‘She sure has,’ Bart panted, ‘and I’m for it—’
In the open, she veered swiftly to the left, making for a cañon mouth, and then in letters writhing a little before Elbert’s dazed eyes: ‘Are You Doomed?’ on its white rock! The living fact of the Flats broke upon him.
‘Why, we’re home, Bart!’ he gasped. ‘The cabin’s back a ways. She’s makin’ for the last water—’
‘First water I’ve seen in some time,’ came from the other, as Elbert helped him down.
There was dusk and wood-smoke; the grinding of the coffee-mill, the sputter of bacon oil for flapjacks, a deadlock on the matter of whether a can of Michigan pears should be opened or Hawaiian pineapple—finally both, for it was a fiesta night at the Dry Cache mine, and the stores were endless. They had fared slim for some days and ridden hard. Few words, because Elbert felt a bulge in his throat from the pressure of unfamiliar joys. After supper, he left Bart and led the two horses, in their ‘cooling’ blankets, down to the last water to finish their deep drink for the night, also to refill canteens. Bart came out of the cabin, as he returned, and they sat down in the clean straw when grain was fed, leaning their backs against the fence.
That astonishing sense of unity crept over Elbert that he had known once or twice before. He remembered Bob Leadley’s story of when he was a little chap, leaving the supper table where there was a fight on between his father and mother, and going out into the barnyard where the cattle ruminated, and there was peace. Yes, he must have listened deeply to all Bob Leadley’s words. It was almost as if he had been that little boy; almost as familiar to him as that night of tequila in Cienaga, in his own experience, when he had sat with Cal and Slim (Chester and the Indian and Mamie grinding at their sun-parched corn). A warm breeze fanned his face now with a smell of sunlit rocks and pine bark and that carried him back to the night of that warm wind at Heaslep’s ranch, when Cal and Slim asked him to join them in a ride south, where he was going anyway. Exquisite ease in the very fatigue that closed in, delight of relaxation complete for the first time in his life.
The next day they didn’t stir far from the claim, only moving about the different patches of sun and shade to stretch out in the deep languor that followed days of strain.
‘Pretty near everything a man could want here—don’t you think?’ said Bart.
‘Pretty near,’ said Elbert.