“I mind at one of the shows at Cheyenne,” he said, “the judges was just beginning to catch on the wild cow milking trick. I won out because they caught everybody else.”
“What is the trick? I never heard of it.”
“No, they don’t do it no more. You’ve got to show milk in the bottle to win: the first one who gets to the stand with milk in the bottle wins the money. The boys used to carry milk right along with them, in the bottle, in their pocket, and make a few motions at the cow with it and then run along to the judges’ stand. It was just a race really. This time the judges was watching out and they felt the bottles and the milk was cold so that let them out.”
“And yours wasn’t cold?”
“Oh no,” said Wally. “I’d been carrying the milk in my mouth: it was right warm. That was the only money I took at that show.”
The creaking of the saddles and the mixed beat of the horses’ hoofs added to a peaceful rhythm of night noises. Passing a farmyard, a little black dog darted out with fierce yaps and Gin’s horse jumped nervously and started to trot. The other three fell into the stride; gathering speed, they cantered up a rise in the road and swung around a bend into the canyon itself. A light breeze met them. Gin closed her eyes, giving herself up to the feeling. She was thinking about Teddy. It was a good thing she had managed to get out of the house tonight. She’d been spending too many evenings waiting for him to call up.
“Probably this is one of the evenings he’ll decide to call,” she thought, and tried to be glad that she wouldn’t be there to answer the phone. “When I see him again I’ll tell him I was in town, and that’ll show him that I don’t always wait for him.” But would it do any good? Would it have any effect, and if so, what effect did she want it to have? She couldn’t figure out how she felt about him. He exasperated her: she always made up her mind to quarrel with him next time she saw him—perhaps a quarrel would break down his easy, lazy indifference to everything—and then when she saw him, she always forgot. It was only when she wasn’t with him that she was so exasperated. Silly to feel anything about him at all. They didn’t know each other very well: they hardly ever saw each other. She wondered whether to speak to Flo about it. But Flo had no use for the Camino crowd at all: she refused to consider them human. “Nuts,” she called them, and forgot all about them.
The soft ceaseless flow of words from Wally and the loping horses pushed Gin into an exaltation, after a little. She was part of the Western world at last: not the West of the daytime where people brushed their teeth and went to offices, but the real West that existed in the fifteen-cent magazines on drugstore racks and the old films that were shown at the theatre Saturday nights.
Baldy slowed down suddenly to a walk, stopped by the horses ahead of him. They all hesitated a moment, then followed Tom’s lead and turned down a path that led to the canyon river.
“I remember a good place along here,” he said, and they splashed and waded to a flat plot of ground with a few bushes leaning over from the slope. Here they swung off and tied the horses, gathering a few small logs and sticks.