“We’re in a hell of a fix, with Van Fleet pulling out the way he is, or I wouldn’t send you two out without this husband of yours showing up to do his business himself.” Ralph Jensen pulled on his nose. It was long, the end flattened like a spade, as though he’d tugged it out of its natural shape years before.
As Imogene reached for the lease, he pulled it back over the counter. “Now wait a damn minute. I’m going to have Mrs. Ebbitt sign this, and you can give me the twenty-seven dollars. Harland or the Judge or anybody can witness. But it’s not legal. A woman signing a lease won’t hold water, even if she has got a letter from her husband with say-so. Take the lease with you and as soon as Mr. Ebbitt shows, have him sign it and send it to me. Understood?” He waited until Imogene and Sarah had nodded like obedient children before he removed his hand from the paper and shoved it and the ink across the counter.
“Round Hole’s a ways from anywhere,” he warned as Sarah stepped forward to take the pen, and she hesitated.
“Isolation won’t bother us, Mr. Jensen,” Imogene assured him.
“This ain’t isolation, lady, this is right damn in the middle of nowhere.” He took in Sarah’s soft uncertain glance, Imogene’s solid answering gaze, and he shrugged. “Go on, you’re holding up the stage. Noisy’ll tell you the particulars and the Van Fleets said they’d stay on a day or two and show you the ropes.”
The leavetaking was subdued. Lutie and Fred saw them off. Fred was to send their things after them by freightwagon. Lutie and Fred were confused and hurt by the sudden departure, and Harland Maydley, newly promoted to the post of Jensen’s assistant, puffed about officiously.
The two women climbed quickly into the mudwagon-a coach smaller than a Concord, with an even more jolting carriage. Mac was on top with the driver, Noisy Dave. Noisy was a rubber-faced man of middle years, with thinning blond hair. A belly as big as that of a woman eight months with child hung over his belt. A mustache of startling proportions, a soup-strainer, completely hid his mouth; the tips were waxed and pointed toward his ears. The driver hawked, spat over the side, wiped his mustache, and, with a bellow, shook the reins and the horses pulled the mudwagon down the main street.
Imogene and Sarah were alone in the coach, seated side by side so neither had to ride backwards. Dust boiled from under the horses’ hooves and was churned into the air by the wheels. Sarah leaned back against the upholstered seat and pulled the shade down.
The ribbon of green that the Truckee unfurled through Reno was quickly behind them. Sarah raised the shade a couple of inches and looked out. They were traveling through a dry valley bordered by hills of sage and rock. “I’m not sure about leaving Reno,” she said, and dropped the shade.
“It will be all right. As Mac says, ‘I can feel it in my finger bones.’ It will be better, we’ll have something of our own. A lease is almost like buying,” Imogene said with more confidence than she felt.
“We had teaching,” Sarah said after a while. “You loved it.”
“I’ll learn to love innkeeping. We’ll learn. This time we’ll learn together.”
Sarah looked out the window again. At the end of the valley, a mountain of rock reared shimmering in the heat, its broken sides supporting nothing but rust lichen and an occasional patch of sparse desert grass. “It’s so dry,” Sarah observed. “Mac says it’s as bad at Sheep’s Hole. Worse.”
“Round Hole. There’s a round spring there. The stop is close to a big lake. How bad can it be?”
Sarah tried to read to pass the time, but the jouncing moved the book so violently she couldn’t follow the text, even using her finger. Eventually she leaned back to wait out the journey.
The coach road wound north through the Carson Range and a little east of Reno toward the Pah Rah Mountains and the western shore of Pyramid Lake. Desert mountains, devoid of any vegetation but the constant gray-black sage, crowded close. Old avalanches had tumbled rock down the mountain faces and lay like scabbed wounds below the ridges. Boulders the size of houses thrust out from the jagged summits. And always the terrain grew dryer, until at last it could scarcely support even the sage, and the bushes grew stunted, ten or fifteen feet apart.
Around three o’clock in the afternoon, a sharp rapping brought Imogene and Sarah out of their torpor. A ghostly face appeared upside down in the window, and Sarah squawked at the apparition before she recognized Mac behind the white alkali dust.
“Told you it was bad,” he snapped, without preamble. “Look lively now, we’re almost through the Pah Rahs. You’ll be able to see the lake in a few minutes, and it’s a beauty.”
Revived by the promise of water and green growing things upon which to rest their eyes, the women sat up straighter and took an interest in their surroundings. But the approach to Pyramid Lake was as desolate as the land they’d been traveling through for the past hours. Alkali flats, blinding white in the afternoon sun, stretched away on either side until they reached mountains spotted with sage. There were none of the soft announcements that usually herald water, neither green foliage nor the soft feel of humid air.
“It’s a little cooler,” Sarah ventured as the stage came to the top of a barren rocky rise.
“Pyramid Lake,” Noisy hollered down.
Below, spreading out across the desert floor, was a lake of the same hard blue as the sky. The shores were crusted with white and nothing grew. Even the sage and the coarse brown desert grass retreated from its shores. Gray, cone-shaped bubbles of stone frothed up fifty, seventy-five, a hundred feet in a skyline of fantastic castles at the north end of the lake. The eastern shore abutted against the foot of a mountain range, and in its shadow several more volcanic cones pushed up out of the lake.
“How bad can it be?” Sarah said.
The mudwagon jolted on, plowing up its plume of white dust. A hot dry wind buffeted the coach and drew the moisture from the lips and throats of the passengers. They rode in silence, occasionally passing each other the canteen Mac had provided. The water was tepid and tasted of metal.
They rounded the end of the lake at sunset. The mountains had turned rose, lavender, and gold. Shadows stretched long over the mountain faces, and the sage dotting the valley floor stretched out dark fingers five times its size. Mac rapped on the side of the coach and called on Sarah and Imogene to witness the mammoth bubbles and spires of rock. Pyramids of liquid stone, frozen in shape by the waters of an ancient sea, lay exposed on the lake shore. They clustered at the water’s edge like a ruined dream of Baghdad. Bats circled the spires and turrets, streaming from hidden caves in black ribbons.
Apathetic with the dust and the rolling of their stomachs, the women stared blankly through the moving frame of the coach window, then fell back against the seat to look at nothing.
Past the lake, the road curved northeast up a sand and gravel hill to a pass in the low hills that marked the end of the Pah Rah Range, northwest of Pyramid Lake. Noisy Dave pulled up at the summit, bellowing boistrous whoas. “Sand Pass,” he hollered. “There’s Round Hole below. If you gals want to step out, take a look, and stretch a bit, go ahead.” They climbed stiffly from the coach, not trusting their cramped legs to support them.
Winding down the shadowed side of the pass, a white wagon track snaked through a sea of sage; mountains, rounded and covered with the same coarse blanket of vegetation, rose to the northeast. To the south, rock-faced and sharp, the granite peaks of the Fox Range curved away in a jagged wall. Held between these pincers of rock and sand was the Smoke Creek Desert.
Near the middle of the broad valley floor, the sagebrush stopped abruptly in a wavy shoreline; beyond, there was nothing but the white glare of an immense alkali flat baked until the crust had cracked into a crazy network of lines. On the edge of the flat, in a blunt finger of sage that poked out onto the dead lake bottom, huddled Round Hole Stop. In an oasis of green the size of a postage stamp, its few trees looking like refugees in an alien land, three buildings, bleached the same drab gray as the sage, clung to the green skirts of a spring.