Showdown at Buffalo Jump by Gary D. Svee Page A

sandstone hauled from an out cropping below.
    The families had come just after the sun set fire to the day, children poking solemnly from the beds of slow-moving wagons like sentinel gophers. Once the wagons stopped, the children spilled over the sides and flowed to the creek as naturally as rainwater, sometimes quiet as a meadow brook and sometimes raucous as a mountain torrent, but always to the creek.
    The children knew the importance of water instinctively. It was hammered into their subconscious by murmured conversations of their parents, desperate eyes seeking dark clouds.
    Consciously, they knew that a creek, open water, would be as close to a carnival as most of them would ever come. Creek water was cool on feet that went dry except for second- or third-hand bathwater on Saturday nights. It was a strange environment inhabited by soft-skinned frogs and snakes that didn’t bite and fish that did. And the stream was edged with grass, green and soft, not hard and brittle like August bunch grass.
    None of the children could resist the creek: None of them tried.
    A barn raising was a holiday, but not from the labor that hardened the homesteaders’ hands and stiffened their backs. They would work as hard today as they did at home, harder perhaps, pitting themselves against one another in unannounced contests of skill and strength.
    But the day was special. They would share scarce gossip, tap into the rich vein of kinship felt by those who shared life on the Montana prairie. They would tease underused muscles into grins and guffaws and share pieces of their lonely lives with others of their kind.
    The men were already at work, following a few quick instructions from Max.
    But wives and older daughters stood rooted in the creek bottom with Max and Edna, awaiting the resolution of a breach of prairie etiquette. Catherine was hostess, and she should have been outside to greet the women as they came, to tell them what they needed to know to prepare the day’s feast, but still she had not emerged from the dugout. None of them were willing to step in, awed yet by the dignity with which she carried herself at the wedding.
    So they fidgeted, watching the doorway of the dugout, awaiting some signal from Catherine.
    Signal, they got.
    Catherine swept aside the dugout’s blanket door and stepped out, pausing a moment for effect. She was wearing a beautiful blue dress, a copy of one she had seen in Boston. It had taken her months to save enough money to buy the material for the dress and weeks to make it, stitching each detail from memory.
    She had sewed in secret, knowing that the other servants would laugh at her for believing she would ever have occasion to wear such a dress. But as Catherine sewed, she dreamed of the stir the dress would create among young gentlemen admirers. And today, she glided down the steps from the dugout as though she were leaving the veranda of a Southern mansion to mix with guests on the lawn.
    Much to Max’s relief, when Catherine spoke she was the model of civility.
    â€œMrs. Lenington, I’m glad you could come.” Then Catherine turned to Max, her smile cold as the moon on a winter night. “Mr. Bass, I thought you would take it upon yourself to set up a table down here in the shade of the cottonwood tree.”
    Max scurried off.
    â€œMrs. Lenington, perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me carry the chicken and potato salad to the table?”
    Edna nodded and then called to the waiting women. “Table will be here, might as well bring down the food.” The women exploded into a rush of talk, walking back to their wagons, eager to get to work.
    One said in a stage whisper as she walked away, “Certainly dresses well for a woman who lives in a hole in the ground.”
    But the woman’s companion brought her up short. “Not all of us can live in a nice tarpaper shack like you do, Lucille,” and that ended the discussion.
    The men had framed the