Whit and Ona Mae Willins lived all their married life together on a small spread about eight miles west of
Farwell never had been much of a town. It started out ‘long about 1888 as a Fort Worth & Denver Railroad siding site and
jerkwater stop, and immediately didn’t get much more important or noteworthy. Mainly, the small railroad depot and stock pens there provided a handy gathering place for the massive XIT Ranch and other cow outfits in the area to ship cattle to the big slaughterhouses back east.
In every direction, the endless
But Whit and Ona Mae had never heard of the Canadian tundra, and wouldn’t have worried about it if they had. Typical of the practical, tough-natured pioneers who chose to go head to head with such a place, they’d survived run-ins with Kiowas, Comanches, cattle rustlers, squatters, oil conmen and crooked land speculators of all kinds, and never gave much thought to such mundane concerns as the scenery, the weather, or where the weather was born.
In fact, since settling in that part of the Panhandle even before the FW&D tracks snaked their way up from Dalhart, about twenty-four miles to the southeast, the Willinses never gave much thought to anything beyond the confines of their three hundred or so acres of deeded property and the thousands of miles of empty prairie they allowed their few hundred head of hardy steers to wander around on. They raised what of their young’uns who survived childhood to accept the endless plains as home and sent them off to scattered home spreads of their own, and then settled into surviving old age.
Outside making a three-mile round trip wagon ride to church every Sunday morning, and the occasional Saturday night church dance, Whit and Ona Mae kept pretty much to themselves. They stayed up on fashions and current events in the rest of the world by perusing the Farmer’s Almanac, and a seemingly endless barrage of catalogs from mail order houses such as Sears & Roebuck, National Cloak and Suit Company, Spiegel, Montgomery Ward, so on.
The Willinses were hardworking, thrifty, devout, sensible, salt-of-the-earth people that, if they thought about it much – and they didn’t – were more or less satisfied, and even happy with their lifetime together.
And, since the cottonwood saplings Whit planted in a complete circle around the house had matured into massive shade trees that offered a cool place to sit at the end of the day, and the few head of sheep he brought in to keep the grass and weeds chewed down around the house did such a fine job of fertilizing and maintaining the grounds, they preferred staying as close to home as possible.
They took care of the truck garden, enough chickens to keep them in eggs and Sunday dinners, a couple milk cows and, of course, the beef herd which supplied the hard cash that kept up the taxes on their land and paid for the flour, sugar, coffee and other necessities they couldn’t either grow or make.
Oh, they knew all about Farwell. Since its lowborn beginnings, they rode horseback to the jerkwater stop every month end or two as the village began to grow. Like other ranchers in the area, they drove cattle to the Farwell pens every fall or so, and took casual notice when the slowly developing town changed its name to Perico in ‘ought five.
But by the time a new school was built in ‘24, Whit and Ona Mae reckoned they’d lived the better part of forty-five years practically within yelling distance of town, and never once visited the place just to take a day off from the endless chores around the ranch.
Five years later, they decided to do just that a one day in early spring.
Whit tended to the two milk cows they still kept after the children had all grown up and left home, and harnessed the team to the buckboard before sunup that Wednesday morning for the hour-long ride. While he pulled the wagon around front, Ona Mae knotted her newest gingham bonnet over hair gone as white as her best linen tablecloth and gazed longingly in the direction of the village she still thought of as Farwell.
This puzzled her.
She’d never felt such eagerness – such a strong, almost overwhelming desire just to get into town and do nothing in particular. Whit said he could take it or leave it. But Ona Mae suddenly couldn’t wait to get there and look at pretty things she never even imagined existed, and experience sophisticated new sensations she never considered before.
“What do you wanna do?” she asked Whit later, as they rattled down the dusty wagon trace leading into Farwell.
“Aw, reckon I’ll see what they got at the implements barn,” he said, shrugging the left strap of his overalls because of the bursitis-induced stiffness his right shoulder. “If I’ve got to waste a whole day anyway, I might look at the seeds. It’s getting on toward planting time.”
“Seeds?” Ona Mae stared hard at her husband of more than half a century. “Implements? Whit, we can get them things delivered at the house from catalogs. Don’t you want to look at something new? Something we ain’t seen before?”
“Like one of them fancy new egg incubators? They don’t give ‘em away, you know.”
“No!” Ona Mae’s earlier desire to experience new and sophisticated sights and sensations came flooding back. “Nicer than that, Whit!”
“Oh. You mean like one of those new trucks?”
Ona Mae shook her head. “I mean like some new curtains I can see before I buy ‘em, so I don’t have to wonder about the exact color before they come in the mail,” she said. “Or maybe some pretty lamps for the parlor.”
“I don’t know if I could even drive one of them trucks,” Whit said, rubbing absently at his bursitis-stiffened shoulder. “Not with all those gear levers and such. I could operate an egg incubator, though. I think I can.”
“Forget about the damn truck!” Ona Mae snorted angrily and folded her arms tight against her chest, and briefly considered telling him to turn the wagon around and take her home. Then she heard the whistle of an inbound locomotive. There’d be freight on the train, she figured. Shiny new inventory for the stores in Farwell. Sewing notions, milliners’ goods, cooking pots. Maybe a few new farm implements for Whit to gawk at. Maybe a new truck, dammit! Maybe something…something pretty. Something nice. Something different. “Whit,” she said, her voice softening, “wouldn’t you like to get a real haircut in a real barbershop again?”
“You cut my hair just fine,” he said, glancing in her direction and realizing something he said made her mad, but not sure exactly what it was. “Real good. Why would I want to let someone else mess with my hair? It don’t hardly seem worth taking a whole day off from chores just to get a haircut.”
“Because–” She sighed and turned to look into his age-weary eyes. “Because it’s something you don’t get to do all that often,” she said softly, brushing away a sudden and completely unexpected tear. “Fact is, I don’t even remember the last time you got a shave and haircut from a barber. Must be years and years now.”
She dropped into a melancholy silence that stretched on for more than a hundred yards.
“I’ll get my hair cut for you, Ona Mae,” he said softly. “Sure. I ain’t had no storebought haircut in a long time. I’ll get ‘er if that’s what you want.”
“I don’t want it for me, Whit,” she snapped. “It’s for you!”
“But I don’t need another haircut just now.”
“Oh, all right!” She drew a deep breath and tried to understand these unusual feelings she couldn’t seem to shake. “How about getting a meal, then? Outside of church suppers, I haven’t had a meal I didn’t cook myself since before the kids were born. Let’s look at a few stores, and such, and eat dinner in a real nice eating place before heading home.”
“You don’t want to eat this jerky and pone I packed along, then?” he asked, toeing the greasy cloth feedsack at his feet.
“We always eat jerky and cold cornbread when we come into town!” Ona Mae found herself near tears again. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d passed this many words between them in the same conversation, and she realized she had an unusual need to make him understand what she was still so bewildered by herself. “Whit, listen to me, I want to do something we ain’t done before,” she said. “I want us to do something we’ll remember for a long time. Maybe for the rest of our lives. Neither one of us will ever see sixty again, and there’s so much we haven’t done.”
Whit thought about it. “If that’s what you want Ona Mae,” he said, casting unsure glances in her direction. “Sure. We’ll just go ahead and eat dinner in town.”
“All right.”
Even though the outskirts of Farwell were in sight, Ona Mae suddenly had misgivings about dinner. Whit was right. Jerky and pone had always been good enough for their noonday meal before. Where was the need to change now? Again, she almost asked him to turn the wagon around. Then the shrill whistle of the departing train roused her from her misgivings.
Sometimes, the thought of catching a train and riding off to somewhere they’d never been before was almost overwhelming.
She clenched her jaw in cold determination and frowned toward the small town.
“All right,” she repeated firmly.
“What?”
“I said let’s look around awhile, then eat dinner, then go back to the house.”
“All right.”
They tethered the team under the same trees just off the main thoroughfare where they had started waiting since the town dug up all the hitching posts from along the streets. Whit loosened the harness and dropped the wagon tongue to take the weight off the horses, and used the bucket he always carried in the wagon to bring them water from a concrete trough around the corner – a drinking trough the city hadn’t yet removed.
While Whit ambled off to look over the new farm implements and equipment, and an egg incubator he said he wanted to study on, Ona Mae wandered through the only store in town offering household goods and frilly furnishings. The merchandise was nice enough, she thought. Very nice. But it was also very pricey.
She critically eyed a set of parlor lamps that looked exactly like a pair she’d noticed in the last Montgomery Wards catalog. But these cost fifty cents apiece more than what Wards was asking for the whole set, and the catalog listing promised to throw in a can of scented lamp oil to boot. When she saw the same cans of lamp oil from the catalog stacked for sale in a separate display, she realized the store brought in the same kinds of things she could buy direct, then split up any sets to sell as individual pieces. And then sell them for higher prices!
Ona Mae sighed and left the store, headed toward a sewing notions shop just up the street. She noticed Whit leaving the hardware store across the way, smiling like a little boy. He waved and turned toward the lumberyard, where a line of new Fords were parked along the street.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford the new lamps. The ranch was moderately successful, and they were able to bank enough hard cash to enjoy their twilight years without worrying about where the money would come from. But no matter what her unusual earlier feelings had her thinking on the ride into town, Ona Mae’s thrifty common sense just wouldn’t allow her to waste the money unnecessarily.
Waste, she’d long ago decided, was one of the worst sins a body could commit in a life as filled with hard work as hers, and she had no intentions of taking up that particular sin now.
Besides, if she bought the lamps here they might get broken on the rough ride back home. If they were broken when they arrived from Wards, she could send them back and get another set and it wouldn’t cost her anything extra. If she bought these and they didn’t survive the trip back to the ranch, she was just out the money she spent on them.
The sewing shop was much the same. While a shiny new Singer sewing machine there did tempt her in the half-hour she wandered around looking at the various wares, Sears would deliver the same model to her door and save her ten dollars in the doing. And it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with her old Howe treadle model.
On the sidewalk, she heard a racket coming up the street and turned to see Whit blazing in her direction at the wheel of a new pickup truck. He was grinning and waving and blowing the horn as he roared by. She sighed, waved halfheartedly back, and turned to gaze at a dress shop on the next corner.
Looking in the window, she decided to not even bother going inside. Do all the stores in
Instead of looking further, Ona Mae dropped into a chair out in front of the small hostel near the depot. It was the middle of the afternoon already, and she was tired of shopping. And she was depressed because what she had thought this morning would be new and different turned out to be nothing but the same old thing with higher prices.
“You ready to eat?”
She looked up to see Whit standing there, rubbing at his sore shoulder and squinting up the street.
“Might as well,” she said, coming to her feet. “Ain’t got nothing better to do. How was the truck?”
“Aw, it was all right.” He shrugged, then winced in pain. “I reckon they’ll get ‘er out of that ditch before long.”
“You drove into a ditch?”
“Yeah,” he said lightly. “Damn that hand brake. Still, I might have to get me one of them trucks someday. Say, a fella at the feed barn told me there’s only one place we can get something to eat this time of day. That’s it yonderway.”
Ona Mae looked where he pointed and saw a sign in a window that simply read “Eats.”
“Fella said all they make is hamburgers.”
“What’s hamburgers?”
“Beat’s me. Let’s go look.”
Before entering the eatery, Whit turned to Ona Mae. “That fella said when they ask us how we want it we oughta tell them all the way,” he said. “It’s best like that.”
“All the way?”
“That’s what he said. Say, why don’t you tell ‘em when the time comes,” Whit said, suddenly sounding unsure of himself. “I might not get it right.”
Bemused by his sudden timidity, but not enough to pursue it, Ona Mae just shook her head and followed him inside. They dropped into chairs at a table near the window, and Ona Mae looked around. Late dinner diners were seated at two of the four other tables in the room, and Ona Mae watched them eat for a few minutes. Hamburgers, she guessed, must be those fried ground beef pat sandwiches on the big biscuits. Directly, a bored waitress sauntered through the kitchen door and shuffled over.
“What’ll you have?” she asked abruptly, not offering any greeting.
“Uh, hamburgers,” Whit said.
“Two burgers? How do you want them?”
Whit looked at Ona Mae and nodded.
She wasn’t quite sure what he wanted from her at first, but then she remembered what the fellow at the feed store had recommended.
“All the way. Is that right?”
“If you want ‘em all the way, you want ‘em all the way,” the waitress muttered, turning toward the kitchen. “It’s not my place to say one way or the other.”
“Can we have some water with that?” Ona Mae asked just before the waitress disappeared into the kitchen.
“Water’s on the side table,” the waitress said over her shoulder, not even bothering to look back.
Ona Mae snorted and walked to the sideboard. She poured glasses of ice water for herself and Whit, and slumped back into her chair. Recognizing the ire in his wife of so many decades, Whit softly asked what was wrong.
“I guess I expected more…I don’t know,” she said. “More appreciation, I guess. Did you see that sign?”
Whit squinted at a slate board near the kitchen door. Hamburgers, it said in neatly chalked letters, cost fifteen cents.
“Is that fifteen cents a copy?” he asked, eyes wide in amazement.
“It doubtless is,” Ona Mae said. “They sure do think a lot of the victuals here.”
“Well these hamburgers better be good!”
“They are good.” Across the room, a bearded man dressed in striped railroad overalls wiped at his mouth with his shirt sleeve and nodded at the sandwich in his hand. “Best hamburgers between
The two others he was sitting with nodded agreement.
“Besides,” he went on, “there ain’t no other place open this time of day.”
“That’s what this fella at the feed barn told me,” Whit admitted.
“Well, he was right.”
“Told you so,” Whit said, turning triumphantly to Ona Mae. “Now didn’t I tell you?”
Not quite sure why that was important, she merely nodded noncommittally and sipped at her water.
The young man seated with an even younger-looking woman at the other table nodded at Whit. “There’s this place over in
Whit and the railroader exchanged scandalized looks.
“I wouldn’t pay that to watch a man eat a bale of hay,” Whit said.
“I would,” the railroad worker quipped, grinning at his table partners, “but I’d have to be drunk to do it!”
“Yeah,” the young man said. He ignored the hard, disapproving stare of his tablemate. “Me too!”
Ona Mae exchanged a pursed-lip glance with the young woman. Drunk talk at the table? This just wasn’t what she expected.
After coming to town for so long with specific errands to take care of, and heading home immediately when those errands were done, nothing about this one day in town set aside for no particular reason was making any sense. As a girl growing up in
“Well, ‘reckon we’ll get on back to work,” the railroad man said, coming to his feet and dropping a coin on the table. He turned toward the Willinses. “Hope you folks like them hamburgers.”
“We will,” Whit said, grinning and ticking his hat brim. “’Preciate it.”
Passing departure pleasantries, the young couple at the other table finished their burgers and walked out a few moments later, leaving Whit and Ona Mae alone.
“Sure smells good,” Whit said, sniffing at the air. He smacked his lips. “Mighty good.”
“It’ll do.”
“Yeah. Say, I guess I don’t need that haircut after all.” Whit nodded at the window, and the barbershop in sight across the street. “I reckon we’d probably best get on back home to the livestock, now I study on it some.”
“Are you having a good time?” she asked.
“Uh . . . maybe.” Whit’s smile slipped. “Ain’t you?”
Before she could tell him that she’d had better times in town as a child, that these townies had some damned odd notions about doing business, that waitresses shouldn’t be so snippy, that talking about getting drunk was not a proper subject at the table, that she was DISAPPOINTED, the waitress huffed back into the dining room with a loaded tray in her hands.
“Cheese is extra,” she said, handing over two plates. “Want it?”
Whit looked at Ona Mae and shrugged.
“I don’t b’lieve so,” Ona Mae said tightly. “Just two hamburgers, all the way. This them?”
“It ain’t chicken.”
Ona Mae frowned at the waitress and started to rise, but Whit cleared his throat and moved his chair closer to his longtime wife and partner.
“’Preciate it,” he said, tipping his hat. “They look mighty good.”
Ona Mae settled back into her chair. But she couldn’t keep the scowl off her face as the waitress set bowls of brightly colored sauces on the table between the plates. The waitress then put salt and pepper shakers and a small crockery pitcher beside the bowls.
“That’s Mexican sauce,” she said, jerking her forehead at the pitcher. “It’s hot. We get the mustard and ketchup from a wholesaler in
When Ona Mae didn’t say anything, Whit cleared his throat and thanked the waitress.
“Yeah, well, I’m going off shift soon as I get those tables clean,” the waitress said, nodding at the dish-cluttered furniture across the room. “So I need you to pay me for the burgers now.”
Ona Mae was tempted to stand up and walk out, but Whit fished his leather change purse from the bib pocket of his overalls. He carefully counted out thirty cents and handed it over. Then he put the purse away.
For some reason Ona Mae didn’t understand, the waitress glared at them both for a long moment before stalking off.
With the waitress gone, Whit removed the top bun and inspected the hamburger while Ona Mae watched. There was a cabbage leaf and a tomato slice, she saw, and someone had gone to the trouble to slice a pickled cucumber and drop a couple of pieces of it on top of the tomato. It smelled good, and she was hungry. But these hamburgers weren’t worth any fifteen cents apiece.
Directly, the waitress had both of the other tables clean. She walked out, throwing one last glower at the Willinses. With her gone, Ona Mae relaxed somewhat and reached for her hamburger plate.
“What about this stuff,” Whit said, nodding at the bowls of sauce. “It come with the hamburgers. What did she call it? Mustard and ketchup? Something like that.”
Remembering all the dissatisfaction she found in town today, and how she was not going to get her money’s worth at the Eats eatery either, Ona Mae shrugged. “We paid for it,” she said. “I guess we ought to eat it.”
Whit gingerly dipped the tip of his pinkie finger into the ketchup and tasted it. “Not bad,” he said. “Kinda like that tomato sauce you make for soup, only sweeter.”
“Then get you some, and leave some for me.”
Whit poured about half the ketchup onto his hamburger. But Ona Mae eyed the mustard suspiciously.
“Outside of corn, I never seen anything that yellow taste any good,” she opined.
Whit nodded sagely, but reached for the mustard bowl anyway while Ona Mae poured the remaining ketchup onto her hamburger.
“They couldn’t bring it out if it was poison,” he pointed out, emptying half the mustard on top of his ketchup-doused burger. “Folks must like it on their hamburgers, or it wouldn’t be here.”
Reaching for what was left of the mustard, Ona Mae nodded.
“I reckon not,” she said.
With the burgers then salted, peppered and re-topped, Whit folded his hands for a short table grace while Ona Mae reverently bowed her head. With the food prayed over proper, they carefully picked up the overloaded sandwiches.
Then Whit nodded at the small pitcher of hot Mexican sauce.
“Forgot about that,” he said, laying his hamburger down and reaching for the pitcher. He held it in both hands for a moment. “You know, she told us this is hot,” he said, puzzled, “but it ain’t no hotter than anything else she brought.”
Ona Mae returned her burger to her plate and reached out to touch the pitcher with the back of her hand.
“For what these things cost,” she said, “you’d think their hot sauce would at least be hot.”
Whit agreed, and fastidiously poured about half of the Mexican sauce onto his burger. Ona May finished it off when he was done.
The sandwiches ready to go again, they exchanged a quick glance and wordlessly hefted up the runny hamburgers.
Whit bit into his first, while Ona Mae watched intently. He chewed in silence for a few moments. When he didn’t say anything about it, Ona Mae took her first big bite. She’d just got to chewing good when Whit’s eyes went round and his face turned as red as the ketchup he’d doused his hamburger with.
Then the taste of the combined mustard and Mexican hot sauce cut through the flavor of the meat and bread, and attacked her mouth as if it were a swarm of bees and her tongue a spent watermelon rind.
Whit snorted like a bull catching scent of a willing heifer.
“D-Damn!” he panted.
He dropped the hamburger and grabbed up the ice water, and poured half the glassful into his mouth with the remaining sandwich bite. Sputtering another cuss word, he almost choked attempting to swallow it all. He finally got the bite down, and tossed back the remaining water. But a sudden violent bout of hiccups caused him to spew it onto the next table in a chunky fountain of droplets and crumbs.
Meanwhile, Ona Mae was having her own troubles. She snatched her glass to her lips and, noting how Whit couldn’t hang onto his water, tried to drink slower than he did. She managed to keep the cold water in her mouth where it belonged, but the icy shock did nothing to ease the intense burning agony clinging stubbornly to her tongue.
Whit wiped tears from his eyes and coughed into his fist. “You know,” he finally wheezed, “It ain’t so bad once you get it down.”
Ona Mae considered leaving her burger on the table and leaving. Then the sign reminded her how much they’d paid for the meal.
“No, I guess it ain’t,” she sighed.
Somehow, they finished off the hamburgers. But it took three ice water refills, and Whit had to go find the cook and ask for another biscuit to sop up the ketchup, mustard and hot sauce drippings still on their plates.
Ona Mae’s stomach didn’t feel too well, and she guessed Whit wasn’t in any better shape. So she was surprised when he reckoned on second thought he might get himself a storebought haircut before heading on back to the house for the evening milking chores after all. No telling when he’d have the time again, he pointed out.
Luckily, there was no one waiting in line at the barbershop. Whit climbed into the chair, and Ona Mae sat fidgeting nearby. She tried leafing through an old mail order catalog featuring barber supplies, but the smell of witch hazel and soap lather kept her stomach in a constant roll.
Her first twinge of something seriously wrong came when she climbed aboard the wagon seat a while later and noticed the stink of the droppings the Morgans had produced when she and Whit were out shopping. In a lifetime around horses and their natural leavings, she couldn’t recall even one time when the familiar odor of healthy animals bothered her.
Until now.
“Whit,” she said, “I think—” Her words were abruptly choked off by a loud belch bubbling up from deep inside her nether regions.
“What?” Whit looked up from where he was reattaching the harness and tightening the traces. “I didn’t quite catch ‘at last part.”
“We‘ve got to moving,” she said. “I need to get some fresh air, and it ain’t here.”
“Why, sure, Ona Mae,” he said. “Say, why not let’s drive by the truck yard again before heading home?” He secured the last buckle and nimbly climbed aboard to grab up the reins and release the brake with his left foot. “This arm don’t feel too bad now, and I’d like to maybe--”
“As long as you get some air circulating right now,” Ona Mae said, fanning her pale white face with an open hand, “I don’t care if we drive all the way to Dumas.”
“You all right?”
“Just get going!”
Whit clucked the horses into a tight turn, but had to wait for a passing delivery truck before he could slap them fully into motion. Stopping at the corner of the main street, he gazed toward the rail yard, and the nearby truck lot, for a moment. Then he sighed wistfully and coaxed the Morgans in the opposite direction.
At the edge of town, a breeze sprang up and Ona Mae’s head cleared and she was able to relax somewhat. But the tight knot in her stomach remained. It became tighter when Whit started whistling a spry little tune. When he started talking, her earlier nausea returned.
“You know,” he said, running a hand through his fresh-cut hair and sniffing at the witch hazel on it, “that barber did a right decent job. Might have to get me a shave next time, too.”
Ona Mae looked over at him. Next time?
“And we might get us one of those meat grinders,” he continued. “I’ve seen ‘em in catalogs, but never thought I’d want one before now. And some of that, what did they call it? Mustard and ketchup? Yeah. Some of that, too. Makes for some right tasty hamburgers.”
Her eyes tightly closed, Ona Mae belched and rode out a sudden stomach spasm at the mention of the burgers. He was talking more now than he had in the last ten tears combined. She hoped he wouldn’t mention Mexican hot sauce.
“You mean we’ll do all that when we bring the stock in for the fall shipping?” she asked when she could speak.
“Fall shipping?” Whit glanced over at her and smiled. “Sure, we’ll be back then, too. You know, taking a day off and looking around in town was a mighty fine idea. Mighty fine.”
“You had in mind to come back sooner than the fall?”
He shrugged and gently slapped the reins over the horses’ backs. “Well, I thought…you know.”
“Know what?” Ona Mae sat up straight and glanced over her shoulder at Farwell receding into the distance. She was disappointed by the whole thing, and didn’t know why. Dammit! The not knowing why made her angry, and the only one around to release that anger on was Whit. “You do want to waste another whole day like a common town loafer, don’t you!”
“D-Didn’t you have a good time?”
She glared at him. Here she practically had to crowbar Whit off the ranch and into Farwell, and all she got for her trouble was heartsick disillusionment and a gassy bellyache.
“Did you?”
Before he could answer, she belched again.
“You feeling all right?” he asked, glancing at her and moving as far away from her as he could on the wagon seat. “You look kinda white in the face.”
“I—” The horse directly in front of her chose that very moment to fertilize the trail, and she realized all the fresh air on the prairie couldn’t stop her mistreated stomach from emptying itself. Soon. “Whit, stop right now,” she gasped. “I need to get down from here.”
While Whit sat calmly noting the fresh breezes, a roadrunner chasing down and catching a manic horned toad just ahead, and a few fine-looking XIT heifers strolling along the barbed wire fence on the west side of the dirt road out to their place, Ona Mae noisily left her hamburger dinner, all the way, in the new spring weeds on the east side of the road.
When she was seated and ready to resume the ride to the ranch, Whit flexed his shoulder experimentally and smiled.
“You know, I believe driving that truck might’ve loosed up this here wing some,” he said, grinning at her. “Might have to get me one. In a truck like that, this drive wouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe go into town for hamburgers on Sunday instead of cooking all the time.”
She just stared straight ahead.
“Yep,” he went on, “and ain’t it a mighty pretty day, too? Can’t beat weather like this after that cold winter.”
“I guess,” she mumbled.
“Reckon where all that cold wind comes from, anyway?” Glimpsing the edge of their spread in the distance, he nodded to himself. “Not from around here, that’s for sure. Have to ask around about that next time we come to town. After getting another one of them hamburgers, all the way, that is. Say, if you’re hungry now, we still got pone and jerky.” He toed the greasy sack. “It’s right here.”
She clenched her eyes against the very thought.
The distant whistle of a train pulling into Farwell wafted delicately over the plains from behind them, and Whit smiled again. “Someday, I think I’m gonna catch a train and go somewhere, too,” he said. “Both of us. Maybe
“Maybe someday.”
“Yeah.” He burped happily. “Say, that sure was good dinner.”
“Just get me home, Whit.”
“Home’s in sight yonder.” He pointed at the ranch. “We’ll be there in plenty of time for you to cook us some supper.”
“Good.” Under her breath, Ona Mae muttered a half-hearted “Dammit.”
