When Laurie had closed the door, she stood with her forehead against it a little while, listening to the violent hammer of hoofs sometimes muffled by the snow, sometimes ringing upon the frozen ground, as the Fort Worth stud tried to put Mart down. When the stud had straightened out, she heard Mart circle back to pick up Sweet-face’s lead and that of the waspish black mule he had packed. Then he was gone, but she still stood against the door, listening to the receding hoofs. They made a crunch in the snow, rather than a beat, but she was able to hear it for a long time. Finally even that sound stopped, and she could hear only the ticking of the clock and the winter’s-night pop of a timber twisting in the frost.
She blew out the lamp, crossed the cold dog-trot, and crept softly to her bed. She shivered for a few moments in the chill of the flour-sack-muslin sheets, but she slept between two deep featherbeds, and they warmed quite soon. For several years they had kept a big gaggle of geese, especially for making featherbeds. They had to let the geese range free, and the coyotes had got the last of them now; but the beds would last a lifetime almost.
As soon as she was warm again, Laurie began to cry. This was not like her. The Mathison men had no patience with blubbering women, and gave them no sympathy at all, so Mathison females learned early to do without nervous outlets of this kind. But once she had given way to tears at all, she cried harder and harder. Perhaps she had stored up every kind of cry there is for a long time. She had her own little room, now, with a single rifle-slit window, too narrow for harm to come through; but the matched-fencing partition was too flimsy to be much of a barrier to sound. She pressed her face deep into the feathers, and did her best to let no sound escape. It wasn’t good enough. By rights, everybody should have been deep asleep long ago, but her mother heard her anyway, and came in to sit on the side of her bed.
Laurie managed to snuffle, “Get under the covers, Ma. You’ll catch you a chill.”
Mrs. Mathison got partly into the bed, but remained sitting up. Her work-stiffened fingers were awkward as she tentatively stroked her daughter’s hair. “Now, Laurie.... Now, Laurie....”
Laurie buried her face deeper in the featherbed. “I’m going to be an old maid!” she announced rebelliously, her words half smothered.
“Why, Laurie!”
“There just aren’t any boys—men—in this part of the world. I think this everlasting wind blows ’em away. Scours the whole country plumb clean.”
“Come roundup there’s generally enough underfoot, seems to me. At least since the peace. Place swarms with ’em. Worse’n ants in a tub of leftover dishes.”
“Oh!” Laurie whimpered in bitter exasperation. “Those hoot-owlers!” Her mind wasn’t running very straight. She meant owl-hooters, of course—a term applied to hunted men, who liked to travel by night. It was true that the hands who wandered out here to pick up seasonal saddle work were very often wanted. If a Ranger so much as stopped by a chuck wagon, so many hands would disappear that the cattlemen had angrily requested the Rangers to stay away from roundups altogether. But they weren’t professional badmen—not bandits or killers; just youngsters, mostly, who had got into some trouble they couldn’t bring themselves to face out. Many of the cattlemen preferred this kind, for they drifted on of their own accord, saving you the uncomfortable job of firing good loyal riders who really wanted to stick and work. And they were no hazard to home girls. They didn’t even come into the house to eat, once enough of them had gathered to justify hiring a wagon cook. Most of them had joked with Laurie, and made a fuss over her, so long as she was little; but they had stopped this about the time she turned fifteen. Nowadays they steered clear, perhaps figuring they were already in trouble enough. Typically they passed her, eyes down, with a mumbled, “Howdy, Mam,” and a sheepish tug at a ducked hat brim. Soon they were off with the wagon, and were paid off and on their way the day they got back.
Actually, Laurie had almost always picked out some one of them to idolize, and imagine she was in love with, from a good safe distance. After he rode on, all unsuspecting, she would sometimes remember him, and spin daydreams about him, for months and months. But she was in no mood to remember all that now.
Mrs. Mathison sighed. She could not, in honesty, say much for the temporary hands as eligible prospects. “There’s plenty others. Like—like Zack Harper. Such a nice, clean boy—”
“That nump!”
“And there’s Charlie MacCorry—”
“Him.” A contemptuous rejection.
Her mother didn’t press it. Charlie MacCorry hung around a great deal more than Mrs. Mathison wished he would, and she didn’t want him encouraged. Charlie was full of high spirits and confidence, and might be considered flashily handsome, at least from a little distance off. Up close his good looks seemed somehow exaggerated, almost as in a caricature. What Mrs. Mathison saw in him, or thought she saw, was nothing but stupidity made noisy by conceit. Mentioning him at all had been a scrape at the bottom of the barrel.
She recognized the upset Laurie was going through as an inevitable thing, that every girl had to go through, somewhere between adolescence and marriage. Mrs. Mathison was of limited imagination, but her observation was sound, and her memory clear, so she could remember having gone through this phase herself. A great restlessness went with it, like the disquiet of a young wild goose at the flight season; as if something said to her, “Now, now or never again! Now, or life will pass you by....” No one who knew Mrs. Mathison now could have guessed that at sixteen she had run away with a tin-horn gambler, having met him, in secret, only twice in her life. She could remember the resulting embarrassments with painful clarity, but not the emotions that had made her do it. She thought of the episode with shame, as an unex-plainable insanity, from which she was saved only when her father overtook them and snatched her back.
She had probably felt about the same way when she ran off a second time—this time more successfully, with Aaron Mathison. Her father, a conservative storekeeper and a pillar of the Baptist Church, had regarded the Quakers in the Mathison background as benighted and misled, more to be pitied than anything else. But the young shaggy-headed Aaron he considered a dangerously irresponsible wild man, deserving not a whit more confidence than the staved-off gambler—who at least had the sense to run from danger, not at it. He never spoke to his daughter again. Mrs. Mathison forever after regarded this second escapade as a sound and necessary move, regarding which her parents were peculiarly blind and wrong-headed. Aaron Mathison in truth was a man like a great rooted tree, to which she was as tightly affixed as a lichen; no way of life without him was conceivable to her.
She said now with compassion, “Dear heart, dear little girl—Martin will come back. He’s bound to come back.” She didn’t know whether they would ever see Martin Pauley again or not, but she feared the outrageous things—the runaways, the cheap marriages—which she herself had proved young girls to be capable of at this stage. She wanted to give Laurie some comforting hope, to help her bridge over the dangerous time.
“I don’t care what he does,” Laurie said miserably. “It isn’t that at all.”
“I never dreamed,” her mother said, thoughtfully, ignoring the manifest untruth. “Why, you two always acted like—more like two tomboys than anything. How long has …When did you start thinking of Mart in this way?”
Laurie didn’t know that herself. Actually, so far as she was conscious of it, it had been about an hour. Mart had been practically her best friend, outside the family, throughout her childhood. But their friendship had indeed been much the same as that of two boys. Latterly, she recalled with revulsion, she had idiotically thought Charlie MacCorry more fun, and much more interesting. But she had looked forward with a warm, innocent pleasure to having Mart live with them right in the same house. Now that he was suddenly gone—irrecoverably, she felt now—he left an unexpectedly ruinous gap in her world that nothing left to her seemed able to fill. She couldn’t explain all that to her mother. Wouldn’t know how to begin.
When she didn’t answer, her mother patted her shoulder. “It will all seem different in a little while,” she said in the futile cliché of parents. “These things have a way of passing off. I know you don’t feel that way now; but they do. Time, the great healer...” she finished vaguely. She kissed the back of Laurie’s head, and went away.