Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page B

practical than even Gerald had figured them for.
It was seven-thirty in the evening by the time the ceremony was
through and a rainstorm was starting to blow up, but they’d refused
the minister’s offer of hospitality and said they’d start right out
on the trail; they had a camp outfit and would be just fine,
thanks—and had vanished into the night, beyond the range of Old
Digger’s informants.
    And that, seeing that they had got
themselves well and truly married, seemed to be that. Old Gerald,
for all the noise he made, wasn’t generally homicidal. His new
son-in-law didn’t have to worry about bullets coming unexpectedly
from behind. For three days Gerald bellowed, and his right-hand man
Joe made what they call comforting noises, and everybody else,
mostly understanding, kept their opinions to themselves. Then
things more or less slid back into routine.
    Without Lainey to look after it, the shack
soon became dusty and cluttered. Gerald couldn’t find any properly
mended clothes and he despised his own cooking. He stood it as long
as he could, and then he hired a woman to cook and clean; and then
promptly fired her a few days later. After that he hired and fired
new cooks regularly, one every three weeks or so. Everybody knew he
was trying to find a replacement for Lainey, but not
succeeding.
    Now you might be thinking there would be
only two ways for this story to go. If it was a literary
masterpiece Lainey would suffer untold hardships and find she’d
made a dreadful mistake, and come back and admit as much to her
father. Or, in the magazine-story mold, Bob Russell would stumble
over a gold nugget while hunting wild horses, or else would turn
out to be the son of a rich rancher who’d been right in Gerald’s
milk pitcher all along. But none of those things happened. It was
more complicated and more ordinary than that.
    For several months the young Russells camped
out in the hills, trailing the herds of wild horses and
occasionally closing with them long enough for Bob to cut out some
likely specimens. They were very much in love with each other and
very happy. Lainey had never lived in the open before, but as she
told her new husband, it wasn’t much different from keeping house
at the stockyards, except there had been a cookstove and less
chance of the roof blowing in on your head. He laughed when she
said that. It was their first family joke—the tent had blown down
on them that first stormy night they spent in it.
    In fact, Lainey’s stockyard upbringing had
fitted her very well to be a mustanger’s wife. She cooked their
meals—cooking for two was practically a lark after feeding a table
of twenty ravenous men every night—washed their clothes and kept
them patched together, and administered first aid when Bob came
away from a tussle with a horse somewhat the worse for wear.
Gerald’s rheumatism and the occasional calamities among the cowboys
had given her practice for that.
    “I really don’t know what you ever did
without me,” said Lainey cheerfully one evening in the tent, as she
rubbed liniment into a sore shoulder that Bob had sprained that
afternoon.
    “I’m not sure either,” said Bob, wincing at
the soreness and smiling at the same time.
    As Lainey corked the bottle of liniment and
wiped her hands he twisted around and lay down with his head in her
lap. “You’re not sorry about running off, are you, Lainey? You’ve
never complained about anything.”
    “Of course not!” said Lainey. “It’s been a
lot of fun—and it will be, so long as you don’t break your neck.”
She gave him a reproachful dig in the ribs.
    “I promise I won’t be dragging you all over
creation forever. Soon as I sell these horses I’m going to build
you a proper house—with a good roof and glass windows right from
the start—”
    “And ‘them doilies on the rocking-chairs in
the parlor,’” added Lainey mischievously.
    Bob craned his neck to look up at her.
“Huh?”
    “That was one of the