“There is no rest for the weary,” he said. “See you in a bit, Neal.”
“I’ll be right back,” Peggy said. “Grab yourself a cup.” She followed her husband out onto the small enclosed mud porch where he was putting on a pair of rubber boots.
Neal figured that Steve was filling her in on their visitor. Neal took the moment to look around the house.
It was basically a square. The walls were made of big, dark logs with white mortar in between. The kitchen occupied a narrow rectangle on the north side of the house. The table was set by a big window that looked out to the mountains on the east. Three other windows gave a view to the north, to the horse corral and the barns. Closets and a stairwell made up the south wall of the kitchen. On the other side was a large living room that made up the rest of the first floor.
The living room was terrific. A stone fireplace took up most of its north wall. A big sofa stretched along the south wall, and two big easy chairs on either side, by the fireplace, created a conversation area. There was a big, dark blue Indian rug on the floor and a large glass coffee table in the center.
The east wall was a beauty, being mostly a huge picture window that afforded a wonderful view of the Mills ranch. Beyond the porch that wrapped around the east and south sides of the house was a small lawn that had been laboriously nurtured and carved out of the surrounding sagebrush. Beyond the lawn the land sloped gently for hundreds of yards down to what appeared to be a creek bed, judging by the thin scattering of pines along its side. The land rose again on the other side of the creek, particularly on a big spur that ran down from one of the bigger Toiyabe peaks.
The mountains were a revelation from this perspective. What had looked from a distance like a solid mass was actually a series of separate peaks joined by saddles along the top. Each peak had a spur that ran down onto the flat, forming a wedge where the mountain met the sagebrush plain. Parts of the mountain were thickly wooded, other sections looked barren and rocky, still others were abloom in enormous fields of wildflowers. Clouds were beginning to wrap around the mountain peaks, obscuring the summits and softening the sharp lines of cliffs and ravines carved in the western face of the mountain.
It was a view, Neal thought, that seemed to build in evocative layers-the homey porch, the struggling lawn, cattle grazing out on the plain, and the dramatic mountains in the background.
“Pretty, isn’t it,” Peggy said as she came back in.
“Pretty doesn’t begin to say it.”
She stood beside him and looked out the window. “Sometimes,” she said, “I just pull up a chair and sit. How’s your head?”
Better than it’s been in a long time, lady, just looking out this window, being here. “It’s okay.”
“Sounds like you ran into some bad luck.”
“I feel like it ran into me.”
She gazed out the window for a few more seconds, as if she were thinking about saying something and wondering whether she should.
“What would you like to know, Mrs. Mills?” Neal asked.
“I’m not much for small talk, Neal. I’m the mother of an impressionable teenage girl and I need to know who’s in my house. So, is there anything about you I should know?”
Where to begin, where to begin… “I’ve had some troubles.”
“Drug troubles?”
“No.” Well, not my drug troubles, anyway.
“Troubles with the law?” Peggy asked.
“No.”
Neal felt her eyes like laser beams, looking right through him.
“So you’re just trying to find yourself?”
No. I’m just trying to find Cody McCall. “Something like that,” Neal answered.
She looked at him for another moment and said, “Well, there are worse places to find yourself.”
Steve came back in the door.
“How’s Eleanor?” Peggy asked.
“Even nastier than usual. She’s got too much milk for that calf and her udders are real swollen. You’d bawl, too.”
“So are you going to Hansen’s?”
“I guess so,” Steve sighed. “Actually, it’s okay. I wouldn’t mind getting another calf.”
“I’ll get some boots on,” Peggy said.
“No,” Steve said. He turned to Neal. “You want to play cowboy with me?”
The turnoff to Hansen’s place was about two miles farther south down the road. The big white clapboard house was set about a half mile east of the road. It had a two-story central section with two one-floor wings coming at forty-five-degree angles on either side.
The ranch had none of the casual, loose charm of the American West but an almost obsessive air of efficiency and order. White fences bordered the long driveway. The clapboard house gleamed with a recent coat of white paint and shiny red shutters. Two large barns were painted orthodox red, as were several equipment sheds, a garage, and a big bunkhouse that was set several hundred yards east of the house. A large lawn, green from fertilizers and neatly trimmed, was protected from the road by a perimeter of crushed limestone. A heard of holstein cattle, uniformly black and white, grazed in a rectangular pasture. A smaller herd of light brown Swiss Charolais patrolled the next enclosure.
“Bob Hansen is a model rancher,” Steve explained to Neal as the old pickup rumbled up Hansen’s drive, “and I mean that sincerely. He scratched this place out of the rabbit bush and he gets the most out of every inch. Now, Bob doesn’t have what you’d call a scintillating sense of humor, and he isn’t the kind of guy you’d sit and have a beer with, but he’s a hell of a cattle man and a fine neighbor. When I got my leg broke, Bob or Jory or one of the hands was over my place every day feeding the cattle and chopping the ice out of the creek.”
Steve gave the horn a beep before pulling into the crushed rock parking circle outside the garage where two green tractors were parked side by side, as shiny and bright as if they had just come out of the John Deere showroom. A minute later a short, middle-aged man dressed in a light khaki shirt over khaki slacks and a big gray Stetson hat came out of the barn. He had the gait of a bantam rooster. His short blond hair was carefully combed and his blue eyes highlighted a handsome face. He looked like the second lead in a forties movie, the guy who gets the money but loses the girl.
“Hello, Steve,” he said.
“Bob. This is Neal Carey.” Steve said.
Bob took off the canvas glove and offered his hand. “Nice to meet you. What can I do you for, Steve?”
“Got a calf you can sell me? I got a cow giving too much milk.”
“Well… I don’t have anything really good I can spare.”
“Don’t need anything really good.”
“Well… then I got a mixed-breed Angus and Charolais heifer I could let you have, might be good for some table beef down the road.
“She’ll do.”
“Come take a look at her.”
He led them to a corral behind the barn where a few cows and calves were lazily swatting at flies with their tails. Hansen pointed at a long-legged calf the color of mud.
“That’s the one,” said Hansen.
“How’d she happen?” Steve asked.
“Ohhh, back up in the mountains during spring pasture, I suppose,” Hansen said with an edge of irritation. “The two hands I had up there weren’t too careful about keeping the herds separated. You know cowboys these days, they know it’s a cow and that’s about all they know or want to know. Half of them move on after the first payday.”
Say, Mr. Hansen, Neal thought, you wouldn’t have a cowboy named Harley McCall working for you, would you?
“How much will you take for her?” Steve asked.
“Hardly worth me feeding her-she’ll never do much. A hundred?”
“Sounds fair.”
Steve opened his wallet and handed Hansen two fifties.
“Thank you,” Hansen said. “I do appreciate it.”
“How’s the bull business these days?”
“Terrible. Federal government’s going to put me out of business. They make all these regulations that mean I have to buy new equipment, but then the bank won’t give me the loan to buy it.”