‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly. ‘You can do most of it sitting down.’
Walt wasn’t amused. ‘And you, what exactly will you be doing?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘On a dude ranch,’ I said reasonably, ‘one dudes.’
At the Post Office I mailed off to him by express delivery six hairs from the mane of the sardine horse, and motored back to the grim business of acting the holiday I’d feared from the start.
The three days seemed eternal. Riding took up the mornings and most afternoons and that was the best of it. Meals continued to be a desperate trial. The nights were long. I wished that Lynnie could have come with me, because in her company the depression seemed to retreat, but she was Eunice’s crutch, not mine. And her father, trust me as he might, would have found it hard to believe I would only ask for her daytime closeness. And maybe I couldn’t have done it. So no props. No props at all.
Yola ran the ranch with a sort of super-efficiency which looked easy, juggling staff and guests into harmony without a single wrinkle of anxiety and without any show of aggression. The fair hair continued to be worn tidily on top. Her clothes were jeans and shirt and soft flat shoes. No boots: no masculinity. She radiated friendliness and confidence, and her smile never once reached her eyes.
She didn’t go riding with her guests, and I never sat next to her at meals because most of the husbands and many of the wives conducted a dignified scramble for her favours, but on Thursday evening, when with several others I was drinking after-dinner coffee out in the open on the long porch, she dropped gracefully down into the empty chair beside me, and asked if I were enjoying my holidays, and was finding my cabin comfortable.
I answered with half-true platitudes, to which she half listened.
‘You are young,’ I said next, with great politeness, ‘to own so beautiful a place.’
She replied to this small probe with frank ease. ‘It belonged to my grandfather and then to my mother. She died a year or two back.’
‘Has it always been a dude ranch? I mean, it seems a bit hilly for cattle...’
‘Always a dude ranch,’ she agreed. ‘My grandfather built it about forty years ago... How did you hear of us?’
I glanced at her unhurriedly, but she was merely curious, not suspicious.
‘I asked in Jackson for somewhere good and fairly quiet, out in the mountains.’
‘Who recommended us?’
‘Just a man in the street.’
She nodded, satisfied.
‘What do you do in the winter?’ I asked.
There was a flicker in the eyes and a quick private smile on the mouth: whatever she did in the winter pleased her more than hotel keeping.
‘We move down south. Snow completely blocks this valley from November through March. Most years it’s May before we come back... We usually open the ranch the second week in June, but the canyons are often impassable then.’
‘What do you do with the horses?’
‘Oh, they go down to the plain, on a friend’s ranch.’
Her voice was as strong and capable as the rest of her. I watched her eyes slide round towards the paddock with the mares and foals, and pause there calmly, and return to me. Expressionless.
I smiled her a force five version of an adults-only smile, and asked if she ever found it lonely, so far out in the wilds. To this mild but unmistakable come-on there was no reaction beyond a crisp shake of the head. I was the only man there not guarded by a watchful wife: Yola wasn’t in the least bit interested.
I complimented her on the ranch food, and on the helpfulness of the wranglers. She said she was glad I was pleased. I yawned and apologized, and said it must be all the fresh air... she’d heard it all dozens of times a year, said everything she’d said so often that she no longer had to think. No use on this occasion using any jolting technique to force out an unguarded phrase: jolting her was roughly the last thing I wanted to do.
After a while I stood up lazily and said I would turn in, and she gave me the usual meaningless halfway-up smile. She hadn’t really seen me at alclass="underline" wouldn’t remember me in another month. Unless I inadvertently gave her cause.
The three bugs in her cabin worked on the audio-switch principle: any noise, and speech especially, which they picked up, automatically started the recording machine which occupied the back half of the ordinary looking transistor radio standing beside my bed. But there was little to overhear. Yola slept alone, and apart from one evening when she invited four of the guests in for a drink, the only conversations were telephone calls.
In my cabin each evening, warming by the squat black stove, I played back the day’s ‘take’. Nearly all the calls were to do with business: grocery orders, laundry, blacksmith’s supplies, and future bookings. But one call, on Friday evening, was worth all the trouble.
‘Uncle Bark?’ Yola’s voice said, low and clear. One of the bugs was behind a picture of drooping roses on the wall over the telephone table.
‘...honey.’ The occasional word escaped from the receiver in return, but Yola must have been holding it close to her ear.
‘Sure. Everything’s fine here,’ she said. ‘Absolutely no kind of trouble.’
‘...Matt?...’
‘That’s what I called about, Uncle Bark. Matt wrote me he’s having to give up in Europe. He says he can’t get near to you-know-who, they’ve got him holed up as tight as Fort Knox. So I guess we’ll just have to keep everything under wraps for a while longer.’
‘...’
‘It sure is a nuisance, yeah. But as long as we get him to you before the snows come again...’
‘...’
‘How can we? You know it isn’t built for that.’
‘...stay...’
‘We certainly can’t send him down to Clint’s with the others. We’d waste a whole year and he might break a leg or something.’ ‘...desert.’
‘We don’t want him at Pitts, it isn’t built for it. But there’s a good long time for Matt to arrange something.’
‘...hadn’t started.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure you would. But it’s too late now. How were we to know that something so goddam stupid would happen? Matt will probably be home some time tomorrow. I’ll have him call you.’
She put down the receiver soon after that: and I wound back the tape and played the conversation over again. Two unsubstantial points emerged. If Dave Teller had been too obviously guarded, Matt would have realized that the punt episode was not considered to be an accident. And the something ‘goddam stupid’ which had somewhere or other upset the Clives’ original plans might be that I’d been there to fish Dave out of the river, or might be something else quite different; something which had made the removal of Dave necessary in the first place. The horse had been stolen on June 15th, Tuesday, and Yola had asked the London hotel for Dave’s weekend address on June 19th, Saturday. So what, if anything, had happened in the four days between? Something goddam stupid...
I told Yola after breakfast on Saturday morning that I had enjoyed my stay immensely and would be leaving the following day. She smiled the regulation smile without clearly focusing, and thanked me for letting her know.
‘So if I could have my bill at breakfast tomorrow?’ I suggested.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you can’t stay over Monday for the Fourth?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
She nodded, not caring one way or the other. ‘I’ll get it ready for you, then.’
The Wilkersons exclaimed over my going. ‘You’ll miss the barbecue,’ Samantha said. ‘And the float trip down the river.’
A local man took parties down the fast flowing Snake on black inflated rubber raft dinghies: one of the area’s attractions, like the rodeo and the ski lift. The Wilkersons had asked me to join them. ‘Maybe I’ll come back next year,’ I said. And maybe I wouldn’t.