not digging. The hillsides were rocky and angled steeply, impossible terrain for plowing. Under the bare trees I scrambled about, hefting stones and inspecting them for weight and flatness. My compact dimensions allowed me to easily crawl under cockspur bushes and sticker weeds if a good chimney piece was beneath them. A few scratches showed up on my face but it was fun. The truth of it is, it was fun to be building something.
All of us dug hard and blistered and heehawed at joking comments. By the end of the second day we had worked off a bunch of our jumpy attitudes and were feeling calmed by the effort.
Jack Bull, with his fingers at his chin, paused often to stare at our ever-growing hole, then would begin to pace off lines and shapes, but he did it often and different each time. This was unsettling. He had grand plans for this ground but maybe too many of them.
“We should face south,” he said. “We all know that. But the horses should be nearest the door.”
“Whatever you think, Jack Bull,” Clyde said. “I just can’t get enough of this sweaty work, so you go on and feature it out right.”
Holt and Clyde laughed. Laughs were the only sounds Holt had made in two days. He kept his tongue well rested.
“We will be in it for weeks,” Jack Bull said, a little bit testy. “Might as well do it right. I don’t see the sense in not doing it right.”
“Ain’t no one going to fight you on that,” Clyde said. “I don’t want to spend the winter sleeping in mud no more than you do.”
“Good, good,” Jack Bull said, his fingers at his chin again. “We can have a double door, or even two doors.” He began to pace off a whole new bunch of lines, and said, “Then put in mud bunks along the walls and lay the chimney…”
All we diggers laughed and listened, and Jack Bull went on and on until we thought he made sense.
Then we built it.
It was right.
Just after sundown of the seventh day Holt came huffing into the hole, his pistol pulled. He spoke his first sentence in a week.
“Rider comin’ this way. One minute off.”
The dugout was finished and awful cozy. The chimney was about the best piece of work I’ve ever done, and the house in general was as sweet as you’d find underground anywhere. I think it raised some proud up in all of us. We were slow to leave it.
“Aw, let’s go see to our visitor,” Clyde said.
Once outside it was clear the rider was coming on bold. There was no slinking involved in the way it came straight at us. Moonlight shone down bright over the cold bare landscape. The soft clopclop of hooves yawned out across the valley. The horse snuffled and whinnied once, and if this rider was a Federal it had to be a general to be so open and silly in this country by night.
“It’s just me,” a feminine voice spoke. “Don’t shoot or some dumb damn thing like that.”
It was Sue Lee, the widow girl.
“Why, how do?” Jack Bull said and swept his hat off and swooped it around. “You talk nice, Mrs. Evans.”
Sue Lee dropped down from her mount. She was bundled up thick in several pieces of clothes. They were all kinds of colors. She smelled good, or else the clothes smelled good, ’cause of a sudden something nearby smelled real good.
“I’ve brung you some dinner,” she said. “Mr. Evans wishes me to apologize for not having sent you food sooner. The Federals have been on the move and he thought it safest not to. And don’t you call me Mrs. Evans. My name is Sue Lee Shelley. It’s a good one and I’m a widow now, you know, so I reckon I’ll go on back to it and use it.”
“Please pardon me,” Jack Bull said in his most riverboat manner. I never liked this particular quality of his. “And come on in, won’t you, Sue Lee?”
George Clyde held open the dirty plank door that opened over the dugout. Sue Lee stepped down into our place and Clyde said, “Evenin’, ma’am.”
Holt and I stood solid and watched as Clyde and Jack Bull did a terrific series of winks at each other, accompanied by the sneaky slinging of elbows. All it took was a girlish widow with a bucket of grub to drop by and those boys commenced to preening like there would be