The silence of the desert was like a blanket. The clear, pure air was a benediction and I slept like a log.
Chapter 3
At seven-thirty the next morning a big iron triangle clanged out a summons. At seven-forty-five an Indian lad in a white coat brought orange juice. At eight o’clock there was coffee. Dolores knocked on my door.
“Good morning, Donald. How did you sleep?”
“Dead to the world,” I told her.
“A breakfast ride leaves at eight-thirty, or you can have breakfast in the dining room at any time now.”
“How far is the breakfast ride?”
“About twenty minutes,” she said. “It will sharpen your appetite. The chuck wagon is already up there with a fire going and coffee ready. When the gang shows up, they’ll scramble eggs and have bacon and toast, Dutch oven biscuits, broiled ham, sausages, anything you want.”
“Rather hard on the horses, isn’t it?” I asked.
“What?”
“Having guests put on so much weight.”
She laughed. “The horses love it. They get to stand around while the dudes — I mean the guests are feeding.”
“Not dudes?” I asked.
“Heavens no,” she said, “only among the help. Otherwise, they’re invariably guests.”
“I’m all ready to go,” I said. “I’ll take the breakfast ride.”
“I thought you would.”
I walked down to where the horses were being saddled. She walked beside me. A couple of times her hip brushed against mine. She gave me sidelong glances and said, “We’re going to see a lot of each other during the season, Donald. This is a steady job, you know. After Helmann Bruno, there’ll be others.”
“Many others?”
“I think so. I think a whole procession.”
“Perhaps I’ll learn to ride.”
Again she looked at me with a sidelong glance. “You might learn lots of things,” she said. “It will be an opportunity for a liberal education.”
We walked out to the horses. Buck Kramer sized me up. “What kind of a horse do you want, Donald?”
“Anything you have left over,” I told him.
“You want a spirited one?”
“Fix up the other guests,” I said. “I’ll take anything that’s left over.”
“We have all kinds.”
“Suit yourself.”
“There’s a bay over there that’s all saddled. Get on and try the stirrups.”
I swung into the saddle and put weight on the balls of my feet, shifted my position from right to left, back left to right, then sat in the middle of the horse. I put gentle neck pressure on the reins, swung the horse to the left, then to the right and got off. “Perfectly all right,” I said. “Those stirrups fit me swell.”
“The stirrups fit you but the horse doesn’t,” Kramer said.
“What’s the matter?”
“You’re entitled to a better horse.”
He nodded his head to a stable boy, held up one finger, and in a minute the boy came out leading a horse that was walking on eggs.
Kramer threw the saddle and bridle on him said “You’ll take him, Lam... Where did you learn to ride?”
“I don’t ride,” I said. “I just sit in the saddle.”
“The hell you don’t,” he said. “You’re tall in the saddle. This horse is inclined to shy a little bit. He doesn’t do it because he’s really afraid, he just does it to be sociable and give his rider a thrill. Pick him up when he does it but not too much.”
“Okay,” I said.
Dudes came straggling in and most of them were helped into the saddle. At eight-thirty, we took off.
We were riding along a jeep road, but there were marks of horses in the center and wagon wheels on the side. We went up a canyon, out of the sunlight into the shadows. Buck, in the lead, put his horse in a slow canter.
The dudes bounced around behind, some of them trying to grip the barrel of the horse with their knees and heels, others hanging on to the saddle horn, others just bouncing. Very few of them sat relaxed in the saddle.
Buck looked back a couple of times and I saw him watching me carefully.
My horse was light on his feet. You could sit in the middle of him and it was like being in a rocking chair.
We jogged along for ten or fifteen minutes, winding along the banks of a dry arroyo, then came to a sage-covered flat. There were hitching racks around the edges of the flat and, in the center, a backboard was drawn up with the tailgate down, a rather elderly, grizzled Mexican with a cook’s hat and a white coat presiding over a bed of coals and a barbecue grate. There were dozens of frying pans and three or four young Mexican boys acting as helpers.
The dudes swung out of their saddles with various groans and heaves and walked stiff-legged over to the barbecue grate, stood around interfering with the cook, holding their hands out to the warmth of the coals, then moving over to a big picnic table and benches on the other side of the buckboard.
They drank coffee out of enameled mugs; ate eggs, bacon, sausage and ham out of enamelware plates; had biscuits and honey, brown toast, lots of marmalade and jelly. Then they sat around smoking cigarettes and relaxing until the sun came over the ridge and flooded the flat with brilliant sunlight.
Buck called for riders on the upper trail and about half of the crowd elected to go back to the ranch; the other half swung on the upper trail.
I took the upper trail with Kramer.
“You sit that horse pretty good,” he said. “You’ve got a nice hand. He has a tender mouth.”
“I like horses.”
“That’s nothing,” he said, “horses like you... How did you happen to come here?”
I said, “Somebody told me about it, a friend of mine.”
“Who was it?” Buck asked. “I remember virtually everybody who is here.”
“Fellow by the name of Smith,” I said. “I didn’t know him too well, met him in a bar one night. He was just back from here, had quite a sunburn, and told me about the wonderful times he’d had here.”
“I see,” Kramer said, and didn’t say anything more.
The upper trail was one that went up out of the canyon, around a high mesa, forked to the left, came out on a point where we could look down over the desert to the south and west, along the mountains to the north; then the trail went down a steep incline which brought a lot of squeals from the women, and occasionally a masculine voice would boom out, “Whoa, now! Whoa! Take it easy, boy! Whoa!”
Kramer turned in the saddle to look at me and winked.
I gave the horse his head and he picked his sure-footed way on down the steep trail, down to the bottom of the canyon through sagebrush, and about eleven o’clock we came to the ranch house.
We unsaddled and went out to the swimming pool. They served coffee.
Most of the guests went swimming.
Dolores showed up in an elastic bathing suit that clung to her like the skin to a sausage.
“Coming in, Donald?” she asked.
“Perhaps later.”
She leaned over, dipped her hand into the water, held up slim fingers, snapped them at me, throwing a tantalizing spray of drops in my face. “Come on in now,” she said, and ran down the ramp as lightly as a deer.
I went into my cabin, put on a bathing suit, came out and jumped in the water.
Dolores was over at the other end of the pool but, after a moment, she came over to me.
“You aren’t big, but you’re certainly well built, Donald,” she said, her right hand rested lightly on my bare shoulder.
“Talk about being built,” I said, looking her over.
“Yes?” she asked, and the fingers of her right hand left a trail of fire down my bare back; then she was swimming away and talking to a bulging woman in her fifties who was splashing around in the pool; then she was over batting her eyelashes at one of the men and, almost immediately, swam over to his wife and spent a few minutes with her.