Now, indeed, she would know where he was.

Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt. He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn't seeking ease. Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish. She could do nothing with the horses on days like that. They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.

Clara had brought two cups. She was very glad to be out of the house. She poured Cholo his coffee and then poured some for herself. She sat down on the mound of dirt beside him and looked into the open grave.

"Sometimes it seems like grave-digging is all we do," she said. "But that's wrong. I guess if we lived in a big town it wouldn't seem that way. I guess in New York there are so many people you don't notice the dying so much. People come faster than they go. Out here it shows more when people go-especially when it's your people."

"Mister Bob, he didn't know mares," Cholo said, remembering that ignorance had been his downfall.

"Nope," Clara said. "He didn't know mares."

They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy. Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.

"What do you think happens when you die?" she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.

"Not too much," he said. "You're just dead."

"Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think," Clara said. "Maybe you just stay around near where you lived. Near your family, or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have."

A minute later she shook her head, and stood up. "I guess that's silly," she said, and started back to the house.

That afternoon July came back with a minister. The two nearest neighbors came-German families. Clara had seen more of the men than of the women-the men would come to buy horses and stay for a meal. She almost regretted having notified them. Why should they interrupt their work just to see Bob put in the ground? They sang two hymns, the Germans singing loudly in poor English. Mrs. Jensch, the wife of one of the German farmers, weighed over three hundred pounds. The girls had a hard time not staring at her. The buggy she rode in tilted far to one side under her weight. The minister was invited to stay the night and got rather drunk after supper-he was known to drink too much, when he got the chance. His name was the Reverend Spinnow and he had a large purple birthmark under one ear. A widower, he was easily excited by the presence of women. He was writing a book on prophecy and rattled on about it as they all sat in the living room. Soon both Clara and Lorena felt like choking him.

"Will you be thinking of moving into town now, Mrs. Allen?" the Reverend asked hopefully. It was worth the inconvenience of a funeral way out in the country to sit with two women for a while.

"No, we'll be staying right here," Clara said.

July and Cholo carried out the mattress Bob had died on-it needed a good airing. Betsey cried a long time that night and Lorena went up to be with her. It was better than listening to a minister go on about prophecy.

The baby was colicky and Clara rocked him while the minister drank. July came in and asked if there was anything else she needed him to do.

"No," Clara said, but July sat down anyway. He felt he should offer to rock his son, but knew the baby would just cry louder if he took him away from Clara. The minister finally fell asleep on the sofa and then, to their surprise, rolled off on the floor and began to snore loudly.

"Do you want me to carry him out?" July asked, hoping to feel useful. "He could sleep in a wagon just as well."

"Let him lie," Clara said, thinking it had been an odd day. "I doubt it's the first time he's slept on a floor, and anyway he isn't your lookout."

She knew July was in love with her and was irritated that he was so awkward about it. He was as innocent as Bob, but she didn't feel moved to patience, in July's case. She would save her patience for his son, who slept at her breast, whimpering now and then. Soon she got up with the baby and went to her room, leaving July sitting silently in a chair while the drunken minister snored on the floor.

Once upstairs she called Sally. Sally had not cried much. When she came into Clara's room she looked drawn. Almost immediately she began to sob. Clara put the baby down and held her daughter.

"Oh, I'm so bad," Sally said, when she could talk. "I wanted Daddy to die. I didn't like it that he just lay up there with his eyes open. It was like he was a spook. Only now I wish he hadn't died."

"Hush," Clara said. "You ain't bad. I wanted him to die too."

"And now you wish he hadn't, Ma?" Sally asked.

"I wish he had been more careful around horses, is what I wish," Clara said.

93.

AS THE HERD and the Hat Creek outfit slowly rode into Montana out of the barren Wyoming plain, it seemed to all of them that they were leaving behind not only heat and drought, but ugliness and danger too. Instead of being chalky and covered with tough sage, the rolling plains were covered with tall grass and a sprinkling of yellow flowers. The roll of the plains got longer; the heat shimmers they had looked through all summer gave way to cool air, crisp in the mornings and cold at night. They rode for days beside the Bighorn Mountains, whose peaks were sometimes hidden in cloud.

The coolness of the air seemed to improve the men's eyesight-they fell to speculating about how many miles they could see. The plains stretched north before them. They saw plenty of game, mainly deer and antelope. Once they saw a large herd of elk, and twice small groups of buffalo. They saw no more bears, but bears were seldom far from their thoughts.

The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force-it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond.

Call had scarcely spoken since the death of Deets, but the beauty of the high prairies, the abundance of game, the coolness of the mornings finally raised his spirits. It was plain that Jake Spoon, who had been wrong about most things, had been right about Montana. It was a cattleman's paradise, and they were the only cattlemen in it. The grassy plains seemed limitless, stretching north. It was strange that they had seen no Indians, though. Often he mentioned this to Augustus.

"Custer didn't see them either," Augustus pointed out. "Not till he was caught. Now that we're here, do you plan to stop, or will we just keep going north till we get into the polar bears?"