by Judy Alter
My first glimpse of the mountains fascinated me. They rose in the distance, faint and purple, like small hills on the horizon. I thought we would reach them quickly, but in two hours they were no closer, no larger.
"By sundown," he said, "we'll be there."
It was barely noon, and I could not believe it would take all day to reach those tiny hills. Of course, at last, as we grew nearer, they grew larger, until they loomed like giants. No longer faintly blue, they were dark gray and black and forbidding, with no green softening their rugged edges.
"Do people live in the mountains?" I asked.
He smiled. "Of course. In the foothills leading up to them, in the valleys between. They're not solid walls of rock—they just look that way. There are thousands of trails and entries into them, if you know where you're going."
"Can we go there?"
He shook his head. "No, we're going to Wyoming. You'll see mountains there—probably more than you ever wanted."
* * *
"Come on," he said impatiently. "We're getting off here."
"Here? In Denver? Even I know it's not near Wyoming, and you're in a hurry to get to Wyoming."
"It's closer than Fort Worth," he said with a grin, "and I'm not in that much of a hurry. We have some shopping to do."
I followed him down the aisle of the train car. At the end, he stood aside with gentlemanly propriety so that I could go first. The conductor assisted me down the steps, and then I turned to Sundance: "My trunk!" I hadn't seen the new calfskin trunk he'd bought me since we boarded in Fort Worth.
"It'll be held for you at the station until we go north tomorrow," he assured me.
"We need to make sure it's taken off this train." I wasn't about to trust anyone with my trunk and fully intended to stand there and watch while it was unloaded.
He chuckled. "No, Etta. It will be fine."
Once again we stayed in a boardinghouse that he knew and where he was greeted like a king. I had half hoped for an elegant hotel, and when I finally mentioned it, he said, "Hotels are too public. No telling who's watching in the lobby."
Once we deposited our hand-carried bags in the room, he was impatient to be gone. "We've got to shop," he said. "Get you some winter clothes. Fort Worth was no good for that. Never gets cold enough down there."
We spent the afternoon in mercantile stores. Sundance held flannel shirts and huge sweaters up against my shoulders, and if they were anywhere close to the same size, announced, "That's fine. We'll take that... and this... and that." Apparently the fit, beyond a rough approximation, wasn't important.
I went away with two warm jackets, several sweaters and heavy shirts, white shirtwaists, two pairs of heavy boots, and—most amazing of all—three split skirts.
"People will think I'm improper," I complained. Fannie, I knew, would have been scandalized if I'd worn a split skirt.
"People you're going to see won't think anything except that you're smart," he said. "You don't want to be riding sidesaddle all over Wyoming, do you?"
Remembering the discomfort of our first horseback ride together, I laughed aloud. "No, I don't."
"Then you'll wear split skirts," he said, swooping the packages up off the merchant's counter and holding his other arm out for me. "And you're laughing again."
I still felt like laughing all the time.
* * *
I made no modest toilette that night. And we had no supper. As we deposited our new purchases—he had also bought himself a new heavy jacket, three pairs of pants, and some shirts—he said, "Try on the split skirt."
Surprised but not unwilling, I picked it up and headed for the screen that served to hide a dressing area.
"No," he said huskily. "Here. In front of me."
I stared at him for a long time. Then, slowly, I backed up to him so that he could undo the tiny buttons that coursed down the back of my blue faille dress. Each time he loosened a button, he brushed his lips gently—tantalizingly—across my back. By the time he reached the buttons below my waist, I was quivering.
"The split skirt," he said calmly, pulling the string that loosened my petticoat.
Wearing only a camisole, I stepped into the skirt and then walked boldly across the room. It swirled about my legs in a way that skirts never did and, at first, threatened to bunch between my legs and trip me.
Sundance laughed aloud. "It'll probably be better ahorseback than on foot," he said. "Kind of like boots." And with that he reached down, deliberately, to pull off the black leather boots he wore.
In a flash I was beside him, dropping the split skirt onto the floor. Then, as deliberate as he had been, I peeled off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt, using my mouth to tease with each button released.
Sundance moaned and reached for me, and we became a whirlwind of activity, each peeling off the other's clothes until we ended in a frantic, passionate coupling in the bed. "You're wanton," he said, "absolutely wanton."
"Only with you," I told him, "only with you."
Chapter 12
We took the train to Cheyenne and changed there to the Chicago & Northwestern for Casper. Outside Denver, the landscape changed dramatically, almost with every mile. Closer to the mountains, the Colorado plain had turned to green. It was, Sundance told me, the foothills, with forests of pine and meadows ripe for grazing livestock. Now, though, the green gave way to a dry brownness, and the land flattened. There were always mountains in the distance—but they were less spectacular, the brown, bare mountains of southern Wyoming. The land close to the train was dismal and barren.
"Is this what Hole-in-the-Wall looks like?"
"Naw," he said, "it looks worse." Then he grabbed my hand and laughed. "No, there's grass, and a stream—Buffalo Creek—and a few trees. And the walls are sandstone—-bright red. It's got a lot more color than this place."
"It better," I muttered. I couldn't imagine living in a place this much worse than East Texas.
"I can get you a train ticket back to San Antonio," he said softly. " 'Course, I won't go with you, but..."
I shook my head. "No." To turn around for San Antonio—sometimes a tempting thought—would have been cowardly. No, I didn't want to be apart from Sundance.
Casper wasn't much—mostly a collection of wooden buildings that looked to be no more than a few years old and were already falling down. The main street wasn't even one block long, and I counted eight saloons in that small place. There were few women on the streets—almost none, in fact. All I saw were Indians and cowboys.
Casper had, he told me, been the site of a gold strike, but by now everyone figured out that the "rich vein" was only asbestos. These days the excitement was oil—the first refinery had been built last year—and oil had brought lots of roughnecks to town.
I watched carefully as my calfskin trunk was unloaded from the train and carted into a mercantile store. Then I followed Sundance.
"Howdy, Mrs. Johnson," he said cheerfully to a rather sour-looking woman behind the counter. "Want you to meet Etta Place. Etta," turning to me, "this is Mrs. Johnson. She and her husband run this store. They're good folks."
Did he wink at me as he said that?
"I'm glad to know you," I said, extending a tentative hand.
She ignored the hand, nodded at me with obvious disapproval, and said, "You can change in there." She jerked her head in the direction of the back of the store, as though having Sundance bring a woman in were a common occurrence.
Head high, I went to the back of the store and soon emerged in a split skirt and a white shirt.
"I need to get into my trunk," I said.
"Etta..." His voice was a cross of question and pleading, as though he was saying "Please don't make me go to all that trouble."
"I need to get into my trunk," I repeated.
He threw his hands up. "All right. What's so dadblamed important in that trunk? You can't wear silk where we're going!"
"Just get it for me," I said.
My back to him, I
unlocked the trunk and dug down carefully until I found my miniature of Mama. Then I locked the trunk and carefully tucked the picture into the bedroll he had prepared for me.
Sundance, seeing what I had gotten, never said another word. He simply hoisted the trunk and took it back to the storeroom.
That settled, I took my first good look at him. He had somehow, somewhere changed out of his suit and into denim pants, now tucked into high boots, a crisp chambray shirt, a kerchief around his neck, and a Stetson on his head.
"Now you look like an outlaw!" I spoke before I thought.
He was definitely not amused, nor was Mrs. Johnson, and I slunk out of the store without thanking her for her hospitality.
Two fine horses were saddled and hitched to the bar outside the store. One was a bay with a dark mane and tail; the other, bigger one was a chestnut so dark it almost looked black. Both were powerful, muscled horses meant for the distance. Behind them was a mule.
"Whose horses are these?" I asked.
"Ours. Boys brought 'em in for us. I wired ahead."
"How did you know exactly when we'd arrive?"
"Didn't. Horses have been down to the livery stable for a week or more now. It's all right, Etta. Don't worry about it. Just try not to talk about outlaws anymore."
I blushed furiously and was not at all reassured to see that he was laughing at me.
* * *
It was midday when we rode north out of Casper onto broad, sweeping plains, green with grass but with absolutely no trees. The land seemed to roll around us in bluffs and small hills, so that sometimes we could see for a distance and other times I could not tell where we were going. Overhead the sky was a bright blue, and the temperature was cool enough that the sun felt good on our shoulders as we rode. It was the wind I noticed. It blew my hair into my face, ruffled the wide legs of my split skirt, whipped at Sundance's hat—and it never stopped.
"Does it always blow like this?"
"Most of the time," he said. "Better than the heavy wet air that settles on you in San Antonio this time of the year."
We rode through deep grass, sometimes startling up prairie hens or an occasional cottontail, even a jackrabbit or two. Once I pointed at a bird circling overhead, and Sundance said tersely, "Hawk. He probably wants that cottontail that just skittered in front of us."
I watched in fascination, hoping to see the hawk swoop down. But it never did, and eventually it gave up and flew away.
There were deer—mule deer, he told me—and lovely packs of antelope that ran like lightning when they saw us.
But I saw no mountains.
"I thought you said Hole-in-the-Wall was next to the mountains. Where are they?"
"Wait."
"Wait? What time will we get there?" I fully expected that mountains would materialize out of the horizon any minute.
"Day after tomorrow," he said.
"What?" I screeched, for I had fully believed that I would sleep happily at Hole-in-the-Wall that night. "Two days?"
He nodded. "Tomorrow night if we ride hard, but I don't 'spect you want to do that."
My legs were already a little sore, and my bottom was tired of the bounce of the saddle. No, all I wanted was to be down from that horse. I'd not foreseen hard riding as part of my adventure.
Sometimes we rode for long periods without speaking. I'd look at him and find him contentedly staring ahead, a slight smile on his face. I decided he was glad to be back in this part of the country, and I said nothing.
We rode in silence, but I was thinking about bank robberies, how they were planned, how a woman, dressed in the fine dresses in my calfskin trunk, could make inquiries in banks that Sundance never could. In my mind's eye, I could see myself walking into a bank, asking the banker's help with my widowed status, gradually gleaning information from him. My years with Fannie had taught me, among other things, how to use flattery with men.
* * *
Out of the blue, late in the afternoon of our first day of riding, he said, "I have a wife you know."
I turned to look at him. "You told me that in San Antonio. Her name's Anna Maria, and she lives... I forget where."
"Castle Gate."
I laughed, but this time it wasn't that happy laughter that had bubbled up in me over the last few days. "Good thing I wasn't expecting you to marry me," I said.
"She says she's gettin' a divorce," he answered somewhat angrily. "Thought she was marrying a substantial fellow, someone who would go to work in the bank in the morning and come home at night. She can't handle the outlaw life." He looked sideways at me, as though waiting for a reaction.
What Anna Maria Thayne wanted was just what I wanted to avoid—boredom!
"You don't seem heartbroken," I said.
"I loved her," he said. "Why else would I have married her? She's beautiful and she made me feel wonderful—all the things you are, Etta." He reached for my hand, but I withdrew it. He shrugged and went on. "But she wanted me to be something I wasn't... and then the love wasn't there anymore. Do I love her? Not anymore."
I asked the question most on my mind. "Was she smart?"
He looked startled. "Smart? She'd been to school... but, no, she didn't read much, and she didn't want to have to think. She wanted me to do that for her."
I dug my heels into the horse's sides and galloped away, leaving him well behind so he wouldn't see the smile on my face. When he caught up with me, he grabbed the reins of my horse and brought us both to a halt. Then, leaning from his saddle, he kissed me soundly.
* * *
That afternoon, as the sun began to move toward the west, big black clouds boiled up in that direction. Storms in Texas are sometimes fierce, but they never seemed to come from the distance that this one did as it rolled toward us.
"Sundance? It's going to storm."
He had already noticed, of course, but he seemed particularly unperturbed. "Looks that way." He shrugged.
"There's no place to get out of it," I said. "No trees, no houses." It was a statement of the obvious, and I bit my tongue the minute I said it. I didn't want Sundance to think I was afraid, and I really wasn't scared. I just didn't particularly want to get wet.
"We'll sit it out," he said. "I've got slickers for us and tarps to put over our bedrolls. We'll be fine."
With that he dismounted, unrolled his pack, and took out the slickers. I put on the one he handed me—a rubbery affair with a hood to cover my head—and watched while he donned the other one and then wrapped both our bedrolls in another long piece of rubberized something.
By now the sky to our left was flashing with lightning, and the horses were beginning to act skittish. Sundance looked at me, as though appraising, and said, "I think we best stop. Don't want the horses running away in a storm."
In that wilderness where there were no trees—I swear I had not seen a one the whole afternoon—he found not only trees but a fallen log, which he dragged away from its small stand of scrub pine to use as a hitching post for the horses.
"No sense in hitching them to a patch of trees lightning might strike," he said as he tied the reins around the log. "I'll probably just hold the reins in case it gets bad enough to really spook them."
And so that was how we sat and waited for the storm—me burrowed down in my slicker as close to Sundance as I could get, him holding the reins of both horses and staring nonchalantly at the sky.
It was a thunderstorm unparalleled. The sky burst with great sheets of lightning, thunder rolled around us as though the god's bowling game was really grand, and large drops of rain pelted us. In the end, the rain was really less than the thunder, lightning, and wind.
"I really like a good storm on the plains," he said.
I thought about hitting him. Rain was blowing in my face, and slicker or no slicker, my hair was getting wet and I could feel water trickling down the back of my neck.
"How long will it last?" I asked, thinking of the storms in Texas that sometimes blew up in seconds and were gone
as quickly. This one seemed to me to have settled in for a longer stay.
"I don't know," he said slowly. "God hasn't confided in me." Then he laughed. "It's just a late-afternoon thunderstorm, Etta. Happens all the time in summer."
We had hunkered on the ground less than an hour when it was all over, and blue sky—now dimmed by twilight—began to appear to the west.
We rode for another two hours before Sundance deemed it time to camp. Then he opened the packs on the mule and drew forth a small tent, plus cooking utensils and preparations for supper.
Oh, it wasn't an elegant supper. We ate cold biscuits and jerky and beans—courtesy of Mrs. Johnson, he told me, though I couldn't imagine any courtesy from that grim woman. It was not the finest meal I'd ever had.
"I hope we get there tomorrow," I said.
"If you want to ride that hard," he replied.
"I'm game," I told him, deliberately using a phrase I'd heard from him.
We slept apart that night, each rolled in our separate blankets, and I appreciated what he had said about nights being cold even in summer. I was grateful for the blankets and would have been even more grateful for his warmth. In the morning he made coffee, tried to fry the leftover biscuits—a greasy disaster—and we rode on.
"I'll ride hard," I said. "I want to be someplace, not just out on the plains."
"All right. You may get hungry."
"I may get sleepy, too, but I don't want to eat your campfire cooking again."
He laughed aloud.
It was a day like the previous one, except that the storm clouds didn't boil up in the late afternoon. Instead, miraculously, I saw mountains ahead—hazy at first, as though I was imagining them, and then more solid. Real mountains rising to the very clouds, but they were far, far away. On our side of the mountains was a ridge, so red it took my breath away.
"They call it the Red Wall," he said. "It's one of several hogback ridges leading up to the Big Horn Range. If we were coming in from the east, you'd really see it. But we'll come in from the south end of the wall. Between it and the mountains is the valley—it's... it's a special place, wide and hidden and... well, you'll see."