on an open sheep-pen. That’s about it.
The dude is disappointed but his patience is vast. He has not been euchered, no sir. He just revises his notions on the girl. Most rich babies would have brotheled up or bucked out by now, but not her. She’s game. She’s in it for real play. She is heeled and she is sour as a new grape. It’s a different situation, that’s all. His employer did not give him the whole hoyle.
When the dude was a boy his mother told him a story about a girl in a red dress that blew town, humping through the high country on foot. Even back then the dude thought that girl was done crazy. Somebody better help her, mama, or she’s gonna get et. Somebody’s gotta track her down and get her back home to her daddy. Well, sure enough this big old wolf pricks her up and starts after, and he’s got a shine on this girl more like a man’s than a wolf’s. It don’t go well in the end—girls and wolfs, they got nothing to talk about. But the dude felt a kinship with that wolf. A profundity, even. That wolf would follow red-dress all the way around the world once he got her in his nose. You could admire that. You could aspire.
And when the dude asks the Great Dog in Heaven to show him the way, it’s the wolf he’s thinking of. Like God’s this powerful big cay-ote up there and the world’s his bone. In chapel with his mama he tries to think of a man up on a cross but it just don’t fix. No, it’s the tricky-clever lolly-tongued red-loving Dog for the dude, amen and all’s well.
The dude prays on it a spell.
It comes up in his head like a bubble in a lake. When a dog’s hurting, when a dog’s hounded and hard-up, what’s he do?
A dog goes to ground.
Snow White
Cheats At Cards
Snow White comes out of the earth. She blinks a lot; her eyes forgot how to suck up so much light. She don’t present much of a woman anymore: filthy with sweat-grime and ruby-dust, white scar on her cheek like a star, clothes hard done by and none too ladylike to begin with, being goatskins, buck trousers, linen shirt, a fish-slicker coat and her daddy’s hat like a creased-up crown. Her hair did grow out some. The sun hits her and Snow White feels like her whole body is baking up sweet and good, like she’d never been born before and is trying alive on for the first time. Charming sees her in the corral and starts hopping fit to stampede the mares, calling out her name in his horsey patois.
The dude is waiting for her. Once he had the picture of it, weren’t no work in figuring which softheart company daddy would let a woman dig shine. Weren’t no sport in it. Easy as sleeping. Nevada is good to the dude, always has been. He’s itchy, waiting on her to pop up mole-like from the grass. He’s thought about just popping her on the head with the butt of his hog-leg gun, but he figures he deserves himself the treat of a sit-down with this calico. She’s given him a good run, best he’s had since the war, and that earns her a few more hours in her mortal coil. Besides, she’s been down underground so long. It’s a right human deed to let her look on the sun awhile before he sends her there on the permanent.
He squares Snow White’s debts to the company man. It’s no skin off him. The dude is flush and he’ll be full fine when he hands over his proofs back in California. The abandon does not like it; she’s cagey and looking to bolt but no man on this earth ever declined to have his accounts cleared and she won’t neither. She asks his name; he won’t give over. Gets her horse geared and the dude enjoys letting her think of him as a black-chapped angel sent by the Dog to secure her. That’s just what he is.
“Where you off to in such a lather?” the dude says. “Get yourself niced up a bit. I bet you haven’t had soap on you in a bear’s age.”
The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can’t bring himself to shoot her while she’s filthy and starving. There’s time.