Full download test bank at ebook textbookfull.

com

Lady in waiting: my extraordinary

life in the shadow of the crown

CLICK LINK TO DOWLOAD

https://textbookfull.com/product/lady-in-
waiting-my-extraordinary-life-in-the-shadow-
of-the-crown-first-us-edition-glenconner/

textbookfull
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Lady from Arezzo My Musical Life and Other Matters

1st Edition Alfred Brendel

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-lady-from-arezzo-my-musical-
life-and-other-matters-1st-edition-alfred-brendel/

Mob cop my life of crime in the Chicago Police

Department First Paperback Edition Pascente

https://textbookfull.com/product/mob-cop-my-life-of-crime-in-the-
chicago-police-department-first-paperback-edition-pascente/

In Hoffa s shadow a stepfather a disappearance in

Detroit and my search for the truth First Edition
International Brotherhood Of Teamsters

https://textbookfull.com/product/in-hoffa-s-shadow-a-stepfather-
a-disappearance-in-detroit-and-my-search-for-the-truth-first-
edition-international-brotherhood-of-teamsters/

Mob Cop My Life of Crime in the Chicago Police

Department First Edition (Advance Proof) Fred Pascente

https://textbookfull.com/product/mob-cop-my-life-of-crime-in-the-
chicago-police-department-first-edition-advance-proof-fred-
pascente/
Be My Queen (The Crown Duet #2) 1st Edition Chelsea
Mcdonald

https://textbookfull.com/product/be-my-queen-the-crown-
duet-2-1st-edition-chelsea-mcdonald/

A Crown Of Pride And Ruin (The Shadow Walkers Saga Book

6) 1st Edition Sloane Murphy [Murphy

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-crown-of-pride-and-ruin-the-
shadow-walkers-saga-book-6-1st-edition-sloane-murphy-murphy/

1930 Europe in the Shadow of the Beast Arthur Haberman

https://textbookfull.com/product/1930-europe-in-the-shadow-of-
the-beast-arthur-haberman/

Extraordinary Chinese Medicine The Extraordinary

Vessels Extraordinary Organs and the Art of Being Human
Thomas Richardson

https://textbookfull.com/product/extraordinary-chinese-medicine-
the-extraordinary-vessels-extraordinary-organs-and-the-art-of-
being-human-thomas-richardson/

20 years in the secret service my life with five

presidents Second Edition Youngblood

https://textbookfull.com/product/20-years-in-the-secret-service-
my-life-with-five-presidents-second-edition-youngblood/
 Copyright

Copyright © 2020 by Anne Glenconner

Cover design by Terri Sirma
Cover photograph © Mirrorpix/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the
value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers
and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without
permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you
would like permission to use material from the book (other than for
review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank
you for your support of the author’s rights.
Hachette Books
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
HachetteBooks.com
Twitter.com/HachetteBooks
Instagram.com/HachetteBooks
Originally published in hardcover and ebook by Hodder & Stoughton
in Great Britain in October 2019
First US Edition: March 2020
Published by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a
subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name
and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that
are not owned by the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951170
ISBNs: 978-0-306-84636-6 (hardcover), 978-0-306-84635-9 (ebook)
E3-20200213-JV-NF-ORI
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue

1: The Greatest Disappointment

2: Hitler’s Mess
3: The Traveling Salesman
4: The Coronation
5: For Better, For Worse
6: Absolutely Furious
7: The Making of Mustique
8: A Princess in Pajamas
9: Motherhood
10: Lady in Waiting
11: The Caribbean Spectaculars
12: A Royal Tour
13: A Year at Kensington Palace
14: The Lost Ones
15: A Nightmare and a Miracle
16: Forever Young
17: The Last Days of a Princess
18: Until Death Us Do Part
19: Whatever Next?

Photos
Acknowledgments
Picture Acknowledgments
Discover More
More praise for LADY IN WAITING
For my children, grandchildren, and great-
grandchildren
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

 PROLOGUE

ONE MORNING AT the beginning of 2019, when I was in my London flat,

the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“Lady Glenconner? It’s Helena Bonham Carter.”
It’s not every day a Hollywood film star rings me up, although I
had been expecting her call. When the producers of the popular
Netflix series The Crown contacted me, saying that I was going to
be portrayed by Nancy Carroll in the third season, and that Helena
Bonham Carter had been cast as Princess Margaret, I was delighted.
Asked whether I minded meeting them so they could get a better
idea of my friendship with Princess Margaret, I said I didn’t mind in
the least.
Nancy Carroll came to tea, and we sat in armchairs in my sitting
room and talked. The conversation was surreal as I became
extremely self-aware, realizing that Nancy must be absorbing what I
was like.
A few days later when Helena was on the telephone, I invited her
for tea too. Not only do I admire her as an actress but, as it
happens, she is a cousin of my late husband Colin Tennant, and her
father helped me when one of my sons had a motorbike accident in
the eighties.
As Helena walked through the door, I noticed a resemblance
between her and Princess Margaret: she is just the right height and
figure, and although her eyes aren’t blue, there is a similar glint of
mischievous intelligence in her gaze.
We sat down in the sitting room, and I poured her some tea. Out
came her notebook, where she had written down masses of
questions in order to get the measure of the Princess, “to do her
justice,” she explained.
A lot of her questions were about mannerisms. When she asked
how the Princess had smoked, I described it as rather like a Chinese
tea ceremony: from taking her long cigarette holder out of her bag
and carefully putting the cigarette in, to always lighting it herself
with one of her beautiful lighters. She hated it when others offered
to light it for her, and when any man eagerly advanced, she would
make a small but definite gesture with her hand to make it quite
clear.
I noticed that Helena moved her hand in the tiniest of reflexes, as
if to test the movement I’d just described, before going on to discuss
Princess Margaret’s character. I tried to capture her quick wit—how
she always saw the humorous side of things, not one to dwell, her
attitude positive and matter-of-fact. As we talked, the descriptions
felt so vivid, it was as though Princess Margaret was in the room
with us. Helena listened to everything very carefully, making lots of
notes. We talked for three hours, and when she left, I felt certain
that she was perfectly cast for the role.
Both actors sent me letters thanking me for my help, Helena
Bonham Carter expressing the hope that Princess Margaret would be
as good a friend to her as she was to me. I felt very touched by this
and the thought of Princess Margaret and I being reunited on-screen
was something I looked forward to. I found myself reflecting back on
our childhood spent together in Norfolk, the thirty years I’d been her
Lady in Waiting, all the times we had found ourselves in hysterics,
and the ups and downs of both our lives.
I’ve always loved telling stories, but it never occurred to me to
write a book until these two visits stirred up all those memories.
From a generation where we were taught not to overthink, not to
look back or question, only now do I see how extraordinary the nine
decades of my life have really been, full of extreme contrasts. I have
found myself in a great many odd circumstances, both hilarious and
awful, many of which seem, even to me, unbelievable. But I feel
very fortunate that I have my wonderful family and for the life I
have led.
 CHAPTER ONE

The Greatest Disappointment

HOLKHAM HALL COMMANDS the land of North Norfolk with a hint of

disdain. It is an austere house and looks its best in the depths of
summer when the grass turns the color of demerara sugar so the
park seems to merge into the house. The coast nearby is a place of
harsh winds and big skies, of miles of salt marsh and dark pine
forests that hem the dunes, giving way to the vast stretch of the
gray-golden sand of Holkham beach: a landscape my ancestors
changed from open marshes to the birthplace of agriculture. Here, in
the flight path of the geese and the peewits, the Coke (pronounced
“cook”) family was established in the last days of the Tudors by Sir
Edward Coke, who was considered the greatest jurist of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, successfully prosecuting Sir Walter
Raleigh and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. My family crest is an
ostrich swallowing an iron horseshoe to symbolize our ability to
digest anything.
There is a photograph of me, taken at my christening in the
summer of 1932. I am held by my father, the future 5th Earl of
Leicester, and surrounded by male relations wearing solemn faces. I
had tried awfully hard to be a boy, even weighing eleven pounds at
birth, but I was a girl and there was nothing to be done about it.
My female status meant that I would not inherit the earldom, or
Holkham, the fifth largest estate in England with its 27,000 acres of
top-grade agricultural land, neither the furniture, the books, the
paintings, nor the silver. My parents went on to have two more
children, but they were also daughters: Carey two years later and
Sarah twelve years later. The line was broken, and my father must
have felt the weight of almost four centuries of disapproval on his
conscience.
My mother had awarded her father, the 8th Lord Hardwicke, the
same fate, and maybe in solidarity, and because she thought I
needed to have a strong character, she named me Anne Veronica,
after H. G. Wells’s book about a hardy feminist heroine. Born
Elizabeth Yorke, my mother was capable, charismatic, and absolutely
the right sort of girl my grandfather would have expected his son to
marry. She herself was the daughter of an earl, whose ancestral seat
was Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire.
My father was handsome, popular, passionate about country
pursuits, and eligible as the heir to the Leicester earldom. They met
when she was fifteen and he was seventeen, during a skiing trip in
St. Moritz, becoming unofficially engaged immediately, he apparently
having said to her, “I just know I want to marry you.” He was also
spurred on by being rather frightened of another girl who lived in
Norfolk and had taken a fancy to him, so he was relieved to be able
to stop her advances by declaring himself already engaged.
My mother was very attractive and very confident, and I think
that’s what drew my father to her. He was more reserved so she
brought out the fun in him and they balanced each other well.
Together, they were one of the golden couples of high society and
were great friends of the Duke and Duchess of York, who later,
because of the abdication of the Duke’s brother, King Edward VIII,
unexpectedly became King and Queen. They were also friends with
Prince Philip’s sisters, Princesses Theodora, Margarita, Cecilie, and
Sophie, who used to come for holidays at Holkham. Rather strangely,
Prince Philip, who was much younger, still only a small child, used to
stay with his nanny at the Victoria, a pub right next to the beach,
instead of at Holkham. Recently I asked him why he had stayed at
the pub instead of the house, but he didn’t know for certain, so we
joked about him wanting to be as near to the beach as possible.
My parents were married in October 1931 and I was a
honeymoon baby, arriving on their first wedding anniversary.
Up until I was nine, my great-grandfather was the Earl of
Leicester and lived at Holkham with my grandfather, who occupied
one of the four wings. The house felt enormous, especially seen
through the eyes of a child. So vast, the footmen would put raw
eggs in a bain-marie and take them from the kitchen to the nursery:
by the time they arrived, the eggs would be perfectly boiled. We
visited regularly and I adored my grandfather, who made an effort to
spend time with me: we would sit in the long gallery, listening to
classical music on the gramophone together, and when I was a bit
older, he introduced me to photography, a passion he successfully
transferred to me.
With my father in the Scots Guards, a regiment of the British
Army, we moved all over the country, and I was brought up by
nannies, who were in charge of the ins and outs of daily life. My
mother didn’t wash or dress me or my sister Carey; nor did she feed
us or put us to bed. Instead, she would interject daily life with treats
and days out.
My father found fatherhood difficult: he was straitlaced and
fastidious and he was always nagging us to leave our bedroom
windows open and checking to make sure we had been to the
lavatory properly. I used to struggle to sit on his knee but because I
was too big he would push me away in favor of Carey, whom he
called “my little dolly daydreams.”
Having grown up with Victorian parents, his childhood was typical
of a boy in his position. He was brought up by nannies and
governesses, sent to Eton and then on to Sandhurst, his father
making sure his son knew what was expected of him as heir. He was
loving, but from afar: he was not affectionate or sentimental, and
did not share his emotions. No one did, not even my mother, who
would give us hugs and show her affection but rarely talked about
her feelings or mine—there were no heart-to-hearts. As I got older
she would give me pep talks instead. It was a generation and a class
who were not brought up to express emotions.
But in many other ways my mother was the complete opposite of
my father. Only nineteen years older than me, she was more like a
big sister, full of mischief and fun. Carey and I used to shin up trees
with her and a soup ladle tied to a walking stick. With it, we would
scoop up jackdaws’ eggs, which were delicious to eat, rather like
plovers’. Those early childhood days were filled with my mother
making camps with us on the beach or taking us on trips in her little
Austin, getting terribly excited as we came across ice-cream sellers
on bicycles calling, “Stop me and buy one.”
The epitome of grace and elegance when she needed to be, she
also had the gumption to pursue her own hobbies, which were often
rather hands-on: she was a fearless horsewoman and rode a Harley-
Davidson. She passed on her love of sailing to me. I was five when I
started navigating the nearby magical creeks of Burnham Overy
Staithe in dinghies, and eighty when I stopped. I used to go in for
local races, but I was quite often last, and would arrive only to find
everyone had gone home.
Holkham was a completely male-oriented estate and the whole
setup was undeniably old-fashioned. My great-great-grandfather, the
2nd Earl, who had inherited his father’s title in 1842 and was the
earl when my father was a boy, was a curmudgeon and so set in his
ways that even his wife had to call him “Leicester.” When he was
younger, he apparently passed a nurse with a baby in the corridor
and asked, “Whose child is that?”
The nurse had replied, “Yours, my lord!”
A crusty old thing, he had spent his last years lying in a trundle
bed in the state rooms. He wore tin-framed spectacles, and when he
went outside, he would go around the park in a horse-drawn
carriage, with his long-suffering second wife, who sat on a cushion
strapped to a mudguard.
Influenced by the line of traditional earls, Holkham was slow to
modernize, keeping distinctly separate roles for the men and
women. In the summer, the ladies would go and stay in Meales
House, the old manor down by the beach, for a holiday known as
“no-stays week” when they quite literally let their hair down and
took off their corsets.
From when I was very little, my grandfather started to teach me
about my ancestors: about how Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester
in its fifth creation (the line had been broken many times, only
adding to the disappointment of my father at having no sons), had
gone off to Europe on a grand tour—the equivalent of an extremely
lavish gap year—and shipped back dozens of paintings and marble
statues from Italy that came wrapped in Quercus ilex leaves and
acorns, the eighteenth-century answer to bubble wrap.
He told me all about when the ilex acorns were planted,
becoming the first avenue of ilex trees (also called holm oak, a
Mediterranean evergreen) in England. My grandfather’s father had
sculpted the landscape, pushing the marshes away from the house
by planting the pine forests that now line Holkham beach. Before
him, the 1st Earl in its seventh creation became known as “Coke of
Norfolk” because he had such a huge impact on the county through
his influence on farming—he was the man credited with British
agricultural reform.
Life at Holkham continued to revolve around farming the land, all
elements of which were taken seriously. As well as dozens of tenant
farmers, there were a great many gardeners to look after the huge
kitchen garden. The brick walls were heated with fires all along,
stoked through the night by the garden boys, so nectarines and
peaches would ripen sooner. On hot summer days I loved riding my
bike up to the kitchen gardens, being handed a peach, then cycling
as fast as I could to the fountain at the front of the house and
jumping into the water to cool down.
Shooting was also a huge part of Holkham life, and really what
my father and all his friends lived for. It was the main bond between
the Cokes and the Royal Family, especially with the royal estate of
Sandringham only ten miles away—a mere half an hour’s drive.
Queen Mary had once rung my great-grandmother, suggesting she
come over with the King, only for my great-grandfather to be heard
bellowing, “Come over? Good God, no! We don’t want to encourage
them!”
My father shot with the present Queen’s father, King George VI,
and my great-grandfather and grandfather with King George V on
both estates, but it was Holkham that was particularly famous for
shooting: it held the record for wild partridges for years and it’s
where covert shooting was invented (where a copse is planted in a
round so that it shelters the game, the gun dogs flushing out the
birds gradually, allowing for maximum control, making the shoot
more efficient).
It was also where the bowler hat was invented: one of my
ancestors had got so fed up with the top hat being so impractical
that he went off to London and ordered a new type of hat, checking
how durable it was by stamping and jumping on it until he was
content. From then on gamekeepers wore the “billy coke,” as it was
called then.
There were other royal connections in the family too. It is well
documented that Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII,
had many love affairs with married, often older glamorous
aristocrats, the first being my paternal grandmother, Marion.
My father was Equerry, an attendant to the Duke of York, and his
sister, my aunt Lady Mary Harvey, was Lady in Waiting to the
Duchess of York after she became Queen. When the Duke of York
was crowned King George VI in 1937, my father became his Extra
Equerry; and in 1953 my mother became a Lady of the Bedchamber,
a high-ranking Lady in Waiting, to Queen Elizabeth II on her
Coronation.
My father especially was a great admirer of the Royal Family and
was always very attentive when they came to visit. My earliest
memories of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret come from
when I was two or three years old. Princess Elizabeth was five years
older, which was quite a lot—she was rather grown-up—but Princess
Margaret was only three years older and we became firm friends.
She was naughty, fun, and imaginative—the very best sort of friend
to have. We used to rush around Holkham, past the grand pictures,
whirling through the labyrinth of corridors on our trikes or jumping
out at the nursery footmen as they carried huge silver trays from the
kitchen. Princess Elizabeth was much better behaved. “Please don’t
do that, Margaret,” or “You shouldn’t do that, Anne,” she would scold
us.
In one photograph we are all standing in a line. Princess Elizabeth
is frowning at Princess Margaret, suspecting she is up to no good,
while Princess Margaret is staring down at my shoes. Years
afterwards, I showed Princess Margaret the photo and asked,
“Ma’am, why were you looking at my feet?”
And she replied, “Well, I was so jealous because you had silver
shoes and I had brown ones.”
In the summer the Princesses would come down to Holkham
beach where we would spend whole days making sandcastles, clad
in the most unattractive and prickly black bathing suits with black
rubber caps and shoes. The nannies would bundle us all into the
beach bus, along with wicker picnic baskets full of sandwiches, and
set up in the beach hut every day, whatever the weather—the
grown-ups had a separate hut among the trees at the back. We had
wonderful times, digging holes in the sand, hoping people would fall
into them.
Every Christmas, my family would go to a party at Buckingham
Palace, and Carey and I would be dressed up in frilly frocks and the
coveted silver shoes. At the end of the parties, the children would be
invited to take a present each from the big table in the hall near the
Christmas tree. Behind the table stood the formidable Queen Mary,
who was quite frightening. She was tall and imposing, and Princess
Margaret never warmed to her because every time she saw her,
Queen Mary would say, “I can see you haven’t grown.” Princess
Margaret minded frightfully about being small all her life, so she
never liked her grandmother.
Queen Mary did teach me a valuable life lesson, however. One
year Carey rushed up to the table and clasped a huge teddy bear,
which was sitting upright among the other presents. Before I chose
mine, Queen Mary leaned down towards me. “Anne,” she said
quietly, “quite often rather nice, rather valuable things come in little
boxes.” I froze. I’d had my eye on another teddy bear but now I was
far too frightened to choose anything other than a little box. Inside it
was a beautiful necklace of pearl and coral. Queen Mary was quite
right. My little box contained something that is still appreciated to
this day.
Our connection to the Royal Family was close. When I was in my
late teens, Prince Charles became like a younger brother to me,
spending weeks with us all at Holkham. He would come to stay
whenever he had any of the contagious childhood diseases, like
chickenpox, because the Queen, having never gone to school, had
not been exposed to them. Sixteen years younger than me, Prince
Charles was nearer in age to my youngest sister Sarah, but all of us
would go off to the beach together.
My father taught him how to fish for eel in the lake, and when he
got a bit older, my mother let him drive the Jaguar and the VW Mini
Minor around the park, something he loved doing, sending great
long thank-you letters telling her he couldn’t wait to return. He was
such a kind and loving little boy and I’ve loved him ever since—the
whole family have always been deeply fond of him.
As soon as I was old enough to ride, I made the park at Holkham
my own, riding past the great barn, making little jumps for Kitty, my
pony. When we were a bit older, Carey and I would follow one of the
very good-looking tenant farmers, Gary Maufe, on our ponies. Many
years later I became a great friend of his wife, Marit. He used to
gallop across the park on a great big black stallion, and after him we
would go on our hopeless ponies, giddying them up, desperately
trying to keep up.
It wasn’t just my family who were part of Holkham but everybody
who worked on the estate, some of whom had very distinctive
characters. Mr. Patterson, the head gardener, would enthusiastically
play his bagpipes in the mornings whenever my parents had friends
to stay, until my mother would shout, “That’s quite enough, Mr.
Patterson, thank you!”
My early childhood was idyllic, but the outbreak of war in 1939
changed everything. I was seven, Carey was five. My father was
posted to Egypt with the Scots Guards so my mother followed to
support him, as many wives did. Holkham Hall was partly occupied
by the army, and the temple in the park was used to house the
Home Guard, while the gardeners and footmen were called up, and
the maids and cooks went off to work in factories to help with the
war effort.
Everybody thought the Germans would choose to invade Britain
from the Norfolk coast, so before my mother left for Egypt, she
moved Carey and me up to Scotland, to stay with my Great-aunt
Bridget, away from Mr. Hitler’s U-boats.
 When she said goodbye, she told me, “Anne, you’re in charge.
You’ve got to look after Carey.” If we had known how long she was
going to be away, it would have been even harder, but no one had
any idea how long the war would last and that, in fact, she and my
father would be gone for three years.
 CHAPTER TWO

Hitler’s Mess

WE WENT TO live with our Ogilvy cousins in Downie Park, one of the
Ogilvys’ shooting lodges in Angus: their main house, Cortachy
Castle, had been requisitioned and was being used as a hospital for
Polish officers.
Although Carey and I were unsettled by the separation from our
parents, going to Scotland felt like an adventure. I loved my Ogilvy
cousins. There were six of them, and the three youngest—David,
Angus, and James—were all about the same age as me and Carey.
We knew them well because every summer they would come and
stay at Holkham, having great fun together, exploring and making up
games. We watched as the boys played endless rounds of cricket on
the terrace, wearing their special linen kilts that Carey and I wished
we had. Our nanny wasn’t quite so keen on them all because the
best fruit—a valuable treat in those days—was kept for them and
she would say they had come to “take over.”
They were all very welcoming at Downie Park, and I was
especially fond of David, whom I followed everywhere. I adored their
mother, my Great-aunt Bridget, who was born Lady Alexandra Coke
and was my grandfather’s sister.
Great-aunt Bridget was a Christian Scientist—a nineteenth-
century religion established by Mary Baker Eddy, which, during the
First World War, cut a swathe through the aristocracy, converting
many to it. It operates on the belief that sickness is an illusion that
can be corrected by prayer. This provided comfort for Great-aunt
Bridget and her husband, my Great-uncle Joe, the Earl of Airlie,
because he, like many men, was suffering from the effects of the
Great War. Great-aunt Bridget practiced her beliefs and passed on
many useful pieces of advice to me. Perhaps the advice that stuck
with me most is “Things have a habit of working out, not necessarily
in the way you expect, and you must never force them.” Her
grounded approach served Carey and me well, because we both
found it very disconcerting to be away from our parents, with the
outbreak of war.
On September 3, 1939, Great-aunt Bridget brought us down to
the drawing room in Downie Park, where we listened to Neville
Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the ancient wireless. There was
something heavy and serious in the Prime Minister’s voice, which
mirrored the atmosphere in the room. I stared at the carpet as I
listened, not really knowing what was happening, wondering when
we would be able to go home.
There was a very different atmosphere when, in 1940, Princess
Elizabeth directly addressed the children of Britain. Again, we sat on
the carpet in the drawing room, huddled round the wireless craning
our necks towards Princess Elizabeth’s voice, excited that we all
knew her. It felt as if she was talking directly to us. At the end,
Princess Elizabeth said, “My sister is by my side and we are both
going to say goodnight to you. Come on, Margaret.” And Princess
Margaret responded, “Goodnight, children.” We all answered back,
thinking they could hear us, somehow imagining they were in the
wireless. The Princesses were our heroines. So many children of our
parents’ friends had been sent off to America in order to escape the
war and there were the two Princesses, still in England, in as much
danger as us all.
The war meant that Carey and I and the Princesses were no
longer in Norfolk together and the only time we saw them was when
Carey, the Ogilvys, and I visited Glamis Castle—Queen Elizabeth the
Queen Mother’s family estate, where Princess Margaret had been
born.
Glamis is said to be the most haunted castle in Scotland and
Princess Margaret knew every nook, cranny, and ghoul. As we were
exploring the grounds, she told us stories about the ghosts, the gray
lady who is said to haunt the chapel and the tongueless lady who
runs across the lawn. The Ogilvys relished the stories and told their
own, all about how there was a ghost at Cortachy, who would beat a
drum whenever someone in the family died, leaving me relieved that
Cortachy had been requisitioned. Just before we left, Princess
Margaret took us down to see the train, which puffed along the edge
of the grounds, standing on the bridge over the railway line, being
enveloped in steam.
Apart from that, we didn’t see them and life was quite limited.
With no petrol and living in a big house far from the nearest town or
city, we stayed within the grounds of Downie Park, only once going
to Dundee when Uncle Joe took us to the theater.
In the winter we would skate on the frozen lake, and when we
weren’t having lessons with our governess, we would do our “war
work,” collecting sphagnum moss for the Red Cross, who used it to
help dress wounds, knitting gloves for the sailors on the
minesweepers, and entertaining the Polish officers at Cortachy
Castle by playing snakes and ladders on their beds and putting on
amateur dramatics for them.
Every afternoon, we would take our fresh air and exercise by
walking down the long drive, then return to the house where a man
from the nearby town of Kirriemuir would teach us to dance. Carey
and I put on our black dancing shoes and in the vast dining room,
with our cousin James, who was the same age as Carey and always
wore a kilt, learned how to do the Highland Fling and the Sword
Dance.
James was not always so beguiling. He and Carey would regularly
gang up on me. This might have been because I spent a great deal
of time, rather pathetically, hugging trees, climbing up them, and
pretending they were my friends. Once up them, however, I would
be too frightened to come down, so Carey and James would stand
below, teasing me with their particular catchphrase: “Cowardy,
cowardy custard!” I had arrived at Downie Park a rather shy child,
but I gradually came out of my shell. Being in a big pack of Ogilvys
and part of a boisterous group soon toughened me up.
My parents had sent our own governess to Downie, my mother
telling me before she left for Egypt: “You’re now too old to have a
nanny, so Daddy and I have chosen a governess for you called Miss
Bonner and she is very nice, and you will be very happy with her.”
Well, it turned out that Miss Bonner was not very nice. She was fairly
all right with Carey, but really cruel to me. Every night, whatever I
had done, however well I had behaved, she would punish me by
tying my hands to the back of the bed and leaving me like that all
night. I was too frightened of Miss Bonner to ask Carey to untie me,
and Carey would have been too frightened to do it anyway. Both
Carey and I suffered badly through this. I wanted to protect Carey,
fearing Miss Bonner might do the same to her, so neither of us told
anyone. While Miss Bonner did not do the same to my little sister,
Carey witnessed this inexplicable behavior towards me and felt
powerless that there was nothing she could do. Her distress would
manifest itself in high temperatures linked to no specific illness.
Because my mother had chosen Miss Bonner, I thought she knew
what the governess was doing to me and didn’t mind, or even
thought it was good for me. It caused me terrible confusion because
I couldn’t understand why my parents would want me to be treated
like that.
Fortunately, Great-aunt Bridget’s Christian Science saved me.
Eventually, Miss Bonner was sacked, not because of her ill treatment
of me (which I am sure Great-aunt Bridget knew nothing about) but
for being a Roman Catholic and taking me to Mass. There was
nothing worse than Catholicism, as far as Great-aunt Bridget was
concerned. When Miss Bonner left, I made a big fuss, pretending to
be really upset that she was going, fearing she might somehow
blame me and do something even more horrible.
Miss Bonner left an invisible scar on me. To this day, I find it
almost impossible to think about what she did to me. Years later, she
sent me a card congratulating me on my engagement, which
triggered the most unpleasant rush of memories and made me
physically sick.
Luckily, Miss Bonner was replaced with Miss Billy Williams, who
was wonderful, although she looked rather daunting with a nose that
was always running and one leg longer than the other so she had a
limp. But she twinkled with kindness.
The minute Billy Williams set foot in Carey’s and my lives,
everything changed, and within days, we were devoted to her. I
think she realized I’d had a difficult time with her predecessor,
because she often gave me treats, taking me on fun days out. One
of my favorite places was an Ogilvy shooting lodge, which was
tucked into the hillside, surrounded by heather. She’d take us all off,
walking along a pretty stream that ran through the bottom of the
garden, stopping for a picnic, during which we would roll heather in
a piece of newspaper and pretend to smoke it. We thought that was
frightfully dashing.
As the months turned to years we became more aware of the
horrors of the war, overhearing conversations referring to the
increasing attacks on Britain. Even though we had been sent up to
Scotland to get away from danger, we weren’t far from Dundee,
which was targeted heavily. In fact, there were more than five
hundred German air raids on Scotland so we would probably have
been safer staying in Norfolk. Once a German plane was shot down
just above Tulcan lodge and, as a “great treat,” Billy Williams took
me up to the wreckage to have a look. It was still smoking, although
we saw no body, and I still have a piece of map I took from the
plane, which was scattered in the heather.
As Carey and I absorbed more information, mostly through the
wireless that James’s nanny listened to tirelessly, we became
convinced that Hitler and all his henchmen would come to England
and each choose a stately home to live in. We had some idea that
Hitler was going to Windsor and presumed, rather grandly, that
either Himmler or Goering would choose Holkham. We weren’t far
wrong. It transpired that the Nazis had indeed planned to take over
the country estates, although Hitler had his sights on Blenheim.
Carey and I, I suspect like many other imaginative children of the
time, felt helpless in the face of the war. Knitting gloves and playing
board games with Polish officers somehow didn’t feel helpful
enough. Our father was fighting and our mother, we had been told,
was doing “war work,” but we were doing nothing to stop Hitler.
Discussing the dire situation, Carey and I became convinced
Hitler was bound to visit Holkham at some point, so we decided that,
somehow, we would go back there to kill him. In preparation for the
assassination, we created a poison that we called “Hitler’s mess,” a
collection of jam jars containing anything really disgusting—scraps of
food and medicine, muddy water, and bits of fluff from the carpet.
We hid it under our beds until it became so smelly that Billy Williams
made us throw it away and, determined, we were forced to start
again.
We had decided to make Hitler fall in love with us, which, when I
think about it now, was rather like the Mitfords. But, then, we were
going to kill him—which, I suppose, was rather unlike the Mitfords.
Of course, we had no real understanding of the situation and even
less control over our own lives. That was why we devised our plan.
We had heard he liked the Aryan look and we were both fair-haired,
especially Carey, who was the blondest little thing with huge blue
eyes. We thought we must take advantage of this in order to save
Britain.
We used to practice by pretending our teddy bear was Hitler,
sidling up to him and saying things like, “How lovely to see you.
We’re so pleased you’ve come to Holkham,” and “Do you enjoy
staying here? We’ve got a lovely drink for you, Mr. Hitler—we’ve
been saving it especially for you.” We didn’t quite think through what
would happen if we did actually manage to kill Hitler, but then I
suppose we didn’t get that far. We were absolutely convinced,
however, that we could and would do it.
In 1943, when I was ten and Carey was eight, our parents
returned from Egypt and we returned to Norfolk. It was an
underwhelming reunion—our parents were like strangers to us and,
instead of a warm embrace after so many years, Carey and I clung
to Billy Williams, hiding behind her, out of sight. It was only a day or
so before our mother won back our affection, but it took longer to
build a rapport with our father, who wasn’t as open and friendly and
never hugged us like our mother.
By then my great-grandfather had died and my grandfather had
become 4th Earl of Leicester. For a little while we lived in the Red
House in the village at Holkham, with one ancient maid nicknamed
Speedy because she moved so slowly. Carey and I enjoyed living
there, playing with the village boys in the wood near the house—we
called it “the donkey wood.”
Then we moved into the family wing at Holkham. It was the first
time, apart from holidays, I had ever lived in the big house and it
felt very exciting to know that it was now our official home.
My grandfather liked to interest me and, wanting to teach me
about Holkham’s treasures, put me in charge of airing the Codex
Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s seventy-two-page manuscript, a study
on water and stars. Once a fortnight, I would retrieve it from the
butler’s pantry, where it was kept in a safe along with the Coke
jewels and a Bible picture book.
I used to lick my finger and spin through the pages, frowning
down at Da Vinci’s mirror handwriting, studying the little drawings
and diagrams with interest. Bought on the 1st Earl’s grand tour, it
belonged to my family for at least two hundred and fifty years
before, very sadly, my father had to sell it, needing money for the
upkeep of the estate. Acquired at Christie’s by an American
businessman, Armand Hammer, in the eighties, it was then sold on
to Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million, a record sum, making it the
most valuable book in the world—and covered with my DNA.
Life soon settled down at Holkham. My father continued his
duties with the Scots Guards and my mother became head of North
Norfolk’s Land Girls, directing agricultural tasks. Carey and I spent a
lot of time playing in the house, making dens in the attic out of a
collection of Old Masters deemed too louche for the walls of the
state rooms, oblivious to the value and the subject.
But the estate wasn’t the same as it had been before the war.
There was a prisoner-of-war camp in the park, first for Italians, then
Germans, and the gamekeepers helped guard them. Carey and I
were very curious and whirled around the outside of the camp on
our ponies, spying on the prisoners. The Italians were charming,
always waving and smiling, and became friends with my mother
who, after the war, employed some of their sisters to work at
Holkham: a lot of them decided to settle in England.
The Germans weren’t so friendly, and Carey and I were terrified
of them. They wore patches on their legs and arms—shooting
targets should they escape—which the gamekeepers longed for
them to do so they could put in their game book: “14 pheasants, 6
partridge, 1 German.” As far as I know, the prisoners never tried to
escape—the Germans were far more frightened of the keepers than
they were of the official guards.
Holkham beach wasn’t the same either. We couldn’t picnic on the
dunes because they were being used as a military practice ground,
and the beach was covered with London buses and taxis on which
the Royal Air Force practiced airstrikes. At the end of the war, the
buses and taxis were just left there. There is a big sand dune now
where they were, and I expect most people have no idea they are
still under it, rusting away in their sandy tomb.
The military also practiced drills all the way along the woodland
near the sand dunes and on the marsh. There was a pond at the
edge of the marsh where a wall was built for training the soldiers
who, throwing smoke bombs in front of them, had then to jump
blindly over the wall and into the pond. Carey and I would take great
delight in watching and, getting carried away, we would shout, “Go
on, jump, you cowardy cowardy custards! It’s not at all deep. It’s
only a bit of water.” Within moments, a furious sergeant major would
rush up, red in the face, yelling, “What are you doing, girls? Will you
get away? You’re ruining my training!” at which point, we’d grab our
bikes and scamper off, giggling.
My childhood was a curious mix of carefree adventure in beautiful
surroundings and a pressing fear of the war. By the time I was
eleven, long days of playing with Carey were swapped for boarding
school. In the autumn of 1943, holding a single leather trunk with
my name on it, off I went by train to Downham—a small school in
Essex for girls. Because of the war, most of the teachers had been
called up or moved into jobs to help with the war effort. Left with
slim pickings, I was hardly likely to learn anything at all.
The school was in a big old house where we all had to sleep in
the cellars for the first few terms because of the doodlebugs, which,
overshooting London, would land very close to where we were: the
plaster would fall from the ceiling into our bunks. It was terribly
frightening, and after a strike, I would check to see if I was in one
piece. None of our parents seemed very concerned.
I felt rather alone and unsure. I had been away from my parents
for three years and suddenly I was without them once more, and
also without my governess, Billy Williams, and Carey, both of whom I
adored. Gradually I did settle in, though, making friends, who
included a girl called Caroline Blackwood, later the writer, and wife of
Lucian Freud, who used to walk with me to lessons and lived in a
perpetual daydream. The older I got, naturally, the easier the five
years of boarding school became, and after two years, Carey joined
me, which was a comfort.
The headmistress, Mrs. Crawford, had a gung-ho attitude and,
despite having a husband, lived with another teacher, Miss Graham.
Having played cricket for Scotland, Mrs. Crawford tried to teach us
girls to play. I hated it—I was always fielding a long way out, praying
the ball didn’t come near and dreading the shout, “Quick! Catch,
Anne!” whereupon I would inevitably drop it. The ball was so hard it
hurt if it hit you. I did, however, enjoy lacrosse. A most aggressive
game, it seemed to be made up of us all rushing about bashing
people’s teeth out with our sticks.
Our games mistress was called Ma P., though I thought she was
really half-man. She was always blowing her whistle, whether to her
dog or to us we never quite knew. She was the one who would get
us into the swimming pool. It was always freezing cold but from
June 1, like it or not, we would “jolly well get in.” I quite liked
swimming and got some medals, including one for lifesaving, which
involved Carey volunteering to be the body, wearing clothes and
being dragged halfway along the pool underwater. I passed and she
survived.
Just before the end of the war, when I was twelve, my sister
Sarah was born. Carey and I had known our mother was pregnant
but when my father’s sister Aunt Silvia rang us at school to tell us
the news, we burst into tears. We knew how desperately my father
had wanted a son and heir, and with my mother almost dying in
childbirth, there was no chance of them having any more children,
marking the end of my father’s particular line of Cokes.
 Despite the huge disappointment for the family, we all adored
Sarah, whom we doted on, treating her like a doll. It was great fun
to have another sister although Carey’s and my childhood was
separate from Sarah’s because she was so much younger than us.
Once the school term had finished, we would rush home to see her,
our mother proudly showing off the rabbit-skin coat she had made
for Sarah. She obviously hadn’t cured it properly because the coat
was completely stiff, so Sarah would sit in her pram, her arms stuck
straight out, rather as if she was in a straitjacket.
When we were home, my mother took charge, organizing every
day with something active and fun that she would do with us all, an
attitude that was rare. My school friends would remark on how
amazing they thought she was, saying things like “I wish I could
have a mother like yours. My mother never plays with me.” But after
the holidays, Carey and I would return to school on the train, waving
goodbye to our mother, knowing it would be months before we saw
her again.
In those days parents only came down to the school once a year,
in the summer. There would be things like a “fathers’ cricket match”
and a “mothers’ tennis match.” At one of these parents’ open days,
after the assembly, the headmistress summoned all the girls to her
study. Looking extremely cross, she said, “Something very serious
happened during assembly, and unless the girl owns up, you will all
be punished. A parent, Sir Thomas Cook…” the founder of the
package holiday, incidentally “… was squirted in the back of the neck
with a water pistol.”
There was silence as everybody looked at each other, wondering
what would happen next. But then Caroline Blackwood put her hand
up rather slowly and said, “Well, actually, it was my mother who did
it.”
Her mother, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, had been
wearing a hat with a sculpture of a duck in a pond with water in it.
Every time she put her head down, the duck dipped its beak into the
pond and, as she moved her head, the water sprayed the
unfortunate Sir Thomas. Her hat was not the only extraordinary
thing she wore: her shoes had see-through plastic heels with fish in
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
that he could return if he wished. But he could not go back. If he
could not go back to places and things he knew he did not care
where he went.
So chafing, he could not fit himself in here. Sometimes he said to
himself that it was all in his mind, that men and women, work and
pleasure were the same anywhere. Only he couldn’t make that a
reality for himself in Seattle. Such pleasures as he sought only made
him sad. Life flowed about him in a surging stream and he was like a
chip in the swirls. He had laid that feeling of loneliness, that
depressing sense of isolation, to being a stranger, to living under a
sodden, weeping sky that never cleared to let him see the blue. He
had never known anything but brightness, air that was crystal-clear,
a look that swept to a far horizon. Here the eyes were in a prison,
shut in by streets like canyons, miles of houses monotonously alike,
dark dripping forests that began where the last suburban cottages
lifted among the raw stumps where logging outfits had taken their toll
of the great trees.
Robin had said to himself that when he knew people, when spring
came, it would be different. It was different. But the difference took
the form of a more acute nostalgia. Robin had never wandered
among the poets, but he knew spring fever and he was learning in
bitterness of heart the meaning of homesickness.
He turned now to face the city rising above him in terraced
avenues. Smoke from ten thousand chimneys cast a haze against
the soft blue sky. The rustle and noise and confusion had stilled a
little, though not wholly, on this day of rest. There was a transient
hush along the water front. An atmospheric beauty hovered upon the
Sound. The Olympics stood out blue toward the Strait of Juan de
Fuca. Yet the city faced Robin like a maelstrom from which he
desired to be afar. He was sick with a subtle sorrow. The medicine to
cure him was a good horse between his legs, a look from some high
ridge out over a hundred miles of grassland all green now and
sprinkled with blue windflowers. There would be mountains in the
distance too; clean, upstanding peaks like Gothic cathedrals rising,
as the Sweet Grass and the Bear Paws rose, abruptly from the level
of the great plains. The sharp smell of bruised sage, the white tents
of a round-up camp in a creek bottom, the howl of a wolf far off in the
night—these Robin’s heart suddenly ached for—and for something
else, that he felt deep within him but would never admit.
“By God, I’ve a mind to go back and face the music!” he said
aloud. “They can’t hang me. I’d as soon spend two or three years in
Deer Lodge as here.”
Of so little value did freedom seem to him in that moment. There
was more than homesickness. A man’s liberty is dear but so is pride.
Only cowards fled the field. He hadn’t fought a rear guard action. For
four months that inner sense of shame had been slowly
accumulating in Robin. All that he cared about, his little cosmos in its
entirety, lay under the shadow of the Bear Paws. He had been
stampeded into flight from a danger real enough, but which he
should have faced.
Robin rose from the weather-beaten pile.
“I will go back,” he said to himself. “I’ve had enough of this. I
shouldn’t have run.”
Within twenty-four hours he was aboard a Great Northern train
rolling east through a gloomy pass in the Coast Range. He lay in a
berth, his face pressed to a window pane, watching the dark forest
slip by, a formless blur in the night, listening to the click-clack of rail
joints under the iron wheels. He felt shut in, oppressed by those
walls of dusky timber draped with mossy streamers, clouds above
and a darksome aisle in the forest down which the train thundered.
No place for a man hungry for bright sun and blue skies.
At dawn the train dropped into the Yakima country. The land
opened up in wide vistas. Cattle grazed on rolling hills, dark moving
dots on pale green. Robin threw open a window. He leaned out
sniffing. Sagebrush ran up to the right of way, receded into the
distance, silver-gray in the first sunlight. He could smell it, sweet in
his nostrils as camp fire smoke to an Arab.
He lay back in his berth with a strange sense of relief. As the
sailor sick of shore sights and sounds goes gladly down to the sea
so Robin returned to his own country.
 CHAPTER XVI
RESURRECTION

At Havre, Robin found time between trains to cross the street and
find the livery stable.
“I left a saddle here about Christmas,” he said to the hostler. “A
three-quarter rig Cheyenne with a pair of anqueros.”
“Yeah, I recollect. Take a look,” the man replied.
Robin hauled his saddle out of the harness room, borrowed a
sack to put it in and check it as baggage on the train. He was under
way up the branch line within ten minutes. An hour and a half later
he stood on the station platform at Big Sandy, wondering with a
mingled curiosity and indifference how long it would be before a
deputy sheriff would saunter up and say with a casual wariness:
“Well, kid, I guess you’ll have to come along with me.”
No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the
southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north
to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome future
didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here and there,
forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field and lane and
orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the hearts of men.
All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed to hold out
invisible hands to Robin. Bright with its vernal garment the land
smiled answer to his eager look as a maiden smiles to a returning
lover.
He stood a minute sweeping old horizons with his gaze. The
station agent nodded. No one had arrived. No one had departed. It
was too early in the morning for loungers. A man from Sutherland’s
store took up the mail sack, said “hello” to Robin. Robin followed him
across the street. He would put up at the hotel. If he went
unmolested for the present—and that was likely enough—he would
take horse later and ride to the Bar M Bar. If they wanted him they
could come and get him. Months in a strange country had taught
Robin that he was not the stuff of which an Ishmael is made.
The moon-faced Teutonic host of the Bear Paw House gazed at
him blandly over a varnished counter.
“Ach, so,” he said. “You have been away, yes.”
No more. Robin signed the register. From force of old habit he
suggested a drink. Host and guest went into the bar. Backed by a
mirror that reflected polished glass and decorative bottles a
bartender Robin had known for years said, “Hello, kid,” and set out
the drinks. Robin grew a little puzzled. This was carrying the normal
cow-country nonchalance toward a man who had been in “trouble” to
an extreme. He might have been gone only overnight, by their
attitude, instead of having jumped the country after killing a well-
known man.
He drank, and leaned on the bar, gazing about. A rider loped from
somewhere about the town and dismounted with a flourish before
the hotel. He stalked in, clanking his spurs. Robin knew him, Jack
Boyd of the Block S.
“Hello, old-timer.” He pumped Robin’s hand and slapped him on
the back. “Where the hell you been all winter? Have a shot.”
“On the coast,” Robin said briefly.
They drank. Boyd talked. He was a rattle tongue, no sequence to
his conversation. Robin’s wonder grew. What ailed them all? Were
they all with him, and trying to make him feel at ease, guessing that
he had come back to face trial? Men had done that before.
His gaze for a second turned to the open door. Across the street a
livery barn bulked large. Its double doors gaped on the brown earth
roadway. A man led out a saddled horse, put his foot in the stirrup
and swung up.
Robin stared incredulously. He could see the features under the
gray Stetson. The flash of silver conchos on saddle, silver inlay on
bit and spur, glinting in the sun; Robin saw these and still could not
believe.
He turned to Boyd.
“Who’s that on the black horse?” he demanded.
Boyd left off an argument with the bartender to look.
 “You been snow-blind lately?” he laughed. “Your eyes still full of
that Puget Sound fog? That’s Shinin’ Mark. You know as well as I
do.”
“He’s actin’ meaner’n I ever knew him since he got around,” Boyd
added in a lower tone. “Some of these days, somebody that’s hot in
the head and quick on the draw is goin’ to get him right.”
“Since he got around?” Robin caught at the first sentence,
repeated it in an interrogative tone.
“Wasn’t it before you went away? No? Well he got careless with
his six-gun down in the Birch Creek line camp last winter and shot
his fool self. Darned near cashed in. He was on the bed ground for
two months.”
Robin listened, with a loud thumping in his breast, a feeling of
relief that was like a great weight rolled off his back. He had seen the
glaze of death gather in Mark Steele’s eyes as his knees sagged
under him. He had stood there looking down at the red stain
spreading and soaking into the dirt floor. He had seen Mark lie like a
log for twenty minutes. It had never occurred to Robin that he wasn’t
dead. How could a man, even an iron-hard man, survive a .45 slug
through the base of his neck, in the region of his wishbone? Yet
there he was, reining in a black horse that curvetted and twisted in
eagerness to be off, while Mark talked to the stableman. Robin could
see his lips move.
The old passion flickered up in Robin’s breast. All the indignity, the
calculated insults, the treachery, Tex Matthews’ death, Steele’s bold
thievery, stirred Robin’s blood again. The old sores reopened.
So that was how it went? He wondered why. What had caused
Steele and Thatcher to take that tack? Accident! Didn’t want it known
that an unarmed boy had shot him with his own gun. Vanity?
Perhaps. It didn’t matter.
Tucked within the waistband of his trousers Robin’s .45 rested
against his stomach. He slid his hand under his coat, felt the curved
bone handle of the gun and took a step toward the door. Boyd’s eyes
had been on his face, in which all unconsciously something of
Robin’s feelings must have been reflected. Boyd caught his arm as
he moved.
 “Aw, look. Let him go for this time,” he counseled cheerfully. “You
got all the time there is to carry on your private war. He’s pullin’ for
Lonesome Prairie. They’re gatherin’ saddle stock. He wanted me to
ride with him but I ain’t quite ready. Pass it up this time, Robin. Have
a drink and let him go. Who wants to throw lead on a spring day like
this?”
Robin laughed. He could scarcely have followed up that first
impulse since at that very moment Shining Mark gave the black his
head and broke away in a gallop. Robin watched him grow small
until he was a bobbing dot on the out trail. Then he said to Jack
Boyd:
“I guess he’ll keep for awhile.”
“Let’s amble across to the Silver Dollar,” Jack suggested. “There’s
some fellows over there.”
The afternoon and evening Robin spent was like that of a prodigal
son returned. He had not been in Big Sandy since the evening he cut
his string and went home full of shame and impotent anger. He had
come back under a cloud. That cloud was dispelled. Here on his own
ground, among his own peers, he passed the first carefree hours
that had fallen to his lot in weary months.
He went to bed at midnight and lay for a few minutes in the dark
room staring at the dim walls, smiling to himself. He did not care
what came next. Shining Mark was still to be reckoned with. He still
had his own word to make good. But that would be man to man, if at
all. In Robin’s mind the T Bar S and theft still remained a problem to
be solved if he desired to remain in the Bear Paws. But the outcome
of any personal clash with Mark Steele was something Robin could
now accept with composure. Somehow, in his mind, Shining Mark
had shrunk to normal proportions. Or perhaps he himself had grown.
He couldn’t say. But he knew how he felt.
Robin ate breakfast in the morning, took horse and rode south,
rode with a heart as light as the little clouds drifting around Shadow
Butte. The Butte itself lifted its cone summit high above him. He rode
past it on ground softened by spring rains, warmed by a spring sun,
green with new grass and speckled with flowers. The creeks ran
clear and strong. The Bear Paws nursed snowcaps on the highest
peaks, white pyramids on a base of dusky pine. Crows sailed cawing
around him. Meadow larks swung on sagebrush trilling their mating
song. Robin lifted his lusty young voice in a ribald version of The
Spanish Cavalier, a careless horseman chanting as he rode.
He pulled up a minute on the ridge where he had watched the
sunset with May Sutherland, and the singing mood passed. It was all
different now. His face turned toward the Bar M Bar. He rode on
soberly wondering what his welcome would be like. He stopped once
more to gaze at the closed door of his own cabin, but he did not
dismount. The new grass was springing thick in the bluejoint
meadow. He smiled. He might have a use for that place yet.
Ten minutes later he rode into Mayne’s. Old Dan himself stood in
the stable door. He stared at Robin, speechless.
“Well, I’m back,” Robin announced the obvious.
Mayne shook his hand, but there was no heartiness in his grip.
“You ain’t exactly overcome with joy, are you?” Robin challenged.
“What’s wrong with you—or with me?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’ a-tall,” Mayne protested. “Only—well, things is
sorta different, I guess, from last fall.”
“How?” Robin’s tone was curt.
“Aw, hell,” Mayne growled. “I might as well give it to you straight.
Me an’ Mark Steele has buried the hatchet. He’s bought a half
interest in the Bar M Bar. We was a little wrong about them T Bar
S’s. Anyway, that’s settled. So—well, you see how it is, don’t you?”
“You’ve took Mark Steele in as a partner?” Robin stared with
narrowing eyes.
“Yeah. His old man died in Oklahoma an’ left him fifteen thousand
cash. It come about kinda offhand. They hauled Mark up here after—
after he got shot down Birch Creek, an’ we took care of him. He ain’t
so bad when you know him.”
“I see,” Robin said slowly. “So because he has a bunch of money
to put in with you you’ve overlooked a little thing like him stealin’ your
stock. You’ve taken a cow thief for a partner!”
“That’s tall talk, young feller,” Mayne growled.
“Maybe. But I’ve said it. If it worries you I won’t talk no more. But
you know what I think. Yes, it sure makes it different,” Robin
muttered. “I’ll go see Ivy an’ ride on.”
 “You better——” Mayne began, but Robin had turned his back and
was striding toward the house. The old man stood leaning against
the stable wall, twisting his scraggly mustache, poking absently at
the soft earth with the toe of his boot. His expression was not
precisely a happy one.
Robin stalked through the kitchen. Whether driven by eagerness
or anxiety he did not consider. Of old Ivy would have run across the
yard to meet him. He found her in the living room sitting beside a
window which commanded the yard. He knew she had seen him.
She rose as he entered but there was no welcome in her eyes. They
were darkly sullen, a little frightened.
Robin didn’t speak. He came up to her, put his hands on her
shoulders, looked searchingly into her face. What he saw there
troubled him with a sudden heart heaviness. To be near her stirred
him deeply. Yet as he looked at her he knew that something which
had linked them close was gone, extinguished like a burned-out
candle.
“You don’t seem noway glad to see me,” he said gently.
“Did you expect me to be?” she returned. “You never wrote.”
“How could I, the way things were?” he asked. “You know I would
have sent word. It never struck you I’d either do that or come back
because I couldn’t stay away from—from everybody and
everything?”
“You ran like a scared coyote,” she said tensely. “An’ you didn’t
shoot Mark, after all. He shot himself with his own gun. You were just
scared of him.”
“Yes? Well?”
Robin paused on the interrogation. He shook her gently.
“Are you goin’ to bust everythin’ up between us?” he asked
quietly. “Is that the way you feel? Did I have to camp right on your
trail to hold you?”
“It’s already busted,” Ivy snapped.
She shook herself free of his hands, backed away a step or two,
looking at Robin with a dumb implacable resentment smoldering in
her eyes. She turned to a shelf on the wall, took something out of a
box and handed it to Robin without a word. It was the little diamond
he had given her—their engagement ring. Robin held it in the palm
of his hand. A pang of sadness, mingled with a touch of anger
stabbed him.
“Maybe it’ll do for another girl,” Ivy said spitefully. “I don’t need it
no more.”
“Neither do I,” he said hotly, and flung the ring into the dead ash of
the fireplace. For a moment they stared at the puff of ashes where it
fell, at each other. The girl’s lips quivered. Robin turned on his heel
and walked out of the house.
Old Mayne still leaned against the stable wall. Robin gathered up
his reins, turned to ask a question.
“Ivy goin’ to marry Steele?”
He shot the words at Mayne with a harshness that made the old
man start.
“I reckon so,” he said apologetically. “I kain’t help it.”
“Nobody said you could,” Robin flung over his shoulder as he
reached for his stirrup.
Dark found him sitting with his feet on his own stove, in a house
without food or bedding, thinking, thinking! To-morrow he would ride
back to town. But to-night—here—he was not conscious of hunger
nor of physical discomfort as he sat with hands clasped over his
knees with an ache in his breast and a turmoil in his brain.
Sometimes it was bad for a man to see things too clearly.
 CHAPTER XVII
A CHALLENGE

Before dawn Robin saddled and headed south on the trail of Red
Mike. Minus supper and breakfast he was hungry. But his mount was
fresh and fed with grazing in the little pasture. Robin was tough. A
meal more or less didn’t greatly matter. And sunrise brought him a
happier mood. Luck also bestowed a double quantum as if to make
up for past niggardliness. Ten miles from the Bar M Bar he ate hot
cakes and coffee with a lowly sheep herder tending his flock on the
northern flank of Chase Hill. Within an hour of that camp he found
his sorrel horse, ranging as the cow horse at liberty was wont to
range, with a band of the untamed.
The wild bunch broke headlong in the general direction of the Bar
M Bar. Robin fell in behind them. The direction suited his book. He
had a bed roll and a packsaddle still at Mayne’s, and a cow-
puncher’s bed was part of his working outfit. He would need that
bedding.
So he loped behind the wild horses until they ran themselves out.
Once Robin caught up and jogged at their heels he headed them
where he wished. With rope ready he watched his chance. A touch
of the spurs, a deft throw, and the rawhide noose closed about Red
Mike’s burnished copper neck.
Robin led him on to Mayne’s, changed his saddle to Red Mike’s
back and lashed his bedding on the livery horse. He saw Ivy’s face
for a moment at a window. Her father strolled over to say a word or
two. Robin answered in monosyllables, not because he was still
angry or resentful—that had all evaporated—but because there was
nothing more to say. When the last hitch was taken in the pack rope
he rode on.
He slept that night at a horse ranch in the foothills halfway
between Shadow Butte and Big Sandy. Before noon he was in sight
of the town, the pack horse trotting to keep up with Red Mike’s
running walk. He did not know what he was going to do but that
uncertainty sat lightly on his mind. He had money in his pocket. An
able range rider was welcome anywhere. In all the long tier of states
bordering the east slope of the Rockies a man who could ride and
rope could be a rolling stone and still gather moss. If the Bar M Bar
and the Block S were both taboo there was still the Bear Paw Pool,
the Shonkin, the YT and the Circle within a radius of seventy miles.
He did not have to quit Montana, only that immediate section of the
Bear Paw mountains—and that merely because he chose, because
the south side of the hills had grown distasteful as well as
dangerous. On the latter count alone he would not have retreated.
He was not even sure he would leave. He would never run again.
Once was enough.
But still he was minded to leave Birch Creek and Little Eagle and
Chase Hill, all that varied region he had haunted for three happy
years. Robin wanted to go clean, to be rid of every tie. Most of them
were broken. There remained only that hundred and sixty acres
which he had dreamed of making a home. He would sell it if he
could, for what he could get. Since the Block S was the only outfit
that set any store by land Robin thought he might sell it to Adam
Sutherland. Looking far-sightedly into a future that should long
outlast himself Sutherland had increased his acreage as his herds
increased. Sutherland would give him something for that homestead,
although old Adam owned thousands of acres he had got for a song
and sung the song himself. Robin didn’t want to see it again. Shining
Mark in partnership with Dan Mayne. Mark marrying Ivy. Pah!
Yet in spite of these dolors riding across earth that exhaled the
odor of new growth under a sun blazing yellow in a sapphire sky,
Robin’s spirits gradually rose. A man couldn’t be sad in the spring
astride of a horse that bounced under him like a rubber ball. Robin
whistled. He sang little snatches of song. He pulled up on a hill to
stare across the flat in which Big Sandy lay. Space and freedom!
Room to move and breathe—and some to spare. The sunrise plains
before they were fenced and trammeled. A new, new land but
yesterday wrested by the cattleman with his herds from the Indian
and the buffalo. Robin could not wholly and consciously visualize the
old wild west of which he was a part. He could only feel instinctively
that as it was it was good.
Concretely his mind turned upon matters of immediate concern.
Below him, where Big Sandy creek debouched from the rolling
country he saw tents and wagons and a cluster of horses.
“Aha,” he said to Red Mike, “there’s the Block S. They’re in off
Lonesome Prairie. They’ll be draggin’ it to the home ranch to get
organized for round-up. I reckon Shinin’ Mark’ll be in town.”
It was out of his way to swing over to the Block S camp. He had
no qualms about bearding the wolf (Robin couldn’t think of Mark
Steele as a lion; a lion in his mind had a certain majesty) but he saw
no reason for seeking the wolf in his own lair. Town would do as well.
He had no desire to avoid Shining Mark. In fact he had a certain
curiosity about what Mark would do or say when they met. To
Thatcher he gave scarcely a second thought.
He stabled his horses. By the hitching rack before the Silver Dollar
a row of cow ponies drooped their heads in equine patience. Robin
walked into the saloon. His gun was belted on his hip, the first time
he had ever carried a six-shooter openly in Big Sandy. Steele was
not there. Block S men, Jack Boyd among them, greeted him
hilariously. Thatcher alone neither spoke nor smiled. Robin looked
him in the eye.
“Well,” he said casually, “if there’s anything on your mind I’m
listenin’.”
“Nothin’ much besides my hat,” Thatcher made a feeble effort at
grinning. “I’m not lookin’ for trouble—unless you are.”
That was fair enough in all outward seeming, and Robin felt that
Thatcher, for whatever reason, spoke the truth. Most decidedly
Tommy Thatcher was not keen for trouble. He showed that plainly
enough. It didn’t occur to Robin that his own attitude was aggressive,
that he was taking a wild bull by the horns with a confidence that
made the bull give ground. Thatcher’s words and bearing simply
gave him an opportunity publicly to close that incident in so far as it
could be closed.
“I never went lookin’ for trouble in my life,” Robin said quietly. “I
side-step it if I can. If I can’t——”
 He shrugged his shoulders.
“Come on, have a drink an’ let her slide,” Thatcher proffered the
peace symbol of the range. Men with bad blood between them didn’t
drink together.
“It happens I’m not drinkin’ to-day, not with anybody,” thus Robin
announced to all and sundry that he was not refusing the olive
branch merely because it came from Thatcher—although he would
have died thirsty rather than drink with a man he felt sure had sped
one of the bullets that snuffed out Tex Matthews’ life. “Thanks, just
the same.”
Probably no one but himself detected the sardonic note in that
phrase of declination.
He walked on up toward the store. He didn’t know Mark Steele’s
whereabouts and he cared less. He wanted to see Adam Sutherland.
The old man was in town. If in seeking the owner of the Block S he
ran across Shining Mark that was as it happened.
He didn’t have to ask a clerk if Sutherland was about. Back by the
bookkeeper’s desk Sutherland occupied his favorite roost deep in an
armchair. The cattleman’s face, round and red about a walrus-like
mustache didn’t alter its normal placidity as Robin approached.
“Hello, kid,” he greeted. “I haven’t seen you for quite a spell.”
“No, and you maybe won’t see me for quite a spell again,” Robin
answered, “if I can do some business with you.”
“Well, shoot,” Sutherland encouraged.
“It’s nothin’ much,” Robin said, “except that I’ve been away for
quite a while. Since I’ve been back and looked the ground over I
reckon I’ll move on again. Nobody loves me and I’m out of a job,” he
finished with a whimsical twist. It was true, but a truth so stated that it
contained for Robin the germ of humor. “I thought maybe I’d sell you
that hundred and sixty I homesteaded on the creek above Mayne’s.”
“Oh, did you? You reckon I’m in the real estate business?”
Sutherland rumbled. “You got your deed to it?”
Robin nodded.
“How much you reckon it’s worth?”
“As much as I can get for it.”
 “Well, I might——” Sutherland stopped abruptly. Robin saw the
change of expression cross his face. He heard the front door click.
Out of one corner of his eye he saw Shining Mark come striding
down between the counters.
“You might what?” Robin prompted.
But Sutherland clasped his hands over his rotund stomach and
leaned back in his chair, silent and expressionless as a poker player
nursing a pat hand.
“Hello, Tyler.”
Robin turned his head at Mark’s greeting. The quality of the man’s
voice was the same, arrogant, subtly menacing.
Robin didn’t even trouble to reply. He looked at Mark calmly, an
outward, deceptive calm for within something was beginning to burn,
a flame that he knew he must keep down. It was like being too close
to a venomous snake—only, somehow, for Robin the snake’s fangs
were drawn. He didn’t know why he felt so sure of that but he did. He
was no more afraid of Shining Mark than he was afraid of
Sutherland’s elderly bookkeeper, who was mildness personified,
years of clerical work and domestic infelicity having rendered him
harmless. He gazed at Mark with deliberate, insolent scrutiny.
“They tell me you had an accident with your gun down on Birch,”
he said at length.
“Yeah. Fool thing to do,” Steele growled. It struck Robin that
Shining Mark was a little uneasy.
“Shot yourself with your own gun, eh?” Robin drawled. “Right in
the wishbone, they say. Too bad it wasn’t about six inches higher.
Seems like I heard, too, that it wasn’t quite accidental.”
“What you tryin’ to do? Provoke me?” Steele asked coolly. “You
act like you wanted to open up a package of trouble. I’d sure
accommodate you on the spot if I was heeled. You act real bad when
you happen to find me unarmed.”
“You’re a liar as well as a thief,” Robin took a step toward him. “Do
you want me to prove it?”
Shining Mark’s face flamed. He looked at Robin, then at
Sutherland sitting quietly in his chair, an impassive listener save that
his eyes were narrowly watching both men. Mark stared at Robin.
That youth laughed aloud in his enemy’s face. A whimsical thought
took form in a play on words—steel had lost its temper!
“You’re weakenin’, Mark,” he taunted. “I’ve just come in from
Mayne’s ranch. I said you were a liar and a thief. I say it again.”
“I heard you,” Steele replied, making a visible effort at self-control,
although his lean face was burning. “You don’t need to say anything
to me at all. I’ll drop you in your tracks as soon as I get my hands on
a gun, you mouthy pup. You sure do swell up when you happen to
have a six-gun on your hip and catch me barehanded.”
“I beat you barehanded once, and I can do it again,” Robin kept
his voice low, his tone casual. “I don’t reckon you understand why I
called you a liar. I know a Texas trick or two myself. You——”
He darted a forefinger at Mark and the man jumped backward—
but not so quickly that Robin’s fingers failed to tap smartly against
something hard and outline it briefly under Steele’s coat.
“You got a gun in a Texas holster under your arm,” Robin said
contemptuously. “And you talk about being unarmed. As if anything
you could say or do would throw me off my guard for a second. You
swine! When I think that you put the fear of God in me once, I could
laugh. That’s how dangerous you look to me now.”
Robin took off his soft Stetson and slapped Mark across the face.
Mark put up his hand and backed away. Behind him Robin heard
Adam Sutherland grunt, heard the scrape of his chair legs. Robin
laughed again. He remembered the dead cows in Birch Creek. He
remembered Tex Matthews’ stiffened body across a bloody saddle,
borne by a tired horse, led by a tired rider through a long winter
night. He remembered with a bitter clearness Steele swinging his
spurred foot from a table in a line camp and saying cold-bloodedly, “I
hate to muss up a perfectly good camp but you’ve bothered me long
enough.”
With those pictures blazing bright in his memory Robin had to
laugh—or cry. He did laugh, looking straight into Steele’s burning
eyes, but there was no mirth in the sound.
“I’ve said my say,” he kept his voice without passion. “If a gun
under your arm isn’t good enough for you, go buckle one on your
hip. I’m not even going to bother looking for you, Steele. That’s how
much I think of you. I won’t waste no time nor talk on you after this. If
you want my scalp—and you’ve been after it a long time—you’ll have
to come after me. If you jump me you won’t be able to say it was an
accident with your own gun a second time.”
Steele turned and walked away. Once he hesitated, seemed
about to turn. Robin stood watching him, one hand resting on the
desk, a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. And when Steele
passed through the swinging doors Robin followed, his thought and
vision so concentrated on the man ahead that he did not hear
Sutherland call after him:
“Hey, Tyler. Come back here. I want to talk to you.”
 CHAPTER XVIII
THE SEAT OF THE MIGHTY

About Shining Mark’s capacity for ruthless action Robin had no

illusions whatever. He did not jump to the conclusion as a lesser man
might have done that his open defiance of Steele had driven him to a
cover from which he would not emerge. Mark was pretty deeply
committed one way and another, and he was growing more cautious,
that was all. Robin had simply put him on the defensive. Mark would
get him when and where he could. After that exchange before Adam
Sutherland, Shining Mark had to go through with it; he couldn’t hold
up his head before his employer if he didn’t. Robin knew that when
he deliberately called him “thief.” That was why he uttered the
epithet. He meant to put the shoe on the other foot, make Mark the
aggressor if war must ensue. And he had succeeded. The mere fact
that certain fibers within him had hardened so that he neither feared
Steele nor any other man did not lead Robin to underestimate his
enemy. Shining Mark was more dangerous than ever, for all he had
backed up from an insult with a gun hidden under his armpit.
So Robin took no foolhardy chances. He went to the hotel,
lounged in the bar and the office, and kept his eyes about him. Two
or three of the Block S riders wandered in. There was nothing to
indicate that they had heard of any new clash. Robin chaffered with
them, but he did not cross the street. He had said his say. The rest
was up to Mark.
Watching idly through a window half an hour later Robin saw Mark
mount his horse and ride to the store, emerge therefrom presently
and jog down the street looking neither to right nor left, vanishing at
last toward the round-up camp.
Robin ate supper, played cards until ten o’clock, went to bed. In
the morning he saddled Red Mike and rode south a mile or two. The
Block S outfit was gone. Robin rode west toward the mountains to
see a rancher he knew. He had all the time in the world. He meant to
stay around Big Sandy two or three days. He would sell that bit of
land to Adam Sutherland if he could. Then he would drift. He would
go on spring round-up with the YT or the Pool. One of the big outfits
would make a place for him he knew. If later his trail crossed Mark
Steele’s—well, he would never eat his words.
In the evening he went back to town. When he walked into the
hotel the rotund host said:
“Sutherland, he send the Chinaman for you. He want to see you
by his house ven you come in already.”
Robin walked over to the Sutherland cottage. Sutherland stood on
the top step rolling a cigar between his lips.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes. Come on in. Still chilly in the evenin’s.”
Robin sat down in an upholstered chair in a comfortably fitted,
homelike room. Sutherland stared at him for a minute.
“You’ll know me, I reckon, next time you see me,” Robin
suggested dryly. That appraising stare ruffled him a trifle.
Sutherland grinned.
“I reckon I will,” said he. “What possessed you to jump on Mark
Steele roughshod?”
“He had it coming,” Robin defended. “Anyway, I didn’t jump him. I
just told him where he got off.”
“Well, I guess he got off all right,” Sutherland grumbled. “Now
what’s the root of this trouble between you and Mark Steele? Strikes
me it’s more than a girl. Twice you’ve called him a thief. I got a right
to know.”
“You have,” Robin admitted frankly. “But I’m not goin’ to tell you,
right now. You’d have only my bare word. If I had a round-up crew to
myself for a couple of months I might be able to show you.”
“Is it that serious?” Sutherland asked slowly.
Robin looked at him keenly. He couldn’t quite make out this
heavy-faced man whose brain was of a vastly different quality from
his flesh-burdened body or he would never have become a power in
the Bear Paws. Sutherland wasn’t stupid. Neither was Robin. Only
Robin didn’t want to talk, now that he had a hearer—where six
months earlier he would have poured out his tale.
“Do you know that Steele has bought in with Dan Mayne?” he
asked Sutherland.
Sutherland nodded. His eyes were on Robin narrowly.
“This got something to do with Bar M Bar stock, this trouble
between you two?”
“Partly.”
“You don’t seem to want to talk.”
“I won’t,” Robin said bluntly. “If I had a chance I might show you.”
“All right, you can show me. I’m from Missouri.”
“How?” Robin inquired.
“Well,” Sutherland drawled. “You can go to work for the Block S for
one thing. You said nobody loved you and you were out of a job. I’ll
give you a job.”
“I couldn’t work for the Block S, as things stand,” Robin said
impatiently. “You know that.”
“Don’t see why. You’re a cow-puncher. I can use you.”
“See here,” Robin told him bluntly. “I’ve ideas of my own. The only
way I’d ever work for the Block S would be to run it.”
“All right,” Sutherland said abruptly. “I’ll give you a whirl at being a
range boss. Mark Steele has quit me. Think you can fill his boots?
It’ll take a man.”
“I fill my own boots,” Robin answered slowly. “That’s good
enough.”
A slow smile spread over Sutherland’s broad face.
“You’ll be the youngest wagon boss in Montana, I reckon,” he
drawled.
Robin didn’t answer. But his heart leaped within him. To attain the
seat of the mighty at a single bound! It seemed incredible. He had
made a reckless statement bear rich fruit. When he told Sutherland
that the only way he would work for the Block S would be to run it he
had been sincere enough; but that was only an oblique way of
stating that he didn’t want to be a Block S rider as matters stood.
This was a horse of a different color. When it came to that he was a
cowman. Responsibility had no terrors for him. If he could handle
men? Well, why not? Power is a sweet morsel for any man to set his
teeth in. Robin had confidence without vain conceit. He knew himself
equal to the job.
Sutherland mused, pulling at his walrus mustache, his rubicund
face glowing behind the smoke cloud of his cigar.
“Yes, sir,” he continued. “You’ll be the youngest wagon boss in
Montana. I’m kinda disappointed in Mark. He was a slashin’ good
cowman. Maybe gettin’ some money left him has spoiled him. He’s
quit. Least that’s how I take it. He drew all the money he had comin’,
put Jack Boyd in charge of the outfit, and got on the train this
afternoon. So you go out an’ take charge. The wagons’ll be camped
by the ranch. I’ll give you a note to Jack.”
“All right,” Robin said quietly.
“Now look,” Sutherland continued. “I don’t want you to take up
with the idea you’ve scared Mark Steele outa the country, because
that’d be a bad mistake. If he didn’t have it out with you right then
and there he had his own reasons besides bein’ afraid to take a
chance. Mark’s got a money interest on this range now. He’ll be
back. I’d be watchful,” Sutherland said very slowly, “if I was you.”
Robin had no mind to contradict that. He merely nodded.
“I don’t want to crowd you,” the old man went on in the kindliest
tone Robin had ever heard him use. “I ain’t got to be near sixty and
own thirty thousand cattle by goin’ through the world blind, deaf and
dumb. Maybe a man here and there fools me for awhile. See you
don’t. If I trust a man and he knifes me, I don’t forget. You say you
can show me somethin’ if you have a round-up crew to work with.
Well, you got it. And I’m from Missouri. I’m waitin’ to be shown.”
“I don’t want to talk big,” Robin murmured. “I’m kinda dizzy right
now. But when I spread my hand on the table I think you’ll say it’s
good.”

On a ridge overlooking the home ranch on Little Eagle, Robin

drew rein for a look. The painted roofs of barn and out buildings and
rambling house glowed in the sun. Windows flashed like beacons.
The willows fringing creek and irrigating ditch were one shade of
green, the wide meadows another, the pines that clothed the hills