Imogene came to bed after midnight, walking softly so she wouldn’t awaken Sarah if she was sleeping.

            “Imogene?” Sarah called softly.

            “It’s me.”

            Sarah pulled herself up and made a place for Imogene on the bed. “You’re up so late.” She took Imogene’s hand and kissed it.

            “Those boys stayed up drinking. I don’t like to see young people drink so much.”

            “Maybe they’re homesick.”

            “Maybe.”

            “I’ve been looking at our little shed. I haven’t built anything before. It’s easy.”

            “I sometimes think women are discouraged from doing men’s work because they’re afraid we’ll discover how easy it is.”

            “I like it. Imogene, I don’t hate it here as much as I think I should.”

            Imogene laughed. “Well, that’s good. Maybe we’re getting used to it. It’s late, we’d best get some sleep.” She slipped into her nightgown and crawled under the covers. “How did I stand a cold bed all those years?” she asked as Sarah snuggled close.

            Before dawn, a wagon driver was banging on the counter in the bar and bellowing Imogene’s name. Pulling on a heavy wrapper, she came quickly. It was still dark, with only the barest glimmer of light in the east, but Imogene recognized him by his barrel shape and low-crowned hat.

            “What is it, Cracker?”

            “Those reb boys I give a lift in? They fell in the drink last night. Too drunk to get out, what with the high sides and the grass slippery.” Blunt and angry, he poked his finger into the air. “Fence that goddamn hole in! I mean it. I told Van Fleet and now I’m telling you.”

            “The boys drowned?” Imogene asked stupidly.

            In the face of Imogene’s horror, his anger dissolved somewhat and he mumbled a gruff affirmation. “They did. Me and one of the boys heading out Susanville way fished them out. They must’ve staggered into it when they went out to bed down for the night. I don’t expect they had the price of a bed between them?”

            Imogene shook her head. She stood silent for a moment, looking past him, then said, “I’ll get dressed.”

            The young men lay side by side in the grass by the spring. The Round Hole yawned still and dark in the half-light before dawn.

            “You can see where they tried scrambling out.” Cracker pointed to where the grass was torn and pulled down. “The bank’s high, and what with the grass growing out over the water the way it does…”

            “Why didn’t they call for help?” Imogene cried. “Didn’t anyone hear them? I’m sure it would have awakened me. I’ve always been a light sleeper…” Her voice trailed off.

            “No sense worrying it now, ma’am, maybe they were just too drunk, thought it was all in fun till they was spent. Maybe one passed out and tumbled in and the other got dragged down, trying to fish him out. There’s no telling.”

            Another man, round-headed and thick-shouldered, arms soaked to the shoulders, searched the two dead men. Cracker jerked his chin toward him. “Lyle here pulled them out.”

            Lyle rocked back on his haunches, resting huge hands on his thighs. “They got nothing on them to say who they was,” he said. “Just drifters, I guess. Like as not didn’t have any folks to speak of.”

            The boys’ faces, so animated and young the night before, were gray and old, wrinkled by water. Imogene held herself against the chill, rubbing her upper arms as the sun topped the mountains.

            “If you can point us to some shovels, we’ll bury them,” Lyle offered.

            “Here?” Imogene said, aghast. “Shouldn’t there be someone—a graveyard—something?”

            “The heat’ll be on us in an hour or so,” Lyle warned. “They’ll start stinking. We’d as well bury them now.”

            “There are shovels in the shed.”

            While the passengers on the morning stage for Reno loaded their baggage and harnessed a fresh team, Lyle and Cracker quietly dug a grave in the meadow below the spring. Imogene had fetched two old sheets from the house, and the boys’ bodies were wrapped head to foot in makeshift shrouds.

            As the men lowered the corpses into their common grave, Sarah ran down from the house. Lyle saw her and waved her back. “Nothing you can do, missus. Go on back now.”

            “It’s all right, Sarah,” Imogene called. “There is no more to be done.”

            But Sarah came anyway. With short, determined steps she ran across the road and skirted the Round Hole spring. Her face was as pale as death, but her mouth was set in a firm line and her eyes were clear.

            Imogene stepped between her and the open grave. “My dear, you needn’t have come.”

            Sarah held out the book she had clutched across her bosom. “The Bible,” she said breathlessly. “You would’ve forgotten it. Those boys would want the words said over them.” Sarah held the Bible out to Imogene.

            “Will you read it?” Imogene asked softly.

            “The Bible’s not for me to read or not read anymore,” Sarah replied.

            Imogene took the Bible and opened it to the Twenty-third Psalm. Sarah stood beside her, her eyes averted from the bundles in the bottom of the trench. The two wagoners bared their heads and stood quietly by as Imogene read aloud in a deep, sure voice. When she closed the Bible, she had tears on her cheeks.

            Cracker cleared his throat. “That was right. Me and Lyle would’ve forgot entirely.”

            “Thank you, Sarah,” Imogene said, and they walked slowly back to the house.

            That afternoon, when the stop was empty, Sarah and Imogene, the younger woman gloved and bonneted against the rays of the sun, used their newly learned skills to erect a railing around the spring.

31

            THE CHICKENS ARRIVED, A ROBUST, STRINGY LOT WITH PARTICOLORED feathers. Only two had succumbed to the rigors of the journey, and they were eaten for dinner. Imogene’s saplings arrived on the same coach; their wavering green tops, frosted white with alkali dust, gave the mudwagon the look of a grizzled old head. Mac and Noisy supervised the planting from the shade of the porch, giving suggestions and speculating on their chances of survival. Noisy was pessimistic, but Mac figured they’d live out the week.

            Summer ended abruptly. Imogene’s saplings, planted in a neat line around the house’s side yard, lost their leaves almost overnight, and a biting wind blew out of the northwest all autumn and through December. Slate-colored clouds scudded dry and cold across a dome of scoured blue.

            The valley was too dry for snow, but the mountain peaks were white, and frost covered the ground through February and March. Imogene made the trip by wagon the eighty miles to Loyalton to get hay. She was gone nearly a week, and Sarah ran the stop alone. On her return they spent the better part of two days breaking the bales into manageable lots.

            The weather stayed bitter through April but held a suggestion of softness in the afternoons, and rain fell in cold scattered showers, the progress of a lone thunderhead often visible as it carried its dark streamers of rain over the face of the desert. High-voiced new frogs peeped from the spring, and the winter black of the sage was taking on a greenish cast. By the end of May, the bitterbrush was in bloom and spiny yellow and blue flowers half as big as a penny and close to the ground appeared along the road where the water settled in the swale. Jackrabbits and cottontails the size of a woman’s hand grazed fearlessly on the short, coarse grass by the meadow’s edge. Occasionally a coyote, tempted by the easy game and a winter’s lean belly, would hunt them in the daylight, and the nights were filled with coyote song as they called to unseen mates over the Smoke Creek.

            The coach out of Reno rattled through the crisp spring air, the dust from the horses’ hooves and the wheels plumed up behind for three hundred yards. About a mile from the house, waist-deep in the fragrant sage, Imogene shifted the carcasses of two freshly killed quail and shaded her eyes to watch the mudwagon. Van Fleet’s old coat hung from her shoulders down past her hips, its mottled blue-and-brown plaid stained with use and the blood of rabbit, squirrel, and deer. The sleeves were too short and her bony wrists stuck out several inches. The dress she wore was faded and patched, an old housedress she reserved for hunting; it had shrunk over the years and didn’t quite reach the top of her wide-toed, lace-up, men’s boots—her tramping boots, Sarah called them.

            Noisy was the first to look her way; she waved and started for the road. Noisy Dave hollered and waved back. Mac, half-asleep beside him on the high seat, jerked upright. Head bare to the weather, the Henry Repeater held easily in the crook of her left arm, Imogene strode through the brush.

            “You’re a ways from home, Miss Grelznik,” Mac said as Noisy reined up. Several passengers craned their necks out the side windows to catch sight of her. Imogene had become a character people talked about even in Reno.

            “Can we give you a lift home?” Mac asked.

            “That would be nice,” Imogene thanked him. “Sarah ought to have lunch on; we’ll get there while it’s hot.”

            Mac jumped to the ground and handed her up, as gallant a gentleman as if she were in satin slippers and a taffeta gown. When she was settled between them, Noisy shook the reins and hollered instructions to the lead team. The horses, excited by the smell of water and the sight of the barn, needed no second invitation and started off at a good clip. Noisy, hunched forward, his round belly on his knees, the leather leads strung between his fingers so that he resembled a puppet master, looked over at Imogene. “You want to give it a try? Take the wagon in?”

            “No, thanks,” she laughed. “Two horses are enough for me, and it took me a while to learn to handle that. We must walk before we run. Maybe next year.”

            A rut, cut in the roadbed by an old wash and revived by flash floods during the spring rains, jolted the coach, and a gunnysack hung on a post by the seat yelped and whined. “I near forgot,” Noisy said. “Mac and me brought you and little Mrs. Ebbitt a present.” Spitting a graceful arc of tobacco juice over the side, he lifted the sack free and dumped it unceremoniously on Imogene’s lap. “It’s tied up tight, better leave it like that, he’s a feisty little feller. I think he’s too little to bite you through the sacking, but I wouldn’t trust him far as I could throw him, if I was you.” Imogene held the bundle carefully, trying to protect it from the jolting of the ride.

            “It’s a coyote pup,” Mac explained. “Don’t know if he’ll live or not, he’s pretty small. Noisy here spotted him off to the side of the road. The bitch had been shot—must’ve been near the den, because three pups had come out to her. The pups were no more’n three or four weeks old. This little fella was the only one left alive. Just bones, tail, and ears. He was so weak he couldn’t hardly stand, but he bit old Dave a good one.” Mac laughed.

            “Damn pup,” Noisy growled amiably. “Be a good dog if somebody don’t kill him first.”

            The pup stirred inside the burlap bag and Imogene laid her hand on it. She snatched it back quickly. “He was trying to bite me through the sack!”

            “He’s quite a pup,” Noisy agreed.

            “Watch him, Miss Grelznik, pups’ve got teeth like needles. You want me to hold him?” Mac offered.