LITMIR.BIZ

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ten seconds,” Lon said bravely, and got his reward; she started laughing again. She said, “Thanks, sister,” to the waitress for the change, and left a tip and stood up. “Walk me out to the fairgrounds to look at my horse.”

      But outside he hesitated, and she said, “I told the chambermaid we wouldn’t be back till about eleven; to sit with the kids till then. Let’s walk, it isn’t far out to the fairgrounds.”

      “My pickup is at the hotel.”

      “No, let’s walk.” She took his arm, and they turned right. The street was crowded, with the usual rodeo night crowd of any Western town; the shopkeepers and the clerks in the department stores and banks and utility companies, the foremen in the millwork plant had all put on plaid shirts and saddle pants or levis; some of the men and women wore high-heeled boots, but most of the tight breeches ended disappointingly in low heels and laces.

      Mixed up with the crowd were millworkers in their Sunday best and others in overalls and denim jackets, going up for the night shift. There were farmers and ranchers from around the countryside, there were a couple of dozen professional rodeo riders following the circuit, and there were some pickpockets and short-con workers—who also followed the circuit.

      There was a merry-go-round set up at a wide corner, and kids whooped and yelled and dodged around underfoot, their faces smeared with chili and hot-dog mustard.

      Lonnie nodded at one brat who had nearly collided with the solid rear end of a state policeman. “That kid’s only about seven. Ought to be in bed.”

      Vera Mae laughed. “Stop being a professional father. You’re a young man out with a girl.”

      “Well—” They had passed the lighted streets, were in the dark belt between town and the fairgrounds. The sidewalks ended, and he had to feel for the paving rather than watch it. He put his arm around Vera Mae’s shoulders.

      “That’s better,” she said. “I’d think I was losing my grip if you didn’t try and cop a feel now and then.”

      “Don’t talk so rough,” Lonnie said. “You can’t scare me. I heard all the words once, even if I don’t know what they mean.”

      There was a light in each of the barns at the fairground, and a couple of patient watchmen walking the rounds, sniffing for fire. The smell of cows and horses came out of the first buildings they passed, and also a small whiff of, pig. “Whoosh,” Vera Mae said. “Why do pigs smell so much like pigs? You seen the twin palominos?”

      “June went right to them,” Lonnie said. “Just like Mike found the soil conservation exhibit.” But they turned in at the fairground building anyway.

      In a front stall a cream-colored mare stood drowsing, but she shook off her tiredness when she saw she had visitors, and threw her head back proudly, her silver mane rippling. And she had something to be proud of: twin colts, as rare as human twins, and both of them a paler gold than hers, but with a dark skin promising they’d be the true palomino when they grew older, a color by definition the “shade of a newly minted gold piece.”

      A blue ribbon fastened to the front of the stall said, “Special Award, Palomino Mare with Twin Colts,” but neither of them laughed at her as the two youngsters waded through the deep straw and began to nurse, pushing each other back and forth until each got a nipple.

      “Golly,” Vera Mae said, “I love horses. Everything about them, the way they look and the way they eat, and the way they smell . . . I’ve sure been around them a lot, and I never get tired of them.”

      “Did I tell you,” Lonnie asked, “that I started to turn the ranch over into a horse ranch? Everybody says there’s no money in it, but I wanted to try anyway.”

      “What happened?” Vera Mae asked. She smiled at the mare, and took his arm and guided him out into the night. They started toward the dark grandstand and the rodeo stock barns behind it.

      “My stallion got away,” Lonnie said. “Old Mulemouth.”

      “Got away? What’d he do, cut himself up on barb wire?”

      “No,” Lonnie said. “He just got away. He’s running loose on the desert.” He could feel her staring at him, somehow, though it was too dark to see her expression. He guessed maybe he ought to explain. “He was wild,” he said. “There’s a lot of wild horses around our country. Mostly just little broomtails, but sometimes a good mare gets away and runs with them, sometimes some rich man comes up and starts raising horses and gets tired of it and moves away and—”

      “I’ve never seen wild horses,” she said. “I mean really wild, not this rodeo stock, but wild and not belonging to anybody.”

      They were past the grandstand and skirting along the corrals that held the roping steers and calves, the Brahma bulls. Ahead stretched the long stable where the riding stock slept; then off in the night, dust still rose from a corral where the broncs were put up.

      “They aren’t worth rounding up,” he said again. “When I was a kid, they used to have big drives, round ’em up, break the best of ’em, shoot the rest; the broomtails were taking the country over. Now it’s not so bad, there aren’t so many. But there was this one—”

      He stopped, because she’d stopped walking and was leaning into a box stall. A head came out to greet her. She stroked the horse’s nose, and said, “Go on.”

      “Well, we called him Mulemouth. And most of the boys around there said there wasn’t any such a thing, and some said he’d been seen, but it was always by somebody you couldn’t count on. So—” He stopped again. “This is all mixed up. What do ya call your horse?”

      “Brownie,” she said. “He’s seal brown, six years old, fifteen-three. And I want you to look at his near front leg, but later. First tell me.”

      He said, “I want to. I just want to get it straight in my mind first . . . We had these two kids, Mike and June, and they were wonderful. I wanted another, and Joan was favorable . . . But it ain’t much of a ranch. People hear you’re a rancher, and they think you’re rich, but it’s the last homestead anybody’s hung on to, up there . . . Some of ’em went back to the government, and some big companies have bought up, for land and cattle or timber . . . You can’t hardly make out on a sagebrush quarter.”

      “It sure is mixed up, Lonnie . . . Take your time.”

      His hand ran down the horse’s nose, and found her fingers. She hung on tight, and that made it easier, the pressure on his fingers like the kids’, only different.

      “So I took off, we have three horses, and I packed one and rode one and left Joan the other to work the ranch. I was gone three weeks. Couldn’t get nobody to help me, nobody believed, you see and— Anyway, I built a brush fence across a box canyon. Staked my mare in there, and rode out on the gelding, we call him Bob . . . Tracked him and tracked him—”

      “This is in the desert?”

      He said, “Yeah. There are high buttes there. The stallions get on ’em, and look out. I run off two studs, and they wasn’t him. I rode two pairs of shoes right off Bob, and I tacked the third one on, and told myself when they were gone, I’d have to quit.”

      “How about food?” she asked.

      “Joan and me jerked some beef. I still had some left. And Bob and me, we were both raised in that country, we can stand an awful lot of alkali . . . Lots of that water on the desert won’t kill you, it just tastes bad . . . I picked up the track of this herd, and damn, the stud had big feet, and deep prints, like he was heavy . . . Coulda been some old truck horse somebody turned out, but I didn’t think so . . . I stayed behind him drifting. By that time, I reckon I’d been on Bob so long, if they had smelled me, they’da thought I was a horse. But I’d shoot off a gun once in a while, to keep them moving. A fella told me once, if you keep them moving, they’ll head for the rim of the desert, where a moving horse can eat and walk. You see, he had a bunch of mares about due to drop their colts, and that held him

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