Fight for Powder Valley! (9 page)

Molly was staring with lifted face at the low hills rising against the darkening sky beyond the creek. In an almost inaudible voice, she agreed, “Yes, Joe. Tomorrow we'll … we'll have plenty of time to look around.”

The horse's hoofs thudded on the soft bottomland, and the wagon wheels creaked as Joe drove on to the bank of the creek. When he stopped and jumped down from the wagon seat, he drew in a deep breath and exclaimed almost defiantly, “Feel that coolness coming on, Molly. The air's different from Kansas … plenty different.”

“It certainly is.” Molly's voice was crisp as she accepted his hand to step down over the hub. “We'll need all our blankets sleeping out … and we'd best have plenty of firewood in case it gets real cold. Joey! You and Mary start gathering dry wood.”

The children obeyed cheerfully, excited and thrilled by the strange land and the new life to which they had come. Molly competently set about heating up some dinner, and a pot of savory stew was boiling over the crackling fire by the time Joe had the team unharnessed, watered, and staked out for the night where they could fill their bellies with the lush grass.

It was a cheerful and heartening sight to the man when he returned and found his little family sprawled out on pallets contentedly eating their first really good meal for days, and he stopped just inside the circle of firelight to thrust his hands deep into his pockets and survey them quizzically.

Molly jumped up and came to him as he stood there. He awkwardly put an arm about her thin shoulders, and for a moment thought he felt her trembling. Then she stiffened against him and resolutely lifted her face to the clear sky where vagrant stars were beginning to pop out. He stroked her hair gently and said:

“I know it seems pretty bad, Molly, but it'll be different as soon as some neighbors come and we get a little house built and a garden patch cleared.”

“It's … it's fine, Joe. It seems lonesome now, but I'm sure there'll be others along soon. The children are going to … love it here.”

A plaintive ululation drifted downwind from the low hills across the creek. A long-drawn wailing sound, pitched in a minor key, rising to a passionate crescendo and trembling off to a faint echo, then culminating in a wild exultant clamor of frenzied yapping that sounded like the chorus from a hundred furry throats.

A second coyote answered from another windswept knoll, and in a moment a third and fourth joined in the nightly serenade to the setting sun.

Joe Hartsell's arm tightened about his wife's shoulders. He reassured her, “It's only some kind of wolves they have out here. We'll get used to them.”

She laughed shakily. “Only … wolves.” She turned away from him to face the savage clamor. In a moment she said queerly, “They sound the way this country makes me feel, Joe. Sad and lonely, yet with a sort of aching desire inside of me to grab hold of something and destroy it.”

Joe Hartsell did not answer her. Sometimes he didn't understand Molly, and he had learned that words were useless between them at such times.

In a moment he left her quietly, and went to the fire to serve himself from the pot of bubbling stew. He did not know that the tears were flowing unashamedly down Molly's cheeks.

7

The long ride home from Dutch Springs was like a nightmare to Sally Stevens. Like a horrible nightmare from which one strives to awake but cannot do so. Pat Stevens sat beside her in tight-lipped silence. Dock was in the back of the buckboard, still bloody and bruised from his encounter with the homesteader's boy. He remained silent during the long ride also, painfully conscious of the strained relationship between his mother and father in the front seat.

Pat hadn't said anything to Sally back there in town. After the prairie schooner creaked away clumsily, he acted like a stranger to his wife, asking her about her purchases in a curt, harsh voice, going into the store for them and loading them into the buckboard, refusing to speak to the other citizens and ranchers who crowded around indignantly and demanded what he intended to do about the Hartsells.

That was the beginning of Sally's nightmare. The strange, impersonal manner in which she was treated by men who had always shown her every politeness. No one spoke to her. They acted as though she had ceased to exist. Twice, she impulsively tried to explain the feeling that had prompted her to help the Hartsells obtain food, but the men rudely turned their backs and would not listen.

It was the first time in her life that Sally had been made to feel an outcast. After the second attempt to explain, she stood back against the store front with compressed lips and heightened color.

When Pat had the buckboard loaded, he curtly ordered her to get in, while he crawled up on the seat and gathered up the lines. Grim-faced men made way for her to reach the buckboard as though she was the bearer of a dread disease and they feared to be contaminated if she got too close.

She folded her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead as Pat urged the team into a fast trot and they left Dutch Springs behind them.

Sally stole a look at the cold profile of the man whom she loved better than life itself. He sat erect, staring straight ahead, his thoughts as utterly withdrawn from her as though she were a thousand miles away.

After half a mile Sally couldn't stand the silence any longer. She timidly put her hand on his arm and cried out piteously, “I couldn't help it, Pat. Did you see that hungry woman … those half-starved children.”

Pat said, “I saw them,” in a voice that dismissed the subject.

But Sally refused to be dismissed that way. Her fingers tightened on his arm. “I can't stand to be treated this way, Pat. We've always talked things over before.”

Pat said, “There's nothing to talk over this time. You knew it was my plan not to sell the nesters any groceries. You made a fool out of me before all the men that trusted me. That's all there is to it.”

Sally shook his arm and cried wildly, “There's more to it than that. Those people were human beings. I couldn't … I just
couldn't
let them drive on hungry.”

Pat Stevens didn't answer Sally. His face was as hard as a visage carved of stone. He shouted to the team and the harsh urgency of his voice lifted them into a fast lope.

Sally let go of his arm and shrank back to her side of the seat. It was their first quarrel—their first
real
quarrel. She felt the sickness of utter despair inside of her. Other husbands and wives quarreled—but not she and Pat. They had always been so proud of that. Now it had come. After ten years. It couldn't be, a frantic voice cried out wildly inside her. But it
was
.

This man beside her was a stranger. She knew the terrible temper that dwelt inside her husband. She had seen it in action before, but always directed at someone else. She knew his singleness of purpose, the driving determination that refused to compromise once he had set his gaze on a certain goal. She had been proud of that quality of Pat's in the past, but now she was desperately afraid. A vista of loneliness opened out before her. Suppose Pat never spoke to her again!

When they reached the ranch, Pat stopped the team near the front door and got down. He went around to the back and swung Dock out to the ground, shouldered a box of groceries and started around to the kitchen. He passed Sally without looking at her, without speaking.

Dock ran to her suddenly. His blood- and dust-grimed face was twisted in fright, and big tears rolled out of his eyes. He whimpered, “Is Daddy
mad?
Why doesn't he say something? Why doesn't he lick me for fighting? I wish he would, 'stead of lookin' like that.”

Sally knelt in the hard-packed dirt of the yard and put her arms about her small son. “Daddy's not mad at you, Dock. He's not going to lick you for fighting.”

“I wisht he would. What's he mad at then?”

“He's mad at me,” Sally told him sadly. She caught his tear-muddied face and pressed it against her cheek, crying out forlornly, “Oh, Dock! I don't know what I'm going to do.”

Pat came striding back just then. If he noted the heart-breaking tableau presented by his wife and son, he gave no sign. He led the team to the barn and started unharnessing.

Sally took Dock inside and had him wash his face and hands, and change his dirty, torn clothing. She went about the kitchen fixing supper with her ears attuned for the sound of Pat coming in the front door. He was so long in coming that she began to think he must have saddled a horse and ridden off without telling her.

Her heart was constricted with a fear she had never known before. Her hands fumbled at their familiar tasks, and salt tears got in the biscuits as she rolled them out.

She stopped crying when Pat's step sounded on the front threshold. Everything was miraculously all right again. She could stand anything except to have him ride off without telling her where he was going.

She heard the creak of his rocking chair as she flew about the kitchen doing the last necessary things before dishing up an appetizing supper. When the steaming dishes were on the dining table she went to the door and called, “Come and get it, Pat, before I throw it out to the hogs.”

Pat got up heavily and came to the dining room. The set sternness of his face had not relaxed one iota. Dock came running in, fresh-scrubbed and cheerful, with only a bruise and a cut lip to show for his fight.

Pat ate supper without speaking. Sally found herself making conversation to Dock in a subdued undertone, as though the man at the head of the table were a stranger who must not be disturbed by their talk.

Pat stalked back to his chair in the living room when supper was over. Sally listlessly began removing the dishes to the kitchen. Slow anger began to burn in her breast as she went about the nightly work of cleaning up. She was through being treated like a condemned criminal. She had done nothing to be ashamed of. Pat had no right to act as though it were an unforgivable crime to buy the Hartsells some groceries.

She knew other men who sometimes treated their wives like this, but Pat had never been like other men. From the beginning, their marriage had been a partnership. They had always talked everything over, often disagreeing but always reaching a satisfactory compromise by having tolerance and respect for each other's opinions.

Sally was ready to do battle by the time the kitchen and dining room were cleaned up. She whisked off her apron and hung it up, fluffed out her hair and went into the living room where Pat sat in his favorite chair staring into the fireplace and Dock was sprawled out on the floor behind him tying and untying knots in a piece of string.

Sally stopped in the doorway and said, “Please go to your room, Dock.”

He started to protest, “Aw, Mom,” but she cut him off firmly, “Run along. I want to talk to your father.”

He got up and ran along without further argument after looking up at her face.

Very deliberately, Sally pulled up a chair in front of Pat's and sat down. She said, “This isn't going to happen to us, Pat. I won't let it.”

His strong features twitched. When he looked at her Sally discerned utter misery in his brooding eyes. He asked, “What aren't you going to let happen?”

She brushed the unnecessary question aside. “You know I couldn't do different this afternoon. There's not a bit of use for you to pretend. You would have done the very same thing yourself if you'd seen the look on those folks' faces when Mr. Winters told them he wouldn't sell them anything. Don't you deny it, Pat Stevens. I know you too well.”

“That is just what's the matter with me. I know it, Sally,” said Pat suddenly. He sounded dismayed and he looked at her with such an expression of self-reproach that Sally found she had to laugh at him.

When she was able to stop laughing, she wailed, “You frightened me by being so stern and silent. I thought you would never forgive me.”

“I'm pretty well mixed up,” he told her sourly. “I don't know what the other men are going to think. I've kept them from starting anything this long by planning to run the farmers out as fast as they came in. When my idea had its first test today, you ruined it.”

“And you just admitted it was the right thing to do.”

Pat frowned at her and shook his head. “I didn't say that.”

“You did too. You admitted you'd have done the same.”

“But that's not saying it's the
right
thing,” he argued. “It's not doing the nesters any favor to encourage them to settle down. You know that. It'll be harder for them in the end. Might be a lot better for them to go hungry right now and keep on moving.”

“Pat! You can't mean that.”

“But I do mean it, Sally. They've got a little cash-money, maybe. Those people this afternoon didn't look like they had much. What'll they do when it runs out? They'll be worse off than they are right now.
They can't stay here in the valley
.” He pounded his fist on his knee. “You know they can't. Well then, the sooner they find it out the better all 'round.”

“Oh, Pat! I don't know. It's an awful mess any way you look at it. Those poor children! And that man and woman, Pat. Their voices when they spoke of their ‘land.' All they want is a chance to make a decent living.
They
haven't done anything wrong. How can we blame them?”

“I'm not blaming them.” Pat twisted his face and doubled both fists. “I'm not blaming them at all. But what else can we do?”

Sally said, “I don't know.” She shivered and blinked her eyes rapidly. “I suppose they're camped down by the creek tonight … on
their
land. Think how they must feel after being treated like lepers in Dutch Springs this afternoon. Think of the hope they brought with them … striking out to look for a new home where they can raise a crop and feed their children.”

“It's mean,” Pat agreed somberly. “Downright murder to encourage them to come out here where they've not got a chance.” He arose and began to stride up and down the living room, furrowing his bronzed forehead.