letters was in his pocket, but he had not heard from Prim, although he had written her two or three times a week. A paragraph in his mother’s letter stood out vividly in his mind: “Prim Munro’s gone for the summer—to the highlands, some say, but not a soul seems to know where. . . . Before she left, Crowter the rag-buyer was seen with her along the highroad and in the town of a Saturday night. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think you should know . . .”
He had written Prim again last night, an angry letter with words crossed out and then put in again. What did she mean, running with Crowter after what they had been to each other that night on the shore? And why hadn’t she answered his letters? What was he to think of her, anyhow?
He felt foolish, remembering the words he’d so painstakingly put down the first weeks at the Red Hill Ranch—“Prim, my dearest one . . . Prim, my very own . . .”
Before him now was the wide river he had crossed the first day he was in the Park, and the ranch house south of the pole bridge was the home place of Monte Maguire. As Tommy had directed, he turned in at the gate and followed the rutted road along the riverbank to the ranch house with the dirt roof that sprouted grass and weeds and small tomatored flowers. He tied the team to the hitching post, walked across the bare yard, and knocked on the front door. A middle-aged woman with thin gray hair drawn tightly back from her high bulging forehead opened the door, looking at him questioningly, her pale lips pursed.
“Is Monte Maguire in?”
“You’ll find her at the corral. She’s not often in the house, except to eat and sleep.”
He drove the lumber wagon to the corrals. Back of the barn was a smaller corral, and it was there he saw her. She was bending over a bull that lay on a pile of hay in one corner. She held a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and Kelsey could hear the heavy, rasping breathing of the bull as he walked toward her. She bent lower, setting the bottle aside, trying to force the bull’s mouth open.
“Let me do it,” Kelsey said.
She straightened, wiping sweat from her forehead. “He’s got pneumonia, I figure. One of those Missouri bulls I bought this spring, and the altitude’s hard on ’em. I thought I ought to drench him.”
Kelsey forced the animal’s head back and the mouth open. The bull was feeble. Slobbers ran from his mouth and a yellow discharge from his nose. Monte poured the whiskey down the throat. The bull snorted and choked, but he made no attempt to rise. He was gaunt, the ribs showing under the yellowish-brown hide. He closed his eyes, making an ugly sound.
“Hell,” Monte Maguire muttered, “he’s gonna die anyhow. I just as well have drunk the whiskey and rubbed the bottle on his belly.” She glanced at Kelsey and added dryly, “It was good whiskey and wouldn’t have hurt me—though I see it pains you to think of me, a woman, having a taste of whiskey.”
A thin smile quirked his lips. “I no longer think of you as a woman, Mrs. Maguire.”
A flush spread under the tan of her skin. He was surprised to see anger in her eyes. Her words came out cold and steady. “A lot of men have, Mr. Cameron. And what’s your business here this mornin’? Speak up! I’m not goin’ to stand around all day.”
“Tommy said I should mention I was after a load of rock salt.”
“Get it at Faun Gentry’s. That’s where I do my trading.”
She picked up the empty whiskey bottle and walked away, leaving him standing beside the sick bull.
He drove on, hearing the meadowlark’s clear, sweet notes from the willows. The town of Walden lay on a rough plateau above two rivers. The scattering of log and frame buildings stood lonely and windswept. Approaching the single block of main street, Kelsey felt again a sense of shock and disappointment. There were no trees or shrubs, only the buildings, naked and bold and yet with a sense of unreality about them, as though they had been hastily dumped there on the gray land and might be gone tomorrow. Over them stretched the sky, high and blue and clean, curving down to rest on the tented peaks to east and west.
A woman was hanging out washing before a small log house, her long full skirts hitched up at the waist, showing the men’s boots she wore to wade through the mud, for the earth was soft from a recent rain. The wet clothes whipped in the wind, startlingly white in contrast to the shabby buildings.
The main street was wide, a stretch of mud rutted by the tracks of buggies and wagons. It was splotched with piles of horse manure, some old and some fresh and steaming, a few rusting tin cans, pieces of wood, and sodden fading newspapers that lay against the bleached uneven wooden sidewalks.
To Kelsey’s left a low dirt-roofed log building carried a crude wooden sign with the rough letters BLACKSMITH. Next to it was a similar log cabin, but the sign on the front was so faded he couldn’t make out the words. Beyond these was obviously a hotel, a double-story frame structure painted pale buff and sporting a square balcony facing the street. Beneath the balcony a porch was trimmed in brown scroll and flanked by pillars painted chocolate-brown. Next to the hotel was what appeared to be a sort of town hall, a grayish-white frame building with a cupola and bell on top. Farther on, Kelsey glimpsed a water tower and windmill.
Opposite the hotel was a store building; a faded red-and-white-striped awning jutted out to shade the wooden sidewalk: GROCERIES & HARDWARE. On up this side of the street were saloons and hitching racks and another large frame store building with the word GENTRY’S painted in large black letters across the board front.
As he drove toward Gentry’s store the street scene was one of slow activity. Men talked in groups of twos and threes, and occasionally a woman made her way up or down the street with groceries in her arms. But the town was dominated by the men. Cattlemen and cowhands stood in front of the saloons, talking markets and cows. Their hats rested low over their eyes or far back on their heads, showing the narrow strips of white forehead. Other men moved up and down the street, mingling with the storekeepers and saloon owners. As Kelsey got out of the wagon, tied the team to the hitching rack, and looked around, he noticed the small white frame church east of the main street. It had a sharp, thin steeple pointing up toward the blue. He felt a sense of satisfaction when he looked at it, and a part of him applauded those who had made a church possible in this isolated, crude country. He remembered that Jediah said preachers had the hardest time trying to make a living in the Park, for ranchers made up the larger part of the population and didn’t often drive twenty or thirty miles by buggy to attend church.
“That don’t mean they’ve got no religion,” Jediah had said. “Man can’t live in this country, with the big peaks and seein’ life all around him every spring, without havin’ a humble and grateful feelin’ toward something. Don’t matter what you call it, son; you’ll know it’s there when you been in the Park a while.”
Kelsey walked across the wooden sidewalk, looking at the half-dozen men lounging in front of the building. Their friendly, curious faces were turned toward him in frank appraisal. One of them was talking. “. . . and the judge, he come out dressed like he was ready to hold court and he looked at that cow dead by the meadow fence. Then he turns to Shorty, his hired man, and says, ‘I presume she must have expired during the night.’ ”
The men burst into laughter, and Kelsey smiled as he walked into the store. The air smelled of dust and cigar smoke. Confusion lay over everything, as though all the goods brought into the valley had been tossed here and there with no thought of arrangement. Counters lined the walls, and big wooden tables in the center of the store were covered with all manner of materials—bolts of dress cloth, kegs of nails, harness, shoes, canned goods, horse liniments, saddles, boxes of candy.
Kelsey walked between the tables, brushing against them, trying not to knock things onto the floor. He saw a little bald-headed man behind a counter, a man with a tuft of sandy-colored hair above each small pink ear, and he knew that this must be Faun Gentry.
Faun was smoking a cigar. It hung in the corner of his mouth, the black stub moving up and down in the yellow skin of the thin sagging face. The sunken brown eyes peered from wrinkles of flesh, making Kelsey think of a bloodhound. Faun was