One
He sat hunched over in the saddle as he rode up to the schoolhouse on the spotted devil horse he called Huckleberry, the reins held loosely in his gloved right hand. He was dressed in a broad-brimmed white Stetson hat, a leather vest over a boiled white shirt with pockets, and fifteen-dollar fancy striped pants that were tucked into high-heeled boots. Spurs with little chains dangled from his boot heels. A big revolver hung from a wide leather belt strapped around his hips. He touched the brim of his hat with his left hand.
He was just a plain puncher—wiry, because ranchers preferred small, tough men; big men were hard on horses.
She had read The Virginian and all of the Zane Grey books, and he looked to her like a hero straight out of one of those novels. She felt a shiver of excitement go down her spine.
“Ma’am,” he said. He could be a talker and had practiced in his mind how he would greet her, but he was so tongue-tied he could barely get out the single word.
“Yes,” she replied. There was a quiver in her voice, and she cleared her throat.
He drawled, “I work for the I. P. Gurley. I’ve come to fetch Pike.”
“Pike?” was all she could say.
“Yes’m.”
“Oh yes. Pike. Is everything all right?”
He nodded, not sure he could get out another sentence. She waited, and it was clear to him that she wanted an explanation. She couldn’t know that cowpunchers were afraid of proper women, so damn scared of saying something wrong. He took a deep breath. “I came to town to deliver some papers to the lawyer. Mr. Gurley said I ought to ride home with Pike.”
“I see. School is almost over. The children are writing down their spelling words. Pike will be done in a few minutes.” She smiled at him. “It’s such a lovely day that I came outside to stand in the sun for a minute.”
He nodded.
“I’m the new schoolteacher,” she said.
“Oh.” Of course he knew that. Everybody did. The Wallace school board, such as it was, had advertised in Iowa for a teacher, had asked anyone interested to send a letter listing qualifications and references, along with a photograph. The pictures were pinned to the wall in the general store, above the applications, and everyone who came in was asked to mark which teacher they preferred. The names were blocked out to make the selection appear anonymous. Only the mothers of the future students read the applications and noted that the new teacher was less qualified than the others. The men studied the pictures.
He had taken one look at the photographs and put an X under her name—Ellen Webster. Then he’d paid the other Gurley punchers a nickel each to do the same. Of course, it wasn’t much of a contest, because the other applicants looked like old maids. With one exception, the school board was made up of men, and they offered the job to Ellen.
He’d been taken with that picture and had a regular mash on her. And now he’d come to see if she was as pretty as the photograph. He was right pleased. She had blond hair and eyes the color of a piece of turquoise. He hadn’t known from the photograph that she was tiny, barely five feet. She looked like one of those china statues he’d seen on a parlor center table. “You like Wallace right well?” he asked at last. Except for Mrs. Gurley, he wasn’t used to making conversation with women. Most of the women he encountered worked at the saloons or bawdy houses.
“I like it right well,” she replied, then smiled to take the sting out of her teasing.
He didn’t know she’d teased. They both felt the awkward silence that followed and wished the other would say something more. “That’s good,” he said at last.
He dismounted as she came down the steps of the schoolhouse and held out her hand. “I’m Ellen Webster.” She hadn’t been able to see his face under the big hat, but now she observed that it was tanned, that the nose was straight, and that he had eyes the blue of the Wyoming sky. She figured him to be in his late twenties. In fact, he was thirty-three, ten years older than she was.
He wasn’t sure what to do but finally switched the reins to his left hand and shook her hand with his right, barely touching her fingers. “I know.”
She waited, and when he didn’t introduce himself she said, “I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Charlie. Charlie Bacon.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Bacon.”
He smiled. “You can call me Charlie.”
She wouldn’t do so. That was altogether too familiar, but she liked that he offered it. This was only her second week at the school, and she was trying to make a good impression on people in Wallace. It wouldn’t do to call a man by his first name. “I suppose I had better go inside. I wouldn’t want the students to ignore their spelling. You don’t think they’d do that, do you?”
Charlie considered that, as if it had been a real question. He tried to think of a clever remark but could only reply, “I couldn’t say.”
The schoolhouse door was flung open then, and a young man yelled, “Fatback! I seen you through the window. What are you doing out here?”
Ellen frowned. “Fatback?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s what I get called on account of my name is Bacon.”
“I see.”
“What are you doing out here?” the boy yelled again. “You come to check out the teacher?”
The cowboy’s face turned red under the tan, because, of course, that was exactly the reason he was there. Mr. Gurley hadn’t said a word about bringing Pike back with him. “I came to fetch you, boy,” he lied. “Your pa doesn’t want you getting into trouble on the way home.”
“I don’t make trouble.”
Charlie swatted at Pike, who ducked. “He gives you any foolishness, you whip him,” he told Ellen.
“Whip him?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s the only way to keep him in line.” He grinned at the boy.
“How can I do that? He’s five inches taller than I am.”
“You just send for me. I’ll do it.”
“In a pig’s eye,” Pike said.
“Try me.”
The boy considered that. He turned to Ellen. “He beat up Chauncey Tatum last week, after Chauncey insulted my dad. Near kilt him. Broke his arm in two places. I wouldn’t go up against him if I was you.”
Ellen laughed. She felt more comfortable with the boy there. “That’s good advice, Pike. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Charlie scraped the toe of his boot in the dirt and said, “I didn’t have any choice. There isn’t a man who’s worked for him who wouldn’t go to hell for Mr. Gurley.”
There was a commotion in the school; then a dozen students ran outside. “Did you finish copying your spelling words?” Ellen called. There was a chorus of yesses.
Several of the boys came over to admire Charlie’s horse. “You going to let me ride Huckleberry one day, Fatback?” one asked.
“Nope.”
“Can’t nobody touch that horse. Charlie Bacon’s the best rider there is. He can turn on a dime and give you a nickel back,” Pike explained to Ellen. “I guess you’d kill anybody who did, wouldn’t you?” he asked Charlie.
“Probably.”
Ellen had raised her hand to pat the horse, but now she dropped it.
Charlie looked askance. “I didn’t mean you.”
“I wouldn’t want to tempt you.” Now she blushed, wondering if he thought she had been too familiar.
Pike had gone for his horse, which was among several tied to a railing in front of the schoolhouse. He mounted and rode up next to Charlie.
Charlie was reluctant to go, but there was no reason for him to stay. He touched the brim of his hat again. “I guess maybe I’ll see you sometime.”
Ellen didn’t want him to leave. She said suddenly, “At the box supper? There’s one here at the school on Saturday night. The school board thought it was a good idea. They arranged it so that I can get to know the parents—and others.” She blushed and glanced over at where two children were going up and down on a teeter-totter, which was a board placed on a stump.
“Box supper?”
“You know, the women prepare suppers; then they’re auctioned off. The money goes for schoolbooks.”
“I know what it is. I’ve never been to one.”
Ellen threw caution to the wind. “Then you ought to come, Mr. Bacon. I can guarantee you’ll get a good meal.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and mounted Huckleberry and spurred him just a little too much, so that the horse reared before he took off.
Ellen watched him go, Pike riding hard to catch up. She chided herself for being so brazen. What must he think of her, all but asking him to have supper with her?
She did not know that he grinned until he was only a speck in the distance. Or that he’d already decided she was a woman he’d want to get his rope on.
Two
Ellen had taught school in Fort Madison, Iowa, for only a year when she spotted the advertisement in a newspaper for a teacher in Wallace, Wyoming. The ad was in a big-city newspaper that someone had left behind on a bench in the depot, where Ellen was awaiting the arrival of a friend. She studied it for a moment, wondering where Wallace was, picturing it being near deep canyons set against pine-covered mountains. She hadn’t considered that Wallace might be a flat High Plains town with so little vegetation to obscure the view that one could almost see the earth curve. Instead, she thought, there would be ranches with soft-spoken cowboys, feisty young women on fast ponies, maybe holdup men and saloons with scarlet women. Iowa was so sedate, and she smiled at the excitement Wyoming might hold.
She tore out the ad and slipped it into her purse. That night after a Fort Madison teachers’ meeting that was so dull she had nearly fallen asleep, she took out the scrap of newspaper as she was getting ready for bed. She read it again, then crumpled it and threw it into the wastepaper basket. In the middle of the night, she got out of bed and retrieved it. It lay on her dresser for two days.
What harm would it do to apply? she asked herself. There was nothing to keep her in Iowa. Her parents were dead, and her sister was married and living in Illinois. Ellen hadn’t the slightest interest in any of the young men she’d met in Fort Madison. With only one year’s experience, she wasn’t likely to be offered the position in Wyoming, and even if she was, she could always turn it down.
Two months later, a letter with the Wallace postmark was sitting on the hall table in the boardinghouse where she lived. A rejection, she was sure as she took it up to her room and stared at it for a long time, feeling letdown. She hadn’t counted on being given the job, but nonetheless, she was disappointed.
When she opened the letter and saw that the school board had offered her the position, she was so surprised that she sat down hard on the bed. What had she been thinking? She glanced at her bedside table. Zane Grey’s The Last of the Plainsmen was hidden under her Bible. Ellen wasn’t sure it was proper for a schoolteacher to read novels, and the woman who ran the boardinghouse was a gossip. She picked up the book and stared at the cover of windblown clouds over a desert. The story didn’t take place in Wyoming, but what did that matter? She pictured herself in a daring divided skirt, atop a bronco, watching the sky turn crimson at sunset, as she raced across mountaintops beside a cowboy. She smiled at such foolishness. She was being offered a position in a country school, not a romantic encounter with a cowpuncher.
She wondered what her sister, Lizzie, would think. The two were close. Lizzie was four years older, and after their parents died when Ellen was sixteen, Lizzie raised her younger sister. She’d even put off her marriage until Ellen was grown. When Ellen wanted to go to normal school to get a teaching certificate, Lizzie paid the cost. She encouraged Ellen to leave Illinois for Iowa so that she could see a little more of the world—not that Iowa was London or Paris or even California. Ellen ought to ask for Lizzie’s approval, but Lizzie had encouraged her to be independent, to take chances. Maybe it was time that Ellen made decisions on her own.
The dinner bell rang downstairs. Ellen started to slip the novel back under the Bible, then changed her mind and set it on top of the Good Book. At that moment she made up her mind to accept the job. It was only for a year.
She wrote Lizzie right away, and her sister wrote back, “Of course you should accept. What a grand adventure. If you don’t like it, you can always go back to Iowa.”
Copyright © 2023 by Sandra Dallas
