“Uh-huh. I worked for the Block S two seasons back,” the boy answered.
“Good outfit,” Charlie commented.
“Sure. They say the Wineglass is a good outfit to ride for, too,” the other said. “I could go to work for Sutherland again, I guess. Thought I’d try you.”
“I guess I can use you,” Charlie said on impulse. He could. A good man always fitted in, and somehow this boy in three sentences and a look impressed him as being more than capable. Horses did fall on men. Occasionally a rider yearned for distant pastures and left. “What’s your name?”
“Bill Mather.”
“All right, Bill,” Charlie nodded. “I guess you know how to make yourself at home in a bunk house.”
Mather nodded and withdrew.
At ten o’clock Charlie looked out before he went to bed. All white, and more falling. A foot of snow in mid-April. Erratic weather.
It continued to be erratic. The Wineglass floundered in a white world for thirty-six hours. A touch of frost. Then warm rain. Dirty slush. More rain, like ice water on the bare face, slashing out of a lowering sky. Then the sun, smiling wanly, as if conscious of some seasonal aberration, and new grass slowly thrusting up green blades to surround the blue windflowers that spread petals bravely before the snow was fairly gone.
The Wineglass gathered the last of its saddle stock, and moved across the sodden plains to join the Block S south of the Bear Paws by the tenth of May, in a spring the like of which none of the old-timers recalled. Snow, rain, hail and sunshine—all in a twenty-four-hour day. Riders were crabbed, horses fractious. The plains wind whipped their faces and their tempers raw. But while a wheel could roll from one creek to another and cattle be bunched on a round-up ground, work went on.