Hinge glanced at Roper. “Well … so far it’s been kind of a hands-off policy. We avoid trouble. Just the same, come roundup time we’ll ride in there after our cattle, calves and all.”
We ate up. The bacon was good and the coffee better. I ate four rolls dipped in bacon grease and felt pretty good after my fifth cup of coffee. I kept thinking about that third man. The others had been cowhands, but the third man … I knew him from somewhere.
Most of the last three years I’d been riding the outlaw trail. Not that I was an outlaw. It was just that I liked the backbone of the country, and most of the outfits I’d worked for since leaving the home ranch had been along the outlaw trail. I’d never crossed the law at any point and had no notion of it, but I suspect some of the outlaws thought I was a cattle detective, and more took me for some kind of a lone hand outlaw. It was simply that I had a liking for rough, wild country … the high-up and the far-out. My brother Barnabas … named for the first of us ever to come across from England … he took to schooling and crossed the ocean to study in England and France. While he learned the words of Rousseau, Voltaire and Spinoza, I was cutting my educational teeth on the plains of the buffalo. While he courted the girls along the old Bout Miche, I busted broncs on the Cimarron. He went his way and I mine, but we loved each other none the less. Maybe there was a wildness in me, for I had a love for the wind in the long grass blowing, or the smell of woodsmoke down some rocky draw. There was a reaching in me for the far plains, and from the first day that I could straddle a bronc it was in me to go off a-seeking.
Ma held me as long as she could, but when she saw what it was that was choking me up with silence she took down a Winchester from the gunrack and handed it to me. Then she taken a six-shooter, holster, belt and all, and she handed them to me.
“Ride, boy. I know it’s in you to go. Ride as far as you’ve a mind to, shoot straight when you must, but lie to no man and let no man doubt your word. “It is a poor man who has not honor, but before you do a deed, think how you will think back upon it when old age comes. Do nothing that will shame you.” She saw me to the door and when I started to saddle my old roan, she called after me. “No son of mine will go forth upon a horse so old as that. Take the dun … it’s a wicked one he is, but he’ll go until he drops. Take the dun, boy, and ride well.
“Come back when you’re of a mind to, for I’ll be here. Age can seam my face as it can the bark of an oak, but it can put no seams in my spirit. Go, boy, but remember you are a Sackett as well as a Talon. The blood may run hot, but it runs strong.”
They were words I still remembered.
“We’ll ride home in the morning,” Hinge said. “We will talk to the major, too.”
“Who’s your boss? Who runs the Stirrup-Iron?”
Danny Rolf started to speak, but shut up at a look from Roper. It was Hinge who replied. “An old man,” he said, “and a kid girl.” “She ain’t no kid,” Danny said, “she’s older’n me.”
“A girl-kid,” Roper added, “and the old man is blind.”
I swore.
“Yeah,” Roper said, “you’d better think again, mister. You ain’t in this like we are. You can ride on with a clear conscience.”
“If a man can ever leave a pair like Balch and Saddler behind and still have a clear conscience. No,” I said, “I ate of your salt, and I’ll ride for the brand if they’ll take me on.”
“What’s that mean?” Danny asked. “That about the salt?” “Some folks think if you eat of somebody’s bread and salt it leaves you in debt … or something like that,” said Hinge.
“That’s close enough,” I said. “Are you boys quitting?” There was no friendly look in their eyes. “Quittin’? Who said anything about quittin’?”
“Goin’ against a tough outfit for a blind man and a girl,” I said, “just doesn’t make sense.”
“We ain’t about to quit,” Roper said.
I grinned at them. “I’m glad I ate that salt,” I said.
2
The ranch house on the Stirrup-Iron was a low-roofed house of cottonwood logs chinked with adobe, its roof of poles covered with sod where grass had sprouted and some flowers grew. Nearby were three corrals of peeled poles, and a lean-to barn with an anvil at one end, as well as a forge for blacksmithing. It was a common enough two-by-twice outfit with nothing special about it. Others of its kind could be found in many parts of Texas and other plains states. Only when we rode down the long, gradual slope toward the house did we see a man standing in the yard with a rifle in the hollow of his arm. He must have agreed with what he saw, for he turned on his heel, seeming to speak toward the house. Then he walked back to the bunkhouse which lay across the hard-packed yard facing the shed.
A thin blonde girl stood on the steps, hair blowing in the wind, shading her eyes to see us. Joe Hinge said, “Ma’am, I brought you a hand.” “He’s welcome, and when you’ve washed, come up for supper.” She looked after me as we rode to the corral and stripped the gear from our horses. “Who was that with the rifle?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Danny cautioned, “but step light and talk easy. He’s a neighbor.”
“How many hands do you have?”
“We’re them,” he explained. “Harley comes over to help, sometimes. He’s got him a rawhide outfit over east against the break of the hills.” The bunkhouse, also of logs, was long and narrow with bunks along the sides and a sheet-iron stove at the end. There was a pile of dusty wood near the stove with somebody’s socks drying on it, and a fire-blackened coffeepot atop the stove.
Four of the bunks had rumpled bedding and four had no bedding at all, only cowhide for springs, lashed to each side of the bed frame with rawhide strings. Coats and slickers hung on pegs along the wall, and there were a couple of benches and a table with one slightly short leg. A kerosene lamp stood on the table, and there was another in a bracket on the wall near the stove. There were two beat-up lanterns sitting along the wall.
The floor was scuffed and dusty, not looking like it had been swept in a while, but I’d grown up with Ma watching and knew that wouldn’t last. Outside the door there was a washstand with a broken piece of mirror fastened to the log wall with nails, and a roller-towel that had been used forty or fifty hands too long. Rinsing the basin I washed my hands and combed my hair, looking in the mirror at the man I was: a man with a lean, dark face and sideburns and a mustache. It was the first time I’d seen myself in anything but water for three or four months, but I didn’t seem to have changed much. The scar where a bullet cut my hide near a cheekbone was almost gone.
Danny came out and slicked back his hair with water. A cowlick stuck up near the crown of his head. “The grub’s good,” he said. “She’s a mighty fine cook.” “She does the cooking?”
“Who else?”
I whipped the dust from my clothes with my hat, drew the crease a mite deeper and started toward the house, my eyes sweeping the hills around, picking out the possible places for anyone watching the place. They were few, as the hills were bare and lonely.
There was a picket fence around a small bare yard in front of the house and a few pitiful, straggly flowers. A stone-flagged walk led to the door, and the table inside was spread with a red and white checked cloth. And the dishes were kind of blue enamel and a chipped enamel coffeepot. There was a fine looking beef stew steaming on the table, and an apple pie on the sideboard … dried apples, of course, but it looked good. There was also a pot of beans, some crabapple jelly and slices of thick white bread looking fresh from the oven.
She was even thinner than I’d thought, and her eyes were bluer. “I am Barby Ann.” She gestured to the head of the table. “And this is my father, Henry Rossiter.”