She started to talk about the soy-bean project and the by-products of its crop. The words flowed without effort. She knew the facts, the theories, the statistics, the chemistry of the soy-bean industry as well as she knew the road to her house. She discussed them as she might yesterday's weather, or a neighbor's dog. I don't give a damn about soy beans, she seemed to be saying, I just know about them because I was roped in to lend my land and I'll be damned if I'll give my land without knowing why.
"Well, that's enough talk about soy, I guess," she said when she turned off the road to the lane leading to her house.
"I don't imagine there's anything else to know about it," Hall said.
"Here we are, Matt."
"Say, it is a nice house."
"Hollow tile and stucco. I found the plans in an old issue of House and Garden."
"I'll be damned. It looks as Spanish as the Cathedral."
"Oh, it should," Margaret said. "It's supposed to be an authentic New Mexican ranch house. Let's go in and get a drink."
Like the railroad station, the house was also covered with tiger vines. It was built around a flagstone patio. Leaded glass doors opened from the patio to the two-story-high beamed living room, the kitchen, and the back corridor. This corridor opened on both the living room and the stairs to the upstairs quarters. Inside, the living room was furnished like a quality dude ranch—hickory and raw-hide furniture, Mexican serapes and dress sombreros hanging on the walls and over the large stone fireplace, a Western plank bar with a battered spittoon at the rail and a lithograph of the Anheuser-Busch Indians scalping General Custer. The saloon art classic, of course, hung in a yellow oak frame behind the bar.
"Holy God," Hall said, "when I was a kid this litho used to give me nightmares. It used to hang in the dirty window of Holbein's saloon on West Third Street in Cleveland—that's my home town—and every time I passed it I used to see more gore pouring down old Custer's throat."