The Bones of Plenty Read Free Page B

three more months to go. It was queer how an animal as big and powerful as a horse was so hard to breed and so liable to abort at almost any time.
    “Oh, Kate,” he said softly. “Now what do you want to go and do
this
for?”
    Any mare he’d ever known wanted privacy at a time like this, so he went back to the cows’ end of the barn and sat on a milkstool. He thought of the stud fee he’d paid that deadbeat Otto, and felt sicker.
    He sat down on a milk stool and rolled a cigarette. The match glimmered brightly in the gloom of the barn, and he watched it till the flame reached his fingers. Damn the son-of-a-bitch that would leave a hole like that. Didn’t a man have enough trouble from enemies he already knew about without being dealt a blow like this from some idiot whose name he would never even know?
    He remembered how a schoolmate of his had fallen down an old well like this one. It was spring and the ground was wet. The well was so old that all the curbing had rotted away and the sides kept collapsing on the boy. They had got him out alive, but he grew up peculiar.
    He could tell from the way Kate was stamping around that the foal wasn’t born yet. He wished she’d hurry up about it if she was going to do it. He wanted to get back to work. After this morning’s catastrophes, he felt more desperately far behind than ever. This last year he had got so far behind that he sometimes caught himself saying, “What’s the use?”
    George Armstrong Custer saying, “What’s the use?”
    He thought, as he so often did, of how things had changed so much faster than anybody had ever supposed they would. George had been born a mere twenty-three years after his namesake rode a high-stepping sorrel horse into ambush at the Little Big Horn. His grandfather had come from Illinois to homestead in the Dakota Territory just two years after General Custer was killed. The old man loved to tell about how he had been to Bismarck when it was nothing but a ferry landing on the Missouri River and a place for the soldiers from Fort Abraham Lincoln to get booze and women. And two years after the Boy General was dead, he was still, after booze and women, the main topic of conversation. Fort Abraham Lincoln—four miles from Bismarck—the westernmost fort in the north of the continent. And out of it had ridden the troops behind the fearless redheaded cavalryman—so nearly immortal while he was alive, so obviously mortal when they found his white, naked body lying along with all the others on the hillside.
    George’s old granddaddy would not believe his eyes if he could see Bismarck now. Here the twenty-story white tower of the capitol rose up from the prairie—there a silver bridge spanned the Missouri, and beyond, Highway 10, the Red Trail, proceeded in a humdrum concrete strip through the country of Sitting Bull and on to the Pacific Ocean. Yet George himself had been born on the western frontier, and his grandfather had seen fit to bestow on him the name of a frontier hero. When he was a lad of six or seven, herding cows in the unfenced pastures, he would kick over a buffalo skull every time he went after a stray calf or ran a badger down a hillside. Some of the skulls even had patches of hide on them.
    It was all over in Kate’s stall. He stood up and buttoned his sheepskin coat. He drew on his heavy leather gloves and pulled the flaps of his hunting cap down over his ears. He was a big man, nearly six feet three, and almost two hundred pounds. He could still spring up from a milk stool as light as a cat on his feet, but the job ahead of him at the moment did not cause him to move in such a manner.
    He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle, hoping the fetus wouldn’t be too hard to look at. It was a light little thing, seemingly perfect. The afterbirth was normal. Kate was feverish, but that was to be expected. He made sure the blanket he’d put on her was securely fastened. After he got the foal out of her stall, he’d bring