Genuine delight flashed across Jack McQueen's face. He nodded, as if granting her a victory in their little skirmish, then turned his attention back to his son. He slapped his gloved hands together, shivering dramatically. "Turning out to be a bad winter, isn't it? When the sun bothers to show up at all lately, it seems as if it's only long enough to say good-bye."
Gus pitchforked a mangerful of hay to his horse. "You going to tell me what you want?"
"My, what a surly young'un you are, and after all I've done for you. Raising you up tenderly, putting food in your belly and a shirt on your back..."
Gus's lips pulled back from his teeth. "When you scalp a man more than once, you begin to run out of hair."
His father tsked and shook his head. "Such bitterness doesn't become you, my boy. But then, it's been a bitter year for you, hasn't it? And it's only going to get worse. You're looking to be about as poor as a blanket Indian come spring. I hope you weren't counting on your twenty percent of the lease money from the Four Jacks to bail you out."
Gus's hands clenched around the handle of the pitchfork. He drove it into a hay bale with such force it twanged. "I've heard the rumors."
"Well, it was hardly likely to stay a secret for long, and it won't be the first time a promising vein of silver petered out over time. The ore we've been mucking out lately has mostly been low-grade stuff, full of zinc. The cost of transportation and smelting is taking too big a chunk out of the profits, and the market's drying up. No, the sad fact is, Gustavus, the Four Jacks Consortium has decided to allow its lease to lapse."
The income from their twenty percent share in the Four Jacks had waxed and waned over the years, but Clementine knew the closing of the mine would be a sore blow to Gus. Another dream turned to dross.
"Once we shut her down and allow her to fill with water,"
Gus's father was saying, "your share will be about as useful to you as a pot of cow pee. So what do you think about selling it to me?"
Gus laughed. "When pigs fly."
Jack McQueen heaved an exaggerated sigh. "Now, why did I just know you would prove to be stubborn?" He pulled a small square leather satchel out the deep pocket of his coat. From the satchel he removed a stiff sheaf of papers. "When the latest ore samples gave such a poor showing, I hired an engineer to crawl all over every drift, crosscut, and winze. The silver is exhausted, Gustavus."
He held out the engineer's report. When Gus didn't take it, he set it down on the hay bale beside the pitchfork. The report had been prepared on a typewriter and was even embossed with a seal.
"I am wondering, Mr. McQueen," Clementine said into the silence that stretched between father and son, "why a smart businessman like you would want to acquire another twenty percent of something that is worthless."
He threw Gus an amused glance. "Do you always let your woman do your wondering for you?"
"Why don't you answer her?"
He waved a resigned hand through the air. "Oh, very well. I'll lay my cards on the table. I was thinking I could unload the Four Jacks onto some unsuspecting eastern syndicate. Those suckers back in New York hear the words 'silver mine' and they almost piss in their longhandles with excitement. It would be easier to swing a deal if I had a hundred percent of the whole caboodle to peddle."
Gus stopped his puttering to stare hard at his father. "That's it, huh? Cards on the table. You tell me you're going to try to swindle someone and you want me to think that someone isn't me." He grinned, showing his teeth again. "Now let me see the card you got up your sleeve."
Jack McQueen looked wounded. "What makes you think I have one up my sleeve?"
"Because you always do."
A wry smile pulled at Jack McQueen's mouth. "I always figured a pretty-pious boy like you couldn't peddle ice in hell.
Now here you go and prove me wrong. Maybe you got more of me in you than I ever gave you credit for." He paused a moment as if pondering hard, stroking his chin, then shrugged as if coming to a decision. "Well, hell. This time I really will put all my cards on the table." He winked at Clementine. "Even that ace I had up my sleeve... There's copper in the Four Jacks."
Clementine could see Gus trying to figure out what sort of bunco his father was working this time. "I thought copper was supposed to be bad," Gus said.
"It is if you're mining gold or silver. But not if copper is what you want in the first place." With two of his slender, clever fingers Jack McQueen tapped the report that lay on the hay bale. "The silver might be played out, Gustavus, but she's plumb loaded with copper. Now, you don't need to tell me copper is only selling for twelve cents a pound, which makes it hardly worth the cost of digging it out. But that's today. I'm looking to the future."
Gus poked his tongue in his cheek. "Seems like I remember hearing this patter once or twice before in my life. You got a way to make me rich, and all's I gotta do is put up a little seed money to get things rolling."
"If you don't choose to believe me, that is your prerogative, and ultimately it will be your loss. But to get this venture off the ground I'm going to need investors, big investors. If you want to keep your twenty percent share of what I'm calling the Four Jacks Copper Mine, you'll have to put up, say, two thousand dollars. And in case you think I'm cheating you, let me tell you right now that my share will be fifty thousand. So you can see I'm offering you a fine deal." He flashed his roguish smile. "You are my boy, after all."
Gus's head fell back in rafter-shaking laughter. "You think I'm going to give you two thousand dollars to invest in a copper mine that even you don't quite have the balls to claim is a sure thing. Man, it would almost be tempting just to finally be quit of you... if I wouldn't also be quit of my hard-earned money."
Jack McQueen's mouth hardened. "If the play is too deep for you, my dear boy, then deal yourself out. I'll give you that two thousand dollars right now, cash on the barrelhead, for your share to the claim."
Still laughing, Gus hooked his hip on the hay bale and picked up the report. Clementine brought the lantern closer. To her surprise he gave the papers over to her to read when he was done with them.
"You think I should sell out?" he said, looking over her shoulder as she studied the report.
"You must do what you think best, Gus."
He made a snorting noise, and then his mouth broke into a sun-bright Gus McQueen smile. "You're only saying that now so's you can point the finger of blame at me when it turns out to be a dumb-ass mistake."
Clementine looked up into his laughing eyes and that was when she knew it didn't matter what sort of deep and devious game One-Eyed Jack McQueen was playing at. They didn't have two thousand dollars to invest in the venture anyway, and they could sure use the two thousand the man was willing to pay them for a sale. Gus needed that money to keep the ranch alive, and she wanted that for him. No, she wanted that for herself. This was her home, her dream as well as his, and she would fight at his side to see it through.
Jack McQueen had slipped more papers out of the satchel. "I took the liberty of having my lawyer draw up the deal, giving me your twenty percent share in exchange for two thousand dollars. I even brought along the tool to sign it with." He shook a small cork-stoppered ink bottle. "I hope this didn't freeze on the way out here." He pulled out the cork with his teeth, dipped the pen, then carefully drained the ink from the nib before handing it, along with the bill of sale, to his son.
Gus's eyes narrowed on the paper. "You were so sure I'd want to sell out that you had this all written up ahead of time?"
Jack McQueen shook his head, huffing a melodramatic sigh. "That suspicious mind of yours must truly be a burden to you at times. I had two different documents drawn up, Gustavus. One if you decided to sell, another for full partnership in the newly formed Four Jacks Copper Mine. It's not too late to change your mind."
"Sure, change my mind and give you that two thousand dollars I don't have and that I'm just pure anxious to throw away into your pocket." Gus took the bill of sale from his father and read i
t over three times before he rested it on the hay bale and scratched his signature across the bottom.
"I have this niggling little feeling you will regret this someday," said Jack McQueen with a sad smile. "And then inevitably you will blame me for it. You'll twist it all around inside that righteous head of yours until I come out the villain, just so you won't come out the fool. Here's the money, all in treasury notes, no greenbacks. I expect you'll want to count it."
"Damn right."
Gus carefully examined every note. He even held one up to the lantern light as if he suspected it of being counterfeit. His father made a show of leaving slowly, as if he didn't want them to think he was in hurry to get away.
"I'm durned if I can see it, Clem," Gus said as they stood together in the barn and watched One-Eyed Jack's sleigh cut through the yard. "But I know somehow he's hornswoggled us good."
"At least we have some ready money now, when we need it most. And you're free of him."
He slipped an arm around her waist, and she turned her head to look up at him. His face was hard, almost bitter. And his eyes were dark with an emotion she couldn't read. Not fear, exactly, or anger. He looked almost haunted.
"Gus?"
His arm tightened around her, pulling her close. "I don't know if I can ever be free of him, girl. He's in my blood."
The next morning Gus showed her a newspaper that had come out of Deer Lodge only last week. A sodbuster was selling hay—at a dear price, but as he told her, they had money now and matters were desperate. As in other years, they'd only put up enough of their own hay to see their saddle horses through the snow months. This winter they needed more,
"I can get there and back in two days if I push it," he said. "The beeves just aren't making it on what little range grass they can find. If I can hand-feed 'em during the worst of these storms, enough of them just might make it."
Clementine slipped the newspaper out of his hands to take a closer look at it. "How scandalous!" she said with a little sniff.
"What's so scandalous about hay?"
"Not hay. This." She tapped the paper with a mock-indignant finger. Her lips worked hard to keep from smiling. "An advertisement for red flannel drawers for ladies. And they come all the way from Paris. Imagine that."
Gus widened his eyes and twisted his mouth into a lustful leer. "I'm imagining it."
Laughter bubbled up out of her. She tried to stop it with her hands and he stopped it with his mouth. They clung to each other a moment before separating.
She made sure he dressed warmly, fussing over him as if he were one of the children. Everything wool and fur from the skin out. Wool longhandles and three pairs of wool socks. A red-checked woolen shirt and California pants and a sheepskin jacket, and over all that a buffalo coat. Knee-high buffalo boots worn with the hair on the inside and fastened with leather snaps and brass buttons. A sealskin cap and sealskin mittens lined with wool.
He went into the kitchen, where Saphronie was boiling the week's laundry and the children were playing within the circle of warmth cast by the stove. "Daddy!" Sarah shrieked as he bent to kiss her good-bye. "You look like a bear!"
"If he isn't careful," Clementine teased as she put on her own sheepskin coat, "he's liable to stampede the cattle."
Sarah gave her mother a disgusted look. "You are silly, Mama."
Clementine and Gus were laughing together as they left the kitchen and went out into the yard. Last month, when the snow got deep, Gus had put the ash-hub runners on the hay wagon, turning it into a sled. Now she helped him add the hayrack. The air shimmied with the cold, and a fresh snowstorm brewed darkly against the mountains. The clouds were heavy and murky, the color of wet slate.
"At least it isn't snowing yet," she said. He'd finished hitching up the team and was rolling the wagon-turned-sled out into the frozen yard.
"Don't hex the weather." He shook his finger at her, laughing, and she thought suddenly that they had been doing that a lot lately—laughing. Laughing and being in love—so in love they were almost giddy with it.
He climbed into the sled and wrapped the leather reins around his mittened hands. He looked down at her and she saw the flash of his teeth beneath the tawny brush of his mustache. "If I get a chance while I'm in Deer Lodge," he said, "I'll buy you a pair of them scandalous red flannel drawers... Gee-up!"
The horses jerked into motion, harness chains jangling, the runners crunching over the snow. She watched, shivering in her baggy sheepskin coat, until he disappeared over the crest of the rise. A lone magpie flapped across the sallow sky. Her breath smoked, wreathing her face.
She told herself she was being foolish, but suddenly she felt very much alone. And scared.
He'd been gone only an hour when it started to snow.
It snowed fitfully, lacy flakes sifting out of the cloud-swollen sky. By noon, it had grown so dusky the lamps had to be lit.
And it was cold. Cold enough, Saphronie said in Montana lingo, to make a polar bear unpack his longhandles.
Clementine hung asafetida sacks around the necks of the children and slathered goose grease on them to ward off the grippe. She bundled them up into so much wool and fur they could barely move. Sarah didn't like this restriction on her freedom one bit. She stomped around the house like a martinet, trailing scarves, her little body lumpy with fur wraps, determined to show that no winter storm was going to cramp her style.
At such times Clementine would look at her daughter and wonder how she had ever managed to produce such a child. Opinionated and outspoken, demanding and bossy, insatiably curious and brave enough to face down a grizzly. So at ease in her own skin, so sure of herself that she insisted on trying to impose that certainty onto others. "I don't want to" or "I don't care" was her answer to any demand that went contrary to her own will. She never said it defiantly, only matter-of-factly. She truly didn't care. Sarah McQueen pleased only herself.
She is all that I once had it in me to be, Clementine often thought, before my father and life beat it out of me. And she worried for her little girl's future. She wished she could wrap Sarah up against the pain that was coming as easily as she had bundled her up against the cold. For as sure as night ended even the sunniest of days, life would try to break her daughter's spirit. The world was cruel to little girls who didn't want to please, and to grown-up women who bravely spoke out and went their own way.
And she worried about Daniel as well. His was such a gentle, dreamy spirit, not at all like Charlie, who had been pure cowboy from the minute he drew his first breath. This was a country that demanded hardness from a man, a tough body and a tough heart. Men broke horses with spurs and whips, and pressed hot irons into the hides of little calves. Men hanged other men from cottonwood trees. Looking at her son now, she couldn't imagine him growing up to do these things, these tough-man things. His health alone would brand him a weakling in the western code.
At least he didn't seem to suffer as much from the lung spasms during these cold months. Right now he lay before the stove content to be wrapped up like a silkworm in a cocoon. He babbled nonsense sounds to himself, although every now and then Clementine caught the word "bear." It was the only one he knew, besides Mama and Dada, and she couldn't imagine how he'd come to learn it when they'd had no trouble with bears around the ranch since he'd been born.
Clementine wished she could wrap herself up into a cocoon. She could use another pair of drawers, no matter what their color, although she already had three pairs on, so that she waddled when she walked. But cold air billowed up from the floor as if the earth were breathing ice. She finally put all female modesty aside and followed Saphronie's example, putting on a pair of Gus's trousers under her skirts. With the trousers, the three pairs of shimmies, two wool petticoats, a wool skirt, Gus's socks, which were as thick as saddle blankets, and a belly swelling with baby, she no longer waddled when she walked; she rolled like a log in water.
Sarah and Saphronie came back just then from a trip upstairs to the water closet. Th
eir breath wreathed white around their faces even here in the kitchen, which was always the warmest room in the house. Clementine began to worry about what they would do if it got much colder. The fire crackled in the wood cookstove, but it didn't seem to put out enough heat to beat back the frigid air that poured right through the walls. She and Saphronie had to keep stoking the stove, and they all stood before the open door, turning themselves like chickens on a spit. Earlier Saphronie had gotten too close, and her skirt had caught fire. They'd all had a fine laugh over that... once the flames were safely put out.
Because it had grown dark so early that afternoon, Clementine set about making a supper of bachelor fare: a stew made of canned beef and camas root and seasoned with sage. And Saratoga chips, dried apricots, and sourdough bread to go with the stew. She rattled the pots and pans and shouted "Grub pile!" just like a roundup cook, and they pretended they were out on a cattle drive.
When the children had been put to bed, huddled beneath fur robes on the hooked rug in front of the kitchen stove, Clementine took out the bottle of whiskey she kept in her remedy chest for medicinal purposes and spiked the coffee with it. She and Saphronie pushed the sofa from the parlor into the kitchen and huddled on it side by side beneath a mackinaw blanket, drinking the whiskey-spiked coffee and talking in hushed tones of past winters, both good and sad.
"Of all the winter holidays, I think everyone loved New Year's best when I was a girl," Clementine said. "It was one time when a gentleman could safely go calling on a lady without arousing talk, you know, of whether he was seriously courting her. He would pay his call between two and four. And he always took off his hat and overcoat, but left his gloves on. He partook of a refreshment of tea and cakes. No intoxicating drinks, of course. And he stayed only fifteen minutes, not a second longer."
Saphronie looked up from the sock she was trying to darn in the dim firelight while at the same time keeping her hands warm beneath the blanket. Her forehead pleated in puzzlement. "What's the point of going visiting when you don't stay above fifteen minutes? And what kind of feed is that to offer a guest—tea and cakes? A man can't properly fill up his belly on tea and cakes."
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