LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 5

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      CHAPTER V

      The morning after she had buried her father Hilma Ring set herself to a conscientious survey of the debit and credit aspect of her future; what were the assets and what the liabilities of Old Man Ring's daughter, left fatherless? She did this methodically and without any hindrance of emotion or grief born of the events of yesterday. Not once had she given way to tears since first she met Uncle Alf riding with her father's body swung across his saddle horn. Tears she 'd not known since the day her mother died; grief there could not be where tragedy had not trampled on love. Instead, her single inspiration, aside from the dominant one of necessity, was a vague, formless curiosity: What had this grubby little man she had lived with so long to show for all the years of bitter isolation in the Big Country?

      So, when she had breakfasted on bacon and coffee and ashed her plate and skillet, Hilma ​dragged to the doorway the blue glazed zinc trunk containing the Bible, the family album and her doll and sat down on the doorstep to investigate. She chose the doorway, flooded in sunshine and with the stupendous panorama of the tumbling divides and the Broken Horns unrolled to infinite distances, because somehow the gnawing pain of lonesomeness was less sensible away from the dark corners of the house. Out from the trunk came a square tin box which she had never dared open before; it had been a Bluebeard's cache, exclusively the prerogative of her father to explore. Almost a thrill of expectation attending turning the key and lifting of the lid.

      Nothing within to justify thrills. Just a sheaf of papers, a yellow-bound bank book, a portentous document with the arms of the United States graven in the midst of a frilled and curlicued border—and a photograph. Hilma snatched at the latter the instant she spied it and let the hot sunshine fall on its dimmed surface while she gazed at it many minutes without movement. A woman—a very young woman—gazed back at her from the glossed surface. She stood, in wedding dress and veil, one hand stiffly holding a ​bouquet in a paper cornucopia, the other resting on the shoulder of a seated man, who glared frozenly, his silk hat nursed in the crook of one arm.

      Her mother and father, these two. They had posed in wedding finery back there in a forgotten day when love was young and life lay rosy along their path. Dully, yet with a dogged insistence, Hilma's imagination began to reconstruct the picture that lay beyond that figured back drop the photographer had arranged behind the stiffly posed bridal couple. The back drop rolled up and she saw these two—the young girl with her cornucopia of flowers, the man with his sacerdotal silk hat—walk down a vista together. She saw the figure of the girl fade as if in twilight—fade until it disappeared altogether, and the man stood beside a graven stone on a cheerless prairie. Then on and on, through the vista imagination painted, the man walked stumblingly, purposelessly; he fell and rose again, fell and struggled to his feet, then went down a last time——

      The girl slowly lifted her gaze to that flower-blown knoll above the creek where yesterday she had dug a grave—the end of the ​long road. From the distant mound of earth to the photograph and back to the mound once more Hilma's eyes traveled. She was stirred to depths never before plumbed; some deep-lying, half-sensed sympathy struggled for a form of thought to clothe itself. Life: Hilma Ring never before had glimpsed it subjectively. Life, with its promise of joy and high hopes, life, which buffeted and scarred its creatures yet held inexorably to the road of obstacles, to fall and to rise again, to fall at last into the long rest; for the driven creatures on this road of life rather than concretely for the twain of the photograph was Hilma Ring's sympathy awakened.

      For the first time in her nineteen years the daughter of the sheepman of Teapot Creek recognized herself kin with that high blue rampart of the Broken Horns, kin with the blue-bonnets that blossomed just beyond the beaten 'dobe of the dooryard. Just a pencil dot in a vast chart.

      Catching at only the penumbra of this truth, sensing it vaguely as some indefinable overtone of the life that was Hilma Ring, first the girl was appalled, then blind battle lust of her Norse forefathers claimed her all its own.

      ​"Me!" she challenged a hundred-mile sweep of the Big Country, and there was no histrionic stilting in her voice, just a cold matter-of-factness. "Me, I 'm going to fight you—fight everybody. No love, no wedding veil and hand on some man's shoulder for me. Just fight."

      Speech cleared the atmosphere of introspection like a thunderstorm. Immediately she dismissed the photograph from her mind—nor did it occur to her that this hidden treasure might have been a shrine of a withered little man's devotions—and came back to hard dollars and cents. Rather the search for them, for in the box on her knees was not so much as a Mexican dollar.

      The bank book showed her father had something over two thousand dollars to his credit in the Grangers' Bank at Two Moons, but the box yielded a note for fifteen hundred dollars held against Ring, once renewed and due again in five months; interest was eight per cent. The government paper was title to the homestead here on Teapot—one hundred and sixty fenced acres with the house and water rights appertaining thereto. For the rest, sheep books.

      ​Hilma studied these with slow thoroughness. Her father's bookkeeping was primitive and followed a system all his own. The sum of three hours' solid burrowing through the maze of crabbed figures and script—part of which was in Danish, which the girl translated with difficulty—was this: One of Old Man Ring's bands, numbering about twelve hundred, was ranging under the care of Miguez, the Basque, on the highlands where the Crazy Squaw breaks out of its gorge in the Broken Horns. A second and smaller band was thrown in with the big band that Woolly Annie, the sheep queen of the Big Country, was running over on the headwaters of the Poison Spider, a parallel stream down from the mountains fifteen miles or so to the south of the Crazy Squaw. Ring had been maintaining one sheep wagon and two herders with that outfit.

      Hilma's assets, so she figured them, were two thousand sheep, two thousand dollars in the bank, three sheep wagons, with their crude equipment, and the homestead. Chief of her liabilities was that note for fifteen hundred dollars; the pay of the three herders totaled seventy-five dollars monthly and sowbelly, as the phrase of the country had it.

      ​There was no will; Hilma knew nothing about wills, anyway. What had been her father's now was hers; she took that for granted. What disturbed her most was the total absence of ready cash. She could not think of sheep in terms of dollars, and had the vaguest idea of how a sheep or its wool was minted into dollars, what were the transactions of marketing and where the buyer might be found. All those things her father had kept secret, following his fixed idea that a woman had neither competency nor right in matters of business.

      "I 've got to find money. Can't run a sheep outfit without money. Can't run myself even without money," Hilma complained querulously as she quit her place in the doorway and began to rummage through the house. She opened the pendulum door of the clock with

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