Jackson preserved its own wild western flavour to the extent of a small authentic stage coach waiting in front of the drug store: but the sleepy disillusioned horses between the shafts looked a poor prospect against galloping redskins. Broad raised boardwalks edged with hitching rails ran along in front of the stores in the short main street, though the mud they had been built to avoid had long been metalled over. Motels with signs saying ‘air-conditioning and central heating’ were called ‘Covered Wagon’ and ‘Rustlers’ Hideout’. Jackson was an uneasy mixture of evolution and make believe, and clearly a success.
I sat in the sun on a hitching rail most of the afternoon: did a bit of thinking, and made two calls to Walt at Buttress Life.
Yola Clive led me round a neat stack of sawn logs, up two steps, across a minimal porch and through a screen door and a wood door into the cabin.
‘Bathroom through there,’ she said, pointing. ‘And you’ll probably need to light the stove in the evenings. The snows only melted here two or three weeks ago, and the nights are cold.’ She smiled briefly and indicated a small tubful of a crumbly mixture which stood beside the squat black stove. ‘Light the logs with two or three handfuls of that.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Pep,’ she said. ‘A mixture of diesel oil and sawdust.’ Her eyes glanced professionally round the room, checking that everything was in order. ‘There’s an ice machine out back of the kitchen, if you want to make drinks. Most guests bring their own liquor... We don’t sell it ourselves. I expect you’ll want to go riding tomorrow. We usually fix that up over dinner.’ The half smile came and went, and Yola walked quietly away along the track.
Sighing, I investigated my quarters. There had been a reasonable compromise between age-old materials and modern construction, resulting in a sturdy two-roomed cabin with a pitch roof and varnished tree trunk walls. Two single beds stood on the polished wood floor in the main room, covered with patchwork quilts. A curtain across a half-shelved recess acted as closet, and the two upright chairs and the table were all home built. So, too, I discovered, were the towel rail, stool, and shelf in the bathroom. But the backwoods stopped short of the plumbing: and the lighting was ranch generated electric.
I unpacked on to the shelves and hangers, and changed from town clothes into Levis and a blue-and-white check shirt. The complete vacationer, I thought sourly: and buckled the gun belt round my waist.
After that for an hour I sat on the porch and looked at the view, which was good enough for a chocolate box. The Teton range of the Rocky Mountains stretched north and south, with dark green pine forests washing up from the valley to meet spotless snowcapped peaks. Along the bottom ran a sparkling thread of blue and silver, a tributary to the upper reaches of the one thousand mile Snake River: and between the river and the woods on whose edge my cabin stood, a wide stretch of sage brush and scrub was dotted with yellow weed-like flowers.
The woods around the cabin stood on the lower slopes of another ridge of peaks which rose sharp and high behind the ranch, shutting it in, close and private. The stream ran right along, in and out, but the only road into the narrow valley stopped dead in the parking area of the High Zee.
A bell clanged loudly up at the ranch house. I went back into the cabin and put on a sloppy black sweater which hid the Luger and looked reasonable at nine thousand two hundred feet above sea level, though the still persisting heatwave was doing a good job in the mountains too. Walking slowly along the dusty grass track I wondered if Matt Clive would know me. I certainly had no clear memory of his face on the punt, though I now knew it well from the photograph. It was unlikely, since his full attention must have been concentrated on Dave Teller, that he had taken much notice of me; but he might possibly have a sharper impression than Yola, as I had been closer to him when I went in after Dave.
I needn’t have wondered. He wasn’t there.
Yola sat at one end of a long golden wood table flanked by chattering well-dug-in ranch guests. Family groups, mostly, and three married couples. No singles except me. A bright well-coiffured mother invited me to sit beside her, and her hearty husband opposite asked if I’d had a long drive. On the other side of me a small boy told his parents loudly that he didn’t like stuffed pancakes, and every face round the table looked sunburned, vital, and overflowing with holiday spirits. I battened down a fierce urge to get up and go out, to get away from all that jollity. I didn’t see how I was ever going to make the effort to look as if I were enjoying myself.
By the end of the meal it felt as if my smile were set in plaster, rigid and mechanical to the extent that my face ached with producing it. But the hearty man opposite, Quintus L. Wilkerson III, ‘Call me Wilkie,’ seemed pleased to have a practically non-speaking audience, and made the most of it. I endured a splash by splash account of his day’s fishing. His wife Betty-Ann had ridden to the lake with him, and then gone on into the hills in a party containing her two children, Samantha and Mickey. I heard about that too, from all three of them. They asked me to ride with their party the next day, and I wrenched my tongue into saying I’d be glad to.
I lasted out the coffee. The Wilkersons promised to see me at breakfast, and Yola asked if I were comfortable in the cabin.
‘Thank you, yes.’ Remembering the German accent. Smile.
‘That’s fine,’ she said brightly, her eyes sliding past. ‘Ask if there’s anything you need.’
I walked stiffly out of the ranch house and along the dark track to the empty cabin; leaned wearily against one of the posts holding up the porch roof and looked at the row of peaks glimmering palely in shifting moonlight, with streaky cloud across the sky. My head ached with a feeling of compression, as if my brain wanted to expand and fill up with air.
How could I go on like this, I thought. Dinner had been about as much as I could manage. I didn’t know what to do about it. No use praying: no faith. If I went to a doctor I’d get a bottle of tonic and a homily about pulling myself together. There was absolutely nothing to be done but endure it, and go on with that until it got better. If I could only convince myself that it would in the end get better, at least I would have something to cling to.
Somewhere in the valley a stallion shrieked.
Maybe it was Chrysalis. If he wasn’t actually on the High Zee Ranch I thought the chances very high that he was somewhere near. Maybe Keeble did know what he was doing sending me to find him, because it was evident that I could still function normally on the work leveclass="underline" concentration acted like a switch which cut out the personal chaos. If I concentrated twenty-four hours a day, life would be simple.
One trouble with that. It was impossible.
The ranch held upwards of a hundred and twenty horses. About forty of them were penned in a big corral near the main ranch house, saddle horses for the ranch guests to ride.
Breakfast had been early, but the fitting of guests to horses took some time, even though everyone except me had been there two or three days and knew which animal they wanted. The head wrangler asked me if I could ride, and if so, how well.
‘I haven’t been on a horse for nine or ten years,’ I said.
He gave me a dead quiet one with U-shaped hocks. The western saddle seemed like an armchair after the postage stamp I’d been teethed on: and there were no new-fangled things like buckles for raising and lowering stirrups. The head wrangler unlaced the thong holding the three-inch-wide leathers to the saddle, slid them down two or three holes, and laced them up again. Good soft leather, which could go all day and not rub the horse.