Read The Whistling Season for Free Online Page A

branch-line train—"and that man came around demanding fresh tickets, goodness gracious, we had only enough for my fare. And so he grabbed—"
    "—confiscated as collateral—" Morris Morgan interpolated, as if interested in the philosophy of it.
    "—my poor brother's hat. Mr. Milliron, I hate like everything to ask. But might I draw ahead a trifle more on my wage? Just enough to cover Morris's fare?"
    Now it was Father and Damon and I who looked around nervously, to make sure no one was overhearing this. He had soundly counseled the pair of us not to mention to anyone the outlay for a housekeeper we had never laid eyes on, while Toby had got it into his head that sending money to her saved her the trouble of stealing it from us, satisfying Aunt Eunice's warning.
    You can't leave a man hatless in the middle of Montana. But Father did say, "If this keeps on, Mrs. Llewellyn, you'll have the house and we'll be in your employ." He counted out the exact fare and handed it to Rose.
    Notably, she did not hand the money onward to her brother, but marched over to the conductor and liberated the Stetson herself.
    "Now that that's settled," Father was determined to take charge, "Mrs. Llewellyn will ride out with us," nodding in the general direction of Marias Coulee, then inclining civilly but definitively toward the unforeseen brother, "and you we can drop at the hotel." He paused as the newly hatted figure drew himself up straighter yet and pulled out a pocket watch, one of those extravagant ones the size of a turnip, at the end of the gold chain.
    Looking at Father instead of the time, Morris Morgan asked: "Does Westwater boast a pawn shop?"
    "Not yet," Father was forced to admit.
    "Oh dear," said Rose.
    I was the one who came up with:
    "George and Rae have that attic room."
    Â 
    Even I cannot fashion the kind of extreme dream Rose and Morrie, as we were calling him before long, must have felt themselves caught up in as our wagon wheeled away from a clapboard depot that slumbered back into the prairie twenty-three and a half hours of each day. Westwater then was one of the newest spots on earth, and possibly the most far-flung. A solitary substantial building, the brick hotel, towered three stories over the downtown intersection where buffalo had been the only traffic not many years before. Saloons had been shooed into one section of street north of the railroad tracks. Newcomers could follow their noses, in any of three directions, to the
rival livery stables known as the White Barn, the Green Barn, and the Red Barn. But otherwise, the raw town rising out of the open plain seemed to be a mirage missing many of its vapors. Streets as long and open as boulevards arrowed off through the grassland, with only a sporadic house in evidence on each thoroughfare of dirt and weeds. The impression of civic scatter continued out to the flatland horizon, where isolated homestead shanties sat like potted plants. A few dabs of Westwater still lay here and there around us when Father smacked the horses into a mild trot, but pretty plainly our wagon had long since passed the city limits of our passengers' imaginations.
    Bang!
went something. Rose and Morrie both jumped an inch out of their Minneapolis hides.
    Even from behind, the three of us relegated to sitting on sacks of coal and oats in the back of the wagon could tell Father was starting to relish this. Grownups had games of their own, Damon and I already knew and Toby would catch on to in his own good time. "Westwater does boast a shoe emporium," Father was saying past Rose to her disconcerted brother. "If you happen to be equine." With that he threw a wave to Alf Morrissey in his blacksmith shop, and Alf lifted his hammer in salute before tonging a red-hot horseshoe to a new angle on his anvil and giving it another thunderous
bang!
    The road to Marias Coulee put the railroad to shame for straight intent, and by the time Father had clipped off the first mile by giving the