I tell you,” Lonnie asked, “that I started to turn the ranch over into a horse ranch? Everybody says there’s no money in it, but I wanted to try anyway.”
“What happened?” Vera Mae asked. She smiled at the mare, and took his arm and guided him out into the night. They started toward the dark grandstand and the rodeo stock barns behind it.
“My stallion got away,” Lonnie said. “Old Mulemouth.”
“Got away? What’d he do, cut himself up on barb wire?”
“No,” Lonnie said. “He just got away. He’s running loose on the desert.” He could feel her staring at him, somehow, though it was too dark to see her expression. He guessed maybe he ought to explain. “He was wild,” he said. “There’s a lot of wild horses around our country. Mostly just little broomtails, but sometimes a good mare gets away and runs with them, sometimes some rich man comes up and starts raising horses and gets tired of it and moves away and—”
“I’ve never seen wild horses,” she said. “I mean really wild, not this rodeo stock, but wild and not belonging to anybody.”
They were past the grandstand and skirting along the corrals that held the roping steers and calves, the Brahma bulls. Ahead stretched the long stable where the riding stock slept; then off in the night, dust still rose from a corral where the broncs were put up.
“They aren’t worth rounding up,” he said again. “When I was a kid, they used to have big drives, round ’em up, break the best of ’em, shoot the rest; the broomtails were taking the country over. Now it’s not so bad, there aren’t so many. But there was this one—”
He stopped, because she’d stopped walking and was leaning into a box stall. A head came out to greet her. She stroked the horse’s nose, and said, “Go on.”
“Well, we called him Mulemouth. And most of the boys around there said there wasn’t any such a thing, and some said he’d been seen, but it was always by somebody you couldn’t count on. So—” He stopped again. “This is all mixed up. What do ya call your horse?”
“Brownie,” she said. “He’s seal brown, six years old, fifteen-three. And I want you to look at his near front leg, but later. First tell me.”
He said, “I want to. I just want to get it straight in my mind first . . . We had these two kids, Mike and June, and they were wonderful. I wanted another, and Joan was favorable . . . But it ain’t much of a ranch. People hear you’re a rancher, and they think you’re rich, but it’s the last homestead anybody’s hung on to, up there . . . Some of ’em went back to the government, and some big companies have bought up, for land and cattle or timber . . . You can’t hardly make out on a sagebrush quarter.”
“It sure is mixed up, Lonnie . . . Take your time.”
His hand ran down the horse’s nose, and found her fingers. She hung on tight, and that made it easier, the pressure on his fingers like the kids’, only different.
“So I took off, we have three horses, and I packed one and rode one and left Joan the other to work the ranch. I was gone three weeks. Couldn’t get nobody to help me, nobody believed, you see and— Anyway, I built a brush fence across a box canyon. Staked my mare in there, and rode out on the gelding, we call him Bob . . . Tracked him and tracked him—”
“This is in the desert?”
He said, “Yeah. There are high buttes there. The stallions get on ’em, and look out. I run off two studs, and they wasn’t him. I rode two pairs of shoes right off Bob, and I tacked the third one on, and told myself when they were gone, I’d have to quit.”
“How about food?” she asked.
“Joan and me jerked some beef. I still had some left. And Bob and me, we were both raised in that country, we can stand an awful lot of alkali . . . Lots of that water on the desert won’t kill you, it just tastes bad . . . I picked up the track of this herd, and damn, the stud had big feet, and deep prints, like he was heavy . . . Coulda been some old truck horse somebody turned out, but I didn’t think so . . . I stayed behind him drifting. By that time, I reckon I’d been on Bob so long, if they had smelled me, they’da thought I was a horse. But I’d shoot off a gun once in a while, to keep them moving. A fella told me once, if you keep them moving, they’ll head for the rim of the desert, where a moving horse can eat and walk. You see, he had a bunch of mares about due to drop their colts, and that held him down. Even so, sometimes old mares’d drop out past me, they couldn’t keep up. None of ’em was worth nothing, just broomtails. I wanted to see a colt, see if it was any better than its mama.”
“You never got to see Mulemouth, then?” Still holding his hand, she ducked under Brownie’s head, and came up facing him, close. Natural as if they’d practiced for a springtime, she relaxed against his shoulder, most of her weight on the stall door.
“Bob and me kept them moving so that Mulemouth would have to stay in front, picking the way, finding feed and water. There was pretty good graze back where I’d left my mare, and anyway, a wild stud’ll almost always stop and try and add a good mare . . . All of a sudden, he heard her whinnying, and the last six miles it was me and Bob right after him, and the mares scattering to hell and gone. When I pulled my trap, they all come up against it from outside, whinnying to papa. But he was in there with our Betsy, seventeen hands tall and prettiest horse I ever did see, golden buck with black mane and tail and four black legs. And in good shape, even then. A horse that could stand all that and still look good—”
“Money couldn’t buy him,” Vera Mae said.
“Naw. And you could always sell his colts. He was plenty mad, but not bronco-mad, not mad enough to kill himself, like some little ole wild studs’ve done . . . I went and got everybody I knew, and we got enough ropes on him to make him say uncle, and trucked him up the mountain and into a breaking corral I’d built, ten feet high and solid logs.”
He stopped. Her cheek moved up against his for a second, and then away. She said, “I never heard anything like that. I never knew a cowboy didn’t have something like that, a lost gold mine, or a wild horse that was really worth money, or a place in the desert where there is all the water you want two feet down or—you know.”
He said, “Sure. When I was traveling around, we’d talk about them. Mine was where holdup men in the old days had buried a lot of silver . . . I’m still going to find it.” He laughed. “It’s up the head of Bear Creek Canyon, sure as hell. Wore out the knees of three pairs of levis when I was a kid, climbin’ around there.”
She said, “Yes. But you went out and got the stallion that was worth the fortune.”
He thought. “You might say I had to. But you’d be smarter if you said I was lucky.”
“How much jerky did you have left when you finally corralled Mulemouth?”
He laughed again. “Oh, it had been gone since a couple of days after I cut his trail.”
The girl moved away from him, and he could see her face dimly in what light the single watch bulb at the other end of the stable gave. “You got more guts than anybody I ever knew.”
In the night wind, his shoulder was cold where she’d moved away. “Maybe so,” he said. “But they’re a damn poor substitute for brains.”
Her laughter startled Brownie, and the horse threw his head up, shoving
