by Moonwitch
The sky was an angry slate, and there was moisture in the air, a sharp and clinging moisture that signaled another snow. Three since the end of October, and here it wasn't even Thanksgiving yet.
The pinto eased its way diagonally down the steep slope of a low hill, picked its hooves high to cross the tracks, and settled into a slow walk as Doug urged it toward Main Street. He was greeted with smiles and he returned them broadly; he was greeted with tipped hats and genteel nods, and he raised his own hat in turn. So normal was it, so mannered and precise that he thought he would scream by the time he reached the office and set the pinto to the hitching post.
No one was inside. He dumped his hat on the desk and glanced in at the cell block housing two drunks still sleeping it off and a mousy little man who had tried to break into Daniels's place and rifle the safe. He figured Kurtz would give the man thirty days--enough to freeze him solid-and then chase him out of town. In December that was tantamount to a hanging.
The door swung open behind him just as he was slipping out of his sheepskin coat. The blast of chilled air made his teeth chatter, and he glared until Harley closed it again and moved to stand with hands extended near the Franklin stove.
"You're a stranger, " Doug said uneasily, his smile starting and stopping as though he could not control it.
Harley shrugged his broad shoulders. "Just been to the bank. "
"Really?"
Harley glanced over at him without turning around. "You best be civil to me now, Sheriff. You're talkin' to someone what's goin' t'be about the biggest landowner in this here part of the whole damned territory. M 'be next to the . . . to Mrs. Munroe, that is, of course."
Doug looked at him, not quite understanding and not knowing whether he dared smile or not. Peterson's sense of humor was something he had never managed to get a handle on, and there had been some times when he had laughed and discovered that the man had been perfectly serious. Rather safe than sorry, he cautioned himself, and contented himself for the time being with a polite and quizzical stare.
"Well?"
Doug blinked. "Well what? Harley, I'm just a poor, dumb Indian. If you want your mind read, you'll have to go see Amanda. I'm only the sheriff. "
Harley grinned, took off his hat, and began a close examination of the brim.
"Damn it, Harley!"
"I'm thinkin', I'm thinkin'."
"About what, for God's sake?"
"About how to say this, Doug. I ain't really sure that I understand it myself. "
"Well try. Please. Before I beat it out of you."
Peterson straightened, grinning as he shoved his hands into his coat pocket. "The Circle B," he said. "If there ain't no hitches 'tween now and next summer, I'm goin' to be the owner. "
"You're kidding. "
"Not a bit," Harley said, pulling himself up as though he were a preening eagle. "Just signed my part of the papers. Wilder and me made ourselves a deal. He's goin' to get the harvest and spring profits the first year, I get everything else after. Course it ain't as big as it was when that old crook, Longstreet, had it. Seems he sold about a full third of it to that jackass Arnie Martin on the other side. Still . . . , " and he
shrugged.
"Wait a minute," Doug said. "I don't get it. You said you signed your half of the papers. Wasn't Wilder there? Didn't you see him sign?"
"I got business to do," Harley explained. "Besides Ryan was there. He's no fool. He knows I'll tear him limb from limb if he tries somethin' funny . "
"All right, then, " Doug said, not wanting to frown. "But what don't you understand, Harley? It sounds . . . not exactly usual, but all right. "
"There's this thing called an option. "
Doug nodded. "Yeah. I know it. Clause in the contract that says either one of you can change his mind without penalty . " He saw Harley's expression and smiled. "Without having to pay anything, or lose any money. "
"Oh yeah, I knew that. Well, this option says all's right come the first of July next year. I think '82 is goin' to be one hell of a year for me, Doug. One hell of a year. " And he grinned.
Doug saw the joy in the man's bright eyes, and he came around the desk quickly, pumping Harley's hand eagerly and thumping his shoulder hard enough to raise dust. He laughed, stopping just short of hugging him.
"Well, I'll . . . be damned, " he said. ''I'll be . . . damned. " Then he frowned and stepped back a pace. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Didn't this guy Wilder just buy that place from Hope last month? I mean, he's only had it a month. "
"Yeah, that's right. "
"Then-"
Harley spread his hands. "I don't know," he said frankly, "and I ain't askin' nothin' to anyone. He wants to make his money in damned funny ways, that's all right with me. He's got more gold in Ryan's bank than anyone around, so I hear tell, and that tells me he knows what he's doin'. And since he wasn't complainin' about the deal, I wasn't about to open my big mouth and spoil it. All I know is, Livy's as happy as a pig in shit and that ain't no lie, Doug. You should've seen her face when I told her why I was comin' in today. Damned near made me break down, it did. She looked like a waterfall after a heavy rain. "
Doug perched on the corner of his desk and combed his fingers through his hair, tugged gently at an earlobe. "Something else, isn't it, Harl. I tell you, friend, if this doesn't get about giving you religion, nothing on this God's earth will, that's for sure."
"Livy got enough for the both of us, thank you."
Doug laughed quietly. "I guess she does at that. And . . . " He looked to the barred front window and the wagons passing outside, their teams' heads bent away from the wind. "What does Amanda say about all this?"
"Why don't you ask her your own self?"
He began plucking at the dirt on his trousers. 'Tm kind of busy these days, Harl. With not much left to do on the range and the farms, especially south of the tracks, I got my hands full with guys coming in to raise a little hell before they all get themselves snowbound . "
"Sure," Harley said. He moved toward the door, stopped and turned around as he reset his hat. "Listen, Doug, you don't be a stranger, hear?"
He looked up and smiled. "I won't be. Really. That's a promise.
"Good. 'Cause the way you're walkin' around now, folks'd think you was kin of Garfield when he died."
''I'm kin to no one, Harley, " he said quietly. "You know that. "
"And you know what I mean, Sheriff. "
He almost nodded, caught himself in time, and said nothing more until Peterson decided it was time for him to head home. As he stepped outside, a flurry of light, dry snowflakes gusted over the threshold.
There was a small room off the side of the restaurant's kitchen that Carla, in one of her increasingly frequent moments of sheer boredom, had turned into a tiny office for herself. Lonny, who had suffered a severe fall two weeks before, was still upstairs in his bed. She knew he was dying.
She wished every night he would ring in the new year by doing it, instead of spoiling that celebration the way he had her Christmas, making her stay in and fussing over him as though he were the most precious thing in her life. She scowled, wondering why she just didn't go up there now and slip her knife under his ribs.
It would be so easy-so terribly easy. And the pleasure she would get from it would be worth the potential trouble.
Unfortunately she would have no excuse for doing it, at least none that would suit the law. Not the way Diane had with that ugly little man from Four Aces.
The kerosene lamp on the shelf over the desk flickered wildly as a draught slipped through the window in the rear wall . She shivered and pulled her shawl more snugly around her shoulders. Then she stared again at the letter she had received in the afternoon mail.
She still did not like what it said, but she knew she had no choice. Patience was something she had never been saddled with before, and she was almost to the point where she was ready to forget it, take the money she already had, and head further west. Not San Francisco. Some
place like Los Angeles where she would fit in and could spend all her time in a grand mansion overlooking the ocean, where it never snowed except for miracles, and where she would never have to hear of places like Wyoming.
Patience.
She spat dryly and decided it was about time to pay a visit to Douglas. That part, at least, wasn't so bad.
TWENTY
A breeze that spoke gently of a dying winter, and the spring to come, drifted in through the open window, teasing Amanda's hair around her shoulders, causing a quivering to shake the first wild flowers of the year in their vase on the dresser. Water from an early morning shower still dripped from the eaves, and its music was perfectly in tune with the song she was humming.
She picked up the piece of worn, deeply creased paper and read it again, noting how bold was the writing, how assured the name elegantly lettered at the bottom.
14 January 1882
My dear Amanda,
This letter written so early in the new year will come as a shock to you, I know, but I believe that I have some news that I think you will find extraordinarily close to what I have been dreaming about these past few, empty months .
You will remember, and with some very proper anger I will assume, the few days I spent with you last August. On that Friday, you will also recall, I had run into Mr. Ephraim Wilder of Kansas and points East, and had struck up an acquaintanceship that I had thought might prove to be financially, as well as personally, satisfying.
Well, my darling, it has, at last .
As of the 11th of this January, in the year of our rather overweight lord, Chester A . Arthur, I severed my relationship with my old employer and became a partner with Mr. Wilder.
What does that have to do with us?
Amanda, darling, I am to be in charge of all that man's Great Western operations . And the project that he holds most dear to his mercenary little heart right now is that ranch he purchased from the second, or should I say new, Mrs. Munroe and subsequently began arrangements to sell to Harley Peterson.
Well, Amanda, I will be coming back to Wyoming shortly after the beginning of April-or May, depending on the whim of Mr. Wilder, who tends to change his mind quite a lot-to see if Mr. Peterson is still willing to complete the option clause that Mr. Wilder and he agreed upon last year. I have no doubt, of course, that Mr. Peterson will jump at the chance to close the deal once and for all . He is a good man . He deserves this .
You are, of course, free to mention this to him if you like . I myself will be writing to him as soon as I complete this missive to you .
I cannot wait to see you again, Amanda. My dreams, 1 must admit, have been rather disturbing during this miserable winter past .
I hope you have not forgotten me .
Amanda reread the letter a third time, though there was no need. In the two months since she had received it, she had taken it out at least twice a day, just to be sure that she had not been dreaming. At first she'd nearly been driven mad with frustration because he had not included on either letter or envelope a return address for her to respond to. But the promise of his coming back to Coreville for what was obviously more than a mere handful of days soon enough overrode all other emotions, and all of her objections.
Harley, of course, had been almost delirious with excitement, voicing to her out of Olivia's hearing that he had not been sure he had done the right thing, had had few nights' sleep during the winter just waiting for word that Wilder would not stop him from owning the Circle B. And whatever doubts Amanda had had about the deal herself were swept away in his enthusiasm, even when he kept wondering aloud if Wilder was really as crazy as he seemed.
Amanda did not care.
She would have put up with anything just to have Trevor come back for good.
Not, she thought as she tucked the letter back in her jewelry case, that it had been a bad winter. It had not been, despite all Carl's dire predictions. From Christmas through March the land had been covered with snow, but there had not been a blizzard the entire time. Instead there had been only a periodic fall that served to keep the trees laced with white gold, the streams edged with crystalline ice, and the air fluffed with an aura of cotton.
She had taken many walks through that fantasy of ice and glittering diamonds, relishing the cut of the air against her cheeks, the sharp tingling that filled her lungs. Part of it was due to Alex's almost painfully transparent joy at marrying Hope. The ceremony had taken place in Reverend Campbell's church, and there was scarcely room for a snake to squeeze in, so great had been the congregation. With so few events to mark the lonely march of winter's progress, the entire community had declared a holiday that had had her weeping with happiness from the moment of the organ's first thunderous pealing to the time when the last guest staggered off into the night, two days later.
The house on the western reaches had not been completed, so Alex and his new bride moved into the smaller version of the main house that stood several hundred yards to the north-the house that had once belonged to Harley Peterson, before he'd married Olivia.
The rest of her almost meditative contentment was due to a settlement she had made with herself. It had not been a sudden event, but one that she realized she had reached one morning upon awakening.
There was no use consuming herself with guilt, with confusion, with the nightmares she created out of thin air. Since it was more than clear that Doug Mitchell was lost to her not only as a furtive and somehow illicit dream, but also as a friend, then she would wait for Trevor's return.
And if he did not propose to her in the first five minutes of their first meeting, she would do the deed for him.
Love, she had decided, would come later. The infatuation she now felt would have no trouble blossoming into the full fruit of that which would protect her for the rest of her life.
And once she had decided, she had seen a clarity to the world around that had not existed before. She stopped behaving like an adolescent and became an adult, with adult pleasures and adult wisdoms. She began taking Bess with her on her solitary excursions and showed her the wonders of the forest-not the grandeur of its sweep up toward the white-topped peaks, though that was a part of it, but all the tiny things that built toward that magnificence: the snow flowers trembling beside a stream so clear it seemed the rocks in its bed were covered only by air; the tracks of deer, elk, cougar, bear, marching through the woodland along invisible trails; the empty mouth of the silver mine abandoned for the season, and the gouts of steaming water from the hot springs on the other side of the broad-based hill through which it had been cored. The stark relief of birds in flight. The melancholy and dramatic sight of cattle huddling in a single huge mass for warmth, while bulls worked their way across the pastures, digging through the snow for grass to eat.
Bess had been silent the entire time.
And Sam, when he chose to accompany them, accepted her taking of his hand and tugging him to this treasure or that, demanding that he speak more than five words at a time so that she might understand how the world worked.
The child had never again mentioned Trevor, but Amanda knew that she would accept his continuing presence with time; as would she.
She reached out, then, and touched her reflection in the bedroom mirror. She smiled and went into the living room where Hope was waiting to take lunch with her.
The girl, she thought, had changed since her marriage; the doll-like quality had altered subtly into something that mirrored a previously unknown strength. She had filled out, and her white-blond hair had taken on a luster that could not come with a thousand strokes of brushing. She was already seated at the table and rose with a broad smile when Amanda entered.
"For heaven's sake, Hope, " she said, taking her chair, "you make me feel like an old dowager when you do things like that. "
Hope laughed, her eyes vanishing in a veil of soft, pink flesh. "Matriarch, " she said.
"What?"
"Matriarch, " she said again. ''That's what you are, you know
. Queen of all this land. " Her laughter filled the room. "You know, Amanda, you really don't understand how important you are, do you?"
Amanda waved away the remark.
"No, really. I think that sometimes you might look at yourself as a big frog in a little pond, but I know that even the governor writes to you now and then for something or other. "
Amanda felt a blush working up from her chest. What Hope said was true, but she had been trying to keep all such correspondence between herself and the governor. She did not fool herself into believing that her wealth of land was inconsequential, but neither did she suffer the delusion that she could make or break kings, as the English saying went.