Giant Read Free Page B

Texas a man is no better than his horse, and a man on foot is no man at all. Nowadays a fella without an airplane has got no rating, might as well be a Mexican.”
    At last. “Don’t you want to leave the car here and fly down with us?”
    “Oh, Leslie!” Vashti’s tone of astonishment would not have deceived an amoeba.
    “Well, say, if you’re sure it wouldn’t crowd you none——”
    Quickly Vashti cinched it. “Love it! Just purely love it, and thank you kindly. Who all’s going? Who’s over at the Big House, h’m?”
    As Leslie Benedict answered there was a half-smile on her lips, a rueful little smile. She thought, This is ludicrous I suppose. Twenty-fiveyears ago Pd have said it was too fantastic to be true. When I introduce Pinky and Vashti, these good and kind people, there are no terms in which I can define them. They are of a world unknown outside Texas. Even as she answered Vashti she was seeing these two with the eye of one who would always be an outsider in this land. Pinky. As unlike the cowboy of the motion picture and the Western novel as one could be in the likeness of a man. Small, his bone structure as delicate as a woman’s. His feet in their high-heeled ornately tooled cowboy boots were arched and slim as a girl’s. Pink cheeks, pansy-blue eyes, white hair that waved in thick clusters of curls. In the dust-clouded past he had come to Texas from nowhere. They had deviled him and ridiculed him with their rough jokes and rougher horseplay. He must compensate for his miniature frame and his innocent blue eyes and pink cheeks. So he had been tougher, more daring than the biggest and most daredevil cow hand in the brush country. He used big words whose meaning they did not always understand, he spoke softly but at times his tongue was a whiplash. The small hands were steel-strong, there was no horse he could not gentle. He had come to the Hake ranch—the vast Double B—possessed of nothing but the saddle he carried under his arm—his ridin’ riggin’ in the ranch idiom. And Vashti Hake actually had married him on the rebound—this big booming woman who had been a big awkward girl—this daughter of old Cliff Hake, now long dead. Two million acres of ranch land, oil wells, cattle, millions.
    “Who all’s going, Les? Who’s over at the Big House, h’m?”
    Leslie walked to the veranda screen door, she listened a moment. “The cars went out to call for them.”
    “Yeh, but who, Les?”
    “Well—uh—there’s Cal Otter the cowboy movie star. You know—with the white hat and white buckskin chaps and white horse and all those white teeth. And the King and Queen of Sargovia and Joe Glotch the ex-heavyweight champion and Lona Lane that new movie girl and her husband and my sister Lady Karfrey——”
    “She here! When’d she come?” Vashti interrupted.
    “Leigh flew over from London on Tuesday and flew on here next day. And Jordan’s brother Bowie and his sister from Buffalo——”
    “Uh-uh! Trouble. And who else?”
    “Well—the Moreys are here from Dallas, and Congressman Bale Clinch, and Gabe Target stopped on his way down and Judge Whiteside and a South American ex-Presidente who’s Ambassador now—I’ve forgotten which country—and Tara Tarova and some others—and Cal Otter’s taking his white horse.” The absurd list gave her a mischievous pleasure.
    “On the plane?” Vashti asked somewhat nervously.
    “It’s all right. In the forward compartment. He’s used to flying. We’ll be up only an hour or two, Jordan wants to show the King and Queen something of the ranch from the air, they’re thinking of buying a few thousand acres up north in the Panhandle. They spent a day or two at the King ranch. Jordan says they bought some of Bob Kleberg’s prize Brahman bulls.”
    “Kind of nice selling foreign royalty a bill of goods for a change. They been taking us for a couple hundred years. They better watch out or Jett Rink’ll be unloading one of his dusters on