“Did you now?” I said.
“Over on Pumpkin Ridge,” said Weizkowski. “Asked him if he didn’t maybe want to join us. He said he had business elsewhere.”
“I know where, the son of a bitch,” I said.
*****
We called Ryne all the names, and Harlan all the names, and Griselda all the names. The jugs kept going around and we decided we best look into this ourselves. About half a dozen of us mounted up. We didn’t have no plans. We hadn’t got that far along. Them that didn’t come cheered us as we left, holding up jugs in salute. I rode double with Weizkowski.
Righteousness kept us warm the seven-mile ride to Harlan’s, wind blowing to beat a banshee. Harlan’s place was scrimmed over in a year’s worth of weeds. He hadn’t put no crop in. Too busy getting owned for wages. Harlan’s cur set to yapping and the front door swung open and there was Griselda Harlan standing in a square of light, hands on her hips. Looking disheveled in a pretty blue dress, the kind a woman wears when she plans on getting seen.
“Hello boys,” she says to me. “Where you headed?”
They was all looking at me. I could tell if I didn’t say what was needful, no one else would.
“Right here,” I said.
She wasn’t no kind of fighter, Griselda Harlan. She backed out of the entranceway leaving the door swung open and we piled in. Crowded in that front room where a couple gas lamps hissed. Good fire going in the stove. The table laid for two, glasses and china. Ryne was in there, all right. Eyes twitching like a trapped creature. He had on a clean shirt. The only man there whose shirt was.
“Hello fellas,” Ryne said. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one feeling neighborly this evening.”
“Some more neighborly than others,” I said.
Griselda bustled over to the stove, put on a kettle.
“You can leave off with the coffee,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”
Griselda clanged down the kettle. I could see her hands shaking.
“We all got to look after one another,” said Ryne.
Sherrill spit on the floor.
“Cut the shit,” said Weizkowski.
“Hey now,” said Ryne. “There’s a lady here.”
“Ain’t no lady I can see,” I said.
The room got quiet.
“Now boys,” said Ryne, holding out his hands.
“You been fooling where you ain’t ought to of been fooling,” I said.
“We can’t have it,” said Weizkowski.
“Hell, boys,” said Ryne, “it ain’t what you think.”
“No, it’s worse,” I said. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”
Griselda looked at Ryne to say something else but he never did. He ran.
He crashed out of the back bedroom window, screeching like a little girl. We got turned around, banging into one another and back out the front door, Griselda’s china smashed to the floor.
Like I say, it was a year’s worth of weeds out there. Out back of the house they was tall as a man. That and we was half-cocked, in no kind of condition to go tracking in the dark. We might of gave up the whole business but for who stepped out of the weeds.
Cora.
“This way, Pa!” she said. “Come on!”
Wasn’t nothing for it but to do like she said. We followed her over the cracked alkali ground. She knew the lay of the land but good. Ran us right up the little draw where Ryne was trying to make a hidey hole out of a fox den.
Things might of gone different for him if he hadn’t run, so that a ten-year old girl had to smoke him out for us. Now our blood was up. We glugged down the rest of that whiskey and yanked his trousers down and took out a sharp knife. Held Griselda, made her watch, sobbing. After, I saw Harlan’s cur loping away into the night with Ryne’s manhood.
*****
Cora, she hung tight to me the whole ride home. Six miles over the hills, cold wind cutting us all the way. First couple miles, didn’t neither of us say nothing.
“He going to live, Pa?” Cora finally asked.
“Not well. But he ain’t going to die, if that’s what you mean.” We rode on a ways. “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.
“You can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to,” Cora said.
“That’s right.”
“I like this horse, Pa.”
“He’s a good one, all right.”
That Mustang was, too. He’d ride me right up into the mountains and carry the furs out. Keep me off the wages. Cora behind me patted the Mustang’s shanks.
