She Was Hired to Cook for Twenty Hands—When the Wagon Never Came, She Filled the Larder Herself

PART 2:

 From the middle of it, you could see the whole valley of the sweet brier laid out ahead, pale gold grass rising to dark timber, and behind the timber, a long line of mountains already white on top. Nettle talked about cattle for the first 10 miles, and he talked well. He ran 900 head on the benches north of the river.

 Two-year-olds and cows, and he had come up the trail from Texas with the first of them 8 years ago. He knew which draws held water in August and which ones drifted full of snow in January. He knew a steer with lump jaw from 40 yards off. He knew that a cow would walk 20 m through snow for a lick of salt. And he said a cattleman ought to know salt the way a cook knows flour.

He knew what beef was bringing in Chicago that week to the quarter cent. Fall gather starts the 5th. He said 20 men riding. They’ll be out on the range working the far country till the 12th or so. Then they bring the whole herd into the home corral to cut out the beef and brand the late calves.

 That’s when the house fills up and that’s when I need a cook and the stores for 20. Co Pepper hauls everything. He said it the way a man says the sun comes up. Vitis Culper. He’s got the freight warehouse in Carll and the only wagons on this side of the railroad. The fall order comes up on the 1st of October.

 Flour, sugar, coffee, bacon, beans. It’s all taken care of. How much flour? He thought about it. A good deal, he said. Enid looked at him sideways. He was watching the road. How much is a good deal, Mr. Nettle? Enough, he said. And then, because she was still looking at him, whatever the last cook wrote down, Co Pepper has the list. She said nothing to that.

 She watched a hawk sitting on a fence post and counted posts until the hawk flew. The Nettle Ranch sat on a bench of level ground above a bend of the Sweetbar, where a creek came down out of the hills to meet the river. It was a long log house with a porch facing south, a bunk house with a stovepipe, two barns, a set of pole corral, and a stout log cookhouse with a stone chimney.

 Past the corrals, a gate of gray weathered poles opened onto a wagon yard. And past the wagon yard, the road ran down to the river. There was a smokehouse behind the cook house with half its roof fallen in. There was a garden fenced with brush that had gone to weeds as high as a man’s belt. The bram burned into the gate post was a capital N lying on its side.

 The way cattlemen call lazy. Everybody in the country called the place the lazy inn. Nettle pulled up at the cook house. She got down, still holding the croc, and went straight in. It was a good kitchen. She saw that at once, and it made her angry for a reason she could not name yet.

 There was an iron range with six lids and a water reservoir, a long pine table with benches for 20, a dry sink, a wood box, and a row of hooks for pots. Somebody had built it well and cared for it once. At the back of the kitchen, a plank door stood half open on a storoom. The door had apid walked into the middle of the storoom and turned all the way round once.

Shelves on three walls, floor to ceiling, hooks in the beams, bins along the floor, room for a winter stores for 20 men, and nearly nothing in it. Mr. Nettle, she called, “Would you come in here?” He came to the doorway. She counted out loud, and she touched each thing as she counted it. One flower barrel about a third full, which was perhaps 60 lb.

 a coffee sack with 11 pounds left in it, which she weighed on the kitchen scale while he watched. One side of bacon, the rind gone rancid along one edge. A sugar sack halfus used. A keg of molasses. A keg of cider vinegar. A bin of last year’s potatoes, soft, most of them sprouting. Two crocs of salt and a paper of soda.

 Nine empty quart jars on the top shelf, dusty. A tin of pepper, nothing else. That’s what feeds your house until Thursday, she said. He stared at the shelves as if he had never seen them before. Very likely he had not. It was the cook’s side of the yard. Co Pepper comes Thursday, he said. Then it’ll do till Thursday.

 Six men were eating at the home place that week. The other 14 were in cow camp on the far range until the gather. They came in at dusk and lined up in the cook house doorway, hats in their hands, looking at her. The oldest was Lig Bowen, 58, lame in his left knee from a horse that had rolled on him in 1871, who wrangled the saddle horses and did whatever else nobody else would.

 He had a white mustache and very blue eyes, and he looked her up and down and nodded once, like a man agreeing to a price. Beside him stood a long, loosejointed hand with a sunburned nose and a gap in his front teeth. That was Nat Welock. He was 31 and he had been making jokes on the lazy end for 4 years. Ma’am, Nat said, the boss tells us you’re here to feed 20. That’s right.

Well, I just walked through that store room. He grinned round at the others. There ain’t enough in there to cook for two. The men laughed. L did not. Then I’ll fill it. Enid said. She meant it plainly. She turned back to the range. Nat Welock laughed again, a little less sure, and sat down.

 She fed six men that night on potato cakes fried in bacon fat with the rind cut away and the rancid edge thrown to the dog and a pan of biscuits from the barrel and molasses and coffee made strong but not wasteful. There was nothing left in the pans when they got up. Balthazar Nettle ate last alone after the men had gone to the bunk house.

 He took the last place on the bench by the woodbox with his plate and did not talk. When he stood to go, a letter fell out of the inside pocket of his coat onto the bench. She knew the envelope. It was hers. It was the letter she had written from Cheyenne in August answering his notice for a cook in which she had given her age and her four kitchens and her references and had asked in the second line what the wage would be.

 He picked it up quickly and put it back in his coat, but she had seen that something was written across the back of it in pencil, a line or two in a heavy hand, and she had seen that he did not want her to read it. Good night, Miss Scadding,” he said. “Good night.” She lay awake a while that night in her room behind the kitchen.

 It had a door as promised and a bolt on the inside. She had $11 in a knitted stocking in the bottom of her carpet bag. She had a sourdough starter in the stone wear croc, which had come west with her mother in 1867, and had been fed every day since, in four kitchens and two blizzards and one fire.

 And she had the terms of her hire, which she wrote down that night on the last leaf of the little account book she carried in ink with the date, $35 a month. board, a room with a door, 20 hands to feed through the fall gather and the winter. She did not know what the man had penciled on the back of her letter.

 She wondered about it more than she liked to. On Sunday, she was up at 4:00. She lit the range, fed the starter a cup of flour and a cup of warm water, and set a sponge for bread. By first light, she had the store room emptied onto the kitchen table and was scrubbing the shelves with lie soap and a stiff brush.

 Laj Bowen came in for his coffee at halfass 5 and found her on a chair with her sleeves rolled past the elbow and her head in the top shelf. Last cook never did that, he said. Which one was the last cook? Fellow called Berdette. Before him, a Dutchman. Before him, a widow from Rollins who stayed 3 weeks. He poured his own coffee. Berdette lasted till August.

 Said the boss never knew what was in the storoom and nobody else cared. And he got tired of being blamed for the both of it. Did the men help themselves? Lege considered his cup. Door don’t lock. He said she put everything back in order that morning. every item on its own shelf. And she wrote down on a sheet of brown paper tacked inside the door what there was and how much. And she dated it.

 Beneath the list, she drew a line. And under the line, she wrote what 20 men would eat in a week. It was a long list. The line between the two halves of the paper looked like a river. That afternoon, she went to see the smokehouse. The roof poles had rotted through at the eaves, and the sod on top had come down inside onto the hanging rails.

 It had been a good smokehouse once, set into the slope with a stone fire pit outside, and a clay flu running in under the floor. She stood in the doorway and looked up at the sky through the hole and made a note. She looked at the garden, too. Berdette had planted it in May and left it in August.

 Under the weeds there were rose, potato tops, dead and flat, the feathery green of carrots, the broad leaves of beets, turnup tops, cabbages, 40 or more gone loose and big in the heads. A dozen tomato vines sprawled against the south fence with the fruit on them still green and hard. Nobody had dug a thing.

 The frost had not come yet, and so nobody had thought about it. She made another note. On Monday morning, Balthazar Nettle stood on the porch of the long house with his coffee and studied the western sky for a long time. Then he went down to the corral and told Lee to saddle four horses. To Enid the sky showed very little, a haze along the peaks.

 A little wind out of the southwest warm for September. Rain, Nettle said when she asked. A lot of it up high first. The creek will come up tonight and the river by tomorrow. How do you know? He pointed with his cup at the far mountains. You see the snow on the tops. Yesterday it came down to that bench, the one shaped like a saddle.

This morning it’s gone back up a thousand ft. Warm winds eating it. And there’s a ring round that bank of cloud there. If you look, he drank. I’ve got a 140 head on the low bottom by the river. I’m moving them up before dark. He was right. The rain began at noon on the high ground and came down onto the bench by two, warm and hard.

 It rained all Monday afternoon and all Monday night. By Tuesday morning, the creek beside the cookhouse had come up brown and fast over its banks, and the sweet brier below the wagon yard was a wide roaring mudcoled thing full of whole trees going by. The 140 head were up on the bench, wet and balling and safe.

 Not one was missing. Nettle had counted them through the gate himself twice. Enid thought about that while she made breakfast. a man who would count 140 cows twice in the rain and could not tell her how much flour he had ordered. On Tuesday afternoon the 29th, the rain eased and she walked out to the edge of the bench with nettle and leash to look at the river.

 On a clear day, you could see the county bridge from there far downstream, a thin dark line across the valley. They could not see it now. There was the river, brown and full from bank to bank and the line of stone peers and above the peers there was nothing. Took the span, Lodge said. Nettle looked at it a long moment.

 Well, he said they’ll build it back. On Wednesday the 30th, the mail came through. The male carrier was a thin patient man named Marston who rode a gray mule and led a second one under the sacks. He had swam both mules across the sweet brier at the lower ford a mile below the wreck of the bridge with the water up to their chests and he was wet to his armpits and in a bad temper.

 “Bridge is gone,” he said while Anid poured him coffee. “Every stick of the span. The county man was out this morning looking at it. Says they can have a new span on those peers in 3 weeks, maybe four, if the timber comes. What about freight? Freight? Marston laughed. Nobody’s taking a loaded freight wagon across that Ford for a week, ma’am. Maybe more.

 It would go right over. She thought about Thursday. Here’s the thing that nobody at the lazy end knew on that Wednesday afternoon and that you listening to this need to know now. 14 miles away in Carl on the far side of the river, the nettle wagon was already loaded. It had been loaded since Tuesday morning before the bridge went.

 20 barrels of flour with the ranch’s name stencled on every head. 16 sacks of sugar, a dozen sacks of coffee, six sides of bacon, 10 sacks of beans, four barrels of dried apples. It stood under a tarpolin in Vitus Co Pepper’s warehouse yard. And the team that should have hauled it was eating hay in his barn.

 And that Wednesday evening, when the teamster asked him when they meant to start, Vitis Co Pepper told him the wagon would stay where it was until the 20th of October, not a day before. The bridge had not given him the idea. It had only given him the excuse. Neither Enid Scadding nor Balthazar Nettle standing on the bench above a river full of drowned trees thought to ask the one question that would have saved them both two weeks of hunger.

Nobody asked where the wagon was. They only asked when on Thursday the 1st of October, the day the fall stores were due. Enid baked eight loaves and rationed the coffee and watched the road. Nothing came. She hadn’t truly expected anything with the river where it was, but she watched all the same. On Friday morning, before she lit the range, she took a stick of chalk from her apron pocket and made one short white stroke on the inside of the storoom door beside the list.

 One day late, Le saw it when he came in. “What’s that for?” “Counting,” she said. She had learned to count that way in the winter of 1875 when she was 19. She had been living with her aunt in a railroad town on the Plat River in Nebraska where her aunt kept a boarding house for railroad men. 22 borders. Enid did the cooking.

The snow started in October that year and did not stop. And by January, the trains could not get through and the town had one store with flour in it. The storekeeper’s name does not matter now. What mattered was that he had 40 barrels in his back room and he told the town he had six.

 He sold the six at four times the price. Then he sold four more at six times the price and said they were the last. Her aunt paid it. She paid it with the rent money and then with the furniture. And in March, when the trains came back and the price of flour fell to nothing overnight, the boarding house went to the bank. Enid had helped carry barrels out of that storekeeper’s back room in April, full ones, when he sold off his extra stock at ordinary prices to anyone who would buy. She had counted them herself.

30. She had understood something that spring that she had not understood before. A man who holds flour back is not short of flour. He is long on patience, and he is counting on your hunger to run out before his does.” She did not think of the storekeeper often. On Friday morning, making the chalk stroke on the door.

 She thought of him. On Tuesday, the 6th of October, Marston came across the ford again, the water lower now to his mule’s bellies instead of their chests. He brought a letter for Nettle in a good cream envelope sealed with red wax. Nettle read it at the kitchen table where the lamp was and then held it out to Enid without a word.

She dried her hands and took it. It was written in a clear, careful clerk’s hand and signed in a big one. Dear Mr. Nettle, the county bridge being down. I regret your fall shipment cannot come forward until it is rebuilt, which the county tells me will be the 25th instant. The goods are held safe in my warehouse.

 Should the ranch run short before that date, I am able to supply from my own private stock in emergency flour at $12 the hundred weight, other goods in proportion. I remain your servant. Hey, Co Pepper. Enid read it twice. $12. She said it’s an emergency. Nettle said he has to get it across somehow. What does flour cost in Carl? Four? Said lege from the stove.

 Four and a quarter maybe. So he’s offering to sell you flour at three times the price. Enid said while your own flour sits in his warehouse. Nettle frowned at her, not unkindly. He was a man who had been told something he did not have the tools to think about. The bridge is out, he said. That’s not his doing. No, said Enid. It isn’t.

 He left the letter with her and she took it to her room and set it under the lamp. She did not say the rest of what she was thinking because she had no proof of it and because she had been wrong before about men and flower once or twice in the other direction. But she made the next chalk mark that night, not in the morning.

 She could not sleep. On the bench by the range next morning, there was a tin cup of coffee waiting for her, already poured, still hot. She knew the men’s coffee ration to the ounce by then. She knew there was not supposed to be a cup to spare. Her glance went to the cup and to the door where Nettle had just gone out and then to the tin on the shelf where he kept his own coffee for the long house.

 It was lighter than it had been. She drank the coffee. She didn’t say anything about it. Neither did he. On Thursday the 8th, Marston came back north with the mail and he did not swim. Enid saw him from the cookhouse window a little before noon. He came up the river road at a trot and he was not riding his gray mule.

 He was sitting on the seat of a light buckboard behind the mules with the male sacks and a crate of something roped down in the back and the wheels were wet only to the hubs. She went out to meet him with a cup of coffee. You brought a wagon over. River’s dropping fast. Marston said that ford’s got a good gravel bottom once the water goes down. Hub deep this morning.

 Two more days of this and a man could take a team across and not wet his load. He drank the coffee. Could have taken a heavier rig than this one today if he knew the crossing. Could a freight wagon cross it? He looked at her over the cup. Depends on the teamster, he said, and on how much she wants to. That night, she wrote it down in her account book on the last page.

8th October, mailbuck board across the ford, hub deep. Why, she could not yet have said. She only knew she wanted it on paper with a date. By then, she was cooking by the cup. She had worked it out in pencil under the storoom list. 60 lbs of flour at the start, less the Sunday bread, less what the starter ate.

Sixmen and herself and nettle. If she baked bread every day, it would be gone in a week. If she baked every second day and stretched the dough with mashed potato and made biscuits only on Sunday and fed the starter the scrapings, it would last until the 12th. So that was what she did. She boiled the soft potatoes and mashed them fine and worked them into the dough.

 A cup of potato to every two of flour. The loaves came out heavier and a little gray inside, but they held together and they kept moist longer than plain bread. She cut them thin. She cut them thinner each day. She fried the potato peelings in the last of the bacon fat and served them as if she had meant to. The men noticed.

 Men always notice bread. Nat Wheeler held his slice up to the window one morning so the light came through it in places. Ma’am, he said, “I believe I can see Carll through this.” “Then you’ll know when the wagon’s coming,” said Enid. “And you can tell me.” The others laughed at that, and so did Nat, but on the way out, he stopped at the door and looked at the chalk marks. There were seven of them.

 He counted them with his finger and his face changed. On Friday, she asked Nettle for the contract. What contract? With Co Pepper for the hauling. You said he has the list. I want to see what’s on it and when it’s promised and what happens if it doesn’t come. Nettle took her into the office in the long house.

 It was a small square room with a roll top desk. a gun rack with no guns in it. A map of the county on the wall and a cattle ledger lying open on a table. The cattle ledger was beautiful. Every head, every brand, every sale in columns, in ink going back 8 years. The roll top desk was another thing. He rolled it up.

 It was full of paper, letters, bills, circulars from a Chicago commission house, a catalog of windmills, receipts on scraps. None of it was in any order. A good many of the envelopes had never been opened. “It’s in here,” he said, and began looking. He looked for a quarter of an hour. Enid stood in the doorway and did not help because it was his desk and she had not been asked.

 She watched him turn over envelope after envelope and saw his neck go slowly red. I signed it in April, he said finally. It’s in here somewhere. What did it say? That Co Pepper hauls for the ranch. Everything from the railroad at a set rate and that I don’t use any other hauler. He shut the desk. That’s the way it’s done here.

 He’s the only freighter in the county. Every outfit north of the river signs the same paper. And if he’s late, Balthazar Nettle looked at her. He was a good-looking man, she thought in a weathered, tired sort of way. And he looked just then like a man who has been asked a question in a language he half knows. I don’t know, he said.

 I didn’t read that part. On Saturday the 10th, Nettle rode the south line of the range alone, checking the fence along the river where the flood had taken it down. He reached the lower ford a little after 10 in the morning. The water was clear now, running fast over clean gravel and not much over a horse’s knees.

 There were tracks on the near bank, fresh ones coming up out of the water. The tracks of a heavy wagon, iron tires cut deep in the wet sand, and the prince of four big horses shaw all round. They went up the bank and away north along the river road toward the county poor farm on Analopee Creek. He sat his horse and looked at them.

 He thought, “Somebody got a load across.” He thought, “Good for him.” Then he rode on along the fence looking for broken wire and gave the tracks no further thought until 3 days later when Enid Scadding made him. He was a cattleman. He was the best one on the sweet brier. He could read a wagon track for the weight of the load and the number of the team and which way it had gone.

 He simply had never in his life had to ask himself what it meant for his kitchen. On Sunday the 11th, Enid baked the last bread. There was enough flour in the bottom of the barrel for four loaves, stretched with potato and a cup to feed the starter. She scraped the barrel with a wooden paddle until the stave showed bear.

She baked the four loaves and set them on the rack and covered them with a cloth. That night, she made the 10th chalk mark on the storoom door. On Monday morning before light, she made the 11th. The men who had been out on the range for a week were coming in that day. All 14 of them with the herd behind them for the cutting and the branding at the home corral.

 20 hands at the table by sundown and a week of hard work ahead of them, the hardest of the year. She had half a loaf left cut for breakfast. She had a bin of potatoes. She had coffee for perhaps five more days if she made it weak. She had molasses. She had vinegar and salt. She had nothing to feed 20 men that would keep them on a horse from 4:00 in the morning till dark.

At 4 in the afternoon, she went into the store room to fetch the molasses. And her foot knocked the flower barrel and it rang hollow. Something in her went loose. Then she took the barrel by its rim and dragged it out of the store room through the kitchen and out of the door into the yard.

 It was the last empty barrel on the place. She stood it up on the rise outside the cookhouse and she looked at it and she kicked it over. It went rolling down into the mud of the yard and fetched up against the buckboard wheel. That was the moment you saw at the start. Nettle with the bridal on his shoulder.

 Laj Bowen and two others at the corral rails. The sun gone behind the ridge and the cold coming down. That was the last of it, she said. I was hired to cook for 20 hands, Mr. Nettle. Nobody told me I’d be feeding them on air. Nettle took the bridal off his shoulder and hung it on the fence. What do you need? Flour. I haven’t got flour.

 Then I need meat. Enid said. a lot of it tonight. He stood very still. She could see him doing the arithmetic, and she could see that he did not like where it came out. Beef was the one thing on the ranch that could be turned into money. A 2-year-old steer would bring $30 at the railroad. He did not kill his own cattle to feed his crew.

 No rancher she had ever cooked for did, unless the steer had broken a leg. “I’ll kill a steer,” he said. He did it himself, and quickly, a lame 2-year-old that had been limping behind the others since the flood, and Lee and one of the men helped him hang and skin it at the barn. By 5:00, Enid had the four quarters in the kitchen.

 She wasted nothing. She could not afford to. The shoulder claws went into the big roasting pans with onions. The shanks and the neck went into the stockp with the bones for soup tomorrow and the day after. The heart and the liver she sliced and fried in what bacon fat was left. The tongue she put to boil. The sweet she cut away in white slabs and put by in a croc because she had already begun to think about the next day.

 and she peeled potatoes. Every potato in the bin that was not rotten. Two full wash tubs. At sundown, the herd came in. She heard it before she saw it. A long low rumble in the ground. And then the balling. And then the dust came up gold over the ridge against the last of the light. 900 cattle and 20 riders poured down off the bench into the big holding pasture.

The men came into the yard in twos and threes, filthy, stiff, grinning, loud, the way men are after a week in cow camp. They washed at the trough. They came in and filled the long benches, 20 men in a room built for 20, shouldertosh shoulder, and they looked at the table. Roast beef, fried liver and heart, mashed potatoes, great heaps of them, coffee, molasses, no bread, not a slice, not a biscuit.

 For a moment, nobody said anything. Then a big red bearded hand at the far end said loud enough for the whole room. Where’s the bread? There isn’t any, said Enid from the range. No bread. The flower wagon hasn’t come. The man looked round at the others and then at the plate in front of him and then at her.

 “Cook for 20,” Natlock said quietly into his plate. Nobody laughed this time. They ate. They ate everything down to the last spoon of potato. And they were hungry again by 9:00, and she could hear them saying so through the bunk house wall. At 10:00, she sat on her bed with her carpet bag open on the floor. She’d not decided anything.

 She told herself that she was only looking at what she had. Three dresses, two aprons, the account book, the stocking with $11 in it, the croc with the starter which she had fed the last cup of flour that morning, and which would have nothing tomorrow. Co Pepper’s letter was on the table under the lamp where she had put it 6 days before. She read it again.

 I am able to supply for my own private stock in emergency. She sat with it a long time. Then she folded her dresses and laid them in the bag, one on top of another very neatly, and left the bag open and blew out the lamp. At 3 on Tuesday morning the 13th, she had breakfast on the table for 20 beef hash fried crisp and sweet with potatoes, coffee, wheat, nothing else.

 The man ate it and went out to the corral in the dark without complaint, which was worse than complaint. Nettle came in last. He was dressed for town in a clean shirt and his good coat, and he had his purse in his hand, counting what was in it. I’m going in to Carville, he said. I’ll see Co Pepper.

 If he has flour, I’ll buy enough to see us through the gather at $12. At whatever he’s asking. Enid wiped her hands. Will you take me with you? He looked at her at her apron at the kitchen with the breakfast pans still on the range. Lodge can keep the stockp going, she said. The dinner’s cooking itself. I want to see the Ford and Mr.

Co Pepper’s warehouse. Why? Because I’d like to know where my flower is before I pay three times over for it. He almost smiled. It’s my flower, he said. It’s my kitchen, said Enid. He took her. They reached the river, crossing a little past 6 with the sky going gray and pink behind them.

 The sweet brier was running clear and quick over its gravel bed down almost to its summer level. Nettle pulled up the team on the bank. “Wait,” Enid said, and got down. She walked down to the water in her boots and bent over the ground. The tracks were there going down into the river and coming up out of it on the far side and on this side, too.

 deep double ruts cut by iron tires 4 in wide and between them the big round prints of heavy horses. The edges of the ruts had dried and crumbled a little. Two days old, perhaps three. A heavily loaded wagon and it had gone north. Somebody took a freight wagon across here. She said, “I saw those Saturday.” She turned round and looked up at him on the seat.

 You saw them Saturday riding the south fence. He shifted. I didn’t think she let that stand. She did not need to add to it. He had heard it himself out loud in his own voice, and she watched him hear it. She walked out into the ford a few steps, holding her skirt up in one hand. The water came to the tops of her boots and a little over, cold as iron.

 She walked back and showed him the wet line on the leather about 10 in above her heel. That’s the deepest of it, she said. Would your wagon go over in that? A loaded wagon would go over in that with a good team, Nettle said slowly. And not wet a single barrel. They crossed. The team did not even have to swim. Carell was a main street of falsefronted buildings a quarter of a mile long with the river on one side and the stage road on the other.

 Co Pepper’s warehouse stood at the north end near the wreck of the bridge. It was the biggest building in town, two stories of sawn plank painted gray with a loading dock along the front, a big barn behind for the freight teams, and a yard fenced with tall boards. The gate of the yard stood open. A man was pitching hay into a manger.

 Square in the yard stood a freight wagon, a big one, with a canvas tarpollen roped down over the load. Enid got down from the buckboard before Nettle could stop her, and crossed the yard as if she had business there, which she felt she had. She went round to the back of the wagon where the tarpolin had come a little loose at one corner and lifted it with two fingers.

Flower barrels, rows of them standing on end lashed tight. She could see the heads of five. On every head, stencled in black paint, was the word nettle. Beneath it, in smaller letters, the name of a mill in Omaha, and beneath that, a lot number chocked in a clerk’s hand. Lot 41. She let the canvas fall.

 Ma’am, said a voice behind her. That load’s not for looking at. She turned. The man who had been forking hay had come over, and he was holding the fork. He was a heavy sunburn man in his 40s with a soft face and anxious eyes. And he held the fork the way a man holds a thing he does not want to use. I’m the nettle cook, Enid said.

 That’s our flower. The man looked past her at Nettle who had come up behind her and something went across his face. He knew Nettle. Everybody in Carell knew Nettle. Yes, ma’am, he said. I know it is. How long has it been loaded? He looked over his shoulder at the warehouse. Nobody was on the dock.

 He turned back and lowered his voice. Since the 29th, ma’am, the Tuesday morning before the bridge went, he wet his lips. I’m dope Birdwell. I drive for Mr. Co Pepper. I’d have had it to you on the first bridge or no bridge. I’ve crossed that fort a 100 times. Then why haven’t you? Mr. Co Pepper said she stays put till the 20th.

Do Birdwell said. Them’s the words. Not a day before. I asked him twice. A door opened on the loading dock. Doke said a pleasant voice. Is that Balthazar Nettle? Bring him in, man. It’s cold. Vitas Co Pepper came down the steps of his dock with his hand held out. He was a man of about 50, not tall, well-fed, with a neat gray beard and a black brockloth coat and a gold watch chain across a gray waist good.

 He had a kind face. It was the first thing anybody would have said about him. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke, as if what you were saying interested him more than anything else had all week. He shook Nettle’s hand. He bowed to Enid. Mrs. Nettle, Miss Scadding, Enid said. I cook for the lazy end.

 Of course, of course you do, he beamed. And you’ve come in for the emergency stock? I thought you would. Come in. Come in. I’ve got it all in the warehouse ready. Flour, sugar, coffee, whatever you need. He turned to Nettle. I’ll be honest with you, Balthazar. I hate to charge what I’m charging, but you understand how it is with the bridge.

 It all has to be got across somehow, and it’s my risk. The Ford’s down to a man’s knees, Enid said. Co Pepper looked at her kindly. For a horse, perhaps, not for a loaded freight wagon, Miss Scatting. Not with 20 barrels. I’d not risk a team on it, nor your goods. The county tells me the new span will be up by the 25th.

 Until then, I’m afraid it’s the emergency stock or nothing. Is the flower on that wagon yours or ours? It’s paid for on delivery, said Co Pepper gently. Until it’s delivered, my dear. It’s mine to look after, and I will look after it. You have my word. Nettle had his purse out. He was counting.

 Enid could see what was in it and could all but hear him thinking five barrels six $60 70. He had been told the price of a thing by the only man selling it and had not yet thought that there was anything else to be done. She put her hand flat on the purse over his. It was the first time she had touched him. “Not yet,” she said.

 His glance dropped to her hand, then rose to her face. She took the hand away. “Somebody took a heavy wagon over that fort on Saturday,” she said to Co Pepper pleasantly, as if she were remarking on the weather. “Four horses north toward the poor farm. Would that have been one of yours?” Something in the kind face went still for a moment. “Only a moment.

” “That would be the county wagon,” Co Pepper said. “Mr. Quarriers, the county supply agent. He takes his own risks with county goods. That’s his affair. It is, said Enid. Good morning, Mr. Co Pepper. She went to the buck board and got up onto the seat. And after a moment, Nettle put his purse away and followed her.

 He said nothing until they were out of the yard and halfway up the street. “You want to tell me what that was?” “Drive to Phoenix,” said Enid. I need salt. Fen was the general store, a long, dim room smelling of coffee and leather and coal oil. Mr. Fenick was a thin, quiet man with spectacles who had been in Carell 11 years and had learned, Enid thought, to say as little as possible about anybody.

 He sold her 20 lb of salt, a keg of vinegar, 2 lb of soda, three of pepper, and a paper of salt peter. That was all the salt he had loose. The rest was in sacks in the back, and he told her he had eight sacks, and she said she would send for them tomorrow with a wagon. He did not ask what she wanted with so much salt.

 When Nettle asked him, while he wrapped the parcels whether he had any flour, he looked over his spectacles at the window where the gray front of Co Pepper’s warehouse could be seen down the street. “I don’t carry flour, Mr. Nettle, he said. Not anymore. Nobody in Carell carries flour but Mr. Co Pepper. He tied the string. Mr.

 Co Pepper hauls my stock, too. Who’s the county supply agent? Enid asked. Mr. Stoddard Quer. He buys for the poor farm in the jail. He lets the county hauling contract. Fenick handed her the parcel. He lives on the Analopee Creek Road 2 miles out. He’s an honest man, ma’am, and not a patient one.

 They drove back over the ford in the late afternoon without speaking much. The water was lower than it had been at 6 that morning. Enid watched it slide past the spokes clear to the gravel and thought of 20 barrels standing on end under a tarpolin 14 mi behind her and of a kind gray beard and of the smell of a Nebraska backroom in April when she was 19 and carrying out full barrels at the ordinary price.

Nettle drove with his jaw set. Twice she saw him turn his head and look back along the road toward Carell as if he expected to see something following them. Nothing was only the dust of their own wheels hanging gold in the low sun and a hawk turning over the river bottom and far off to the north the dark line of the lazy own timber.

 Halfway up the long grade from the river he said one thing. Six years I’ve hauled with that man. She did not answer. There was nothing useful to say to it, and he had not said it to be answered. It was dark when they got home. The men had eaten Leg’s stockpot and the rest of the beef. There was still no bread, and nobody asked about it anymore.

 After the kitchen was clean, Enid went up to the long house and knocked on the door of the office where the lamp was lit. “I want the contract,” she said. and I want every letter in that desk that’s come from a flower mill. It took them an hour. She sat on one side of the table and he sat on the other and they went through the roll top desk envelope by envelope and she opened everyone.

The contract was in a long envelope from a Carell lawyer at the very back. It was one page. She read it out to him slowly. co pepper to haul all goods for the ranch from the railroad at Antwistle to the lazy N and a dollar and a quarter the hundred weight. The ranch to use no other hauler delivery by the date agreed for each shipment and one more line near the bottom which she read twice.

Should any shipment be 20 days or more past the date agreed, the ranch may end this contract. October the 1st, Enid said. 20 days. He’s safe until the 21st. On the 21st, you could tear this up and hire anybody you liked. Nettle stared at her. And he told Do the wagon stays till the 20th, she said.

 The mill invoice was in a thin envelope, postmarked Omaha, never opened. 20 barrels, 196 pounds of flour in each, paid in full with a bank draft in August, shipped to Ant Whistle. Lot 41. She laid it on the table between them and put her finger on the line. That’s paid for, she said, in August with your money. It isn’t his to look after whatever he calls it.

 It’s yours, and he’s sitting on it. She laid out the whole of it for him then in order as plainly as she could. How a man with the only wagons in the county could hold a load back past the day it was due with a broken bridge to blame. How he could wait until the ranch was hungry with 20 men in off the range in a week of branding ahead.

 How he could sell them flour at triple its worth in the meantime from what he called his own stock. and how on the 20th, the day before the contract let them go, he could send the real wagon over the fort safe and on time by the letter of the paper and keep the ranch’s hauling for another year. He’s done it before, Enid said. Not here maybe, but he’s done it.

Nobody thinks of that on the first try. Nettle sat for a long time looking at the invoice. I’d have paid him, he said at last. this morning. I had the money in my hand. I know. Why didn’t you let me? Because I’ve paid a man like him before, said Enid once. She went back down to the cook house. Her carpet bag was standing by the door of her room, where she had left it open the night before.

She knelt and closed it and buckled both straps and stood it up. She had not heard Nettle follow her. He was in the kitchen doorway. His eyes went to the bag. You’re going, he said. You hired me to feed 20 men out of a larder that would be filled by the first. It wasn’t. It won’t be till the 20th if then.

 I can’t cook what isn’t there. And I have no way of knowing that the next promise will be any better kept than the last one. She said it without heat. I have $11 and a croc of starter. I can’t afford to be hungry here on a promise. He came in and dropped onto the bench heavily like a man whose legs had stopped.

 What would it take? He said, for you to stay. Enid did not answer it once. She had been thinking about the answer since the four that morning, and she wanted to say it right the first time so that it would not have to be said twice. She took the other end of the bench across the width of the table from him and folded her hands on the scrubbed pine.

 “Three things,” she said, “and I want them written down before I lift a hand. Not after. Before.” Go on. The first is the wage. Your letter said $35. I want 40 because this isn’t the work your letter hired me for. It’s more paid every Saturday in coin, not at the end of the month and not on the books. And paid from the day I came, the 26th, at the new rate. He nodded slowly.

 That’s fair. The second is the store room. I want a lock on that door, a real one. And I want the key in my name and on my person. Nobody goes in there but me or somebody I send. Not the men, not your foreman, not you, unless you ask me first. She watched his face. I’m going to fill it, Mr. Nettle.

 I’m not going to fill it for the men to empty out at midnight. And I’m not going to be blamed for what goes missing the way your last cook was. He opened his mouth and closed it again. The last cook said that. Lash told me. He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Yes.” All right, the key is yours.

 The third said Enid is the one you won’t like. I want the right to walk. If the flower isn’t in that store room by a date you name, I leave and you pay what’s owed me to the day and you drive me to the stage and Carl yourself and nobody says I quit on you. What date? You name it. It’s your flower. Balthazar Nettle looked down at the table.

 He was thinking of the contract she could see and the 20 days and Co Pepper’s kind face. He was thinking perhaps of whether he could do anything at all about any of it. The 20th, he said it’ll be here by the 20th. Or I’ll know why. Then write that down. She fetched her account book and her pen and the ink bottle from her room and tore a clean page from the back and pushed them across the table to him.

 He wrote in the same heavy hand she had seen pencled across her letter. He wrote it all while she watched. $40 a month. Paid Saturdays in coin from the 26th of September. The store room lock and its key to missing its scatting. no entry without her leave. And if the ranch’s 20 barrels were not in the storoom by Tuesday, the 20th of October, she might leave with every cent owed and be driven to the stage. He signed it.

 She read it over twice and signed it under his name. Then she folded the paper in two and put it in her apron pocket. “Now I’ll stay,” she said. He sat looking at her across the table a long while. There was something in his face she could not read, and she did not try to. You’d have walked out of here, he said.

 Tonight, with $11 in the morning, said Enid. It’s 14 mi. He laughed. Then suddenly, the first time she had heard it, a short surprise sound. Then he got up and took the lamp and headed for the barn. He was out there an hour. She heard the file going and the tap of a hammer while she set the sponge for tomorrow’s cornbread, which she had not yet worked out how to make.

 When he came back, he had an iron padlock in one hand, the heavy kind they used on the powder shed, and a key on a loop of leather thong in the other. On the thong beside the key hung a small square of tin cut from the lid of a coffee can. And on the tin he had scratched with the point of a nail deep enough to last. Eto.

 He fitted the lock to the storoom hasp and locked it and unlocked it to show her that it worked. Then he held out the key. She took it. It was still warm from his hand. She put the thong over her head and the key went down inside the neck of her dress, cold against her skin. “Thank you,” she said. “Don’t thank me.” It was in the paper. She sat up another hour after he had gone and wrote a letter. It was short.

It was addressed to Mr. Stoddard Quarer, County Supply Agent, Antelope Creek Road, Carville. It gave her name in her place. It said that the lazy ends fall shipment, 20 barrels of flour paid for in August, lot 41 of the Omaha mill, had been standing loaded in Mr. Co Pepper’s warehouse yard since the 29th of September, as she had seen with her own eyes that morning. That Mr.

 Co Pepper’s own teamster had told her it was held back on his order until the 20th. That Mr. Co Pepper had meanwhile offered the ranch emergency flour at three times its price on the grounds that the ford could not be crossed by a loaded wagon and that she understood Mr. Quer had crossed it himself with a loaded county wagon and four horses on the 10th.

She wrote that she would be grateful if he would come to the lazy end on Monday the 19th at noon. She had reason to think Mr. Co Pepper would be there by then to sell his emergency stock. She did not know that. She guessed it. A man who had waited that long would not wait much past the week’s end to see whether the fish had taken the hook.

At first light on Wednesday, she gave the letter to Dietrich Karns, who was driving the light wagon into Phoenix for the eight sacks of salt. Shad Karns was 24, the youngest man on the place with big ears and a slow smile and a reputation as the best shot on the Sweetbrier. She gave him a dollar of her own money for his dinner in town and asked him to put the letter into Mr.

 Quar’s own hand and nobody else’s. He read the address. Then he read her face. This about Co Pepper? It’s about flower. Shad put the letter inside his shirt and buttoned the pocket over it. Laj says Co Peppers had this whole country by the neck for six years. He said, “Won’t be sorry to carry this one.” And went to hitch the team.

Wednesday the 14th of October, the first of the four days. She had written the whole plan out the night before on one sheet of brown paper, and she tacked it up inside the storeroom door beside the chalk marks where she would see it every time she went in. 12 days of meals from now until the 25th, the day the county had promised its new bridge, because she did not mean to count on anybody’s promise but her own.

 20 men, three meals a day. Across the top, she wrote the four things she meant to make because they were the four things there were to make them from. Lard from the two hogs in the pen behind the barn, meal from what she had not yet found, meat salted and smoked to keep, and the seller from the garden. At the bottom she did the arithmetic.

 It was a great deal of food. She sat with the figures for a while and then she went and put the coffee on. Before the crew left for the pens that morning, Nettle wrapped his knuckles twice on the long table and the talk stopped. Two things, he said. The store room’s locked from today. There’s one key and Miss Scadding has it.

 Any man wants so much as a spoon of molasses out of there asks her. And if she says no, it’s no. That includes me. Somebody down the table laughed and then saw his face and stopped. The second thing is the wagon’s not coming. Not this week. Maybe not next. He didn’t soften it. Co Pepper’s got our flower sitting in his yard and he means to keep it there till we’re hungry enough to pay his price.

We’re not going to pay it. Miss Scadding’s going to feed you without it. She’ll need hands for some of it. And when she asks for a man, she gets him and he does what she says the way he do what I say. The benches were quiet. 20 men looked at her standing by the range with a dish towel over her shoulder and she looked straight back at them.

 Nat Welock raised one finger like a man bidding at an auction. Ma’am, he said, how do you figure on feeding 20 with no flower? The same way you’d move 900 cattle with no railroad, said Enid. one day at a time and on foot and counting. Lodge Bowen nearest the door made a sound into his coffee that might have been a laugh.

Nobody asked her anything else. They filed out. But when she stepped out to the wood pile 10 minutes later for kindling, she found it split and stacked to the eaves and nobody would say who had done it. The hogs came first because they had to. Enid had never yet met a ranchhog that was not half wild.

 And these two were no different. A pair of long-legged, long-nouted, rangy animals that had been living on garden scraps and what they could root up by the creek. But they were fat. The weeds had been good to them all summer. Nettle and Lodge did the killing at the pen early before breakfast was cleared and did it quick and clean.

 Then four of the hands were kept back from the branding pens and set to scalding and scraping with the big iron kettle set up on stones in the yard and a fire going under it and the carcasses dipped and turned and dipped again until the bristles came away under the scrapers. Enid did not scrape. She waited. When the carcasses were hung and opened, she came with two wash tubs and a sharp knife and took the fat, all of it, the thick white leaf fat from inside the ribs, which makes the best lard of all.

The back fattened slabs 2 in deep. The trimmings from the bellies and the jowls and the hams. She knew what every piece was for, and she said it out loud as she cut. The men stood round and watched her the way men always watched a woman with a knife who knew exactly what she was doing a little uneasily.

 “Where’d you learn to cut a hog like that?” said Natock. “From a butcher,” said Enid, who liked his supper. She cut the fat into pieces no bigger than a man’s thumb so it would melt even. That took two hours. Her hands achd with it. Then she rendered it. She did it in the yard in the big kettle, scrubbed clean now of the scalding water over a fire kept low.

That was the whole art of it. And she told the two men helping her sew three times until they got tired of hearing it. A low fire, hot enough to melt the fat, never hot enough to scorch it. Scorched lard tastes of smoke forever and burns in the pan and goes rancid in a month. Good lard, rendered slow, comes out wide as snow and keeps all winter.

 She poured a cup of water into the kettle first to keep the fat from catching. Then the pieces went in a few at a time, and she stirred with a long wooden paddle and didn’t stop stirring. It took all morning. The fat went clear and then golden, and the pieces shrank and floated and turned brown. The cracklings. The yard smelled of it for a mile.

 The dog lay by the fire with its chin on its paws and would not be moved. A little afternoon, the kettle shifted. One of the stones under it had cracked in the heat. The kettle tipped toward her, a slow lean, and a wave of hot lard came up over the rim. She could have jumped back. There was time for it.

 If she had jumped back, the kettle would have gone over into the fire, and the whole of it, the fat of two hogs and half a day’s work, would have gone up in one sheet of flame, and very likely taken the cookhouse wall with it. She did not jump back. She put the paddle under the rim and pushed hard with all her weight and the kettle rocked back and settled.

The layer that had come over the rim ran down the outside of the kettle and across the back of her left forearm from the wrist nearly to the elbow. She did not scream. She said a word her aunt would have washed her mouth out for. Then she said, “Hold that paddle. Keep it stirring. Don’t let the fire up. One of the men took the paddle.

She walked, not ran, to the trough, and put her whole arm in the water to the shoulder and held it there. Nettle came across the yard from the barn at a run. How bad? Bad enough. Her face had gone white round the mouth. Not so bad as losing the kettle. He looked at the arm in the water and at her face and did not say any of the things she could see him wanting to say.

He went into the cook house and came back with a clean flower sack and a croc of butter and held them and waited. When she took her arm out of the water, the skin was red from wrist to elbow, and there were blisters coming up already along the top, white and shining. He wrapped it for her with the wet sack gently the way she had seen him handle a horse’s leg.

 “You’ll have a mark,” he said. “I’ve got others.” She went back to the kettle. By 4:00, the layard was done. She strained it hot through a clean cloth, one-handed with lege, holding the crocs steady, and it ran into the stonewear clear and golden, and began at once to set white at the edges, five crocs of it. She weighed them on the kitchen scale that evening, subtracting the crocs, 71 lb of lard and a wash tub full of cracklings, brown and crisp, that left the bread.

20 men will eat meat without bread for a day or two and potatoes for a week. But a man working cattle from 4 in the morning wants something in his hand that he can put in his coat pocket and eat on a horse. And there is nothing in the world that does that like bread. Every cook in the territory knew it.

 Enid had known it since she was 12. She had no flour. That was the whole of the problem. And all afternoon while the lard was cooling and her arm was throbbing inside its wet sack, she turned it over. At 4, she crossed to the horse barn because she had remembered something. Balthazour Nettle was in the alleyway between the stools with a sorrel gelding cross tide cleaning out a hoof.

 He looked up when her shadow came across the door. How’s the arm burning? What’s in those bins? He looked where she was pointing. Along the back wall of the barn stood four big wooden bins with hinged lids. Each one the size of a coffin. Oats in the two on the left, he said. Corn in the other two. For the saddle horses through the winter.

 What kind of corn? Shelled yellow corn out of Nebraska. Came up on Co Pepper’s wagon in the spring. He set down the hoof and straightened. Why? She did not answer. She stepped to the nearest corn bin and lifted the lid. It was nearly full, hard, dry, golden kernels, clean with very little chaff in them.

 She pushed her hand into the wrist and brought up a fistful and looked at it in the light from the door. She smelled it. She bit a kernel in half with her back teeth and examined the inside. Sound, she said. No wevil, no mold. That’s horse corn, said Nettle. It was corn before it was horse, said Enid. How much is in here? He was quiet for a long moment.

 Then something moved behind his eyes, and she saw him understand what she meant to do with it, and saw him not quite believe it. Near 40 bushels between the two bins, he said. I’ll need some of it back. The horses work hard in the snow. I’ll need half. You can have half. It was that easy. She had expected an argument and there was none.

 He had simply never in his life looked at a bin of horse corn and seen anything but horsefeed. And once somebody showed him he did not waste time pretending he had known it all along. She carried a bucket full back to the cook house. There was no grist mill on the place. The nearest was 40 mi off on the railroad.

 What there was, screwed to the kitchen wall beside the range, was a big cast iron coffee mill with a crank handle and a wooden drawer beneath it, the kind every ranch kitchen in the West kept to grind the week’s coffee. She cleaned the coffee out of it with a brush. She set the grind as fine as the screw would go.

She poured in a handful of corn and turned the handle. It was hard work. The corn was dry and the kernels were big. And the handle fought her at every turn. She turned it with her right hand and held the mill steady with the flat of her burned left one and gritted her teeth. What came out in the drawer was not meal.

 It was grit, coarse yellow chips like sand from a creek bed, some of them nearly whole. She mixed a little of it with water and salt and a spoonful of lard and patted it thin and baked it on a greased griddle in the oven. It left the oven looking like Johnny cake. She broke it. It crumbled in her fingers into a pile of hard yellow crumbs, and when she put a piece in her mouth, it was like chewing gravel.

Lash came in for coffee and saw her face. “No good, no good,” said Enid. “Not yet.” She sank onto the bench and frowned at the drawer of grit and thought. The corn was too dry and too hard for the mill and too big. She could not make it softer. Wet corn would clog the burrs, but she could make it more brittle.

 Corn dried hard in an oven shatters under a grinding wheel instead of squashing. And shattered corn goes fine. So she spread the whole bucket of corn in her two biggest roasting pans and put it in a slow oven for an hour, stirring it every 10 minutes so it would not scorch. It came out toasted a shade darker and smelling like popcorn.

 She let it cool. Then she ground it again. It ground easier. What came out was coarse meal now, not grit. She put it back through the mill a second time with the screw set tighter still. What came out the second time was fine yellow meal with the fine holes mixed in. She sifted it through a square of cheesecloth, stretched over a bowl, shaking it with one hand, and what went through the cloth was as fine and soft, and even as any cornmeal she had ever bought in a sack.

 What stayed behind in the cloth, the bran and the bits of hull, she tipped into a pale for the hog she no longer had, and then remembered and put it aside for the chickens. two lbs of meal from the first bucket. After all that, it had taken an hour and a half, and her right arm achd from the shoulder down. It would take a great many buckets.

She did the sum in her head and didn’t like it. At supper that night, there was Johnny cake. She made it in the big roasting pans with the fine meal and salt and soda and the sour starter from the croc, which had been hungry since Monday, and took the cornmeal gladly, and a great spoonful of new lard, and the cracklings from the kettle, crumbled in.

 It came out of the oven 2 in high, golden brown on top, crisp at the edges, with the cracklings baked through it like raisins in a cake. She cut it into squares the size of a man’s hand and heaped it on four platters and set them down the length of the table between the men and said nothing about it. The man with the red beard, whose name was Orland Mackey, took the first square.

 He bit into it and stopped chewing. He turned the square over in his hand and then looked up at her at the range. Where’d this come from? The barn, said Enid. Nobody asked what she meant. The four platters were empty in 10 minutes. She had made enough for two squares a man and some for their pockets in the morning, and there was not a crumb left on the table for the dog.

 Nat Wheeler put the last corner of his in his mouth and sat back. Well, he said, that ain’t air. After supper, she set the men to grinding. She had not meant to ask. She had meant to do it herself. A bucket a night until her right arm gave out. But when she came back from the store room with the second bucket of toasted corn, Lege was already standing at the coffee mill with his sleeves pushed up.

 “Show me how tight you want the screw,” he said. She showed him. He cranked for 20 minutes, steady without a word. And when his shoulder began to catch, he stepped aside and Nat Welock took the handle without being told. Then Orland Mackey, then a quiet Swede from the far range whose name she never did learn to say properly, who ground faster than any of them, and hummed while he did it.

 She sat at the table with the cheesecloth over the bowl and sifted what came out of the drawer and poured the bran into the chicken pale and weighed the meal a pound at a time into clean flower sacks. The kitchen filled up with a fine yellow dust that settled on everything on her hair and on the men’s hats and on the lamp chimney so that the light went gold.

 Nobody talked much. The mill ground. The clock on the shelf ticked. Outside at the corral, the herd shifted and loaded in the dark. At 10:00, she tied the last sack. 11 lb that night. How much does a man eat in a day? said Nat, rubbing his arm. Of this, a pound if it’s all he gets. Nat looked at the sack and thought of 20 men at the table three times a day, and did the sum and whistled, “We’ll be grinding till Christmas.

” Then you’ll have arms like a blacksmith, said Enid by Christmas. Shad Karns came back from Carl after dark and the wagon was empty. He came in stiff with cold and stood in the kitchen doorway turning his hat round in his hands and he did not want to say it. Fenix got no salt. Ma’am, he had eight sacks yesterday. He told me so himself. Yes, ma’am. He did. Shad swallowed.

Co Pepper’s man come in yesterday afternoon after you’d gone. Bought every sack, paid cash money for them, and had them carried down to the warehouse before dark. Fenick didn’t want to sell, but Co Pepper hauls all his stock. He looked at the floor. Fenick said to tell you he was sorry. Did you give Mr. Quarer the letter? Yes, ma’am.

 Into his own hand, like you said. Shad brightened a little. He read it standing up in his own front door. Read it twice. Then he said to tell you he’d be here. Monday noon. Did he say anything else? He said a word I won’t say in front of you, ma’am. About Co Pepper. Then he went in and shut the door. She thanked him and gave him a plate of Johnny cake that she had set aside in the warming oven and he ate it standing up by the range.

 Then she took a lamp into the store room and unlocked the door with her key and took stock of the salt. It did not take long. The two crocs she had found that first Saturday, the 20 she had bought from Fenick, 30 all told, perhaps a little over. She thought about the salt all the way through washing the supper dishes. 30 lb would put down the pork trimmings and that was all it would do.

A whole elk dressed is 400 lb of meat and more. To dry salt it and then brine what she could not smoke would take a 100 lb of salt at the very least, and she would have wanted more. Co Pepper had not needed to guess that. It was the one thing every ranch cook in the country would run to buy if flour was gone. Salt.

 and he had gone to Fenix the same afternoon she had and bought it all. She stood in the storoom, lamp in hand, looking at the two crocs and at the chalk marks on the door and at the plan she had tacked up that morning. Meat salted and smoked to keep. She was very angry and she was very tired and her arm hurt. She did not cry. She locked the store room and hung the key back around her neck and went to bed.

 But she lay awake for an hour thinking about salt. And sometime before she slept, she thought of something Nettle had said to her on the first day on the road from Carville and could not remember why it mattered. Thursday the 15th, day two of four. She was up at 3 and so was Nettle to her surprise. He was standing in the dark kitchen when she came in with the lamp, holding a cup of cold coffee from the night before, dressed and boosted.

 Karn said about the salt, he said. I know. How much do you need for an elk if we get one? £100. More for the brine. I have 30. He put his cup down. Come to the corral, he said. Bring the lamp. She followed him across the dark yard. The branding fires were banked in the pens, and the herd was lowing and shifting behind the fence.

 A great warm, restless noise in the cold. He took her past the corral to the far gable of the long shed where the harness was kept and held the lamp up. Six barrels, big ones, the size of flower barrels, standing in a row under the eaves of the shed. Nettle knocked the lid off the first one with the heel of his hand. Salt. Coarse gray white salt in crystals the size of peas.

Stock salt, he said. For the cattle. Every outfit on the range puts out salt in the winter. They’ll walk 20 m for it if they have to, and they won’t winter without it. I bought eight barrels in the spring. I’ve put out two. He stood back. near 200b to the barrel. She stared at the barrels.

 That was what she had half remembered on the edge of sleep. On the road from Carville the first day, telling her about the country, he had said every cattleman knew salt the way a cook knew flour. She had not been listening. She dug into the barrel and brought up a fistful of the crystals and held them to the lamp. It isn’t all clean, she said.

 Some stock salt has dirt in it. Some has other things. I want to look at every barrel. Look at them all. She did. It took her until the sky went gray. She opened all six barrels and dug down into each one with a scoop and spread what she brought up on a clean board under the lamp and studied it and smelled it and tasted a grain on the tip of her tongue.

Two barrels were dirty, gray with dust and sand, and one had got wet at the bottom and gone solid. Those three she left for the cattle. The other three were clean, coarse, but clean and white and dry from a salt works on the railroad, and she would have bought them for her own kitchen without a second thought.

600 lb, she said, and straightened with her hand pressed to the small of her back. Maybe a little less. Balthazar Nettle was sitting on an upturned bucket by the shed wall, watching her. Is that enough? It’s more than Co Pepper thinks I’ve got, said Enid. They had the salt. Now they needed something to put it on.

Shad Karns went out before breakfast with Nettle’s rifle and a packorse up the long draw behind the ranch where the aspens grew thick and gold against the dark of the timber above. The elk had been coming down out of the high country for a week ahead of the snow. Lj had seen a band of them at the head of the draw on Sunday evening at the salt lake Nettle’s cattle used.

Enid had not asked Shad to go. Nettle had not ordered it either. Shad had simply come to the cookhouse door at a/4 to 4 with the rifle and said, “Ma’am, if I bring you an elk, what do you need done to it before it gets here?” “Bled well,” she said. Cleaned quick, kept out of the dirt, and the hide left on till I say. He nodded and went.

 She heard the shot at a little after 6. One flat crack coming down the draw while she was cutting the Johnny cake for the men’s pockets. Only one. Nat Wheelock at the table lifted his head and grinned. That’s Shad, he said. He only ever needs the one. At 8:00, four men came down the draw on horseback with ropes, dragging a stoneboat behind them, a flat sledge of planks that the ranch used for hauling rocks out of the fields.

 On it lay a bull elk. He was a big one. He had six points on each side of his antlers, and he lay on the planks with his legs folded and his great dark maned neck stretched out. And he was so heavy that the four horses together could only drag him at a walk. Enid came out in her apron and stood looking at him while the men swung down.

600 lb on the hoof, said Lee, who had come out behind her. Maybe seven. That’s 400 of meat near enough once he’s dressed. Then we’d better start, said Enid. They hung him from the big cottonwood by the barn with a block and tackle. Three men on the rope. Enid did not skin him herself. That was man’s work on a ranch, and they were quick at it.

 But she stood by with her knife and told them where to cut. And when the hide was off, and the carcass hung clean and pink in the cold morning air, she took over. She broke the elk down the way her aunt’s butcher had taught her to break down a steer with a knife and a meat saw and a hatchet, working from the top. the hind quarters first, each one heavier than a sack of grain.

 She took them off at the hip and laid them on a clean canvas on the plank table and cut them into their parts, the round, the rump, the sirloin tip, the shank. The two big hams she left whole for smoking, the four quarters next, which she cut for roasts and stew meat. Then the two long backstraps, the tenderest meat on the animal, which she rolled in a clean cloth and set aside for Saturday.

The neck for sausage, the ribs for the pot, the heart, the liver, the tongue, the bones went in a tub for soup. She counted as she went. Every piece on the table had a number, and she wrote it down. By noon, it lay there in rows, dark red and marbled with white, on the canvas under the cottonwood.

 22 separate cuts, not counting the scraps. 420 lb by the kitchen scale. The men who had been working with her stood round and looked at it. “I never saw an elk go that far,” said one of them. “Nobody ever made it go that far,” said Leech. Then the salting began. She had scrubbed out a long wooden trough from the barn the night before, the kind used for watering horses with soap and boiling water until the wood was white.

 She had a wash tub of clean salt from the stock barrels, which she had pounded finer in a canvas sack with the flat of the hatchet. She mixed a little brown sugar in from the bottom of the sugar sack and a pinch of the salt peter she had bought at Phoenix and a good deal of black pepper.

 Every piece of meat got rubbed, not sprinkled, rubbed with the heel of her hand, hard into every fold and crease and seam so that the salt went into the meat and not only onto it. The big hams she rubbed for 10 minutes each, turning them on the canvas. Then each piece went into the trough packed close with salt thrown in between until the trough was full and the top layer was white.

It was slow work and it hurt. Every time the salt got into the blisters on her left arm through the cloth, it burned like a coal. She wrapped the arm tighter and kept on. Why so much rubbing? said Nat, who had been sent to help her and was pounding salt. Because salt pulls the water out of the meat, she said.

 “What it pulls out doesn’t rot. What it doesn’t reach does. I’d rather rub for an hour now than throw away a ham in December.” The smaller pieces she did not dry salt. There was not room in the trough. Those went into a clean barrel in a brine she made of salt and water boiled together and cooled strong enough that a raw potato floated in it.

 It was the old test. Her aunt’s butcher had used an egg. There were no eggs to spare. By 3:00, the trough was full, and the brine barrel stood covered in the coldest corner of the storoom with a stone on the lid. The big hams would lie in the salt a week at the least and be turned every day before they were ready for smoke.

But the thinner cuts would not wait that long. She had cut the rounds into long strips as thick as two fingers and rubbed them at noon. And those and the pork trimmings would need smoke by tomorrow, and the smokehouse had no roof. Balthazar Nettle had been at the branding pen since dawn, where 200 late calves were being roped and thrown and marked with the lazy n.

 He came up to the cook house at 3:00 in the afternoon, black with smoke and dust from his hat to his boots, and found her standing in the door of the smokehouse, looking up through the hole at the sky. He stood beside her and looked up, too. “The rafters are gone,” she said. All along this side, the sod came down on the rails and the rain came in on top of it.

How long since anybody used it? Two years, Leech says before Berd. He walked all the way round the outside of it once slowly as a horseman walks round a lame horse. He crouched by the stone fire pit outside the wall and the clay flu that ran under the floor and put his hand into the flu to feel for a blockage and pulled out a handful of old dry leaves and a mouse nest.

 Walls are sound, he said. Floors sound. Flu’s clear or will be. It’s just the roof. He squinted west. The branding will finish by dark. I’ll take lege and two men off it at 4. We’ll have a roof on it by morning. It needs to be smoking by morning. Then we’ll have a roof on it tonight. They did.

 He brought lege and Shad and Orland Mackey with the red beard. And they worked until it was full dark and then by lantern. They cut new poles from the aspens at the foot of the draw, straight and white and green inside, and laid them across the walls for rafters and pegged them down. Over the poles they laid slabs split from a cottonwood log.

And over the slabs a layer of old canvas from a torn wagon cover. And over the canvas the sod fresh cut from the creek bank grass side up. Enid brought them coffee and Johnny cake and elk liver fried with onions at 7:00 and they ate it standing on the roof of the smokehouse in the lantern light with their boots in the new sod.

 Nettle came down the ladder to take his plate from her. He had a smear of mud across his forehead and his hands were torn up from the aspen bark. He took the plate and sat down on the smokehouse sill to eat. And after a moment, because there was nowhere else, she sat down on the other end of it.

 There was one tin cup of coffee on the sill between them. She had brought it for him. He drank half of it and set it down between them. And after a while, she picked it up and drank the rest. “Can I ask you something?” he said. “You can ask.” “Tuesday night. The paper, the terms.” He looked at his hands.

 “I’d have done every one of those things without it. The wage, the lock. I’d have paid you to the day if you left. You didn’t need it written down. I know that. Then why did you want it?” She was quiet for so long that he thought she was not going to answer. The winter I was 19, she said at last. A man told my aunt he had six barrels of flour left in the whole town.

 He was a pleasant man. He went to our church. Everybody liked him. He had 40 barrels in his back room. We found that out in April after the bank had the house. She turned the empty cup in her hands. I believed him. My aunt believed him. We believed him right up until he took every stick of furniture we had. And I made up my mind that spring that I would never again stand in a kitchen and feed people on what a man said he would do.

Only on what he’d written down. And signed and I could hold in my hand. He was silent a while. Was it Co Pepper? No, a man in Nebraska. He’s dead now. She set the cup down. It doesn’t matter who he was. They’re all the same man. Balthazar Nettle sat looking out at the dark yard with the plate on his knees. I’d have paid him on Tuesday, he said.

$12. I had the money out. You told me. I’m telling you again, he said, because I want you to know I know it. She looked at him then. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the lantern on the roof where Lege was pegging down the final strip of sod. She got up and took his plate. The smokehouse was finished soon after 9.

She lit the first fire herself in the pit outside the wall with dry cottonwood kindling and then bigger pieces and watched the smoke go down into the flu and come up through the floor inside and curl out through the gaps under the new eaves. It was too hot. She knew it in 10 minutes by putting her hand flat on the floor inside and on the meat which she had hung from the rails that evening, the elk strips on sticks and the pork in cheesecloth, rinsed of their salt and patted dry.

 The air in the smokehouse was warm like an oven, not like a summer day. Too much heat would cook the outside of the meat before the smoke had gone into it and seal it, and the inside would spoil. Too much fire, she said. She rad half of it out of the pit and threw earth on it. Then she built it back up with green cottonwood that Shad cut for her from the creek, wet and heavy, that smoldered instead of burning.

She hung a wet gunny sack across the mouth of the pit to cut the draft. The smoke changed. It went thick and white and cool and slow, and it filled the smokehouse and came curling out of the eaves in a lazy gray rope that went straight up in the still cold air. She put her hand in again. Warm, not hot, like a hand on a hand.

 That’s it, she said. Now it has to stay that way for 4 days. Somebody has to watch it all night. I’ll take the first watch, said Nettle. She eyed him black and filthy and bleeding at the knuckles after 18 hours in the branding pens and on the roof. You’ll fall asleep. Then lege will kick me, said Nettle. And I’ll wake up.

Marston came in from the ford at 10:00 that night late with the mail and stopped at the cookhouse for coffee as he always did. He drank it hunched over the table and did not talk at first, which was not like him. Something wrong. Enid said. There’s talk in town. Marston said, “I thought you’d want to know.

” What kind of talk? Cull Pepper’s been in Fenick’s store every day this week and in the saloon. Telling anybody who listened that the nettle outfits got a new cook who threw out the emergency flower. Says she’s too proud to buy it and she’ll starve 20 men by Sunday. He studied his cup. says any hand with sense would draw his time and come to town.

 He’s got work hauling for anybody who wants it. He says good pay, three square meals a day. Enid stood very still by the range. He’s saying that out loud in front of half the town. Some of your men’s friends were there. She turned toward the window where the smoke from the smokehouse was going up gray against the stars. Thank you, Mr.

Marston, she said. That night, she made the 14th chalk mark on the door and then stood looking at the 14 of them in a row by the light of her lamp. The key hung cold against her chest. Through the kitchen window up at the long house, the lamp in Nettle’s office was still burning. It was still burning at midnight when she looked again.

He had handed the smokehouse fire to Lege at 11 and gone up to the house. Through the glass, he was plainly visible at the table with a page in his hand. She knew what it was without being told. He was reading the contract. Friday the 16th, the third day. At breakfast, three men did not sit down. They came into the cook house with their bed rolls already tied and their saddle bags over their shoulders, and they stood by the door in a row while the others ate, not looking at anybody.

 Two of them Enid knew only by sight, a pair of brothers from Missouri named Lusby, who had come up with the herd from the far range on Monday. The third was Cass Huckabe. Cass was 26, dark and quick and quiet, and he had ridden for Nettle two seasons. He was the best roper on the place, Lush said after Nettle himself.

On Monday night, with the cattle just in off the range, he had helped her carry water for the potatoes without being asked. Nettle came in from the pens and saw them standing there and stopped. “You want your time?” he said. “Yes, sir,” said the elder Lusby. All three of us now in the middle of the gather.

 Co Pepper is hiring teamsters. $2 a day and found. The man shifted his feet. No offense to the cook, sir. It ain’t her. It’s there’s no flour and no wagon coming and the whole town says there won’t be. A man can’t work cattle on cornmeal and promises. Nobody at the table said anything. Enid stood at the range, coffee pot in hand, and her eyes went from the three men by the door to the platters of Johnny Cake on the table, and then to the chalk marks on the storoom door.

15. Nettle fetched the time book and the cash box from the office. He paid them there, standing at the table, counting out the coin, every cent to the day. He did not argue with them. He did not raise his voice. The two lusbes took their money and went. Cass Huckabe stood a moment longer with his in his hand.

 He looked at Enid. Ma’am, he said, I’m sorry. Are you? He couldn’t hold her eye. He went out and she heard the three horses go down toward the fort at a trot and the sound of them get smaller and stop. 17 men at the table. Now she did the arithmetic in her head without wanting to. 17 men to feed, 17 men to do the work of 20 through the rest of the gather and the cutting and the drive to the railroad.

 The count had gone down and it had gone down because of her. That was what the whole of Carell would say by nightfall. That was what Co Pepper had made sure they would say. She put the coffee pot down and went into the store room and shut the door and waited in the dark with her hand over her mouth for about a minute. Then she came out and cleared the table.

 At 2:00 that afternoon, Nettle came down from the ridge behind the house where he had gone to look at a bunch of cows in the draw and walked straight to the garden where Enid was on her knees in the weeds by the tomato vines. He did not come through the gate. He stood outside the brush fence looking west. How much is still in the ground here? She sat back on her heels. Everything.

Potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets, the cabbages, the tomatoes are green. She glanced up. I meant to start digging tomorrow and do it slow. A row a day and celerate as I went. You haven’t got tomorrow, he said. Look at the sky. She looked. It was clear, pale blue, cold, without a cloud, and very still.

 The sun was bright on the aspens up the draw, which had gone from gold to a kind of burning yellow in the last week. It’s a fine day. It’s too fine. No wind and not a cloud on the whole mountain. Did you feel the air this morning at 5? Dry as paper. He pointed with his chin at the peaks.

 The snow on the high ground came down 2,000 ft overnight. When it’s like this in October, with the air this dry and the sky this clear, the cold comes straight down off the mountain after dark. There’ll be a hard freeze tonight, a killing one. 10°, maybe lower. By morning, every potato in the top 6 in of this ground will be frozen through.

 and every turnip and every carrot and the cabbages will split. She stood up. You’re sure? I’ve lost a garden to it before, he said. I’ve lost calves to it. I’m sure. Her eyes went over the garden. 40 rows the length of it under the weeds. She looked at the sun, which was already 2/3 of the way down the sky. Then it all comes out tonight, she said.

every row or we lose it. Where are you going to put it? She turned and pointed at the creek bank below the cook house where a low plank door was set into the slope, half hidden by choke cherry bushes. There, she said, the root cellar had been dug into the bank by whoever had built the cookhouse years ago and roofed with logs and saw like the smokehouse.

 It was a good cellar, deep and cool, 8 ft by 12 with a floor of packed clay and bins along both walls. Nobody had used it in 2 years. When Enid and Leege pulled open the door, the smell that came out made Lodge step back and swear. It took them an hour to clear. The bottom shelves on one side had rotted through and collapsed. In the back corner was a packrat’s nest as big as a wash tub built of sticks and old sacking and bits of bone and a tin spoon and a harmonica which Lege put in his pocket.

 There were the black dried remains of whatever Berdett’s potatoes had been the year before last. There was a dead snake. They carried all of it out in buckets and burned it. They swept the floor and scraped the walls. LE brought four new planks from the barn loft and nailed up the fallen shelves. And Enid sent Nat Wheelock and Orland Mackey down to the creek with the stone boat and a shovel to bring up clean sand from the gravel bars. Sand, said Nat.

 For the carrots and the beets, she said, you bury them in it in layers in the bins. They keep all winter that way, crisp as the day they came up. Out of the sand they go soft in a month. By half 4 the cellar was clean and three bins stood full of damp creek sand and the sun was going down behind the western ridge and the air had already begun to change.

 She could feel it on her face and on her burned arm through the cloth. A dry, still deepening cold coming down off the mountain the way Nettle had said. At supper, Nettle stood up in his place before anybody started eating. “There’s a killing frost coming down tonight,” he said. “Everything in that garden has to be out of the ground before it gets here, or the cook loses half of what she’s got to feed you on through the winter.

 I’m asking every man who can stand up after supper to bring a lantern and a fork and come dig.” It’s not ordered. I’m asking. He sat down. Nobody said anything. They ate. Then one by one, as they finished, the 17 men got up and went out to the bunk house and came back with lanterns. All of them. Even the ones who had ridden since 4.

They dug by lantern light in a long line across the garden with forks and spades in their bare hands. Enid went ahead of them down the roads, pulling weeds to show where the plants were, and the men came behind her and turned up the earth. The potatoes came up in clusters, pale and round, some of them as big as a man’s fist, with the dark soil clinging to them.

 The men shook them off and threw them into bushel baskets. The carrots came up long and orange, and the beets came up round and dark red, and the men twisted the tops off and laid them in rows on the ground. The turnips came up white and purple and fat. Balthazar Nettle dug beside her. He had taken his coat off, and his shirt was dark with sweat in the cold, and he dug fast and steady and without talking, as he had worked on the smokehouse roof.

 At 9:00, she stood up to straighten her back and found him standing beside her with his fork, breathing hard. You were right, she said. Feel the air. I told you. You did. She looked at him. I didn’t doubt you. I only wanted to know how you knew. 8 years of losing things to it, said Nettle, and went back to digging.

 She didn’t go back to the rose at once. She stood and watched him a moment, and the line of lanterns across the dark garden, and the man bent over the earth. There was frost on the brush fence already, white and delicate like salt. At 11, the last row came up. They carried it all down to the cellar in the dark, in baskets and sacks, and on the stoneboat, and Enid stood inside the cellar door with a lantern, and put every piece where it belonged.

The potatoes in the big bins on the floor, not washed with the dirt still on them because washed potatoes rot. The carrots and beets buried in the sand in layers, not touching the turnips in their own bin. The cabbages she had them pull up whole by the roots, and she hung them upside down by the roots from the log rafters, 40 of them in rows like green lanterns.

 She counted them in as they came. She said every number out loud and L wrote it on a shingle with a pencil. 31 bushels of potatoes, nine of turnipss, six of carrots, five of beets, 42 heads of cabbage. When it was done, she stood among the bins with the lantern held up and looked it over. The bins full to the top, the cabbages hanging overhead, the smell of cold earth and sand.

That’s a winter, said Leege quietly at her elbow. For a family of 10, that’s a winter. It’s 2 months for 17 men, said Enid, if I’m careful. Longer with the elk. But she stood a while longer, looking at it before she came out. The tomatoes were the last thing. She had forgotten them. She remembered at 1:00 in the morning walking back up from the cellar and she went to the south fence with the lantern and found the 12 vines sprawled against the brush heavy with green fruit and the first white rhyme already on the leaves.

She didn’t call anybody. They had gone to bed. She got a wash tub and began to pick. She had filled the tub nearly to the top when she heard boots on the frozen ground behind her and Nettle came into the circle of the lantern with another tub. Go to bed, she said. You go to bed. He began picking at the far end of the vines.

 They worked toward each other in the dark without saying anything. The green tomatoes coming off the vines cold and hard as stones in their hands. They met in the middle at a little before 3. By then the leaves were stiff with frost, and the tomatoes they touched last were cold all the way through, but not yet frozen. Two washtubs full.

 She guessed a bushel and a half. Nettle picked up both tubs, one in each hand, and carried them to the cookhouse, and set them down inside the door. Then he stood there in the dark kitchen with his hands hanging, too tired it seemed to her, to remember which way the long house was. Good night, Miss Scadding. Good night. At 10 minutes past 3, the killing frost came down on the sweet brier.

 She heard it from her bed, a thin crackling sound all over the yard, like somebody walking on sugar. In the morning, every weed in the garden was black and flat. The brush fence was white. The water in the horserough was frozen 2 in thick, and Shad had to break it with an axe. Nothing that had been in the ground the night before.

 It was in the ground now, Saturday the 17th, the fourth day. She put up the tomatoes first because they would not wait. She was chopping them by five, green and hard, a bushel and a half of them, with two heads of the cabbage and a heap of onions, and she salted them down in a croc the old way. Her aunt had let them stand overnight.

Enid gave them 5 hours and drained them at 10. Then she cooked them slow in the big kettle with the cider vinegar from the keg and a cup of molasses in place of the sugar that had gone into the elk and mustard seed and pepper until the kitchen smelled sharp enough to make the men’s eyes water when they came in for dinner. Green tomato relish.

She had made it in her aunt’s kitchen every October since she was 10. And while the relish cooked, she boiled beets, two bushels of the small ones, until a straw went through them easy. She slipped the skins off in her hands under cold water, which turned her fingers red to the knuckle and sliced them and packed them into the scalded jars and poured hot spiced vinegar over them.

 Pickled beets, deep dark glowing red. There had been nine quart jars on the top shelf when she came. She had found 13 more, dusty, in a crate in the barn loft, which Lee said Berdette had bought for putting up plums and never used. 22 jars, 11 of relish and 11 of beets. She set them on the storoom shelf in a row when they were done, still hot, and heard the lids pop as they cooled one after another, like somebody cracking knuckles.

All day the smokehouse fire smoldered, and one man or another sat by it and fed it green cottonwood and wet chips. Shad took the morning. Orland Mackey took the afternoon. And in the afternoon too, Enid made sausage from the hog trimmings and the elk neck, ground together in the meat grinder and seasoned with salt and sage from the garden and black pepper, stuffed into casings she had cleaned and scraped herself on Wednesday, and tied into links.

 They went into the smokehouse with the elk strips at 4:00. By dark, the strips that had gone in on Thursday night had been in the smoke for 2 days. She took one down and cut it. The outside was dark brown and dry, and the inside was deep red and firm. It tasted of salt and smoke and meat and nothing else, the way it should.

 She stood holding it in the cold, dark by the smokehouse door, and chewed and kept it to herself. At 5:00 on Saturday, before the supper went on the table, Balthazar Nettle came down to the cookhouse with the cash box under his arm. He set it down by the breadboard and opened it and counted out coin onto the scrubbed pine.

 3 weeks at $40 a month from the day she came, less nothing, $27.70, which he had worked out on a scrap of paper and got right. He stacked the silver in two neat piles and pushed them across to her. “It’s Saturday,” he said. “That was the bargain.” She had not reminded him. She had wondered all afternoon whether she would have to.

 She counted it. It was right to the scent. She put it in the pocket of her apron and felt the weight of it there, pulling the cloth down against her hip, and she found that she could not quite look at him. Thank you. Don’t thank me, said Nettle. I’d like to be the kind of man who doesn’t need thanking for paying what he owes.

He shut the lid of the box. I haven’t been much. Not with the stores. I’d like to start. He went out. She stood with her hand on the coins in her pocket for a moment and then went back to the range because the backstrap needed turning. 17 men came in to supper on Saturday night.

 She had been cooking for it since noon. Elk backstrap, the tender long loins she had set aside on Thursday. Roasted whole in the range and sliced thick and pink. Johnny cake in all four pans with cracklings through it. Mashed potatoes with a lump of new lard melting on the top of every bowl. Turnips mashed with pepper.

 Cabbage fried in lard with onions. A jar of the relish opened on every table and the pickled beets. Fresh elk liver for any man who wanted it. And at the end, a cornmeal cake baked in a skillet and sweetened with molasses cut in wedges with hot coffee. She said it all on the long table, dish after dish, while the 17 men sat on the benches with their hats off and watched it come and didn’t say a word.

When the final dish was down, she stood back at the range with her hands wrapped in her apron. Nobody started eating. Nat Wheelock looked up and down the table. His eyes went to her, then to the padlock store room door and the chalk marks. “Well,” he said and cleared his throat. “Well, ma’am, I said there wasn’t enough in there to cook for two.

” “You did? I’d like it wrote down somewhere, said Nat Wheeler, that I was wrong. The whole table laughed. Then they ate. Sunday the 18th came up clear and cold and bright, the frost gone off the yard by 9, and the whole valley of the sweet brier shining gold under a sky so blue it hurt to look at.

 The men had Sunday morning off. Most of them slept. A few sat on the bunk house step in the sun, mending tac. Balthazar Nettle walked down to the wagon yard at 10:00 in his hat and his long dusty coat. He did it every morning. Enid had watched him do it every morning since the wagon failed to come.

 He would finish his coffee and put on his hat and walk out past the corrals to the big pole gate at the head of the wagon yard where the road came up from the river. He would put his hand on the top rail of the gate and stand there looking down the empty road toward the ford for about as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee.

 Then he would turn round and walk back. He did not seem to know he did it. She did not think he expected anything to come up that road anymore. It was habit. It was the place where if the wagon had come, it would have come. This Sunday, he stood at the gate longer than usual. The road was empty and white with dust in the sun all the way down to the river.

He turned round and Enid Scadding was standing in the doorway of the storoom. She had come through the kitchen and opened the outside door of the store room, the one that gave onto the yard, which had been bolted shut since the first day she came. The sun fell full on her. She stood on the sill with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her dark hair coming loose from its pins in the green dress and the white apron gone gray with flour and cornmeal and lard and ash.

The burned arm was wrapped in a clean cloth. In both arms, held out in front of her toward him, she had the big willow basket from the kitchen. And the basket was heaped. Dark smoked elk in long strips and thick pieces, glossy brown links of sausage, fat and red brown from the smoke. Three jars, two of them deep red with the pickled beets and one green and gold with the relish.

 carrots with their feathery tops still on, orange as fire. Two white turnipss big as a man’s two fists. A striped cloth folded under all of it. Behind her, through the open door, the storoom shelves went up into the dark, and they were not empty. Balthazar Nettle stood with his hand still on the top rail of the empty gate. His mouth came open.

 He did not say anything at all. She had kept the key. She had kept her word about the key, and so had he. In 4 days, he hadn’t once asked to go into the storeroom. He had carried the cabbages to the cellar in the dark, and the tomatoes to the kitchen door, and he had roofed the smokehouse and dug the garden, and he had eaten the supper.

 But he had not seen it all together. Nobody had, only Enid, with the key round her neck and the lamp late at night counting. You better come and look, she said, before you go on waiting for a wagon. He let go of the gate. He came across the yard slowly and stopped a yard from her and looked at the basket in her arms and then passed her through the door. She stood aside.

He stepped up onto the sill and into the storeroom doorway. On the shelves along the left wall stood five crocs of lard, white as new snow under their cloths, 71 lb in all. Beside them, a tub of cracklings. On the shelf above, 22 quart jars, 11 red and 11 green, in two rows with the sun from the door lighting them up like church windows.

on the right wall in sacks and bins. The cornmeal she had ground every evening since Wednesday by the bucket full with L and Nat and Orland Mackey taking turns on the handle when her arm gave out. 68 lb of it fine and yellow and on the hooks in the beams overhead the first of the smoked elk hanging in strips and the sausages in links and a side of salt pork from the hogs beneath the shelf.

the brine barrel with the stone on its lid. Beyond through the kitchen, the salt trough where the two big elk hams lay buried in white, and under the creek bank below the cookhouse, which he could not see from here, but knew the cellar, its bins heaped with potatoes and 42 cabbages hanging from the rafters like green lanterns.

He stood there a long time. 6 days ago, he said at last. You kicked the last barrel down the yard. I did. And you’ve done all this since Wednesday. We’ve done it, said Enid. You roofed the smokehouse. You found the salt. You told me about the frost. The men dug. Shad shot the elk. She shifted the basket on her hip. I only knew what to do with it.

He turned round and looked at her. He had a look on his face that she had never seen on it before. And she found she had nowhere to put her eyes. How long will it last? He said. All 17 men, three meals a day with meat at everyone. Till the new year, said Enid. Without a single barrel of Co Pepper’s flour.

 And if you’ll buy me a proper grist mill in the spring and plant twice the garden, and let me keep the hogs, it’ll last us every winter after.” He made no answer. He took the basket out of her arms, which she had not expected, and held it himself, and looked down at it. “$12,” he said.

 “I was going to pay him $12 a 100.” “I know you were. You wouldn’t let me.” “No.” He looked up from the basket. “Thank you,” said Balthazar Nettle. “It was in the paper,” said Enid. He laughed, the short surprised laugh she had heard only once before, and they stood there in the storoom door in the Sunday sun with the basket between them for a moment longer than either of them needed to.

 Monday the 19th of October, a little before noon, Enid was at the range with the dinner for 17 when Lee came to the kitchen door. “Dust on the river road,” he said. “Two lots of it.” She wpped her hands and went out. From the edge of the bench, you could see a mile down the road to the ford. The first lot of dust was a big wagon, a freight wagon with a four-horse team.

Two men on horseback rode beside it. The second was a light buggy with one horse a good way behind, coming fast. The freight wagon came up the road first, slowly, heavily, and pulled into the wagon yard through the big gate Nettle had stood at the morning before. Vitis Co Pepper sat on the seat beside his teamster.

 It was not Do Birdwell driving. It was a man Enid had never seen. And so were the two riders, big men in canvas coats with their hats pulled low, who swung down from their horses and stood by the wagon wheels with their arms folded. In the bed of the wagon, under a canvas, roped down tight stood a load of barrels. 10 of them, she counted by the shape of the canvas.

 Co Pepper climbed down from the seat slowly like a man with no need to hurry. He was wearing the same black broadcloth coat and the same gold watch jean and he had the same kind face and he smiled at her across the yard. Miss Scadding, good day to you. Is Balthazar about? Nettle was about. He stepped from the barn where he had been shoeing a horse in his shirt sleeves and leather apron with a rasp still in his fist and the men were about.

 It was dinner time and they had been washing at the trough. And at the sound of the wagon in the yard, they came round the corner of the bunk house and stopped and stood in a loose half circle with their hats on and their faces wet. 17 of them. Enid counted them without thinking, the way she counted everything. Balthazar, said Co Pepper warmly, and came and shook his hand.

 I’ve heard how things are with you. The whole town has. It grieves me. It truly does. 20 men in a winter coming and no bread in the house. He shook his head. I couldn’t sit in Carell and let it happen. So, I’ve brought the emergency stock out to you myself to save you the drive. 10 barrels. Flower. The best Omaha patent. It’s got you out of a hole or I’m no judge. At $12, said Enid.

 He turned the kind face on her. At $12, the hundred weight miss scatting as I rode and cheap at the price given the risk to my team at the Ford. 10 barrels, 1960 lb. $23520. He took a folded bill from his breast pocket and held it out to nettle. I’ll take a draft on your bank, Balthazar. I know you’re good for it. Nettle did not take the bill.

 The buggy came into the yard then fast with the horse lthered and pulled up hard by the cookhouse. Shad Karns was driving it. She had sent him to Analopee Creek before dawn to bring Mr. Quarrier out by the Ford Road. Beside him sat a lean, white-haired, grim man of about 60 and a dusty black suit with a hard mouth and very sharp eyes behind a pair of steel spectacles and a leather satchel on his knees.

 Co Pepper saw him and something in his face shifted and then smoothed again. “Worer,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming out.” “Neither did I,” said Stoddard Corrier, getting down from the buggy until Wednesday. He didn’t shake hands with anybody. He walked out to the center of the yard, planted his feet, and looked round at all of them and at the freight wagon, and nodded once to Enid.

 Miss Scaddin, Mr. Quar, thank you for coming. Don’t thank me. Go on with whatever you were doing. So she went on. She did not speak to Nettle first. She did not wait for him to speak. This was her kitchen and her larder and her flower. and she had written the letter. Nettle stood back by the barn door with the rasp in his hand and let her have it and she saw that he knew he should. Mr.

 Cull Pepper, she said, this ranch doesn’t need your emergency stock. He smiled at her. My dear Miss Scadding, three men walked off this place on Friday because there wasn’t bread on the table. The whole county knows it. I have a pair of them working for me now. He spread his hands. Pride’s a fine thing. It doesn’t fill a plate.

 Come and see what fills a plate, said Enid. She took the key from round her neck over her head on its leather thong. The tin tag with her name on it caught the sun. She went in by the kitchen, unlocked the padlock, and from inside the storoom, she threw back the bolt of the outside door and pushed it wide to the yard. Come and look, she said. All of you. It’s your dinner.

 They came quarer first, then the man crowding, craning, looking over one another’s shoulders, then slowly Co Pepper himself with his two big men behind him. She stood inside the door and counted it out loud for them. She touched each thing as she named it, the way she had counted out the empty shelves on the first day for Nettle.

 71 lb of lard, 68 of cornmeal ground on the place, and more to come. There’s near 20 bushels of corn in the barn, 22 quarts of relish and beets, 420 lb of elk, salted and smoking, and the two hams in the trough, two hogs worth of salt pork and sausage. Out there under the bank, 31 bushels of potatoes, nine of turnipss, six of carrots, five of beets, and 42 heads of cabbage.

 She turned and looked at Co Pepper. That will feed every man in this yard until the new year. There’s not one of them has missed a meal since Wednesday. Ask them. Nobody needed to ask them. Co Pepper’s face did not change very much. He had a great deal of practice at keeping it where he wanted it, but he had gone a little white round the mouth as she had on the day of the burn.

 Very admirable, he said. Very admirable indeed. Cornmeal and elk. But I don’t suppose your men want to eat cornmeal all winter, Miss Scatting, when there’s good wheat flour to be had. And that flour is on my wagon. Yes, said Enid. It is. She stepped down off the storoom sill and crossed to the freight wagon and nobody stopped her.

 The two big men by the wheels looked at Co Pepper. Co Pepper did not move. She untied the rope at the back corner of the canvas where she could reach it and threw the canvas back. 10 barrels standing on end. On every head in black letters the name of the mill in Omaha and a lot number chocked. But where the word nettle should have been stencled above the mill’s name on every barrel, there was a smear of fresh brown paint.

Mr. Quarer, said Enid, would you lend me your knife? Stoddard Quer stepped over and took a folding knife out of his waist coat pocket and opened it and then did not give it to her. He clambored onto the wagon wheel himself stiffly and leaned over the nearest barrel and scraped at the brown paint with the blade. It came away in soft curls.

 The paint had been put on so recently it was hardly dry. Underneath in black stencil the letters came up one by one. Ne tle corer scraped the next barrel and the next and the next. He went down the whole row of 10 without a word while the whole yard watched him and under every smear of brown the same six black letters came up.

 Then he straightened up on the wheel and turned round. His eyes went past Co Pepper to Enid. You’ll have the invoice, he said. She took it out of her apron pocket where it had been since Tuesday night, folded in with the signed page of her terms. She handed it up to him. He unfolded it and read it and then read the lot number chocked on the barrel head beside his hand and then read the invoice again.

20 barrels, he said loud and flat, so that the men farthest off could hear him. Flower Omaha Mill lot 41 paid in full in August by bankdraft from Balthazar Nettle shipped to Antwistle for hauling to this ranch. He tapped the barrel head with the knife. “Lot 41,” he climbed down. “I crossed the lower ford with a county wagon of four horses and 3,000 lb of poor farm stores,” said Stoddard Quer on Saturday the 10th of October.

 “I did it because this man had told the county in writing that the Ford could not be crossed by a loaded wagon and that the poor farm stores would come forward with the new bridge on the 25th. The water was to my horse’s knees. I have the county’s receipt for the load, signed by the poor farmkeeper, dated the 10th.

 He turned then and looked at Co Pepper at last. That is Balthazar Nettles flower, Co Pepper. Paid for in August, and you have brought it out here with the name painted over to sell back to him at three times its price. Nobody in the yard moved. Co Pepper’s two big men looked at each other. Then, very slowly, the one nearest the wagon unfolded his arms and took a step back from the wheel.

 After a moment, so did the other. Vitis Co Pepper did not raise his voice. Enid had not thought he would. He was not that kind of man. “There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said pleasantly. “My cler marked the wrong barrels. It happens in any warehouse. I’ll have him spoken to. Your clark painted over 10 barrel heads, said Quar with paint that isn’t dry.

 Then he’ll be spoken to severely. Co Pepper turned to Nettle and smiled and held out his hand again as if the last 5 minutes had not happened. Balthazar, we’ve done business 6 years. You and I both know the bridge is down, and we both know I have the only wagons north of the railroad. Let’s not be foolish over a clerk’s mistake.

 I’ll let you have these 10 at contract rates and the other 10 by the 25th when the span’s up, and we’ll say no more about it. Balthazar Nettle had not moved from the barn door the whole time. Now he did. He put the rasp down on the anvil block. He took off his leather apron and hung it on a nail.

 And he walked across the yard, pasted Co Pepper’s outstretched hand to Enid and held out his own hand to her, palm up. She knew what he wanted. She took the folded paper out of her apron pocket, the one he had given her on Tuesday night to keep with the invoice, the one she had read aloud to him in his office by lamplight, the hauling contract. She gave it to him.

 He unfolded it and held it up so that the man could see it. This is the paper that says this man hauls for the lazy in. He said every pound off the railroad at his rate and no other man’s wagon on my road. I signed it in April. I didn’t read it. He looked at Co Pepper. Miss Scadding read it for me.

 He tore it in half. Then he put the halves together and tore it again and again until it was in pieces too small to tear. and he opened his hand and let the wind take them across the yard, over the frozen mud, past the buckboard wheel, and away. 17 men watched the pieces go. Nobody said a word.

 “You’ll take your wagon off my land,” said Nettle. “You’ll leave my 10 barrels in my yard, and you’ll bring me the other 10. Or I’ll send my own man to Carell with a wagon to fetch them out of your warehouse, and Mr. quarer can come and watch. You don’t set foot on the lazy ant again. Not you and not your wagons, and not any man who drives for you.

 You can’t haul a pound of freight in this county without me, said Co Pepper. For the first time, his voice was not pleasant. Nobody can. That said, Stoddard Quer is going to change. He took a notebook out of his satchel and a pencil and wrote in it standing up slowly while everybody watched. Then he read it out. On the 19th of October at the lazy end in front of Balthazar Nettle Enid scatting and 17 hands of the ranch, Vitis Culper offered for sale at $1210 barrels of flour.

 Omaha Mill, lot 41, the property of Balthazar Nettle, paid in August with the owner’s name painted over. The ranch’s shipment was held in his warehouse from the 29th of September, loaded by his own order, as stated by his teamster. He told the county in writing that no loaded wagon could use the lower Ford. The county used it on the 10th.

 He closed the notebook. That goes to the county commissioners on Wednesday with my name on it. Co Pepper holds the county’s hauling contract for the poor farm in the jail and is done these six years. He will not hold it after Wednesday. And every rancher on the Sweetbar will know why before Sunday because I shall tell them myself. Co Pepper looked at him.

Then he looked round the yard at the 17 men and at Nettle and at Enid on the storoom sill with her key on its thong in her hand. He did not look like a kind man anymore. He did not look like anything at all. He looked like a man in a black coat standing in a muddy yard with nobody on his side of it.

 “Unload the barrels,” he said to his teamster without turning round. “The men of the lazy n unloaded them. They did it fast in a line. the 10 barrels coming down off the wagon from hand to hand and rolling across the yard to the storoom door where Enid stood and counted each one in 10. Then Nettle sent lige for the cash box and paid co pepper’s teamster in coin in front of Quarrier the freight on 10 barrels at the contract rate 1960 lb at a dollar and a4 the 100 weight $24.

50 50 cents, not a cent more for the hauling, he said. It’s what was agreed. The teamster took it without looking at anybody. Co Pepper took the seat beside him. The two big men got on their horses, and the wagon turned round in the yard, empty now and riding high, and went out through the polegate and down the road toward the ford.

 Nobody watched it go but the dog. At supper that night, 17 men ate elk stew and Johnny cake and potatoes and relish. And for the first time since she came, there was a loaf of real bread on the table. One made from a scoop of the ranch’s own flour out of the first barrel she opened, and risen all afternoon on her mother’s starter.

It was not enough for more than a slice each. She cut it so that everybody had one. Nat Welock held his up to the window. “Can’t see Carll through this one,” he said. That evening, when the kitchen was clean and the men had gone to the bunk house, Nettle came down from the long house and knocked on the cookhouse door, which he had never done before.

He had always simply come in. “Come in,” she said. He came in and sat down by the woodbox where he had eaten his supper alone on the first night. She was at the range banking the fire. She finished it and came and sat down across from him. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out the letter, her letter, the one from Cheyenne in August that had fallen out on the bench on the first night.

 He set it down and turned it over, so the back of it was up and pushed it across to her. She had wondered about it for 23 days. She looked down at it. In the heavy hand, she knew now from the terms. In pencil, it said, “Hire her.” She asks the wage before she asks about the house. She will not lie to me about what’s in the storoom.

 She read it twice and said nothing. I wrote that in August. Nettle said I’d had nine letters. Every one of them told me about the view or asked about the house or said they’d do anything at all. Yours asked what I’d pay you in the second line. I thought that’s a woman who counts. He looked at his hands on the table.

 I didn’t know then how much I needed somebody who counts. She folded the letter and gave it back to him. Keep it. She said it’s yours. You wrote it. He put it back in his coat. You kept your terms. He said everyone. So did you. I named the 20th, said Nettle. It’s tomorrow. There’s 10 barrels in there. I said 20.

 Then you’ve got till tomorrow night, said Enid, to find me 10 more. He laughed. Then he got up and said good night and went. On Tuesday the 20th, at a little after 3:00 in the afternoon, Doke Birdwell drove a freight wagon up from the Ford and threw the pole gate into the wagon yard with four horses and 10 barrels of flour under a canvas.

 He had quit Co Pepper on Monday night, he said, when the wagon came back empty and the story came back with it. On Tuesday morning, he had gone into the warehouse where a paper quarrier had written for him and loaded the last 10 barrels with nettle on their heads while Cop Pepper stood on the loading dock and watched and lifted no hand to stop him.

 He had hired the team from the livery in Carville with his own money. You can pay me what you think is fair, Mr. Nettle, he said. I’d have brought them on the first. I told the lady so you told me, said Enid. Nettle paid him the contract rate for the hall and $5 over and asked him whether he would like to haul for the ranch in the spring by the load with no paper tying him to it and no paper tying the ranch.

Do Birdwell said he would like that very much. The men unloaded the barrels. Enid counted them in, and when the 10th came in, she took the chalk from her apron pocket and wrote on the door under the 19 marks in figures a foot high. 20 barrels on the 20th as written. Nettle stood on the sill and read it.

 Then he fetched the cash box for the second time in three days and paid her the coming week in advance in coin on the kitchen table because the 20th had come and the terms were kept and he said he saw no reason she should wait for Saturday. She counted it. It was right. She put it in the stocking with the $11.

 Then she said, “I’ve got new terms.” He sat down. I’m staying, said Enid, but not the way I came. I’ll keep the key. I’ll write the orders for this ranch myself, everyone. What’s needed and how much, and I’ll sign them, and I’ll see them counted in. I’ll choose who hauls them by the load, and a price agreed on paper.

 No man is ever going to hold this ranch by the neck with a flower barrel again. And $45 from the 1st of November. 45 said Nettle. I have a scar on my arm from wrist to elbow, said Enid. And there’s two elk hams in the trough that’ll need turning every morning till Christmas. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he nodded.

 “Write it down,” he said, “and I’ll sign it.” She did that night on a clean page torn from her account book. He signed it under her name. Stoddard Quier kept his word. The county commissioners met in Carell on Wednesday the 21st and Corer stood up in front of them with his notebook and the county’s own receipt signed by the keeper and read it out.

 By Wednesday evening, Vitis Co Pepper did not hold the county’s hauling contract anymore. By the end of the week, three ranches on the Sweet Brier had torn up their hauling papers the way the lazy N had, and two had asked Quarier to look at what Co Pepper had charged them the winter before. The new span on the county bridge went up on the 26th, one day late.

 By the spring of the next year, freight came up the Sweetbar from the railroad in four different wagons owned by four different men, and Doke Birdwell drove one of them. Vitus Co Pepper’s warehouse stood empty at the north end of Carville with its gate chained. Mr. Fenick carried Flower again in his own store at $4 and a quarter.

 On Saturday the 24th of October, Cass Huckabe rode back up the river road alone and got down at the cookhouse door. He did not go to Nettle. He had heard in town whose storoom it was. Ma’am, he said with his hat in his hands, I’d like to come back if there’s a place. Co Pepper’s got nothing to haul now, and I never should have gone.

 Enid looked at him from the doorway. Behind her, through the storoom door, Cass could see the shelves. “You helped me carry water the night the herd came in,” she said without being asked. “Yes, ma’am. Then here’s your terms. You come back at a hands wage, not a ropers, till the spring.

 You take the smokehouse fire every night for 2 weeks, which is the job nobody wants. And you tell every man in Carell who’ll listen what you saw on this table the morning you left and what you saw when you came back. Cass Huckabe looked at the shelves a long time. Yes, ma’am, he said. I’ll do all three. He did. The two Lusbes never came back.

Nobody at the ranch ever found out where they went. 18 men sat down to supper that night. In November, Stoddard Quer came out to the ranch a second time. He came with the keeper of the county poor farm, a tired widowerower named Alman Sedwick, who had 11 old men and four old women to feed through the winter on what the county sent him, and who had never put down a pound of meat or seller to turnip in his life.

 Quarrier asked Enid whether she would teach him. She said she would for $2 a day, which the county would pay, and her dinner. She taught him for 4 days. Salt and smoke and sand and the low fire under the lard kettle. When he left, she gave him a jar of the green tomato relish to take home. The burn healed by the end of November.

It left a mark down her left forearm, nearly wrist to elbow, smooth and shiny and pale, the shape of a spilled cup. She saw it every morning when she rolled up her sleeves to knead the bread. She did not mind it. It was the kind of thing you could hold in your hand and count. The empty barrel lay where it had fetched up on the 12th of October against the back wheel of the buckboard until the first snow.

On the 1st of December, Enid went out and got it. She rolled it uphill to the cookhouse and scrubbed it out with li soap and hot water and dried it by the range and set it upright in its old place in the storoom. Then she opened one of the 20 barrels and filled it to the brim. Nat Wheelock came in for his coffee while she was doing it and stood in the store room door watching her.

“Cook for 20,” he said and grinned. “18,” said Enid. “And I’ll thank you to remember it, Mr. Wheelick, when the snow comes and I send you out to turn the hams.” The chalk marks stayed on the inside of the storoom door all that winter. 19 short white strokes and the big figure 20. Nobody washed them off.

 She never asked anybody not to. A man who holds back the flower is counting on your hunger. The only answer anyone ever found is not to be hungry and to keep the key