Clifton Adams - Gambling Man

They took the old stage road out of town and headed north toward the hills. The parched land lay spread out before them, dazzling yellow and shimmering in the sun. There was a great silence broken only by buggy wheels and hoofs, and now and then a field lark's cry. Some of that big country's lonesomeness fell around Amy as the noisy activity of the town fell behind them.

Amy found herself thinking back to other times, to the years of her childhood. She found herself watching Jeff Blaine's hard young face, wondering what it was about those intense eyes and thin mouth that had always drawn her to him.

Being wise in so many things, it was strange that she understood so little of the man himself. Amy, whose young will could control a headstrong man like Ford Wintworth, learned early that the harder you held to Jeff Blaine the easier he slipped away. He was quicksilver; he was mystery. And within his strong body was locked the secret of his own doom.

Much of this was foolishness, of course, the product of a romantic girl's too-active imagination, and in an objective way Amy knew it. Certainly there was nothing mysterious about a barefoot boy who was too muleheaded and stubborn to come to one of her parties—the kind of boy Jeff had once been, before Nathan Blaine had filled him with his own importance, spoiled him and brought to life an arrogance and violence that most men were content to leave sleeping.

In her quiet way, Amy hated Nathan Blaine. She hated the man's arrogance, and the way he had tossed his big head and stared down at you with those dark eyes. Most of all she hated him for the bragging bully that he had made of his own son, and for this she would not forgive him.

In Amy's cold, woman's logic, she could almost admire Beulah Sewell for the thing she had done! With Nathan out of his life, Jeff had become a boy again with normal feelings and emotions.

Now Amy wished for the impossible. Gladly would she have stood up for Beulah's lie, but she knew that it would only bring Jeff's rage down upon her. And besides, lies were not practical. Despite all good intent, their cut was cruel when they were found out, as Beulah Sewell came to know.

Still, Amy admired Beulah's courage. Beulah had seen what Nathan Blaine was doing to the boy and she had done what she could to stop it.

At the moment it did not occur to Amy that Beulah had self-righteously taken the law into her own hands. The end, it seemed to Amy, was_ worth the means, and that the plan had failed was its only fault.

Now, as the buggy rolled across that wide prairie, Amy gazed out over the shaggy grassland dotted here and there with patches of nester corn. Jeff had not said more than a dozen words since the town had fallen behind them, but now he waved abruptly toward the fields of corn.

“Good grassland. Soon it'll all be plowed up and blown away.”

That was what the cattlemen had been saying since the first nester sank his dugout in Landow County, but the land was still there and the corn thrived. Amy looked at him, but said nothing. Sooner or later he would get around to telling her of other things. She was good at waiting.

“There's Stone Ridge,” he said after a while, pointing to a hogback hump of scrub and sandstone in the distance. “Two sections over there somewhere were deeded to me this morning. Not much to graze beef cattle on, but it's something.”

Amy spoke for the first time. “Two sections is a lot of land to some people. You haven't said how you got it.”

Jeff shot her a quick glance. “I told you I won it. At poker, from a nester.”

Amy felt that small chill go over her again, and she looked away from those intense eyes that reminded her so much of his father. She heard herself saying quietly, “I didn't know you were such a good gambler.”

“Good?” He laughed shortly. “I was lucky. I'm no great shakes as a gambler right now, but I'll learn. My pa said I had a natural talent for it.”

“Oh,” she said softly, but if he heard the note of dismay in her voice, he did not show it. “Is that what you mean to make of yourself, a gambler?”

Now he did look at her, levelly. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

Her voice sounded weak. “I don't know. I've never known any gamblers.”

“Maybe you'd like me to do something else,” he said shortly. “Maybe I could learn to clean your pa's stables.”

The tone of his voice angered her. “You don't have to clean stables,” she replied cuttingly. “Your uncle was good enough to teach you a trade.”

He grew rigid, high color flushing his cheeks. “I don't want to talk about the Sewells! I don't want to hear their name mentioned!”

They rode in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes. At last he said, “Amy, I didn't mean to bark at you. I'm sorry.”

But it was not the same after that. Amy was angry with herself for coming with him; doubly angry because she knew that she would do it all over again if he asked her. She tilted her chin haughtily and refused to speak to him or look in his direction.

“Well, there it is,” Jeff said flatly when they reached the ridge. There was a broad valley on the western side of the scrubby slope. The land was a thick carpet of grass, dotted here and there with cottonwoods and willows that grew along a shallow creek. Jeff was surprised at the lush-ness of his new holdings. Amy saw a boyish excitement in his face as he dismounted from the buggy and stood looking down at the spread of grass. Despite her determination to stay angry, she felt herself thawing.

“Look at that!” he said huskily. “Grass belly-high on a four-year-old steer, and that nester was trying to farm it!”

He handed Amy down from the buggy and both of them stood on the edge of the ridge gazing down in amazement. Amy pointed toward the opposite slope. “Isn't that a house over there?”

“The nester's shack, I guess. Already falling down.”

“It doesn't look as if it had been farmed,” Amy said, puzzled.

“That's why the nester was willing to gamble it. Too lazy to make enough improvements to hold it.”

“And now it's yours?” she asked, as though she was trying to get used to the idea.

It was then that they saw the lone horseman streaking across the flatland to the west. Both of them watched the trail of dust kick up over the prairie and slowly drift away with the wind. The rider's strong gray covered ground fast and soon disappeared in the afternoon sun behind the ridge.

Jeff glanced at Amy and shrugged. “A poor way to treat horseflesh in this kind of heat. Well, I guess we've seen all there is to see.” They returned to the buggy, turned around on the rocky slope and headed slowly back to Plainsville.

Out of curiosity, Amy looked back over her shoulder as they neared the stage road, but there was no sign of the lone rider. She dismissed the incident from her mind and turned her imagination to that valley of grass that now belonged to Jeff. She could close her eyes and almost see a neat, white painted house there on the green slope, and cattle rolling in fat grazing contentedly in the deep grass along the creek. She visualized the beginning of a new brand in Texas—the Blaine brand.

“Jeff, what are you going to do with that land?”

He snapped the lines over the horse's back and clucked his tongue. “I don't know yet. Sell it, maybe. Two sections of land's not good for anything but farming, and I'm not a sodbuster.”

“I didn't expect anything,” she said, but Jeff could see that she had. They rode for a while in silence, and when Jeff tried to take her hand, she pulled away from him. Angrily, Jeff kept his eyes on the road ahead. He wished that he could forget Amy Wintworth. He could never please her. She always wanted the impossible.

But he no longer denied that he liked being with her. She was not easy to get along with, but she was always there when he needed her, which was more than he could say for anybody else. Even his pa.