He Bet His Creek She Couldn’t Feed 40 Cowboys — She Opened the Underground Steer Roast

Hepsi Castile was standing in the Buffalo Merkantile with a sack of flour on her hip when she heard her husband bet Otter Creek the only water on his place that she could feed 40 men at the spring branding. Zeb Harkin had said it loud enough for the whole store. A woman that size will eat your herd before she feeds a crew.

 Castile and Loyal had said 40 men, yours and mine, and you’ll ask for seconds. Nobody at the counter breathed. Loyal’s hand lay flat on the scarred wood beside the coffee grinder. Judge Grimby turned over a feed bill, licked his pencil, and began to write the wager on the back of it, slow and square, while Harkin laughed, and put his own name under it. That night, it rained.

Pepsi woke in the dark to the sound of cattle balling down below the house and then to the sound of horses running. She sat up. Loyal was already out of the bed and pulling his boots on by feel. “Stay in,” he said. She did not stay in. She waited on the sill in her night gown with a shawl pulled over her head, and the rain came sideways off the roof and soaked her to the knees.

 Down in the black of the pasture, she heard a wire go. A hard, bright twang like a fiddle string snapping, and then another. Men were whistling low, hooves churned the mud. Then the sound went away east toward the river road, and there was nothing but the rain on the roof and her own heart pounding under her hand.

 Loyal came back up the slope, soaked through and breathing hard. Too dark, he said. Couldn’t see a thing. More than one. Riding hard. What did they take? He didn’t answer. He took the lantern down off its nail and lit it with shaking fingers. And she took it out of his hand. I’m coming, she said. At first light, the rain had stopped, and the whole valley smelled of wet sage and cold mud.

 Heepsi walked the fence line with the lantern still lit because she had forgotten to blow it out and her boots sank at every step. She found the first cut strand hanging down like a dead vine. She found the second. The posts on either side leaned and the ground between them was trampled black. The hoof prints ran east in a wide churned path.

 She followed them to the rise and stopped with the lantern swinging, looking down at the brown water of the ford. Harkkins Ford. The tracks went into the water and came out the other side onto Harkin land. She knew before she turned around. She turned around anyway. The red steer was gone. She had picked him herself out of the whole little herd and had fed him grain from a bucket every evening since the thaw.

 fat and red and slow with a white splash down his face. He was to have been the dinner for the branding. He was the whole dinner. What was left in the low pasture were cows with calves at their sides, a few yearlings too thin to feed anybody. And one old longhorn steer standing apart under the cottonwoods with his head low and his horns wide as a wagon seat.

 He was rangy and gray brown and all bone. One yellow eye rolled her way. Loyal came up beside her. There was no need to say it, but he said it. That old one’s too tough to chew. She felt her knees go loose and cold. She put her free hand on the fence post to hold herself up, and the post was wet and gritty under her palm. She was afraid.

She would not let him see how much. Out on the road, a rider was coming at a walk. He sat a tall gray horse and wore a black coat buttoned to the throat in spite of the damp, and his gray beard was trimmed close and square. Ze Harkin did not hurry. He never hurried. He came along the road until he was even with them.

 And then he stopped the gray and looked over the cut wire and the trampled mud and the old longhorn under the trees. Then he looked at Heepsy. His eyes went down her and up her slow, the way a man looks over a load of hay he means to complain about. He touched his hat. “9 days, Mrs. Castile,” he said. He rode on toward town.

 Hepsi stood a long moment gripping the wet post. Then she let go of it. She walked out into the low pasture through the mud and the old steer raised his head and did not run. She came right up to him. She laid her palm flat on his shoulder and under the rough winter hair. He was hard as a barnbeam and warm. Loyal had followed her. He stood a few steps back with his hat in his fist, rain still dripping off the brim.

 Heepsi, he said, I’ll ride in and call it off. I’ll tell Grimby. No, you won’t. That Steer is bootleather on a fire. He is. She kept her hand on the old steer’s shoulder. She could feel him breathing. Then I’ll need a shovel, she said. A deep hole cooks what a fire can. Loyal looked at her as if she had said something in Dutch. “A hole,” he said.

“In the ground.” “As deep as I am, tall and longer than the wagon.” She turned to face him. The lantern was still burning in her other hand, pale and useless in the daylight, and she blew it out at last. My mother dug pits like that for every camp meeting and every election day in the hills above the French Broad.

 She’d put a whole beef in the ground at dark and when the preaching was done the next noon, she’d open it up and feed 400 people. Old beef. Tough beef. The ground doesn’t care how old he is. 400? Loyal said, “I only need 40 men.” He almost smiled at that. It didn’t quite get there. He looked past her at the cut wire and the churned black trail going east and his jaw set hard under his beard. He took it on purpose.

 He said he waited till the ink was dry and then he came and took your steer. I know it and he’ll do worse. I know that too. She wiped her wet hands down the front of her shawl. So we had better start digging before he thinks of what. They walked back up to the house together through the mud, not touching, and the old Longhorn watched them go.

 Hepsi had known it was coming the afternoon before. She had known it on the ride home from Buffalo, sitting beside Loyal on the wagon seat with the flower sack in her lap like a sleeping child, and the feed bill with the wager written on it folded in his shirt pocket over his heart. Neither of them had said a word for the first three miles.

 The team knew the road. The sky over the big horns was going the color of a bruise, and the wind came down off the snow fields cold enough to make her eyes water. She had told herself it was the wind. At the bridge over Clear Creek, she had finally said it. “Why did you say it?” Loyal had kept his eyes on the road. He was a lean man, all rope and knuckle, 38 years old and brown as a saddle from the sun, and he did not talk much.

 She had married him 6 weeks ago in the parlor of the Buffalo Hotel, where she had cooked for two winters, and she was still learning the shape of his silences. Because he said it in front of you, he said. He said worse in front of me. So have other men. Not in front of me. They haven’t.

 He shook the lines once, gently over the horse’s backs. Not about my wife. She had looked down at the flower sack. There was a smear of white on her sleeve where it had leaked through the weave. You bet the creek, she said. Loyal. You bet the water. I know what I bet. He’s wanted it for years. You told me so yourself the first night I came out to the place.

 He’s got 10 miles of grass that goes dry by August. And the only live water on this side of the valley runs through your quarter section. He’s tried to buy it twice. And you handed it to him on a feed bill. I didn’t hand him anything. He turned his head then and looked at her and his eyes were a pale washed gray like creek water over stones.

I bet it there’s a difference. If you feed 40 men, he shuts that ditch gate of his for good. An Otter Creek runs past our corral full all summer instead of half. Grimby rode that part down, too. And if I don’t, you will. Loyal. You will, he said again. I’ve eaten your cooking, Epsi. I ate it for two winers before I got up the nerve to ask you.

 Every trip to town, I told myself I was going in for wire and nails. And every trip I sat down in that hotel dining room and ate three plates of your biscuits and gravy and went home without the nails. She had laughed in spite of herself. It came out of her like a hiccup, surprised. That’s why the fence is so poor, she said. That’s why the fence is so poor.

I know what they see, she said at last very quietly. When I come into a room, I’ve known it since I was a girl. They see the size of me and they think there’s a woman who’s never missed a meal. They think I’m lazy or greedy or both. They don’t think I can do anything but eat. He kept quiet. He waited. She had learned that about him already.

He would wait for a thing to be finished. And now there’s a whole store full of men who heard him say it, she said. And they’ll all be at that branding. Every one of them waiting to see me fail. Then they’ll be hungry when they get there. Loyal said, “That’s good. Hungry men are honest eaters.

” She had looked at him sideways, and he had not been smiling, but there had been something at the corner of his mouth, and she had leaned against his shoulder for the last mile home, flower sack and all. When they came into the yard at dusk, she had gone straight down to the low pasture with a bucket of grain, and the fat red steer had come lumbering up to the fence to eat out of it, white face and all, and she had rubbed the hard curl of hair between his eyes, and told him he was going to be the finest dinner ever served in Johnson County.

And that night, the riders had come and taken him. The next morning, the Monday, Pepsi was up before the birds. She lit the cook stove in the dark with pine splinters and a twist of newspaper, and she blew on the first small flame until it caught and crackled, and the iron began to tick as it warmed. Then she knelt down by the flower bin and lifted out her sourdough croc.

 It was a brown stonewear croc with a chipped lip and a wooden lid. And it had come all the way from Tennessee on her lap on trains and on a stage and on the freight wagon from Cheyenne. Her mother had fed that starter every day of her life and her mother’s mother before her. Pepsi took off the lid and the smell rose to meet her.

 Sour and yeasty and alive like apples going soft in a cellar. The starter had risen in the night and fallen again, and its top was covered with a thin gray skin of bubbles. Morning, she told it. She scooped out a cupful into the big yellow bowl and fed the rest in the croc with flour and warm water, stirred it, and put the lid back on. Then she went to work.

 flour, salt, a pinch of soda dissolved in a spoon of hot water, a good scoop of lard. She worked it with her fingers until it came together soft and tacky and turned it out on the flower table and patted it flat with the heel of her hand and cut the biscuits with the rim of a tin cup. By the time the sky was going gray over the ridge, there were two pans in the oven and the coffee was boiling and the whole cabin smelled so good that she heard the bunk house door bang across the yard.

 Am paid came in with his hat in his hand and his gray hair standing up at the back like a rooster’s comb. He was 64 years old and had come up the trail from Texas with the first herds, and he was the only hand loyal kept on through the winter. He was bow-legged and slow and spoke little before his coffee. He said, “Lord have mercy.

 Sit down, Mr. P.” He sat. She set a cup of coffee at his elbow, black and hot, and a plate of biscuits, split open and running with butter, and a dish of the plum preserves she had brought out from town. He ate the first biscuit in two bites. He closed his eyes. Loyal came in from the barn with the milk pale and set it down and washed his hands at the basin and sat across from Isim without a word. She fed him, too.

For a while, there was nothing in the cabin but the crackle of the stove and the sound of three people eating. Eim Loyal said finally, “You hear what happened in town?” “I heard.” EM wiped his mouth with his knuckles. “Heard about the fence, too. They got the red steer.” “They did?” “Well,” the old man turned his cup around in his hands.

“That’s a shame, ma’am. That was a good fat steer. We’ve got another, Hepsi said. Isam looked at her, then at Loyal, then back at her again. You don’t mean that old Mossyhorn in the low pasture. I do, ma’am. He set his cup down very carefully. I trailed cattle like the one from the noose’s river to the powder.

 I know that animal. He’s 7 years old if he’s a day, and he’s walked every mile of this country twice. You could boil him a week and he’d come out of the pot and walk off. You can’t feed a branding crew on that. You’ll break their teeth. Not if I cook him right. There ain’t a right way to cook bootle. She said it’s slow and it’s under the ground and nobody’s ever taught it to you. That’s all.

 Isam opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked to Loyal for help. Loyal was buttering his third biscuit. He did not glance up. She’s cooking it in a hole. He said, “You’d better eat up. You’re going to be digging.” Pepsi took the bench nearest the stove with her own cup and pulled the lamp closer and began to count on her fingers. “Burlap,” she said.

 Every sack Tumi’s got at the store and more if he can get it. “Would a great deal of wood. And it has to be hardwood if we can find it. What grows down in the draws? Ash, said Loyal box. Elder choke cherry along the creek. Choke cherry, she said. That’s good. That burns sweet. And river rock to pave the floor of it.

The big flat ones. Sheet iron to cover it if you’ve got any. There’s the old stove jacket off the bunk house. Isam said slowly as if he could not believe he was saying it. And that roof iron off the lean to good. And salt, pepper, vinegar, a whole keg, onions, chilies if Tumi has them dried. She looked up and before any of it, a trial, a small pit, and a hog quarter just to see.

 I haven’t done it on this ground. I don’t know how this dirt holds heat. Dirt’s dirt, said Isome. It is not, said Heepsi. My mother used to say that you don’t cook with the fire. You cook with what the fire leaves behind. And what it leaves behind is a different thing in every kind of ground. Loyal was watching her across the table. She could feel it without looking up.

The way you can feel a stove warming the side of your face. He was thinking about the bet. She knew he was. He was thinking that he had stood up in a store full of men and put her in front of them like a horse at a sale. And now she would have to dig and sweat and burn in front of all of them.

 And if she lost, it would be his fault and her shame. She could see it in the way he held his cup, both hands around it tight. She put her own hand over his for a moment on the table among the biscuit crumbs. Eat, she said. There’s more in the oven. If you want to see what comes up out of that ground on branding day, subscribe now and stay with Heepsi until the last plate is scraped and leave a comment with the name of the town where you’re hearing her story.

 After breakfast, she walked down to the creek alone. Otter Creek ran high and brown with snow melt, loud over its stones, and the new leaves on the cottonwoods were so bright a green they almost hurt to look at. She walked along the low bench above the water, where the soil was soft and sandy and easy to dig.

 upstream where the creek came out of the hills, she could see the raw line of Harkin’s ditch cutting off across the slope toward his land and the gray plank headgate where his men let the water in or shut it off. Below the headgate, an old lateral ran down across the bench, dry now, choked with last year’s weeds. She stood looking at that dry ditch for a while without knowing why.

 Then she walked on and found a good flat stretch near the corral, well above the water, and drove a stick into the ground with her heel to mark it. The dirt came up dark on the end of the stick, and it smelled of grassroots and old rain. She crumbled a handful of it between her fingers. “All right,” she said to nobody. “All right.

” She climbed to the house and put on her bonnet to go to town. Tumi’s merkantile smelled the way it always did, of coffee beans and coal oil and new leather, and the pickle barrel by the door. The stove in the center of the floor was cold for the season. But three old men sat around it anyway on their nail kegs, the way they had sat there all winter, and when Hepsi came in with loyal behind her, they all stopped talking at once.

 She felt it on her skin, that silence. She had failed it in every room she had ever walked into. “Mrs. Castile,” said Tumi from behind the counter. He was a small bald man in sleeve guarders, and he said it politely enough, but his eyes went to the old men by the stove before they came back to her. “Mr. Tumi, I need burlap.

” “Burlap? Every sack you’ve got, grain sacks, coffee sacks, it doesn’t matter, so long as they’re clean and whole, and a keg of cider vinegar, and all the black pepper in the store, and dried chilies, if you have them. Tumi blinked. He went into the back room, and they heard him moving things around, and one of the old men on the nail kegs leaned over and said something to another, too low to hear, and the other one wheezed.

 Epsy kept her back straight. Her hands were cold. She put them in the pockets of her coat. Mrs. Tumi came out from the living quarters behind the store, drying her hands on her apron. She was a thin, quick woman with spectacles, and she had been kind to Hepsi from the first week when Heepsi had been only the new cook at the hotel and nobody’s wife.

 “Hepsi,” she said. “I heard. Everybody’s heard.” She lowered her voice. Are you all right? I’m busy, said Hepsi. And Mrs. Tumi laughed and squeezed her arm. How’s that sourdough of yours? Alive and hungry. How’s yours? Oh, I keep it going. That cup you gave me in March. It’s the best bread I ever made. Tumi says so. Every Sunday. Mrs. Tumi smiled.

It’s in a jar by my stove pipe this minute, bubbling like a spring. Tumi came back with his arms full of sacks and dumped them on the counter in a dusty heap. He began to count them. He had got to 11 when the bell over the door jingled, and every head in the store turned. Zeb Harkin came in with his hat on. Behind him came a lean, slope shouldered man in a canvas coat with a long jaw and pale eyes set close together and a way of standing just behind Harkin’s left shoulder like a shadow that has been told where to go. That was Vley. He rode

for Harkin and did whatever Harkin could not be seen to do. And everybody in Johnson County knew it and nobody could prove it. Judge Grimby was just behind them. a heavy slow man of 60some in a gray vest with a watch chain across it. He had plainly not wanted to come. “There she is,” said Harkin pleasantly.

“Buying her groceries? Good. She’ll need them.” “Pepsi said nothing.” “Judge,” said Harkin without taking his eyes off her. “I was thinking about our wager on the ride in. It says Mrs. Castile feeds 40 men. It doesn’t say who does the cooking. It’s understood, said Grimby. I don’t like to leave a thing understood.

There’s women in this town who’d turn out to help her. The Methodist ladies likely Mrs. Tumi here. Harkin nodded at Mrs. Tumi, who had gone pink. Any of them could bring a pie and a pot of beans. And there’s your 40 men fed, and nothing proved at all. I want it written. every dish on that table from her own two hands.

Nobody else’s. That’s not in the terms, Loyal said. Then put it in the terms, said Harkin. Unless she’s afraid to. Loyal took a step forward. He caught his sleeve without looking at him. She looked at Harkin instead. He was a big man himself, broad and heavy in the chest, but he carried it like something he had bought and paid for.

 His coat was good black broadcloth. His boots were polished. He was smiling a little and it did not reach his eyes. “Write it,” she said. “Hepsi, write it, judge. My own hands. I don’t need anybody else’s.” Grimby looked at her over his spectacles for a long moment. Then he sighed and took the folded feed bill out of his vest pocket and spread it on the counter among Tumi’s burlap sacks and rode under the first terms in his square slow hand.

 Harkin leaned over to read it. There, said Harkin. He straightened up. He let his eyes travel over her again, down and up, and he raised his voice so the loafers on the nail kegs would hear every word. 40 men, Mrs. Castile. That’s a good deal of cooking. Of course, I expect you’ve done a good deal of eating, so you’ll know the size of a meal when you see one. The old man laughed.

 One of them slapped his knee. He felt the heat come up her neck and into her face. The old old heat, the same as when she was 11 years old, and the school master had made her stand on the scale in front of the whole class. Her hands were trembling in her coat pockets. She held them there until they stopped. “Mr. Harkin,” she said in a voice she hardly knew was hers.

 “I’ll be glad to cook for your men. I only hope they’re braver eaters than you or a neighbor.” It was not much. It was all she had, but the old man who had slapped his knee stopped slapping it, and Mrs. Tumi made a small sound behind her hand and Harkin’s smile went stiff at the corners for just a moment before he put it back. Eight days, he said, and went out.

 Vley went after him. At the door, Vley turned his head toward the heap of burlap on the counter and then at Hepsi, and his pale eyes stayed on her a second too long. When she stepped outside with the sacks in her arms, the Harkin wagon was pulled up at the saloon rail. Vley was loading a keg into the wagon bed.

 On the seat, a young man sat holding the lines, a long-legged, fair young man with a sunburned nose and a new hat. He could not have been more than 22. He had been in the store. She had seen him by the door. He was the only man in it who had not left. He glanced at her now. Then he looked away quickly and touched his hatbrim and looked away again.

 “Who’s that?” she asked. Loyal low. Tandy Gatlin, one of Harkin’s riders, came up from Colorado last fall. Loyal threw the burlap into the back of their own wagon harder than he needed to. Seems a decent kid. He’s no kid. He’s a grown man. He’s 22. So he’s a grown man, said Hepsi and climbed up onto the wagon seat. On the Tuesday they dug the little pit.

She chose a spot behind the cook house on a rise where the ground was dry and she marked it out with the edge of her spade. Isam dug. Loyal dug. Hepsi dug too, though both of them told her not to. And when the hole was down past her knees, she climbed into it and kept going. Deep enough? Assum said. No.

 She held her arm out straight from the shoulder to here for a hog quarter to here for the steer deeper than my head. The sweat ran down her back under her dress. Her palms were already blistered. She did not stop. When the little pit was dug, they went down into the drawers with the wagon for wood.

 The drawers were full of dead ash and box elder, bleached silver, and along the creek the choke cherry grew thick and twisted with its bark, smelling bitter and sweet when you broke it. They loaded the wagon until the springs groaned. Asam brought an armload of dry pine from the wood pile because it would catch fast. “Pine for the start,” said Heepsy.

 “Then the hard wood on top of it. And then we wait. How long till there’s no fire left? Only coals. They built the fire down in the hole in the early afternoon. It went up with a roar, the pine crackling and spitting, the smoke rising white and then gray and then almost blue, and the heat of it drove them back from the edge.

He fed it all afternoon. Ash on the pine, choke cherry on the ash. She stood over it with her sleeves rolled and her face red and running with sweat. And every time Isam came near with an armful of wood, she told him where to put it. And every time he put it there. You cook with what the fire leaves, she told him.

 My mother said a pitfires like a child. You feed it hard when it’s little and then you let it settle down and do its work. Your mother cook many of these? every summer of my life. She wiped her face with her forearm. Camp meetings, weddings, burials, the 4th of July. People came from three counties when they heard she was digging. While the fire burned, she worked on the meat.

 Loyal had killed a hog that morning and hung it in the cold springhouse, and she took a hind quarter off it herself with his heavy knife. She rubbed it all over with coarse salt and black pepper, working it into the skin with the heels of her hands until her palm stung. Then she made her mother’s mop in a croc. Cider vinegar, water, salt, a great deal of pepper, a chopped onion, a pinch of the dried chile Tumi had found at the bottom of a box.

 She tasted it off the end of her finger. It bit her tongue. Her eyes watered. “That’s right,” she said. She sapped the quarter with the mop until it shone. Then she put the burlap to soak in the creek, three sacks of it, waited down with stone so the current would not carry them off. By sundown, the fire in the little pit had fallen in on itself.

The flames were gone. What was left was a bed of coals that glowed orange and then red and then orange again as the wind moved across it. breathing like something asleep. The heat came up off it in a wave that made the air above the pit shake. “Now,” she said. She wrapped the hog quarter in the dripping burlap, two layers, and then a third, and tied it with wire.

 Loyal lowered it down into the pit on a rope while she held the lantern. When the wet burlap touched the coals, it hissed, and a great cloud of steam came up. white and roaring and smelling of vinegar and wet sacking and hot meat. Azam slid the old stove jacket over the top of the pit. Then the three of them shoveled dirt over the iron until there was nothing to see but a low mound of earth with little threads of steam coming up through it.

 Hepsi walked around the mound and stamped dirt into every crack where the steam came out until there was none. “That’s it,” Isam said. That’s it. Now we leave it alone. How long? Till tomorrow noon. Asam eyed the mound then her. He scratched his neck. Well, he said, I’ve seen stranger things, not many. She could not sleep that night.

She lay in the bed next to Loyal and listened to the wind and thought about the hog quarter under the earth, and whether the coals had been deep enough, and whether the dirt was too sandy and would let the heat out, and whether the burlap had been wet enough, and whether she had forgotten everything her mother ever taught her.

In the end, she got up and put on her shawl and went out barefoot across the cold yard to the mound behind the cookhouse and sat down beside it in the grass. She put her hand on the dirt. It was warm, warm as a loaf just out of the oven, warm as a sleeping body. She kept her hand there.

 After a while, she heard the door and then Loyal’s step and then he sat down next to her in the grass without saying anything and put his coat around her shoulders. “It’s warm,” she told him. He put his hand on the mound next to hers. He was quiet a long time. “Well, I’ll be,” he said softly. They sat there together until the morning star came up over the ridge.

 At first light she saw them. Three riders sat their horses on the crest of the ridge across the creek, black against the gray sky, watching the castile place. They did not move. They did not hide. When the sun came up behind them, she could see that one of them wore a yellow slicker tied behind his saddle, and that another sat very tall and very straight in a black coat.

Loyal saw them too. He stood on the step with his coffee cup and watched them a good while, and his face went hard and still. “Let them look,” said Heepsy. “They’ll smell it before long.” “At noon on the Wednesday, they opened the little pit.” He asked him scraped the dirt off with his shovel, and steam pushed through it before he was halfway down.

 And then he hooked the stove jacket and dragged it clear. And a breath of heat rose from the hole that smelled so good that Isam stopped with the shovel in his hands and said, “Oh my lord.” Hepsi knelt at the edge. Down in the pit, the coals had gone gray and soft, but when she held her hand over them, she could still feel the heat on her palm.

The burlap bundle lay in the ashes, black and scorched at the edges, still steaming. Loyal brought it up on the rope. She laid it on a plank and cut the wire with his knife and peeled back the burlap. One layer, two, three. The skin of the hog quarter had gone a deep dark glistening mahogany brown, and it crackled when she touched it with the knife.

The smell poured up in a cloud. smoke and vinegar and pepper and sweet roasted pork and something else under all of it. Something like the earth itself. The meat was so tender that when she put the fork into it and lifted, it came away from the bone in long pale shreds, running with juice. She took the first piece and tasted it.

She closed her eyes. It was her mother’s kitchenard. It was every summer of her life. here,” she said and held out the fork. Isam took a piece in his fingers. He chewed. He stopped chewing. He stood there a long time with his eyes on nothing at all, working his jaw very slowly, and then he swallowed and wiped his mustache.

 “Ma’am,” he said, “I have eaten meat in 11 states and two territories and old Mexico. I never ate anything like that.” The pair of day riders Loyal had hired for the branding came over from the corral drawn by the smell and she fed them too, standing up off the point of the knife. One of them laughed out loud with his mouthful.

 The other just shut his eyes and chewed and made a low sound in his throat like a man sinking into a hot bath. Loyal ate last. Not a word out of him. He took the meat she gave him and ate it. And then he looked at her across the plank, and what she saw in his face made her have to turn away and busy herself with the burlap. But that night she lay awake again.

 A hog was a soft animal. A hog was young and fat, and its meat wanted to be tender. The old longhorn was not soft and not young and not fat. He was seven years of hard muscle and gristle and senue. And it would take more than a little pit and a night to break him down. Deeper coals, more hours, more wood than she had ever burned in her life.

 And Harkin had seen the smoke. Harkin had watched from the ridge. She lay awake with her hands flat on the quilt and was afraid and did not tell Loyal. On the Thursday, they dug the big pit. She had marked it on the low bench above the creek near the corral where the branding would be and where the trestle tables would stand. The soil there was soft and sandy and easy to move, and it was close to the water for soaking the burlap, and it was flat.

 She walked it out with Loyal holding one end of a rope and herself holding the other, long enough for the whole steer, cut in great pieces and laid side by side. Wide enough for two men to stand in and shovel and deep deeper than her head. Eim looked at the rope on the ground and then at the sky and then at the rope again. That’s a grave, he said.

 That’s a grave for a buffalo. Then dig it like one, said Hepsi. They started at Sunup. Loyal Assam, the two-day riders, and Hepsi. The spades rang on stones and bit into the soft dirt with a sound like somebody tearing cloth, and the pile of earth beside the pit grew and grew until it was taller than the corral rails.

 By midm morning, the men had taken off their shirts. Pepsi could not take off hers, so she rolled her sleeves as high as they would go and tied her skirt clear of the dirt with a length of twine and kept shoveling. The sun was hot for May. Her dress stuck to her back. Her hair came down from its pins and hung in her face in wet brown strings, and she pushed it back with her wrist and left a streak of mud across her forehead.

The blisters on her palms from the little pit broke open and bled, and she wrapped her hands in strips torn from a flower sack and kept going. One of the day riders, a lanky fellow with a gap in his teeth, leaned on his spade and grinned at her. “Ma’am,” he said, “no offense, but I never saw a woman your size work so hard.

 I figured you’d be the kind to sit in the shade.” The other riders stopped digging. Eim stopped digging. Hepsi straightened up in the hole with her spade in her hands. She was breathing hard and there was dirt in her teeth. Most people figure that, she said. Most people figure wrong about a great many things. Loyal was on the far end of the pit.

 He put down his spade and walked along the edge of it until he was standing over the gap to rider. For a moment, he only stood there. “You want your pay for this job,” Loyal said at last, very quietly. “You’ll dig and keep your figurine to yourself.” The gaptothed grin went away. He dug. At noon, Heepsi climbed out of the pit and made dinner for all of them.

 side meat fried crisp in the big skillet, a pan of cornbread, a pot of coffee strong enough to float a horseshoe. They ate sitting on the dirt pile in the sun. Nobody talked much. They were too tired to talk, but she watched the lanky rider take a third square of cornbread and butter it and eat it with his eyes closed, and she said nothing at all.

In the afternoon, they hitched the team to the stoneboat and hauled rock from the creek. She wanted the big flat river stones as wide as a dinner plate or wider to lay a floor under the fire because stone holds heat and gives it back slowly all through the night. The men weighed it out into the cold brown water up to their knees and pried the stones loose and rolled them onto the stoneboat.

 And the team dragged it groaning up the bank. He stood in the pit and laid each stone herself, fitting them together like the flags of a floor until the whole bottom was paved. While they worked, the Harkin riders came and sat on their horses at the fort again, just out of rifle range, watching. Loyal saw them first.

 He stopped with a rock in his arms and stood very still, and Heepsy followed his eyes. There were four of them today. Harkin was not with them, but the man on the Dunhorse had a yellow slicker rolled and tied on, and even from that far off, she knew the slope of his shoulders and the long jaw. Vley Loyal watched him a long time.

 Then he put the rock down on the stoneboat carefully and went on working and did not say a word about it until supper. at supper. He said, “He’s counting how deep we dig. Let him count. He’s not counting for his health, Hepsi. I know it.” She handed him a plate of beans and side meat. Eat. They hauled wood the rest of that day, and all the Friday, ash, and box, elder, and choke cherry from the draws and dry pine from the ridge, until the pile beside the pit stood higher than Loyal’s head. Pepsi walked around the pit at

dusk on the Friday with Loyal beside her. It was a beautiful thing, she thought. She had never thought a pit of dirt could be beautiful, but it was deep and square and cleansided, and its bottom was paved with gray riverstone, and the wood stood ready, and the burlap was piled in the wagon, waiting to go into the creek.

 Saturday, they would rest their backs. Sunday they would butcher and then on the Monday the fire. It’s a good pit, Loyal said. It’s a good pit. Your mother would like it. She thought about it. She’d say it was a little shallow at the north end. She said she’d say I laid that one stone crooked and then she’d put her arm around me in front of everybody.

 He put his arm around her. There was no need to talk. They stood there together a long time, watching the light go off the creek, and the water ran loud and cold below them, and she let herself hope. That night, she dreamed of water. She dreamed of her mother standing waist deep in a flooded pit, bailing with a bucket, calling to her.

 She woke with her heart pounding. It was not raining. The roof was silent, but under the silence there was a sound, low and steady. A sound like water running where no water should be. She got up. She went to the window. Out in the dark, down on the bench above the creek, there was a lantern. It was moving.

 It was far up toward the hills where Harkin’s ditch left Otter Creek. And as she watched it stop, she saw a shape in the glow. A man bent over something. A yellow gleam of oil cloth. Then the man straightened up and the lantern swung and went out. The sound of running water grew louder. Loyal, she said. Loyal.

 He was out of the bed before she had said it twice. He took the rifle down off its pegs and went out the door in his shirt and boots. And she went after him with the lantern barefoot, her night gown catching on the sage. They were too late. They were too late before they started. When they came down the slope to the bench, the old lateral that ran from Harkin’s headgate across the Castile land was not dry anymore.

 It was running bankful, a stream of cold brown water pouring down out of the dark, and a little above the pit, somebody had taken a spade and cut the bank of the lateral wide open, so that the whole stream of it turned and ran straight across the bench and down into the big pit. Pepsi held up the lantern. The pit was full. It was brimming.

 The water stood in it brown and still almost to the lip with sticks and grass turning slowly on its surface. The river stones she had laid one by one were somewhere under it in the dark. The bottom tier of the wood stack stood in a puddle that spread out across the bench like spilled coffee.

 Loyal stood beside her with the rifle in his hands, silent. She heard his breath go in and out, in and out. harder each time. She stepped into the cut where the water was coming through the bank. It was so cold it made her feet ache to the bone. She held the lantern down low. And there, in the soft, wet dirt of the bank, just at the lip of the cut, was the print of a boot.

 A long, narrow boot with a heel worn down on the outside. She looked toward the headgate. It was dark up there. It was quiet. Only the water spoke. “He opened the gate,” Loyal said. His voice came out strange and flat. He opened Harken’s gate and he cut our bank and he drowned your pit. Yes, Vley. Yes. He turned around and went up to the cabin, walking fast. And she knew where he was going.

She knew it the way she knew the smell of scorching bread. She went after him as fast as her bare feet would let her. and caught him at the barn door with the saddle already in his hands. Don’t, she said. Get out of the way, Heepsi. No. He came onto my land in the night. He cut my bank.

 He drowned your pit that you dug with your own hands till they bled. Loyal’s face was white in the lantern light. She had never seen it like that. I’m going to ride over there and I’m going to drag him out of his bed and and shoot him, she said. And Harkin will have a dead man and a sheriff and a jury and you’ll be in the jail at Cheyenne and Otter Creek will go to Harkin anyway because I’ll be feeding 40 men without you.

 Is that what you want? Her voice was shaking. She could not stop it. You’d lose the creek in a fight instead of at a table. That’s what he wants, Loyal. Yeah, that’s what he’s hoping for. He’s standing up on that ridge right now in the dark, hoping you’ll come. Loyal stood very still with the saddle in his hands.

 He wants you to fight him, she said softer. So don’t beat him at the table. Help me beat him at the table. For a long moment, he did not move. Then slowly, he put the saddle back on its peg. He leaned his forehead against the barn wall and closed his eyes. She put the lantern down on the ground and put her arms around him from behind, as far around as they would go, and held on and felt him shaking.

Or she was shaking. She could not tell which. At first light they went back down to the bench with Isim and the hired men and stood looking at it. The water had drained down some in the night, soaking into the sandy ground. What was left in the pit was a foot of thick brown mud with the riverstone showing through it like the backs of turtles.

 The walls had slumped in on the creek side where the water had cut them. The bottom tier of the wood was soaked through and black. Asam walked all the way around the pit. He crouched down and put his hand in the mud. He stood up and wiped his hand on his trousers and kept his thoughts to himself a while. “Ma’am,” he said at last, “that pit won’t dry in a week.

 Not with the ground under it wet like that. You build a fire on that mud, it’ll just steam. It’ll never make coals. And them rocks will crack like you said.” Pepsi stood at the edge with her arms wrapped around herself. The morning was cold. She was still in her night gown under her coat.

 Her feet were caked with mud to the ankle and her hands were scraped raw. And she was so tired she could feel her heartbeat in her eyelids. It was Saturday. Branding was Tuesday. The fire had to be lit on Monday at dawn. She stared at the ruined pit until the cold got into her. Then she turned and looked up the slope, above the bench, above the line of the old lateral to a stretch of higher ground where the grass was short and dry and the soil was full of small stones.

There, she said, “That’s hard ground, ma’am. That’s all gravel. That’s a day’s digging to go down a foot. I know it. You’d need I know what I’d need. higher ground, a deeper hole, and not a drop of water from that ditch can climb uphill to reach it. She turned to them. We’ll haul the drywood up this morning what’s left.

 We’ll pick the stones out of the mud and dry them in the sun, and we’ll dig today. Today, and tonight, Assam looked at Loyal. Loyal was already climbing with a spade over his shoulder. They dug all that Saturday in the hard ground above the lateral. It was nothing like the soft bench. The speeds rang on gravel and turned up rocks as big as a fist, and every foot of depth caused an hour of sweat.

 The hired riders dug until noon and then sat down in the shade and could not get up again. And Heepsi did not blame them. She fed them and sent them to the bunk house. Asum dug until the sun was low and then his old back seized up and he had to be helped up the hill to his bed, cursing all the way. That left loyal and he lit the lantern at dusk and hung it on a stake by the hole and they kept digging.

By then it was down past her waist. They stood in it together, side by side, in a small square of lantern light with the whole dark valley around them. And they dug. The spades rang. The gravel hissed as it slid off the blades. Down at the creek, the frogs were singing, hundreds of them, a great shrill, trembling chorus that rose and fell like breath.

Now and then Loyal stopped to lift out a rock too big for the spade, and she heard him grunt and heard the rock thud on the pile above. Her hands were bleeding through the strips of flower sack. Her shoulders burned. She kept digging. Somewhere around midnight, she stopped and leaned on her spade and could not start again.

 Loyal stopped, too. He leaned on his. They stood there in the hole in the lantern light breathing, their faces running with sweat and stre with dirt. Heepsi, he said. H I ought to tell you something. She waited. That was his trick, but she had learned it. When I said it, he began in the store. When I stood up and bet the creek, he looked down at his hands on the spade handle.

 I didn’t think. I just heard him say that about you and I couldn’t stand it and I opened my mouth and the whole way home I was sick about it. Not about the creek about you. I thought I’ve gone and made her a show. I put her up before the county like a horse at a fair and every man in it is going to stand around and watch her and wait for her to fall and it’ll be my doing. He swallowed.

I was afraid you’d hate me for it. She was quiet a long time. The frogs sang. I cooked at that hotel for two winters, she said at last. Every day men came in and sat down and ate what I cooked and wiped their plates with my bread and went out without ever once looking in the kitchen door to see who’d made it.

And when they did look, when they saw me, I could see them decide. Right there in their faces, there’s the fat cook. That’s all. That’s all they ever saw. She stopped. And then one day, there was a man at the end of the table who looked in the door and saw me and came back the next week and the next and asked me my name. Loyal was silent.

“You didn’t make me a show,” she said. “I’ve been a show my whole life, Loyal. Every room I ever walked into. You’re the first person who ever bet on the show.” He dropped his spade. It fell against the wall and slid down into the gravel. He took her face in both his dirty hands and kissed her there in the bottom of the hole with the frogs singing and the dirt in both their mouths and she laughed against his lips and kissed him back. I love you, he said.

 I should have said it in the store. I should have said that instead. You said it, she said. You just said it in Harkens language. They dug until the morning star came up. When the sun rose on the Sunday, the new pit was finished. It was deeper than the first. It was square and clean and dry as a bone, its walls hard gravel that would hold their shape and hold the heat.

 They had carried the riverstones up from the ruined pit by lantern light, two at a time, and laid them in rows on the grass to dry. And now the sun was on them. Epsy and Loyal lay down in the grass beside the pit. too tired to walk to the house and looked up at the sky going from gray to gold to blue. The frogs had stopped.

 A meadow lark was singing somewhere. We’ll have to line it, she said. And haul the wood up. Tomorrow. Today. The fire is tomorrow. Today then, he stayed flat on his back. In a minute. She started to laugh. She could not help it. She laughed until the tears ran down into her ears. And he laughed too, lying there in the grass with dirt in his beard.

 And down below them, the old drowned pit stood brown and useless in the morning light. And up here, the new one waited dry and deep. She slept 3 hours, and then she got up and cooked. The beans had been soaking since Friday night in the big croc, and she drained them and put them in the iron kettle with a slab of salt pork.

 Two onions cut in quarters. A handful of the dried red chili crumbled between her palms. A long pour of sorghum, and enough water to cover them by a knuckle. She set the kettle toward the rear of the stove, where the heat was low and steady. Before long, the whole cabin smelled of it, the salt pork rendering down soft and sweet, the chily sharp under it, the sorghum going dark and sticky at the edges of the pot.

 Then she made the stack cake. It was her mother’s cake, the Tennessee cake, the one for weddings and burials and the first frost. She had dried the apples herself last fall at the hotel, strung on threads over the kitchen range, and she had carried a whole flower sack of them out to the ranch when she married. Now she put three great handfuls in a pot with water and a stick of cinnamon, and a little nutmeg grated off the nut, and let them stew slow until they fell apart into a thick brown sauce that smelled like October. While the apples cooked, she

made the dough. Flour, a little soda, a little salt, ground ginger. Sorghum and buttermilk, and one egg, and a lump of lard. It was a stiff dough, more like a cookie than a cake. and she rolled it out thin on the flowered table and cut it into rounds the size of a skillet and baked them one at a time in the black iron pan until they were dry and brown and smelled of ginger all through the house.

Seven layers. She stacked them with the apple between thick and dark, pressing each one down with her palm. When it was done, it stood on the plate taller than a hatc crown, brown and lopsided and fragrant. “It isn’t for eating yet,” she told Loyal, who had come in and was standing over it with a look on his face like a boy at a shop window. “It has to sit.

 Two days at the least.” The apple goes down into the cake, and it all turns soft together. By Tuesday noon, it’ll be right. “Two days,” he said, stricken. But I made an extra layer. She broke it in half and gave him one piece and kept the other and some apple left over in the pot. He ate it standing up with apple on his fingers and he said nothing and she needed nothing said.

 The crew came in at noon, all three of them, even Isome creaking with a stick for a cane. She fed them beans and cornbread and coffee at the long table on the porch. The beans had cooked down thick and glossy, almost black, and the salt pork fell apart at the touch of a spoon. The cornbread was hot and crumbling and yellow as butter.

 “The men ate with their heads down and did not speak except to ask for more.” “Mrs. Castile,” said the lanky day rider, finally sitting back and wiping his mouth, “I would dig you a pit clear to China for another bowl of that. You’ll dig me one to the big horns if you want the cake on Tuesday. He laughed and she laughed and for a moment it was as if nobody on earth were watching them from the ridge.

 Loyal hadn’t been at that table for the beans. After his piece of cake he had ridden out with a roll of new wire behind his saddle and the fencing tools in a sack to mend the line the riders had cut in the rain. It was slow, cold work in the wet grass. He set new posts where the old ones leaned and stretched the wire with the claw of the hammer and stapled it and moved on.

 The whole time his eyes kept going east down the churned black trail to the ford where the tracks of the red steer went into the water and did not come out on his side again. It was near noon when he heard the horse on the far bank. Zeb Harkin sat the tall gray on the far side of the ford with the water sliding past the gray’s knees. He had been there a while.

 Loyal thought. He had the look of a man who had been watching somebody work and enjoying it. Castile, he said. Loyal drove the staple home. He did not look up. You’re on the wrong side of the water. I’m on my side. That’s what I came to talk about. Harkin leaned his forearm on the saddle horn. I’ll make you an offer. I’ll make it once.

 Cash money for the Creek Quarter today. A fair price before Tuesday. Before your wife stands up for all the valley to see and makes a fool of herself and you take it and I’ll tell Grimby the bets off between us. Nobody need ever know how it would have ended. Loyal straightened up slowly with the hammer in his hand.

 Everybody would know, he said. Everybody will know worse on Tuesday. Harkin smiled. I saw that pit of yours from the ridge. A ditch and a bonfire. You think men who’ve worked since sunup will sit down and eat beef that’s been buried like a dead mule? They’ll laugh and then they’ll ride to town and eat and the judge will ride it down and I’ll have your water for nothing instead of for cash. He gathered his reigns.

 I’m offering because I’m a neighbor. Think about her. What that’ll do to her? All those men laughing. A woman like that has been laughed at enough. I’d think Loyal’s hand closed on the hammer until the knuckles went white. He thought of Heepsi by lantern with her hands bleeding through the flower sack. He thought of her face by the saddle pegs. He thought of what she had said.

That’s what he wants. That’s what he’s hoping for. He opened his hand and let the hammer drop into the sack. You came all the way down here on a Sunday, he said, to offer money for a thing you say you’re going to win for nothing. He picked up the roll of wire. That’s the first thing you’ve said in a week that makes me feel easy, Harkin.

Go home. Tell your cook to burn the beans. I hear he’s good at it. Harkin sat very still in the saddle. Then he turned the gray without a word and splashed back across and the water slowed behind him. Loyal stood in the wet grass a long time after he was gone. His heart was going hard. He was not as easy as he had said.

 He was afraid if he was honest, more afraid than he had been of anything in his grown life. But he did not tell Heepsi what Harkin had offered. Not that day and not for a long time after. It was in the middle of the afternoon that Tandy Gatlin rode into the yard. He was driving a Castile cow ahead of his horse, a brindle cow with a heer calf at her side, and he brought her right up to the corral gate and waited there on his horse, hat off, not getting down.

 Loyal went out. Heepsi watched from the porch. “Found her on our side of the ford, Mr. Castile.” Tandy said her and the calf must have come through where the wire was down. “Where the wire was cut?” said Loyal. The young man’s sunburned face went red to the ears. He looked down at his saddle horn.

 “Yes, sir,” he said, “wear it was cut.” Loyal opened the gate and the cow went through and the calf after her. He closed it and stood with his hand on the top rail. “Obl,” he said. Tandy did not ride away. He sat there on his horse and turned his hat around in his hands and his eyes kept going past loyal to the porch where the smell of the beans was still coming out of the open door. Pepsi came down the steps.

Mr. Gatlin, she said, “Have you eaten?” He opened his mouth. He shut it. “Get down,” she said. “Come in and sit.” He got down. He came up on the porch as if he were walking into church and reached for his hat again, although it was already off and sat on the very end of the bench.

 She put a bowl of beans in front of him and a square of cornbread and a cup of coffee and then, because he looked so thin and so young and so hungry, a piece of the extra stack cake layer with apple spooned over it. He ate the beans first. He ate slowly. the way a man eats when he’s trying to make it last. When he came to the cake, he stopped and put a bit in his mouth and his face changed.

 “My grandmother made this,” he said. “Back in Missouri.” “I ain’t had it since I was small.” “It’s better on Tuesday,” said Hepsi. “It has to sit.” He looked up at her then. He had gray blue eyes and they were troubled. Ma’am, he said, I ought not to tell you this. She sat down across from him. Loyal came and leaned on the porch post. Mr.

 Harkin got all of us together last night, Tandy said. The whole crew in the bunk house. He said on Tuesday at the branding, there’s to be no man of his outfit sits down to your table. Not one. He said any man that eats a bite of your cooking can draw his time and ride out. and he’ll see to it that nobody else in the county ever hires him. He swallowed.

He said, “If 26 of the 40 won’t eat, it don’t matter how good she cooks. The judge can’t call it fed if half of them go away hungry.” Pepsi sat very still. And the judge’s terms say every man to have his fill, Loyal said slowly from the porch post. Yes, sir. So he doesn’t have to beat her cooking.

 Loyal said he only has to make his men go hungry. Tandy nodded. He looked miserable. Epsy felt the cold go through her. The way it had gone through her on the fence line with the lantern in her hand. She looked down at the young man’s plate. He had eaten every bean. He had wiped the bowl clean with his cornbread. There were apple crumbs on his fork.

 Why tell me this? she said. He turned red again because it ain’t right. He said what he said about you in the store. What they done to your fence. I don’t know about the rest of it, ma’am, but I know that ain’t right. He stood up. And because I’m hungry, we’re all hungry. That wagon cook of his burns everything. And Mr.

 Harkin won’t hire another. He says it’s a waste of money to feed men fancy. He turned his hat around once more. I got to go. If he knew I come here, wait. He got up and went into the cabin. When she came back, she had a round loaf of the morning’s bread wrapped in a clean cloth. She put it in his hands. For the ride, she said.

He held it against his chest and met her eyes. Tuesday, he said. I don’t know what the others will do, ma’am. They’re scared of him. They got no place else to go. Then I’ll have to cook something a man can’t say no to,” said Heepsy. He rode off with the loaf buttoned inside his coat.

 And she stood on the porch and watched him go down to the ford, and her hands were shaking again, and she held them clasped against her apron until they stopped. That evening, after the crew had gone to the bunk house, she sat on the porch step with Loyal and looked down the slope at the new pit in the dusk and the woods stacked beside it and the long bench where the tables would stand. 26 men who won’t eat, Loyal said.

Out of 40, 26 men who are hungry, said Heepsy. You said it yourself in the wagon. Hungry men are honest eaters. She pulled her shawl tighter. Harkin can tell a man not to eat. He can’t tell a man not to smell. Loyal turned his head and looked at her. Which way does the wind come at midday? She said in May at noon.

He thought about it. Down off the hills, he said. Down the creek mostly. Then that’s where the tables go, said Hepsi. below the pit, right under the wind. Every man at those tables is going to sit there all morning at the branding with that pit breathing down on him. And when I open it at noon, it’s going to come down that slope on him like a flood.

She was quiet a moment. My mother always opened on the uphill side. She said, “A pit’s the only preacher that never has to raise its voice.” Loyal laughed out loud in the dusk. the first time in days. And she leaned against his shoulder, and they sat there until the stars came out. When the stars were out, Eam and Loyal killed the old Longhorn by lantern light.

 She did not watch. She stayed in the cook house and scrubbed the big kettles and heard the shot once flat and final across the valley. And then the sounds of the men working in the half dark by the springhouse, the chains and the block and the long saws. It took them until late when loyal came into wash. He was blood to the elbows and gray with tiredness. He’s hanging, he said.

 Four quarters in the springhouse. It’s cold enough in there. How is he? Loyal dried his hands slowly. Lean, he said. Dark like an old saddle. I never cut meat so hard in my life. Asam had to sharpen the knife four times. He lifted his eyes to hers. Epsi. I don’t know. I do. She said it was a lie. She said it anyway.

 Before bed, she carried the lamp out to the springhouse. The four great quarters hung in the cold dark from their hooks, turning a little on the chains, dark red and lean with only a thin rind of yellow fat. She touched one. It was cold and hard as wood. She took the salt croc down from the shelf and began to rub the salt in.

She worked until her arms achd. Then she stood back and looked at the meat in the lamplight and at her own croc of sourdough on the shelf beside the door where it was cool with its wooden lid and its chipped brown lip bubbling slowly in the dark. She went up to bed and slept like a stone. It was the smell that woke her.

She did not know what it was at first. She was coming across the yard in the gray before dawn with the lamp in one hand and the kindling basket on her hip, going to fetch the starter for the morning’s bread. And she stopped halfway to the springhouse with her head up like a deer coal oil.

 The springhouse door stood open a hand’s breath. She had shut it. She had shut it and dropped the wooden latch. She remembered the sound of the latch. She went in with the lamp held high. The four quarters of beef hung untouched on their chains. The salt croc was on its shelf. The butter was on its shelf, and on the shelf by the door, where the brown croc stood with its wooden lid, the lid had been taken off and set neatly beside it, and the reek of coal oil rose from the croc so strong her eyes stung.

 She looked in. The starter lay in the bottom of the croc, gray and dead, with a rainbow sheen floating over it. Somebody had poured the coal oil in and stirred it. stirred it right down through to the bottom so that there wasn’t one spoonful left that was not ruined. She set the lamp down on the shelf because her hands had begun to shake too hard to hold it.

 Her mother had fed that starter every day of her life. Her grandmother had carried it over the mountains from North Carolina in a gourd. Pepsi had carried it 2,000 m in her lap. It had made the biscuits Loyal had eaten in the hotel dining room the first time he ever looked in the kitchen door. It had made every loaf of bread she meant to put on the tables on Tuesday for 40 men. It had been alive.

It had been alive for 60 years. She sat down on the floor of the springhouse in the cold and the dark with her back against the stone wall and the croc in her lap and she could not get up. Loyal found her there when the sun was coming up. He did not ask her what had happened. He smelled it. He stood in the doorway and saw the croc she held and the lid set so neatly on the shelf beside it and his face did the thing it had done at the barn door on the Friday night and then undid it slowly because he had promised her. He

came in and crouched down facing her. Pepsi, he said. I can’t, she said. It came out of her in a whisper. Loyal, I can’t. There’s no bread. There’s no bread for 40 men. Everything’s gone wrong. Everything he touches goes wrong. The steer and the pit and now this. And I’m so tired. And it’s tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. I know it.

Go and see him. She caught his wrist. Go and see Harkin today. this morning. Offer him something. Offer him the grass on the north side, the hay meadow, anything. And make him take back the bed. Make him tear up that feed bill. Save the creek loyal. Please, I can’t lose you the water. I can’t be the reason.

 I can’t be the fat woman who lost her husband his water. I’d sooner die. Loyal was quiet. He glanced down at her hand on his wrist. Then he turned his hand over and took hold of hers. “I didn’t bet on bread,” he said. “I didn’t bet on a red steer or a hole in the ground.” “I bet on you. You’re still here, aren’t you?” She stared at him.

“Aren’t you?” he said again softly. She could not answer. She put her face down on his shoulder and wept, as she hadn’t wept since the store, nor since the fence, nor since her mother’s burying great ugly heaving sobs that shook them both, and he knelt on the springhouse floor, and held her and let her.

 When it was done, she lifted her head. She wiped her face with her wrist and left a smear of salt across her cheek. And then she sat up straight. “Mrs. Tumi. She said, “What?” Mrs. Tumi. I gave her a cup of it in March. She told me it sits on the back of her stove, bubbling like a spring. She was on her feet.

 It’s the same starter. It’s my mother’s. It’s all the same. Loyal stood up, too. It’s 12 miles to town. Then I’d better go now. She was already out the door talking over her shoulder. Isam has to light the pit. Loyal. Listen to me. The pine at the bottom crisscrossed and the ash on the pine and the choke cherry over all of it.

 And he lights it in three places at once. And he doesn’t stop feeding it. Not for anything. Not till I’m back. If the fire doesn’t start at dawn, the coals won’t be deep enough by dark. I’ll tell him. You’ll help him. I’ll help him. He caught her by the arm in the yard. Heepsi, take the rifle. She looked at him, then she took it.

 She drove the buckboard to Buffalo faster than she had ever driven anything in her life. The team ran with their ears laid back and the wheels bounced off the ruts and the rifle rattled against the seat beside her. behind her as she topped the last rise before the river road. She looked back once and saw the smoke go up from the Castile place.

 A thin white column rising straight into the still morning air from the high ground above the creek. Asam had lit the fire. She kept her eyes on the road after that. Mrs. Tumi was in her kitchen behind the store with her hands in a bowl of dough. When Heepsi came through the back door without knocking, breathless and red-faced and smelling of coal oil, Mrs.

 Tumi took one look at her and said, “Oh, my dear, what did they do?” Hepsi told her. Mrs. Tumi asked nothing more. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to the back of the stove and lifted down a tall glass jar with a cloth tied over the mouth. Inside it, the starter had risen nearly to the top, pale and creamy and full of bubbles.

 And when she untied the cloth, the smell came out sour and warm and alive. Hepsi laid her palm against the jar. It was warm from the stove. She could feel it through the glass very faintly working. “Take all of it,” said Mrs. Tumi. “I only need half. You keep the rest. You keep it going. I’ll keep it going, Mrs. Tumi said. She poured half into a clean croc and tied a cloth over it and pressed it into Heepsy’s arms.

 And if anybody ever comes near it with a can of coal oil, I’ll take Tumi’s shotgun to him myself. When Heepsi came out onto the front walk with the croc in her arms, Zeb Harkin was standing on the porch of the merkantile. He was talking with two men in town clothes. He stopped when he saw her. His eyes went to the croc and then to her face and something moved in them quick and cold and was gone.

 You’re up early, Mrs. Castile baking. The two men in town clothes looked at her. Pepsi walked past him. She walked past him so close that the hem of her skirt brushed his polished boot and she kept her eyes ahead and she did not stop. She put the croc on the seat of the buckboard and wedged it in with the rifle and the laproe and climbed up and took the lines.

“You gave me nine days, Mr. Harkin,” she said without turning her head. “There’s one left. See you tomorrow.” She drove home at a walk so as not to shake the croc. She was back by noon. The new pit was roaring. She could hear it from the road, a sound like wind in a chimney. And when she came into the yard, the heat was shimmering above the high ground in a great wavering column, making the hills behind it ripple like something seen through water.

Isam and Loyal and both the day riders were black with smoke and soot from their hair to their boots. They were feeding the fire in shifts. Loyal came to meet her at the buck board. No question. She held up the croc. He shut his eyes a moment. Then he took it out of her hands as if it were made of glass and carried it into the cookhouse himself.

 She fed the starter flour and warm water in the big yellow bowl and set it up high near the stove pipe and covered it with a cloth. Then she washed her face and hands and tied on a clean apron and went out to her fire. All that afternoon the fire burned. She fed it herself now and let the man rest in turns. She worked from the upwind side with a long iron rod and pushed the burning logs where she wanted them and threw on ash and choke cherry by the arm load.

And the heat came up so fierce that she had to turn her face away and work with her eyes squeezed half shut. It dried the sweat on her skin before it could run. It singed the fine hairs on her forearms. Her apron went brown and stiff at the hem. When the wind shifted and blew the smoke in her face, she coughed and wiped her streaming eyes and went on.

 The floor stones had gone from gray to white. Now and then, one of them ticked or popped in the heat, but none of them cracked. They were dry. She had dried them. Your mother would say it’s a good fire. Loyal said, coming up beside her with a bucket of water to drink. She drank from the dipper. The water was so cold it hurt her teeth. She’d say it’s a start, Hepsi said.

In the middle of the afternoon, she left the fire to Isome and went down to the spring house with Loyal and the long knife. The four quarters of the old Longhorn hung from their hooks with the salt crusted white on them. Loyal took them down in turn and laid them on the big plank table she had set up outside the door and she cut.

She cut the steer into great pieces. The rounds whole, the chucks, the long slabs of ribs, the brisketss, the shoulders, each one bigger than a Christmas ham. It was hard work. The meat was so lean and so tough that the knife dragged in it. And she had to lean her whole weight on the handle to get through the gristle. But she did not waste a scrap.

Every piece of that steer was going into the ground. The whole steer. Every pound of them from the neck to the shanks. She rubbed each piece with salt again and black pepper by the fistful until they were black with it. Then she made the mop again. in the wash tub this time.

 The whole keg of vinegar and every onion in the cellar and mopped each piece until it dripped, and the vinegar stung in the cracked blisters on her palms. In the creek, the burlap had been soaking since noon. All the sacks from Tumi’s store, and every sack on the place besides, waited down on the bottom with stones. The men waited in and dragged them out in dripping arm loads and carried them up the slope, leaving a dark, wet trail through the grass.

 She wrapped the meat herself piece by piece on the plank table, one layer of wet burlap, a second, a third. She wrapped each bundle as tight as she could pull it and tied it round and round with bailing wire and twisted the ends and Loyal carried each one up the slope and laid it in a row on the grass. When the sun touched the hills, there was a row of dripping bundles along the edge of the pit as long as a freight wagon.

The fire was down. She walked the edge of the pit slowly looking in. There were no flames anymore. What there was down below was a bed of coals 2 ft deep and glowing from end to end, orange and red and gold, pulsing like something breathing, and above it the air shook with heat so that the far wall of the pit wavered like a reflection in a pond.

 She held her hand out over it flat. She could hold it there for the count of one, not two. Now, she said, it was dusk. The whole crew had come to stand around the pit, and both hired riders and Isam with his stick. Nobody said anything. Down at the creek, the frogs had started up. Loyal and Isim took the first bundle between them on two poles and swung it out over the coals and lowered it.

 When the wet burlap touched the coals, there was a sound like the whole world taking a breath. The steam went up in a great white roaring cloud higher than a man, and the smell came with it. Vinegar and wet sacking and pepper and hot beef and the sweet bitter smoke of the choke cherry. The men stepped back.

 Pepsi did not step back. She held her ground in the steam and the smoke with her face wet and her apron clinging to her and watched the next bundle go down and the next and the next. Rounds and chucks and brisketss and ribs, one after another, side by side in rows on the glowing coals until the whole bottom of the pit was covered with steaming black bundles and the last of them was down.

 the whole steer, every pound of him in the ground. The iron, she said. The men dragged the roof iron and the stove jacket over the pit, overlapping them like shingles. Then they took up the shovels. The dirt went on in a rain, thuting on the iron, and the steam came up through the cracks between the sheets in hissing white plumes, and they shoveled faster, and it found its way through the dirt, and they shoveled more.

 Pepsi went around the mound with her own spade and her own feet, stamping and patting, finding every thread of steam and choking it with earth until the whole pit was one long, low mound of dirt, like a grave in a churchyard, and nothing came out of it at all. Then it was done. They stood around the mound in the dusk, black with smoke, breathing hard, and nobody said anything. Eim took his hat off.

 He held it against his chest. He looked at the mound a long moment. Then, one by one, the day riders took off their hats, too, and loyal. And they all stood there bareheaded in the dark around the long mound of earth, as if at a burial, as if in church. Epsi started to laugh, and then she was crying.

 And then she was laughing again. and Loyal pulled her close and she leaned against him and could not stop doing either one. Well, said Isome, putting his hat back on. That’s the damnedest thing I ever did see. They took the night watch together. She and Loyal. She did not trust anyone else with it.

 After what had been done to the first pit, she did not trust the dark. Asum went up to his bed and the day riders went to the bunk house and Loyal carried a blanket and the shotgun down to the mound and spread the blanket on the ground on the uphill side of it and they sat. The ground was warm. It came through the blanket, through her skirt, through everything.

 A deep, slow warmth rising from the earth like the heat from a sleeping animal. She put her palms flat on the dirt beside her and held them there. It’s working, she said. How do you know? I can feel it. He put his hand down beside hers. After a moment, he said, “So can I.” The stars came out, thousands of them, so thick over the valley that the sky looked dusty with them.

 The creek ran loud in the dark below. Somewhere far off, a coyote started up and another answered it and they went on for a while and then stopped. “Tell me about her,” Loyal said. “Your mother?” He was quiet for a while. “She was a big woman, too,” she said finally. “Bigger than me. People used to laugh at her in town, the way they laugh at me.

” She never let on that she heard it. But at the camp meetings when she opened that pit and the smell drifted over the whole hollow and the people came from every direction with their plates in their hands, I’d watch her face. She’d stand at the head of that pit with the fork in her hand and they’d all come to her, the preacher, the sheriff, the ladies who laughed at her in town.

All of them standing in line holding out their plates. and she’d fill every plate the same and she’d smile. Pepsi turned her face up to the stars. I never saw anybody so proud as my mother at the head of a pit. Loyal was quiet a good while. I’d like to have known her, he said. She’d have liked you.

 She’d have said you were too thin. He laughed softly. Everybody says that. She’d have fed you till you weren’t. You’re doing that already? It was past midnight when she saw the lantern. It was up the slope where it had been the other night near the headgate of Harkin’s Ditch. It moved. It stopped. And after a while, she heard it.

 The sound of water again, running where no water should be. Loyal was on his feet with the shotgun. Wait, said Hepsi. She had her hand on his arm. Wait, watch. The water came down the old lateral in the dark. They could hear it rushing. It came down across the slope and reached the place where somebody had cut the bank above the drowned pit and poured through the cut and ran down across the bench into the old hole below where it had gone before.

 And that was all it did. It could not come uphill. The new pit sat above the lateral on its high gravel shelf, and the water ran past below it in the dark and fell into the empty old pit on the bench and filled it again and went no farther. Up at the headgate, the lantern stopped moving. It stayed still a long time. Whoever held it was standing there looking down, listening to the water run into the wrong hole.

Loyal walked out into the dark with the shotgun in his hands. He did not run. He walked straight up the slope toward the lantern, not hiding. And when he was halfway there, he stopped and stood on the open grass with the stars behind him, where anybody holding a lantern could see him plain. “Vley,” he did not shout.

 His voice carried anyway, flat and clear over the sound of the water. You’re on my land. The lantern jerked. In its swinging light, Hepsi saw the gleam of a yellow slicker. The slope of the shoulders, the long jaw. For one moment, Farley’s face turned toward them, white and pinched. And then the lantern went out.

 They heard the horse. It went away fast toward the ford, splashing, and then there was nothing but the water running down the lateral into the old drowned pit. Loyal came back and sat down beside her on the blanket. His hands were steady. He laid the shotgun across his knees. “I saw him,” he said. I saw his face. “So did I.” “That’s twice.

” “That’s twice,” she said. He did not go after him. She loved him for that more than for anything he had ever done. She took his hand and kept it. And they sat on the warm earth over the buried steer and spoke no more until the sky began to go gray. At 4 in the morning she went to make the bread. In the night the starter had climbed until it was pushing up the cloth over the bowl.

 And when she lifted the cloth, it breathed out at her sour and sweet and alive. her mother’s smell, her grandmother’s, and she stood there a moment in the dark with the bowl in her hands and closed her eyes. Then she worked. She had set a great sponge the evening before in the big wash tub scrubbed clean. And now she worked the flour into it with both arms up past the elbows, turning and folding and pushing the heel of her hand down through the dough until it came together smooth and soft and springy under her palms.

 She cut it into loaves. She baked them in the cook stove oven four at a time and in the three big Dutch ovens set in coals in the yard. And Loyal carried coals for her from the stove in a scuttle and heaped them on the lids. By the time the sun came up, there were loaves cooling on every flat place in the cookhouse, on the table and the shelves and the window sills and the tops of the flower barrels, round and brown and crusted, and the whole ranch smelled of fresh bread.

 The beans were back onto heat in the big kettle. The stack cake stood on its plate on the shelf with a cloth over it. And when she lifted the cloth to look, the layers had gone soft and dark and settled down into one another, just as her mother always said they would. It was right. It was Tuesday, and it was right. She went to the door.

 The long mound up the slope was still there. A thread of steam was coming up out of one end of it into the cold morning air thin as a pencil line. And down on the river road, coming from the direction of the fort, rose the dust of riders. They came all morning. The Harkin outfit came first behind a gather of cows and calves, and the dust of them hung over the ford long after they had crossed.

Then the neighbors reps by twos and threes, and the day riders loyal had hired. By midm morning the whole bench below the Castile place was full of noise. Calves balling, cows answering, men shouting, and the hiss of the irons. 40 men. She counted them from the cookhouse door. She counted twice. She had been up since 4 with the bread.

 And when the riders began to come, she was already on to the coffee. Coffee for 40 men was not a pot. It was the two copper wash boilers from the laundry shed, scalded and set on a trench fire of their own, with the ground coffee thrown in by the double handful and stirred with a canoe paddle until the whole porch smelled dark and bitter and wonderful.

One of the first riders to come by for a cup was a Harkin man. He stood by the porch steps with his tin cup, looking over his shoulder toward the corral where his boss would be. Pepsi filled his cup without a word. He drank it standing there. It was not food, she thought, watching him. Coffee was not food. Arkin had said nothing about coffee.

 He came back for a second cup before he joined the branding fire. So did four others. Pepsi had seen brandings. She had never cooked for one. She stood in the door of the cook house in her green calico dress, sleeves pushed up and a clean cream apron tied over it, and her hair pinned up as tight as she could get it, and watched the men work, and felt her heart going hard and fast under her ribs.

The trestle tables were set out on the grass between the corral and the pit, under the cottonwoods along the creek. planks laid across saw horses end to end. Every tin plate on the place was stacked at one end, and every tin cup, and the neighbors had brought more. The beans were in the big kettle.

 The bread was in the wagon bed under clean cloths. The stack cake stood on its plate in the shade, and the long mound on the high ground sat there in the sun, with its thread of steam still rising from one end. Zeb Harkin came at 10:00. He did not ride with his men. He came alone on the tall gray horse, the black coat buttoned to the throat, though the day was already warm, and he rode through the whole length of the branding without looking at any of it.

 He dismounted on the far side of the corral and tied the gray to a rail. Then he folded his arms across his chest and stood there in the shade of the corral and gazed up at the pit and at the cook house and at her. He did not move after that. He stood there all morning like a post somebody had painted black.

 Vley was working the branding fire. He kept his back to the high ground. Not once all morning did Hepsi see him turn his head toward the pit. Judge Grimby came in his buggy a little before 11. He drove into the yard and climbed down slowly with a grunt and stood with his hands in the small of his back, looking around at the branding and the tables and the mound. Well, Mrs.

Castile, judge, you ready? I’ll be ready at noon. He studied her over his spectacles. Harkin tells me none of his crew will eat. He said, “Mr. Harkin says a great many things. Grimby’s mouth twitched under his mustache. He does, he said. He does that. He walked away down to the tables and lowered himself onto one of the benches and folded his hands on his stomach and waited.

 At a/4 to 12, Hepsi went to the pit. Loyal was already there and the two-day riders with their shovels. The smell was already coming. It had been coming all morning faintly on the breeze through the dirt. She had seen men at the branding fire lift their heads and sniff and look around puzzled like cattle smelling rain.

 Now standing at the mound, she could smell it plain. Smoke and vinegar and something deep and dark and rich under the earth. She pressed her palm to the dirt. Still warm after 14 hours and more. still warm. “All right,” she said. “Open it.” They started at the end, scraping the dirt off the iron. At the first stroke of the shovel, the steam rose.

 It came through the dirt in a hundred little plumes, and then as the shovel scraped the iron bare in a great white rolling cloud, and the smell rode out on it, it went down the slope like water. It went over the trestle tables and through the cottonwoods and down across the corral, and at the branding fire, a man holding an iron stopped with the iron in the air.

 A roper in the pen let his loop fall slack. One after another, the men along the corral rails turned their heads, all of them, as if somebody had called their names. It was the smell of beef that had been cooking in the dark for 14 hours in its own juices. And the vinegar and the pepper and the choked cherry smoke.

 It was dark and sweet and sharp and rich all at once. It smelled like every Sunday dinner any of those men had ever eaten as a boy and better. And nothing any of them had ever smelled before. The branding stopped. Nobody called it. It just stopped. The calves balled on in the pen and nobody went after them. Loyal and Isome hooked the first sheet of iron and dragged it off the pit.

 The heat that rose from the hole was like opening an oven door. Down in the pit the fire had sunk to ash as soft as flour, and lying on it in their rose were the burlap bundles, black and charred and steaming, and the juice had run out of them and sizzled on the coals. And the smell came up out of that hole so strong and so good that Isam stepped back and sat down hard and put his hand on his heart.

 Hepsi went down on her knees. She took the long iron hook and reached down and caught the wire of the nearest bundle and Loyal knelt beside her and took the other end on a pole and together they lifted it up out of the pit and swung it onto the big cottonwood plank she had scrubbed white for a platter. She cut the wire.

 She peeled back the burlap. Black on the outside and brown underneath. One layer, two, three. And the steam rolled into her face, and she did not flinch from it. It was a round of the old Longhorn. The steer that was too tough to chew. The outside of it had gone dark, almost black. A crust of pepper and salt and smoke as thick as the rind on a loaf, glistening and crackled.

 And when she put the big fork into it, the fork went in as if into butter. She pulled. The meat came apart. It came apart in long, dark, tender strands, falling over itself, running with juice, pink at the heart and steaming. and the smell from the heart of it made her eyes fill. She heard Loyal make a sound beside her. She lifted the great plank in both arms, heavy as a child, with the beef piled on it, dark and steaming and falling apart, and turned around to face the tables.

Loyal was leaning in beside her with his hat pushed back and his mouth open. He looked as if he had never seen her before in his life. He looked like a man seeing the sun come up for the first time. Down at the tables, 40 men had turned around on the benches with their tin plates in their hands, and all of them were staring at the plank.

 Behind them, the smoke of the pit drifted through the cottonwoods in the bright noon light. And far off by the corral, small and dark, Zeb Harkin stood with his arms folded and did not move. Hepsi smiled. She could not help it. She was so tired her knees were shaking and her apron was black with ash and her hair was coming down.

 And she stood there with the plank of beef in her arms and smiled at the whole county and felt the joy come up in her like the steam out of the ground. Dinner, she said. Nobody moved. That was the terrible moment. She would remember it all her life. The whole crowd sat there on the benches, 40 men, and not one of them got up.

 At the corral, Harkin had unfolded his arms. He walked a few steps toward the tables, not hurrying, and stopped where his own crew could see him and waited with his hands at his sides. “Boys,” he said. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “You know what I told you.” The Harkin riders sat still at the tables.

 Hepsi watched them. She watched their faces, 26 faces, turned toward the pit, and she saw them swallow. She saw a heavy man with a red beard, close his eyes. She saw a man near the end wipe his mouth on his sleeve and look at Harkin and look at the beef and look at his empty plate. Nobody moved. The whole valley had gone silent except for the calves balling in the pen and the creek running and the soft sizzle of the juice dripping off the plank onto the ground.

Then Tandy Gatlin stood up. He stood up from among the Harkin men with his tin plate in his hand. He did not look at Harkin. He looked straight ahead up the slope at Heepsi. His face was white under the sunburn. He walked up the slope with every man at the tables watching him and stopped in front of her and held out his plate.

 His hand was shaking. The plate trembled. “Ma’am,” he said. Heepsi put down the plank on the table by the pit. She took his plate. She filled it. Beef, a great heap of it, dark and falling apart and steaming. a ladle of beans, a thick slice of the morning’s bread. She gave it back to him. “Mr. Gatlin,” she said, “eat Hardy.

” “Gatlin,” said hearken from down the slope. His voice had gone quiet and very cold. “You eat that, you’re done. You hear me? You draw your time tonight, and you’ll never ride for another outfit in this territory as long as I’m in it.” Tandee stood there with the plate in his hands. Then he picked up a piece of beef in his fingers and put it in his mouth.

Everyone at the tables watched him chew. He chewed slowly. His eyes closed. He swallowed. And then he stood there before the branding crew and said in a voice that cracked in the middle like a boy’s, “Oh Lord, oh Lord have mercy, boys.” He went and sat down at the castile end of the table and began to eat as if he hadn’t eaten in a month.

The big red bearded man got up next. He never glanced at Harkin either. He came up the slope with his plate and held it out and Hepsi filled it and he said, “Thank you, ma’am.” Very low and went back to the table. And then they were all coming. They came up the slope in a rush like a damn breaking.

 Arkin men and Castile men and the neighbors reps all mixed together, pushing and jostling and laughing with their plates held out. And she and Loyal and Isim stood at the pit and filled them as fast as they could. Loyal hauled the bundles out one after another and cut the wire. And the white clouds rolled and the smell and the men cheered.

Esim sliced bread. She forked the beef. Brisket so tender it fell off the fork. Rib meat that pulled away from the bone at a touch. Shoulder dark and smoky to the center. The beans went out by the ladleful. The bread went out by the loaf. At the tables, the noise rose until you could hardly hear the creek. Men ate with their fingers and their knives and the heels of their bread.

Men who had not spoken to one another in years passed the bean kettle down the table. A gray old rep from the Upper Creek outfit stood up on the bench with his plate and shouted, “Where’s this lady been all my life?” And the whole table roared. Down by the corral, Zeb Harkin stood alone. Pepsi saw him.

 She saw him watch his own crew eat her food. Every one of them, 26 men, and she saw his face. It had gone a dull modeled red above the gray beard, and his hands were fists at his sides. Then she saw the Harkin men start coming back. The big red bearded man first. He climbed back with his plate empty and wiped clean, looking sheepish, and held it out again.

I hate to ask, ma’am. You’re not asking. I’m offering. She filled it again. And after him, Tandy, and after Tandy, a dozen more of them, and then 20. All the Harkin crew coming back up the slope for their second plates. And then they came back for thirds. She would never forget it. She would tell it for the rest of her life.

 The Harkin crew, all 26 of them, standing in line at her pit with their plates held out for the third time while their boss stood alone by the corral and watched. When the beef was half gone, she cut the stack cake. She cut it on the plank in thick wedges, and the layers had gone soft and dark and set together as one.

and the apple ran brown and spiced between them. She put a wedge on every plate that came back. The men who had been talking fell silent. A few of them just sat and gazed at the cake on their plates for a moment before they ate it as if it had reminded them of something. Tandy climbed to her one last time with his plate in his hand and apple on his chin and stopped by the pit.

 Ma’am, he said, “My grandmother’s was good. Yours is better. Don’t ever tell her I said it.” Judge Grimby had eaten everything. He had sat on his bench all through the dinner and eaten slowly and steadily, like a man doing a job of work he meant to do right. He had eaten two plates of beef and one of beans and half a loaf of bread and a wedge of the stack cake, and he had not said one word.

 Now he wiped his mustache with his handkerchief and folded the handkerchief away. He took the feed bill out of his vest and unfolded it and stood up. He climbed up on the bench so everyone could see him. It creaked under his weight. The noise at the tables died away. Men put down their forks. Down at the corral, Harkin lifted his head. “Gentlemen,” said Grimby.

 He did not have a big voice, but he did not need one. It had gone so quiet under the cottonwoods that you could hear a calf blowing in the pen. I have here the wager made between Loyal Castile and Zeb Harkin on the second Saturday of this month in Tumi’s store. He said, I wrote it myself. It says that Mrs.

 Castile is to feed 40 men, both outfits at the spring branding, every dish from her own two hands, and that every man is to have his fill. If she fails, Otter Creek goes to Zeb Harkin. If she does not fail, Zeb Harkin shuts his ditch gate on Otter Creek for good and all. He looked out over the tables. I count 40 men, he said.

 I have counted them twice. I watched Mrs. Castile cook every dish that was served here, and her husband and her hand carry it. I saw no other woman’s hand in it. I have watched every one of those 40 men eat. I have watched most of them eat three times. A laugh ran down the tables and died. I will ask it anyway so that nobody can say I did not.

 Is there any man here of either outfit who has not had his fill? Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Then down the tables a man laughed and another and the red bearded harkin rider stood up and patted his stomach with both hands and the whole crowd laughed with him. Then I rule it, said Grimby before the whole of both outfits and every witness here. Mrs.

 Castile has fed 40 men and fed them better than any man in this territory ever ate at a branding. The wager is hers. Hearken. You’ll shut your gate. The cheer went up so loud that the calves in the pen stamped against the far rails. Pepsi did not cheer. She stood by the pit holding the big fork, her apron black with ash and couldn’t move at all. Loyal’s hand found hers.

 He just held on. No. Harkin had come up to the tables. He stood at the end of them facing Grimby on his bench and his face was dark red and his voice shook. “No,” he said again. “It’s rigged. The whole thing’s rigged, judge. She fed them some kind of trick.” “It’s not even beef.” There was no beef on that place fit to eat. Every man in this valley knows it.

That was a 7-year-old mossy horn you couldn’t cut with an axe. Where’d she get that meat? Where’d she get it? She bought it somewhere or somebody gave it to her and she’s passing it off as her own. I’ll tell you where she got it. It was awesome. The old man had got up off the dirt pile with his stick.

 He came down to the tables slowly, bow-legged, and stood in front of Harkin and looked up at him. She got it off that old Longhorn steer you left her. Isome said, “I butchered him myself on Sunday night. It took me four sharpenings to get through him, and she put him in the ground and made that out of him, and every man here ate it.” He leaned on his stick.

 “But since you’re asking about beef, Mr. Harkin, since you’re asking where steers come from. I was down at your holding pan at the ford this morning helping cut out our calves and I seen a red steer in there. The tables had gone very quiet again. “A fat red steer,” said Isim, whitefaced down the middle, and a fresh burn brand on his hip, all blotted over and scabbed, and a notch out of his left ear.

 the same notch loyal Castile cuts in every steer he owns. Harkin said nothing. Grimby climbed down off the bench. “Well,” he said heavily, “I expect we had better all go and have a look.” They went down to the ford together, all of them. 40 men and more walking and riding. Grimby in his buggy, loyal and heepsy at the front of the crowd, and Harkin walking stiffly with men all around him. Nobody touched him.

Nobody had to. The Harkin holding pen stood on the far bank of the ford, a rough corral of poles among the willows. Inside it a few dozen head of Harkin cattle milled in the dust, waiting to be driven up to the branding. And among them, big and red and slow, with a white splash down his face, stood Heepsy steer. She knew him at once.

 She would have known him anywhere. He came lumbering to the rails when he saw her, the way he had come to the grain bucket every evening since the thaw, and pushed his big white face against the poles. Loyal climbed over the rails. Asam climbed after him. They got a rope on the red steer and three of the Harkin riders came to help them.

 And together they turned him so that everyone could see his hip. The brand was blotted. Somebody had taken a running iron and burned over the old mark, a great ugly smear. And the burn had scabbed over black and was still raw at the edges. It was not a week old, but under it, if you looked, if you knew how to look, you could still see the old shape.

 Loyal’s brand, an L with a bar through it, just showing through along the lower edge of the scab, and the left ear had a notch cut out of it. Square, clean, old. That’s my steer, said Loyal quietly. taken out of my pasture the night after the wager through my cutwire. Grimby leaned on the top pole and studied the brand.

 “Harkin,” he said without turning around. “He strayed,” said Harkin. “He came through the wire and strayed into my pen, and some fool of mine put a brand on him by mistake.” “Somebody cut that wire,” said Grimby. “And somebody blotted that brand on purpose.” That’s a running iron, not a mistake. And I’d like to know who. Nobody answered.

 Then all the heads began to turn slowly, one after another, until the whole crowd was looking at the same man. Vley stood at the back by the willows. He had not come with the rest. He had come late and stood apart with his hat pulled low and he wore his yellow slicker, though it was not raining, tied round his waist by its sleeves. He saw them all looking.

 He took a step back, his boot slid in the soft mud by the water. A long narrow boot worn down at the outside of the heel. Varley said, “Loy, I saw you at the ditch gate last night. So did my wife.” Vley’s face went white. He looked at Harkin. Harkin did not look back at him. It was that, Pepsi thought afterwards.

That did it. Harkin would not look at him. Harkin stood there in his black coat with his eyes fixed on the far hills as if Vley were a stranger off the stage. And Vley broke. “He paid me,” he said. His voice came out high and cracked. He paid me. It wasn’t my idea. None of it was my idea. He gave me a gold piece for the steer and told me to cut the wire in the rain so the tracks would wash.

 Only they didn’t wash. And another for the ditch gate. He said, “Open it Friday night. Cut the bank. Drown her pit. And another for the croc.” He said she had some old starter, some old sourdough from her mother. And she thought the world of it. and if I poured coal oil in it, she’d cry and give up. He said a fat woman like her would give up.

 He said it three times. Vley’s voice was shaking. It was him. Every bit of it, judge. I only done what he paid me for. Arin turned around at last. You lying, he began. I’ve got the gold pieces, Vley said. I’ve got them in my war bag in the bunk house. You paid me out of your strong box and they’ve got your mark scratched on them.

 Same as every piece you pay out, so nobody can steal from you. Harkin stopped. Nobody said anything. All those men stood by the water in the afternoon sun and looked at him and nobody said one word. The creek ran over the stones. The red steer balled in the pen. That red bearded rider of Harkkins was the first to move. He took off his hat and looked at it and looked at Harkin and then turned his back on him and walked over to stand beside Tandy Gatlin.

 One by one, the rest of the Harkin crew did the same. Not one of them spoke. They just walked away from him, all of them, and stood with the Castile crew until Harkin was standing alone on the gravel in his black coat with nobody near him but Vley. Judge Grimby took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his vest. Varley, he said, you’ll come to town with me in the buggy, and you’ll tell it again to the sheriff, every word, and you’ll bring those gold pieces.

Hearken. He put his spectacles back on. Altering a brand is a penitentiary matter in this territory. So is paying a man to do it. I’ll be sending for the sheriff tonight. I’d advise you not to go anywhere. He paused. And whatever else happens, you’ll shut your ditch gate on Otter Creek today. Before sundown, I’ll be there to watch you do it. He shut it an hour before sundown.

Half the branding crew rode up to the headgate to watch him do it. And Heepsy and Loyal walked up with them. And Judge Grimby drove his buggy as far as the buggy would go and then got down and walked the rest, puffing. Vley sat in the buggy with his wrists tied and his hat pulled down and stared at his boots.

Harkin came alone on the gray horse. He got down at the gate. It was a heavy thing of gray planks set in a frame of square timbers with an iron wheel on top to raise and lower it, and it stood open, and the water of Otter Creek poured through it into his ditch in a smooth brown tongue. He stood looking at it with his back to all of them.

 Then he put his hands on the iron wheel and turned it. The gate came down slowly, screeching in its frame. The brown tongue of water narrowed and thinned and became a trickle and then stopped. The ditch below the gate went quiet, and all at once the creek, which had been running half its strength past the headgate all spring, came up full between its banks, loud and brown and quick, and went roaring on down the valley toward the Castile Corral with its whole weight behind it. Nobody cheered.

 It wasn’t a cheering thing. They stood on the bank and watched the water go by. Harkin turned around. He looked at the crowd of men, his own men among them, and at Loyal, and last of all, at Hepsi. His eyes went over her one more time, slowly down and up, as in the store, as on the river road. But it was different now. She could see it was different.

He was looking for something he had been sure was there, and he could not find it. Without a word, he got on the gray horse and rode away down the ditch bank toward his own place alone and did not look back. That was the last time Heepsi ever saw Zeb Harkin. The sun was going down behind the big horns when Tandy Gatlin and the red bearded rider brought the red steer home.

They drove him across the ford at a walk, one on each side of him, and he came lumbering through the gap in the new wire with his white face swinging and his fresh scabbed hip catching the sunset. Hepsi was waiting at the fence with an empty grain bucket because she had not known what else to carry. He came straight to it.

 He pushed his nose into the empty bucket and blew, looking for grain that was not there. Harkin’s crew has quit him, ma’am. The red bearded man said from his saddle. The whole lot of us. We told him at the gate after. He didn’t say a word. Just rode off. Where will you go? He shrugged his big shoulders. Somewhere that feeds a man.

He hesitated. I don’t suppose the Castile outfit is hiring. Loyal had come down to the fence behind her. He leaned his arms on the top wire and looked at the two of them, the heavy man and the young one, weighing them. The Castile outfit, he said, is about to have a creek running full all summer and more hay than it’s ever cut and a cook that folks are going to ride 40 m to eat with. I expect it’ll need hands.

” He nodded at Tandy. “You first. You stood up first.” Tandy’s face went red to the hatbrim. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir.” “Then to Hepsi,” all in a rush. “Ma’am, would you teach me the biscuits?” “My grandmother never would. She said a man in her kitchen was like a bull in a church.” Pepsi laughed out loud.

 “I’ll teach you the biscuits,” she said before sunup. “Wash your hands.” When they had ridden off to the bunk house, she stood a while longer at the fence with the empty bucket. The red steer had wandered off a few steps and begun to graze, fat and slow and red in the dusk like an animal that had never been anywhere at all.

 “What’ll we do with him?” Loyal asked. She thought about it. “Grain him all winter,” she said. “He’s next spring’s dinner. He always was. Loyal laughed so hard he had to hold on to the fence post. The crews stayed the night on the bench as branding crews did. Their bed rolls laid out under the cottonwoods and their horses picketed along the creek.

 At dark, she fed them again. There was beef left in the last bundles, cold now, and even better cold. The fat gone firm and the crust gone chewy and sweet. and she sliced it thin and laid it on the last of the bread with a smear of mustard. And the men ate it by the fire with their fingers and licked their thumbs.

Somebody had a fiddle. Somebody always has a fiddle. The red bearded rider sang a song about a girl in San Antonio in a voice so deep it made the coffee cups hum on the plank. And Isam, who had not danced in 30 years, got up with his stick and did a slow shuffle in the fire light until the whole camp was clapping for him.

 He sat on an upturn bucket by the cook fire with a tin cup of coffee in her two hands and watched them. 40 men, full 40 men laughing, the creek running loud behind them in the dark. Late that night, when the fiddle had stopped and the camp under the cottonwoods was asleep, she walked down to the pit alone. The moon was up.

 It lay on the valley white and still, and on the creek running full, and on the long open trench where the pit had been. The coals were dead. She knelt and put her hand down inside on the stones at the bottom and they were still warm faintly like a hand you have been holding a long time. She heard him come down the slope behind her. She knew his step.

 Loyal sat down beside her on the dirt pile. For a while neither of them said anything. At last he told her the news of the evening slowly. the way he told everything. The Upper Creek rep wanted her for his outfit’s branding next month and would pay cash. The men from down the river wanted the same, and Grimby had asked whether she would cook for the fourth in town for the whole town, and Loyal had told him he would have to ask his wife. She laughed.

 “Did anybody,” she said, say anything about the beef? He was quiet a moment. The judge said he’d been eating beef for 63 years, and today was the first time he understood why God made cattle. She laughed again, and then she put her face in her hands. He put his arm around her. He knew better than to ask what was wrong. Nothing was wrong. He knew that.

You were right, he said. In the store, I said he’d ask for seconds. He didn’t. No. Loyal looked out at the moon on the creek. His men asked for thirds. I expect that’ll do. She leaned against him. His shirt smelled of smoke and beef and horse and the creek. Down below them in the dark, the water of Otter Creek ran past the corral full and loud and would run that way now all summer and every summer after.

 Heepsi, he said. I want to go to town Friday, you and me, to the land office. She lifted her head and looked at him. What for? You’ll see, said Loyal. On the Friday, they drove to Buffalo in the wagon. It was a fine, clear morning. The sky washed blue and the big horns standing up wide and sharp against it. The whole valley was green.

 At every ranch they passed, somebody came out to the road to wave. And at the Clear Creek Bridge, a man she had never seen before swept his hat off and called out, “That’s the pit lady.” And his wife beside him waved a dish towel. Loyal drove straight up the main street past the merkantile and stopped the wagon in front of a narrow frame building with a sign that said, “Land office.

” In faded guilt, he helped her down. He did not let go of her hand. Inside there was a counter and a clerk and a great many pigeon holes full of paper. And Judge Grimby sitting on a chair against the wall with his hat on his knee waiting for them. “Ma’am,” he said, getting up. “Castile.” Judge. The clerk put a paper on the counter.

Loyal picked up the pen. He did not sit down. He wrote for a while slowly the way he did everything. And then he signed his name at the bottom and Grimby signed under it. And then Loyal turned the paper around and held the pen out to her. “What is it?” she said. “It’s Otter Creek,” said Loyal.

 “The quarter section it runs through, the water, the bench, the high ground where the pit was. All of it.” He held the pen out steady. “It’s going in your name. You want it. It ought to be yours. She stood there. She could not take the pen. Loyal, she said. It’s your land. It’s your water. You homesteaded it. You I bet it, he said. And you won it.

 That’s how a bet works, Heepsi. He gave her the pen and closed her fingers around it with his own. If you’d lost, it would have been Harkkins. You didn’t lose. So, it’s yours. and I’d like to see the man in this county who tells you otherwise. Grimby cleared his throat and looked hard at a pigeon hole. She signed it. Her hand shook so much the letters wandered all over the line.

 Pepsi Dean Castile. The cler blotted it and stamped it and put it in a long envelope and handed it to her and she held it against her apron with both hands the way she had held the croc of starter coming out of Mrs. Tumi’s kitchen. Grimby had one more thing. He drew the old feed bill from his pocket, soft now from folding with the wager on it in his own square hand and Harkin’s name under it and offered it to her.

 I expect this is yours, too, he said. I have no more use for it. You might want it. She looked at it. Then she took it and tucked it inside the long envelope with the other without a word, and Grimby seemed to need none. He put his hat on. “Ma’am,” he said at the door, “I have eaten at a great many tables in this territory.

 I’d be obliged if you’d let me know when you’re digging again.” When they left the land office, Tumi was standing in the door of his store across the street with his sleeve guarders on and his arms folded and he called over to them. “You hear about Harkin?” They crossed the street. Sheriff came up from the county seat Wednesday, Tumi said, and they took Vley down on the stage with him and those gold pieces and they’ve got him in the jail.

 He’s told it all, every word. The sheriff came back Thursday and took Harkin’s word and bound him over for the fall court. But Harkin has already put his place up for sale. The stock association met last night. They’ve put him out. No outfit in the county will work a roundup with him. No bank will carry his note.

 His own crews quit him to a man. Tumi shook his head. They say he’ll be gone by fall. Back to Omaha where he came from. Nobody’s sorry. And his ditch, said Loyal. Shut, said Tumi. Shut and nailed. The judge nailed it himself. He looked at Heepsi then, and something changed in his face. Something a little ashamed. Ma’am, he said, “Those old men by my stove, the ones who laughed.

 They were all three of them at your branding. They all ate and they’ve been in here every day since, telling everybody who listened that they knew it all along.” Heepsi looked at him. “I’m sure they did,” she said. Mrs. Tumi came out of the back of the store then with flour on her hands, and Heepsi put the long envelope in her apron pocket and hugged her, flour and all.

 right there among the pickle barrels and the sacks in front of the old man by the stove. And the old man looked at their boots. They drove home in the late afternoon with a flower sack in her lap because she had needed flour anyway and the long envelope inside her coat against her heart. It was the same road. It was the same wagon and the same team and the same bridge over Clear Creek and the same snowfields shining on the big horns.

 and the wind came down off them just as cold as it had that other afternoon. But the valley had gone green since then, green to the tops of the ridges, and the meadow larks were everywhere in the grass, and the air smelled of sage and wet earth and new hay. Neither of them said anything for the first three miles. She had learned by now that it was not the silence of a man with nothing to say.

 It was the silence of a man who had said it already and was letting it settle like a stack cake that has to sit at the Clear Creek Bridge. She slipped a hand inside her coat and touched the envelope. Loyal, she said. H you bet me the creek in the store. And then you gave me the creek in the land office.

 She looked sideways at him. What does that leave you? He thought about it for a good quarter mile. supper,” he said. She laughed so hard the flower sack slid off her lap onto the floorboards and burst a seam, and a little white cloud of flour went up between them and settled on his knees and on her sleeve and on the brim of his hat, and he did not brush it off.

 He drove the rest of the way home with flower on his hat, like a traveler caught in the first snow. And when they pulled in at dusk, Eam looked at the two of them and shook his head and went back into the bunk house without asking. That night, she made him supper. Beef steak tumi had cut for them off the block that morning, pounded thin and fried in the black skillet with onions until the edges went crisp and brown.

Gravy made in the same pan with milk and flour and the scrapings. New potatoes from the garden, no bigger than eggs, boiled in their skins and rolled in butter and salt. biscuits from her mother’s starter and a dish of the dried apples stewed with cinnamon because there was not enough left for a cake. The cabin filled with the smell of it.

The lamp was lit. Outside the window, the creek ran loud and full in the dark. He ate everything. When he was done, he sat back and watched her across the table with the lamp between them. and she looked back at him and the lamp hissed softly and there was nothing left that needed saying. That summer the creek ran full past the corral from May to the first frost and the hay on the Castile bench came up so thick that loyal and the new hands cut it twice.

Heepsi cooked Independence Day dinner for the whole town of Buffalo in a pit behind the courthouse. three bees and a hog. And the Methodist ladies brought the pies and stood in line with everybody else. She cooked for the upper creek branding and two more down the river and a wedding on Crazy Woman Creek.

 She was paid for each in cash and the money went into a coffee can on the shelf and the coffee can filled. Harkin left in September. Nobody saw him go. One morning the grey horse was gone from his corral and the house was shut up and a man from Omaha was living in it and that was all. The penitentiary had barley for 3 years. Harkin never answered to the fall court.

 He was in Nebraska before it sat and nobody in Johnson County ever heard his name spoken again except as a way of describing a certain kind of neighbor. The ditch gate up where the creek left the hill stayed shut. After a while, the grass grew up in the ditch and the willows came in along it. And by the next spring, you could hardly tell it had ever been there.

In the winter, when the snow came down off the big horns and shut the valley in, she taught Tandy Gatlin the biscuits. He was hopeless at first. His hands were too heavy, and he worked the dough until it was tough as a bootsole, and the first pan left the oven like river rock. Isams ate one anyway out of pity and said it would do to shoe a mule.

 But Tandy came back every morning in the dark and washed his hands and tried again. And by Christmas his biscuits were light enough that Isam ate four without a word which from Isim was a speech. And every evening all that winter Heepsy took a bucket of grain down to the fence and the red steer came lumbering from the dark to eat it. The next spring they held the branding at the Castile place again.

 Nobody asked where. Nobody had to. By then everybody in the valley and half the people in Buffalo called it Hepsis Pit, the long trench on the high gravel above the creek. And they said it the way you would say the name of a church or a spring or a crossing on a river that everyone knows. It was bigger now. Loyal and Isome and Tandy Gatlin, who had hired on the night of that first branding and never left, had lined it all over again with new Riverstone in April and lengthened it by 6 ft because there were more coming this year. 40 men

from the two crews the way it had been. and the neighbors reps and the upper creek outfit and the Casey men and a good many people who had no cattle to brand at all, but who had heard. Tandy came up to the cook house at dawn on the day before, the way he did every morning now, drawn by the smell.

 “How many we cooking for,” Mrs. Castile? “More than 40 men,” said Heepsy, and put a plate of biscuits in front of him. She fired the pit herself that year, as she did every year after. She stood over it all day in the heat with the iron rod, feeding it ash and choke cherry, and her face went red, and her apron went black, and her arms achd, and it was all joy.

 She wrapped the red steer, grained fat all winter in wet burlap from the creek. She lowered it in at dusk into the glowing coals, and the steam went up roaring white, and all the people who had come a day early to watch, and there were a great many of them took off their hats. Loyal sat the night watch with her on the warm ground.

Nobody came with a lantern. Nobody came at all the coyotes, singing up on the ridge, and a bat or two over the creek and the stars. They talked a little and then not at all. The earth under the blanket was warm as a hearthstone. Now and then a thread of steam found its way up through a crack in the mound, white in the starlight, and she knelt and pressed it shut with her palms and settled again against his shoulder.

 Down on the bench, the crews were bedded under the cottonwoods, and somebody’s fire burned low and red, and the pit’s breath lay over all of it like a blessing. She thought about the first night, the old longhorn in the ground, and the lantern at the ditch gate, and her own heart pounding. She had been so afraid that night.

 She could remember the fear the way you remember a fever, clear and far away, as if it had happened to some other woman. Loyal’s hand found hers and held it. And after a while, he fell asleep, sitting up the way cowmen can, and she led him and kept the watch alone until the sky pald and it was time to bake.

 In the morning, she baked the bread from her mother’s starter, which had lived in a croc on the warm shelf above the cook stove all year, fed every day, and which she had given away by the cupful to half the women in Buffalo, so that it could never be killed again. They came from everywhere that morning.

 The branding crews came the way they all would, but the wagons came, too. Families from up and down the valley with quilts spread in the wagon beds. The Methodist ladies from town in their Sunday bonnets with pies on their laps. Mr. and Mrs. Tumi in a hired buggy with a croc of Mrs. Tumi starter wrapped in a towel as a gift, though Hepsi had given it to her in the first place.

 Judge Grimby came in his own buggy and was the first to sit down at the tables an hour early with his hands folded on his stomach. The old men from the nail cakes by Tumi’s stove came in a wagon of their own and told everyone within earshot that they had been at the first one. By noon, there were more people on the bench above Otter Creek than Hepsi had ever seen in one place in Wyoming.

 Blue smoke rose off the irons. The smell of the pit had been drifting down the slope since sunrise, and every soul on that bench had long since stopped pretending not to notice it. At noon on the branding day, she walked down the slope to open the pit with a sack of flour on her hip. She did not need the flower.

 She had simply been carrying it from the wagon to the cook house when Isam called that it was time and she forgot to put it down. She stood at the top end of the trench with the flower sack on one hip and the big fork in her other hand, and she looked down the slope at the trestle tables under the cottonwoods, full to the ends, with men turned around on the benches with their tin plates waiting, and the smoke of the branding fire going up blue behind them and Otter Creek running full and loud past the corral.

She thought of her mother in the hills long ago, with everyone standing in line. Open it,” she said. They opened it. The steam came up. The smell went down the slope like water, and every head along the tables turned. She filled the plates. She filled every plate the same. Men came to her who had laughed at her once, and men who never had, and men who had never heard of her until this morning, and she filled them all, and smiled.

Loyal came last. He always came last. He held out his tin plate. She filled it beef and beans and bread and he stood in front of her with it. The way he had stood in the store with his hand flat on the counter, a lean brown man with his hat pushed back and a smile at the corner of his mouth. He ate standing up.

He ate every bite. Then he held out the empty plate again. Mrs. Castile, he said, I’d like to ask for a second. She laughed. She put down the flower sack and she put down the fork and she took his face in her two flowery hands in front of every one of those people and kissed him. Then she filled his plate again.

 That evening, when the tables were bare and the last riders had gone home and the pit lay open and quiet on the high ground, they walked back up to the house together along Otter Creek. The water ran beside them, full and cold and loud over its stones. It was her creek. It was their creek. He held her hand all the way up the slope and at the door of the house he stopped and turned and looked back down the valley in the last of the light.

“Fort men,” he said. “Yours and mine, and you asked for seconds,” said Heepsy. He laughed and took her inside and shut the door on the cold. And the smell of bread and smoke came with them into the warm kitchen where her mother’s croc stood bubbling on the shelf above the stove.