“It isn’t likely there’s more than one like that in the country.” Two men, and they had camped here at least two days and possibly longer. There were other signs of camping, too, so the place had been used more than once. We saw a big old brindle steer with a white nose that would weight eighteen hundred easy. There were a couple of others with him, one an almost white long-horn cow with a splash of red along one hip.
Fuentes was starting to haze them back when I had an idea. “Tony, let’s leave them.”
“What?”
“Let’s leave them and see what happens. You’d know that brindle steer or white cow anywhere, so let’s just see where they show up.” He nodded. “Bueno, I think that’s a good idea.” The truth was that we’d know every head we saw that day. A man working cattle develops a memory for them—and the crowd they run with, so when we started back we had more than twenty head for our ride. It took some doing, like always, but it helped that they were headed back to their home range … even though their range was nowhere as good as what we were leaving. Riding gives a man time to think and to look. A man riding wild country has busy eyes if he hopes to stay alive, but a cowhand has them naturally. He learns to spot trouble before he comes close to it, and his eyes can pick out a bogged steer or one with screwworms. A good horse will smell screwworms when a man can’t see the steer for the brush, and he will locate cattle where a man can’t see them.
It was hot, dusty riding, and the black flies hung about us in a swarm. We picked up two three-year-old steers on the drive back. They just saw our cattle and joined up, as cattle will, and Fuentes and me, knowing they would be spooky, kept clear of them.
We were almost back to the line-shack when we saw a rider.
“Ah!” Fuentes grinned. “Now you will see her!”
“Her?”
He gestured at the rider. “The major’s daughter. Be careful, senor. Sometimes she thinks she is the major.”
She came riding toward us on as pretty a gray gelding as you ever saw, riding sidesaddle on something I’d never seen before, a black patent-leather saddle. She wore a kind of riding habit in checkered black and white—a fine check—and a black hat, black polished boots and a white blouse. She gave me a quick glance that missed nothing, I’d guess, and then nodded to Fuentes. “How are you, Tony?” She glanced at the cattle. “Any T Bar T stuff in there?”
“No, senorita, only Stirrup-Iron and Spur.”
“Mind if I have a look?”
“Of course not, senorita.”
“Just don’t spook those two speckled three-year-olds,” I suggested. “They’re edgy.”
She threw me a glance that would have cut a wide swath at haying time. “I’ve seen cattle before!”
She rode around our gather, studying them, and mostly they paid her no mind. Then she cut in close to those steers and they taken one quick look at the sun shining off that patent-leather sidesaddle and they taken off, and it took some hot fast work by Tony an’ me to hold our bunch together. I pulled in close to her. “Ma’am, you go tell your papa to wipe behind your ears before you come out on the grass again, will you?” Her face went white, and she took a cut at my face with her quirt. It was one of those woven horsehair-handled quirts in green and red, a pretty thing. But when she cut at my face with it, I just threw up my hand, caught the quirt and jerked it out of her hand.
She had a temper, that one did. She lost hold of the quirt, but she didn’t stop. She grabbed for her rifle in its scabbard, and I pushed my horse alongside hers and put my hand over the butt of the gun so she couldn’t draw it. “Just take it easy,” I said coolly. “You wouldn’t shoot a man over something like this, would you?”
“Who the hell said I wouldn’t?” she flared.
“You’d better also tell your papa to wash your mouth out with soap,” I said.
“That’s no word for a lady to use.”
She was sashaying around, trying to get away from me, but that little bay I was riding knew its business and was staying right close to her gray gelding. For three or four minutes we kicked up dust, sidling around on the prairie until she saw it was no use.
Maybe she cooled down a little. I don’t rightly know, but she called over to Fuentes, who was sitting his saddle watching. “Fuentes, come and get this man away from me.”
Tony walked his horse over and said, “I do not want you to shoot him, senorita.
He is my compadre.”
“I’ll say this for you,” I said. “You may have the devil of a temper, but you sure are pretty.”
Her eyes narrowed a little. “The major will have you hung for this,” she told me, “if the boys don’t get to you sooner.”
“Why don’t you fight your own battles?” I asked. “You’re a big girl now. No need to call on your papa to help you, or the big boys at the ranch.” “Stop calling him my papa!” she said angrily. “He’s ‘the Major!’ “ “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know he was still in the army.” “He’s not in the army!”
“Then he isn’t a major, is he? I mean, he’s a used-to-be major, maybe?” She didn’t know what to say to that. Defensively, she said, “He’s the major! And he was a major … in the Civil War!”
“Well, good for him. I knew a couple of them, up north. There was one used to clerk in a hotel where I stayed, and then I punched cows with a colonel up Wyoming way. Nice fellas, both of them.”
My face was smooth, my voice bland. Suddenly she said, “I don’t think I like you!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said politely, “I gathered that. When a girl comes after me with a quirt … well, I sort of get the feeling she doesn’t care for me. I’d say that wasn’t really the romantic approach.”
“Romance?” Her tone was withering. “With you?”
“Oh, no, ma’am! Please! Don’t talk about romance with me! I’m just a drifting cowboy! Why, I’d never even think of romance with a daughter of the major!” I paused. “Anyway, I never start courting a girl the first time I see her. Maybe the second time. Of course, that depends on the girl. “You—“ I canted my head on one side. “Well, maybe the third time … or the fourth. Yes, I think so. The fourth time.”
She swung her horse around, glaring at me. “You! You’re impossible! Just wait!
Just you wait!”
She dashed away, spurring her horse. Fuentes pushed his sombrero back on his head and looked woeful. “I think you are in big trouble, amigo. This one … she does not like you, I think.”
“I think, too,” I said. “Let’s get on with the cattle.” The two three-year-olds were gone, and neither of us were of a mind to follow or try to recover them. Besides, they’d be skittish now, and we’d be lucky to even get close.
We drifted along behind our cattle. Several times I thought I heard movement in the brush, as though the young ones were following along, but soon we were out on the open plain and they did not appear.
So she was the major’s daughter? The one Roger Balch was supposed to be trying to round up … or so the talk went. Well, he could have her. Still, she was pretty. Even when she was mad, she was pretty—very pretty. I chuckled. And she had been mad.
We bunched the cattle in a corral and bedded down for the night.
“Those steers,” I suggested, “maybe they’ll come up during the night.”
Fuentes shrugged, and then he said, “It is Friday tomorrow.”
“There’s one most ever week,” I said.
“On Saturday there is a, what you call it, social at the schoolhouse.”
“A box social?” I asked skeptically.
“Si … and I think of these cattle that they need to be with the herd. They will be restless and they might get away … somehow. It is in my mind that we should drive them in.”
“Well,” I agreed thoughtfully, “I do think they should be with their kinfolk. Of course, while we’re over yonder we might’s well stop by and see how they run that social affair.”
“Bueno,” Fuentes agreed seriously. “And you will see a dozen, maybe two dozen head of the finest looking girls in Texas.”
“And that’s pretty fine lookin’ by any man’s standards,” I agreed. “You been to these box socials before? Here, I mean?”