Page 24 of Follow the Lonesome Trail
“How long do you think we’ll have to stay with him?” said Theodore.
“Till Mother finds another situation,” said Margot, in a different voice from her storytelling one. “It might be a little while, and it might be…a while. You know how it is with situations.” She put her arm around six-year-old Dominic and gave him a little squeeze, infusing drama into her voice again. “As soon as the spies have been diverted from our trail, she’ll send for us to rejoin her, in a hiding-place with some other aristocrat loyal to the old Crown. In—Vienna, maybe, this time. With an exile who has gone into the service of the Emperor.”
“What happens if they catch us?” said Dominic, who always asked this question, although he already knew the answer.
“We would be sent to the dungeons,” said Margot, thinking of the great gloomy, gray stone front of the Orphans’ Home they had passed on their walks in New York, where she knew they would have to go for a while if Mother couldn’t earn enough to support them all; “and wear prison garb and be fed on oatmeal and bread-and-milk until our friends on the outside could arrange a rescue.”
“That’s not going to happen to us,” said Theodore stoutly.
“Of course it isn’t,” said Margot. “We have a brave and resourceful mother, and friends in secret everywhere we go. Our enemies have never caught us yet.”
Dominic yawned and twisted sleepily against his sister, and she patted his shoulder. “Put your head in my lap now and try to go to sleep, and when you wake up we’ll be across the frontier and can have breakfast.”
“I can’t sleep. It’s too noisy.”
“You slept on the train, didn’t you? It’s just the rumble of the Cossack ponies’ hooves. If you shut your eyes and listen you cansee them galloping over the moonlit steppes around us, with their fur caps and long lances.”
Dominic obediently squinched down and shut his eyes and tried.
Outside, the stagecoach driver, unaware that he was being protected by a guard of Cossack outriders, spat chewing tobacco over the wheel and set the brake and chirruped to his six-horse team as he steered them round a bend in a road that was growing rockier. The man in the other corner of the coach shifted and recrossed his arms in his sleep, his head nodding and swaying as the stage slewed in and out of the hard ruts of the road.
Dominic was asleep now, his round cheek squished against Margot’s knee, and Theodore was dozing a little against her other shoulder. Margot sat very still, the moonlight illuminating her small, serious profile under the brim of her round schoolgirl hat. If there had been any adult awake to see, they would have wondered what thoughts were passing behind her solemn, almost un-childlike dark eyes, and might very well have believed any strange story they were told about her.
Whit Forster, United States deputy marshal whose jurisdiction covered a sizable swath of Dakota Territory, dismounted at a hitching rail of the Dunstable ranch and stood still for a moment to feast his eyes. The whitewashed frame house stood down near the creek, against a pair of big cottonwoods that spread sprawling green wings which protected it from the weather but did not obstruct a view from the front windows that took in miles of rolling prairie. The house had clearly been built with this view in mind, along with other more practical considerations. Barns,bunkhouse, and pole corrals spaced further along the creek bottom were square and neat and well-maintained. Foreigners and Easterners, both, came and went in cattle country with varying degrees of success, but you had to admit, Forster reflected, that when one of them really took hold and learned his business, the result was worth seeing.
Guy Dunstable was in for midday dinner, and he greeted Forster at the door in boots and spurs and range clothes. A tall, athletic man in his mid-thirties, he had a pleasant smile and a direct way of looking you in the eye, and an English accent that had not worn off after fifteen years in the States, that somehow did not clash with his suntanned, range-seasoned appearance—he would have been a man of action in any setting as well as a man of culture.
“Whit, good to see you. What brings you over this way? Regular line of business?”
“Well, I’ve got one or two things to see to along the way, as usual,” said Forster, “but I rode over to see you particular. I’ve got a little matter you might be able to help me with.”
“Come in and tell me about it. Stay to dinner; you’re just in time.”
They entered the ranch house, and on the threshold of the living room Whit Forster stood still for a moment and breathed deeply. There was no place he knew quite like the Dunstable ranch house. Dunstable had come to America as a boy of twenty and brought little with him, but he had built and gradually furnished the place to his taste as he prospered, and the result was a mixture of old-world richness and western simplicity. There was some handsome furniture shipped from the East, but not enough to overcrowd it: soft carpets, a large buffalo robe flung on the sofa for a local touch; the walls were whitewashed and hung with a few tasteful engravings, giving the room an airy, tranquil feel. It could not be said that Dunstable livedluxuriously, but he had a good library, his brandy was always to be relied on, and the Japanese cook was a master of his craft.
There was the clink of a decanter, and Guy Dunstable turned from the sideboard. “Have a drink?”
“Too early. But yes. I haven’t tasted anything but the cheapest rot-gut money can buy since last time I was here.”
He accepted the glass of brandy and savored it slowly, his eyes traveling appreciatively around the room again to end up at the front window with the best view and the desk in front of it. Forster shook his head with a sigh. “You sure do yourself well here,” he said. “Kind of room a man wouldn’t mind staying indoors for. Or a woman, either,” he added as an afterthought. “Why not?”
“Why not what?” said Guy lightly, looking the other way.
“Just wondering. You’ve had this place fixed to suit for a good few years now, but you’re all alone here. I have a hard time believing you couldn’t add a Mrs. Dunstable for the asking.”
“I haven’t asked,” said Guy in the same light tone, putting the stopper back in the decanter.
“Well, I figured as much. But I’ll bet there’s others besides me who wonder why—female ones. Don’t you like American girls?”
“On the contrary. I’ve met any number of American girls I admired immensely.”
“But not enough.”
Guy Dunstable turned away toward the window and emptied his own glass of brandy before replying. He spoke dismissively. “I’m out of practice making myself agreeable to women. I’ve spent so much time working, I’ve got used to living alone.”
“Can’t recommend it,” said Whit Forster. “I’ve got some excuse, living pillar to post the way I do, with a prisoner handcuffed to my wrist half the time. But if I settle down before you do, when you’re the one with the ideal set-up for it, something’ll be out of joint.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Guy. “What was it you wanted to see me about, anyway, Whit?”
