Page 32 of Follow the Lonesome Trail
“Forster here?” said Guy genially, setting Dominic down and getting up. “Well, don’t worry, Mr. Donnell. He isn’t as formidable an adversary as he appears. We can easily outwit him.”
And to Butch’s dismay, leaving the children where they were on the sofa, he walked coolly out of the house and down the path to where Steady Shaffler was trying to prevent Whit Forster from passing through the gate in the picket fence. It must be confessed that Guy delayed his approach slightly out of pure enjoyment.
“Oh, I ain’t offended; oh, no,” Steady was saying. “I’m sorry for the feller. It’s overwork at doctoring, and the strain of bein’ a leading citizen has caught up with him—set him imagining things.”
“Say, Guy, what’s going on here?” demanded Whit Forster, addressing the master of the house over Steady’s shoulder. “I got into Flat Rock late last night, and Doc Hatch landed on me with a crazy rigamarole about two knuckleheads kidnapping some kids because foreign spies were after ’em. He was so het up about it that I gave up my night’s sleep to trail ’em here.”
“Out of his head,” persisted Steady, firmly blocking the gate. “Disillusional. There’s no kids here, are there, Mr. Dunstable?”
A bellow issued from the depths of the ranch house, and a second later Butch Donnell emerged from the door and staggered down the path, shaking a large hand.
“He bit me!” thundered Butch. “I tried to hustle ’em out the back door to the wagon, and he didn’t want to go! Hebitme, the little polecat! He don’t need protectin’ from nobody!”
It is perhaps kinder to pass lightly over the half-hour of explanations that followed. Butch and Steady had taken it well, considering, though when all was over and goodbyes were being said Steady pointedly refused to look Dominic in the eye. They climbed into the wagon, doing their best to be dignified, with a little group gathered at the gate to see them off—Theodore astride the gatepost, Dominic perched on Guy Dunstable’s shoulder, and Whit Forster in the background, valiantly holding in his laughter till later.
But it was Margot, with her sensitive instinct, who seemed to feel that something more was required. At the last moment she ran out to the wagon wheel, her earnest face tipped up toward her erstwhile protectors.
“You have been true and faithful allies,” she said, “and if any one of my blood should ever be favored by fortune, your service will not be forgotten.”
Steady Shaffler stared down at her for a wordless moment. “I’m...I’m much obliged,” he said. “Good luck to you, too.”
Butch pulled himself out of a sort of daze to snap the lines across the horses’ backs, and the wagon started with a jerk. The group at the gate waved farewell, with the children calling cheerful goodbyes after them.
For half a mile across the prairie neither prospector spoke. Then Steady said, “Butch?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
There was silence for another minute, and then they stole a look at each other, as if they could not resist the thoughts that both were thinking.
“They did say none of the other folks they stayed with ever knew anything,” said Butch. “How’s Dunstablereallyto know?”
“It might just be too deep to tell anyone,” said Steady. “Not even folks they can trust.”
They shared a meaningful glance, and nodded.
“Best carry on that way,” said Steady. “Let Doc Hatch crow over us if he likes. We won’t say anything. We’ll act like the—the little girl wants us to. She said we were faithful, and by gum, we will be!”
The Man with the Long-Barreled Gun
Emily Hayse
She stared out at the last vestiges of the sunlight as it streamed between the slats in the southern corral. The south corral was the last one to get the sun—it, and the high edges of the surrounding canyon. There was already a hungry kind of cold setting in on the evening breeze, the kind that promised an early winter.
Something she could not afford.
“That’s the last of them, ma’am,” came a gravelly voice at her elbow. At the foot of the porch stood Teller, her ranch foreman.He pulled his hat off respectfully as she turned to him. His gray hair was plastered to his head with sweat, even with the cold coming on. The fact that he was here, before dark, told her there weren’t many to get.
“Thank you, Teller.” She smiled. The sinking disappointment in her stomach wasn’t going to show. Teller knew as well as she did what this meant, but she was not going to crack in front of him.
The herd was thinning by the day now, cattle just disappearing off their range. It almost made her want to ask about fencing, that newfangled barbed wire that could be ordered in now by catalogue. She put that notion out of her head. Frank had always been against it, saying it was a danger to cattle, that their instincts took care of them right and proper, that it was taking away the dignity of the land to range it in with twisted metal. That, and there was no way she could afford it right now.
“We’ll find more, ma’am,” offered Teller. “There’s still the Fork Bend Valley. Cattle, they get caught up there by the last nice bits of grazing. Don’t want to leave.”
“Isn’t the Fork Bend near Bar S land?”
He didn’t answer.
