Lonesome Land (33 page)

Kent had been watching her face jealously. “Here, let me take a look, will you? I can tell—” She yielded reluctantly, and in a moment he had caught the focus.

“Tell me what you see, Kent—everything,” she begged, looking anxiously from his face to the river.

“Well, old Jake is fogging along down the coulee—but he ain’t to the river yet, not by a long shot! Ah-h! Man’s riding back to take a run in. That’s the
stuff—got Michael’s feet wet that time, the old freak! They came near going clean outa sight.”

“The sheriff—is he close enough—” Val began fearfully. “Oh, we’re too far away to do a thing!”

Kent kept his eyes to the glasses. “We couldn’t do a thing if we were right there. Man’s in swimming water already. Jake ain’t riding in—from the motions he’s
ordering Man back.”

“Oh, please let me look a minute! I won’t get excited, Kent, and I’ll tell you everything I see—
please!
” Val’s teeth were fairly chattering with
excitement, so that Kent hesitated before he gave up the glasses. But it seemed boorish to refuse. She snatched at them as he took them from his eyes, and placed them nervously to her own.

“Oh, I see them both!” she cried, after a second or two. “The sheriff’s got his rule in his hands—Kent, do you suppose he’d—”

“Just a bluff, pal. They all do it. What—”

Val gave a start. “Oh, he shot, Kent! I saw him take aim—it looked as if he pointed it straight at Manley, and the smoke—” She moved the glasses slowly, searching the
river.

“Well, he’d have to be a dandy, to hit anything on the water, and with the sun in his eyes, too,” Kent assured her, hardly taking his eyes from her face with its varying
expression. Almost he could see what was taking place at the river, just by watching her.

“Oh, there’s Manley, away out! Why, your Michael is swimming beautifully, Kent! His head is high out of the water, and the water is churning like—Oh, Manley’s holding his
rifle up over his head—he’s looking back toward shore. I wonder,” she added softly, “what he’s thinking about! Manley! You’re my husband—and once
I—”

“Draw a bead on that gazabo on shore,” Kent interrupted her faint flaring up of sentiment toward the man she had once loved and loved no more.

Val drew a long breath and turned the glasses reluctantly from the fugitive. “I don’t see him—oh, yes! He’s down beside a rock, on one knee, and he’s taking a rest
across the rock, and is squinting along—oh, he can’t hit him at that distance, can he, Kent? Would he dare—why, it would be murder, wouldn’t it? Oh-h—
he shot
again!
”

Kent reached up a hand and took the glasses from her eyes with a masterful gesture. “You let me look,” he said laconically. “I’m steadier than you.”

Val crept closer to him, and looked up into his face. She could read nothing there; his mouth was shut tight so that it was a stern, straight line, but that told her nothing. He always looked so
when he was intent upon something, or thinking deeply. She turned her eyes toward the river, flowing smoothly across the mouth of the coulee. Between, the land lay sleeping lazily in the hazy
sunlight of mid-autumn. The grass was brown, the rocky outcroppings of the coulee wall yellow and gray and red—and the river was so blue, and so quiet! Surely that sleepy coulee and that
placid river could not be witnessing a tragedy. She turned her head, irritated by its very calmness. Her eyes dwelt wistfully upon Kent’s half-concealed face.

“What are they doing now, Kent?” Her tone was hushed.

“I can’t—exactly—” He mumbled absently, his mind a mile away. She waited a moment.

“Can you see—Manley?”

This time he did not answer at all; he seemed terribly far off, as if only his shell of a body remained with her in the room.

“Why don’t you talk?” she wailed. She waited until she could endure no more, then reached up and snatched the glasses from his eyes.

“I can’t help it—I shall go crazy standing here. I’ve just got to see!” she panted.

For a moment he clung to the glasses and stared down at her. “You better not, sweetheart,” he urged gently, but when she still held fast he let them go. She raised them hurriedly to
her eyes, and turned to the river with a shrinking impatience to know the worst and have it over with.

“E-everything j-joggles so,” she whimpered complainingly, trying vainly to steady the glasses. He slipped his arms around her, and let her lean against him; she did not even seem to
realize it. Just then she had caught sight of something, and her intense interest steadied her so that she stood perfectly still.

“Why, your horse—” she gasped. “Michael—he’s got his feet straight up in the air—oh, Kent, he’s rolling over and over! I can’t
see—” She held her breath. The glasses sagged as if they had grown all at once too heavy to hold. “I—I thought I saw—” She shivered and hid her face upon one
upflung arm.

Kent caught up the glasses and looked long at the river, unmindful of the girl sobbing wildly beside him. Finally he turned to her, hesitated, and then gathered her close in his arms. The
glasses slid unheeded to the floor.

“Don’t cry—it’s better this way, though it’s hard enough, God knows.” His voice was very gentle. “Think how awful it would have been, Val, if the law
had got him. Don’t cry like that! Such things are happening every day, somewhere—” He realized suddenly that this was no way to comfort her, and stopped. He patted her shoulder
with a sense of blank helplessness. He could make love—but this was not the time for lovemaking; and since he was denied that outlet for his feelings, he did not know what to do, except that
he led her to the couch, and settled her among the cushions so that she would be physically comfortable, at least. He turned restlessly to the window, looked out, and then went to the couch and
bent over her.

“I’m going out to the gate—I want to see Jake Bondy. He’s coming up the coulee,” he said. “I won’t be far. Poor little girl—poor little pal, I
wish I could help you.” He touched his lips to her hair, so lightly she could not feel it, and left her.

At the gate he met, not the sheriff, who was riding slowly, and had just passed through the field gate, but Arline and Hank, rattling up in the Hawley buckboard.

“Thank the good Lord!” he exclaimed when he helped her from the rig. “I never was so glad to see anybody in my life. Go on in—she’s in there crying her heart out.
Man’s dead—the sheriff shot him in the river—oh, there’s been hell to pay out here!”

“My heavens above!” Arline stared up at him while she grasped the significance of his words. “I knowed he’d hit for here—I followed right out as quick as Hank could
hitch up the team. Did you hear about Fred—”

“Yes, yes, yes, I know all about it!” Kent was guilty of pulling her through the gate, and then pushing her toward the house. “You go and do something for that poor girl. Pack
her up and take her to town as quick as God’ll let you. There’s been misery enough for her out here to kill a dozen women.”

He watched until she had reached the porch, and then swung back to Hank, sitting calmly in the buckboard, with the lines gripped between his knees while he filled his pipe.

“I can take care of the man’s side of this business, fast enough,” Kent confessed whimsically, “but there’s some things it takes a woman to handle.” He
glanced again over his shoulder, gave a huge sigh of relief when he glimpsed Arline’s thin face as she passed the window and knelt beside the couch, and turned with a lighter heart to meet
the sheriff.

THE END

ENDNOTES

1
. Kate Baird Anderson, “Introduction,” in
The Happy Family of the Flying U
, by B. M. Bower (Lincoln, NE: U
of Nebraska P, 1996), p. xii.

2
. B. M. Bower, Letter published in the “Camp-Fire” section of
Adventure
Magazine, in
Writer of the
Plains: A Biography of B. M. Bower
, by Orrin A. Engen (Culver City, CA: Pontine Press, 1973), p. 50.

3
. B. M. Bower, Letter published in the “Camp-Fire” section of
Adventure
Magazine, in
Writer of the
Plains: A Biography of B. M. Bower
, by Orrin A. Engen (Culver City, CA: Pontine Press, 1973), p. 52.

4
. Mark Twain,
Old Times on the Mississippi
, in
The Portable Mark Twain
, Bernard DeVoto, ed. (New York: Viking
Press, 1968), p. 86.

SUGGESTED READING

CAMPBELL. DONNA
.
Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction
, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

FOOTE, MARY HALLOCK
.
The Idaho Stories and Far West Illustrations of Mary Hallock Foote
. Eds. Barbara Cragg, Dennis Walsh, and Mary Ellen Walsh.
Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1988.

GOETZMANN, WILLIAM H. AND WILLIAM N. GOETZMANN.
The West of the Imagination.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986.

GEORGI-FINDLAY, BRIGITTE.
The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion.
Tuscon: University
of Arizona Press, 1996.

MOURNING DOVE.
Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range
. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

SLOTKIN, RICHARD.
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
New York: Atheneum, 1992.

TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON
The Frontier in American History.
Third ed. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1994.

TUSKA, JON ED.
The Western Story: A Chronological Treasury.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

WESTLING, LOUISE H.
The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

YATES, NORRIS WILSON.
Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers of Formula Westerns,
1900–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1995.