game: their money, along with his own, he had invested in the wood for the new “hotel.” It was all gone, receipted by Alf, he told the furious women, and smiling he invited them to carry off their share of the lumber when it came on the freight wagons.

That took the heart out of them; and nothing more was said or done once the whole problem had reached its natural limits. By the time the lumber came, and Zar was hiring a few miners who knew how to carpenter, the women were actually looking forward to the luxury of those second-story rooms — although they never did warm up to old Mrs. Clement.

And by autumn, when the wedding was made, everyone — Zar, Mae, Jessie as well as the rest of us in the town — were happy for the two young people. And the only shadows were on the faces of Bert and his Chinagirl, both combed and clean but awful scared, and looking sorry about the whole thing.

I was the one did the marrying. I don’t regret it, I think it was proper enough, it sort of fell on me to finish the business I had become party to. We stood out in front of Zar’s old place. There was a scatter of people looking on including a few folks I barely knew. Over the heads, across the street, was Zar’s new saloon, two stories as it was planned, with three rooms with glass windows on the second floor and a false front another story high; next to it, with an alley in between, was Isaac Maple’s wood store which Swede had raised almost by himself. From where I stood the scar of the old street was blocked from my sight. None of the newcomers knew that I was no real Mayor, or that the words I spoke to wed the boy and girl were those few true phrases told to me by Miss Adah — who seemed ashamed even to recall them — plus what I could summon up in my mind from the ordained minister who married me more than twenty years before. Miss Adah had a Bible too, and had offered it to me until Mae pointed out the Chinagirl wasn’t hardly a Christian and so it would not be fitting.

Afterwards Zar gave out drinks on the house. His bar and his mirror weren’t arrived yet and he passed the liquor out from behind his plank, we all drank up, one of the new men showed a violin, and although it was afternoon we danced around on that new pine floor till it was tolerably sanctified. Swede brought his Helga in to dance, I danced with Molly, I did alright for an old man, that rigid back was soft in my hands and there was a flush of pleasure on Molly’s face as we stomped around, arms around, till we could dance no more.

Sometime between that heady evening she relented and that day we danced — there must have been a moment when we reached what perfection was left to our lives. “We’ve both suffered,” she said, but words don’t turn as the earth turns, they only have their season. When was the moment, I don’t know when, with all my remembrances I can’t find it; maybe it was during our dance, or it was some morning as a breeze of air shook the sun’s light; maybe it was one of those nights of hugging when we reached our ripeness and the earth turned past it; maybe we were asleep. Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.

What my mind sees now is the winter, November. The cabin is double-boarded, snug against the wind. Just inside, by the front door, is my desk, Swede’s table which I’ve bought from him. There are shelves on the walls filled with provisions, pegs hung with extra boughten clothes for all of us, a commode with an ironstone jug and washbowl. Mr. Hayden Gillis sits at my desk looking a long time at my books, a man all the way from the office of the Governor of the Territory.

“What have you charged for your lots Mr. Mayor,” he says shortly, turning around to face me.

“Well nothing to speak of. I put down witness stakes whenever someone claims a section he intends to build on. And he signs the ledger and I sign, that’s all.”

“You are not the promoter of this townsite?”

“No …”

“Would you believe it?” Molly says wiping her hands on her apron. “Anyone who wants, gets.”

He looks from her to me — a short man with a large head, hair falling back to his shoulders, small features down near his chin. “Your records are thorough. But I see no mention of your election as Mayor.”

“Well no sir, I just come by the title. You see it got around how I was keeping a write on things. And then when we found there’s going to be a road through us why people began to claim this piece and that along the street, and I kept things straight for them so there would be no fights. Mr. Zar, that’s the Russian, and Mr. Maple the storekeep, they’ve been building for when the crowd comes to lay the road. Zar owns the big place down the street and the public house opposite. Isaac has the store and he’s the one put up those sheet-iron cribs to rent. They are the big owners right now.”

“But for this place and the windmill not a foot of streetfront do we own,” Molly says angrily, “my husband likes to see other people make the money.”

“Alright Molly.”

“Somebody is going to drill another well, it’s bound to happen although Blue doesn’t see how. Then where will we be? I’ll tell you Mr. Gillis, this is more than an honest man standing before you, you can trust his records for they show against him!”

“Well,” the man says as he stands, “I think I’ve seen enough.” He pulls at his hammer-claw coat, takes his stovepipe from my desk. “If you will come with me, sir,” he says to me, and to Molly he nods.

Outside, although it is cold and the sky heavy, Zar and Isaac are waiting with their hats in their hands. We all four walk up to Zar’s new place, not a word being said as the man strides in the lead, badly bowed in the legs and rocking with each step. Jimmy darts in from nowhere and begins to walk behind him in imitation until I take a swipe at him and he’s gone again.

Isaac whispers to me: “Blue, if ye get the chance ask does he know Ezra Maple. He’s a travelin’ man, could be he’s met my brother along the way.”

I would like to ask it for Isaac, along with a few questions in my own mind, but the official is not a man who allows himself to be put upon. While the others wait at the bar we go upstairs to the room he’s taken (hastily given up by Jessie the day before) and he sits down at a table by the window and works with a sheaf of papers and ink stamps for a bit, muttering to himself as if I wasn’t even standing there.

“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Governor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians … What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.”

Then he turns and goes to his Gladstone traveling bag, unlocks it, burrows under some things and comes up with a labeled bottle of whiskey and two small glasses. He rubs the glasses with the flap of his coat, and then glancing up at me with that small face in that big head he hands me a glass and pours: “The jail can wait, but now let’s drink to the end of your tenure.”

Well everything he’s said I stow in my mind, only thinking now what his visit means: it will be a long year of expectations but by the spring they will come true.

I don’t remember tasting whiskey as good as that. A few minutes later I walked down the stairs while the anxious faces looked up at me from the bar: Zar, Isaac, Swede, Bert Albany — none of them would do. Before anyone could say anything I went out and up the street to the stable and found Jenks sleeping just inside the door. I shook him awake and dragged him back to Hayden Gillis. And at the top of the stairs, while everyone below looked on amazed, and while Jenks himself stood wide awake now with his mouth open the man stuck a tin star on his jacket and swore him in as a Deputy Sheriff, salary twenty-five dollars a year payable the following year.

“You ever kill your man?” Mr. Gillis asked Jenks.

Jenks turned red: “Yessir, reckon …”

“Good. You’re running this town now. See to it these folks make up a pot for a jailhouse. Get the records from Mr. Blue here and keep them neat. First time you get a serious outlaw, undead, write a letter to the capital and we’ll put a circuit judge on to you. Here’s paper. Town charter. Census list forms. Petition for statehood you can get people to sign when there’s nothing else to keep you busy.”

Then the man was clumping downstairs with his bag in his hand and his stovepipe hat and out the doors he went without a nod to anyone. Isaac Maple called up to me: “Blue?” But I shrugged and he ran out after. Everyone else crowded around me at the bar. What did it come to, this man’s visit? What was happening? I smiled because there could be no doubt. “Rest your mind Zar,” I said to the Russian, “all the money you’re in for will come back at you double.”

Jenks, in the meantime, was standing on the stairs with that sheaf of papers in his hand, glancing down at the badge on his coat and then toward the doors and back again at his chest. He was well confounded. But then he began to appreciate what had happened and as he came down each step his wolfy smile got wider and wider.

“Wal,” Zar shouted, “we are OK and without worry now Janks is Sheriff!”

Everyone laughed. Jenks came up to the bar and said to Bert who was tending: “Somethin’ fer everman heah!” and he waved his hand grandly. In the drinking that followed Jenks laid his papers on the bar. They must have fallen off in the fun, I found them later on the floor, bootmarks all over them. I gathered them up and tucked them inside my vest.

Jenks’s being a lawman didn’t change things much. People still came to me with what was on their minds; and I still kept the ledgers. I was ready to give them to him any time he asked. But maybe a month after Hayden Gillis had been through, the Sheriff came to me saying as he’d allow me to do the paperwork for him considering how busy he was on the street keeping an eye on matters — and how, besides, I knew how to write. And from then, as before, he had no part in anything that was on my desk, except to come in once or twice each day to look over my shoulder if I was sitting there, to nod sagely, but more likely only to get a free meal from Molly. So far as I know nobody in the town paid Jenks much attention except to make a joke of him now and then; but Molly and Jimmy treated him with respect and deference and it made him feel more the man he was supposed to be. He paced the street regular, wearing a gun in an open holster from his belt, and his star carefully displayed. And sometimes Jimmy followed a few steps after him and it got so you could tell where Jenks was by spotting Jimmy at some door along the street.

By the new year the street ran from my cabin, which was its southernmost end, in a crescent that found itself once more at John Bear’s shack at the foot of the trail leading up to the lodes. It was a full year, and half again another, since the day I put spade to earth for a dugout.

Molly said: “All these fools have come like buzzards after the smell of meat.”

“Buzzards eat what’s dead, Molly. This town is alive.”

“Nobody talks. They’re all keeping an eye out.”

“They’re waiting for the spring, Molly.” Why did I need to tell her so? “Everyone stands to make a little money comes the warm weather.”

“Jimmy?” she called.

We were by the front of our door in the dark of late afternoon. There was a crust of snow on the ground. Up the street there were lights shining from the windows. In the sharp, cold air, you could smell suppers cooking.

“Molly,” I turned to her, “what’s worrying you? We are alright, can’t you see that? We are prospering.”

Just then Jimmy jumped out of the shadows where we hadn’t been looking for him. He put his hands over Molly’s eyes: “Hoo!” he said in her ear.

She started. Then she pulled him around to her and held him tight: “Oh Mayor,” she said, “if this town stretched four ways as far as the eye could see, it would still be a wilderness!”

The boy’s trick had startled me too. And for one chilling moment I knew what Molly meant. A shudder ran down my back. But then the true sight of our town returned to me, and once more Molly and I were looking at the same scene but with different eyes. I had to smile how like a woman it was to scare in the good times.

That was only last winter but it seems like ancient days in my mind.