Miss Morissa by Mari Sandoz

Author:Mari Sandoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2024-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Tris Polk, like the other cattlemen, sent his roundup wagons to the Walker ranch for their summer horse show. He had an extra house tent brought along for his two pretty Texas cousins and their mother, furnished with cots, wolf-skin rugs for the floor and a cheval glass and dressing table as ladies required. With a little trouble he got the ranch cook into a white cap and willing to set up a folding table, with flowers beside the breakfast biscuits. Then he drove over for Morissa Kirk and, because she had Charley and his serious-faced Ruth to look after her patients now, to dispense physics and digestatives or bandage a wound, she went. Appaloosa was tied beside the buggy team, Morissa’s green riding habit and her plumed hat in the valise under the buggy seat. Neither Tris nor the girl spoke of last year’s preliminary show, in which Morissa was to ride even though the Carlotta saddle did not arrive in time. By that show time sod had been broken on her homestead, and the rancher’s horse pawed no flies at her gate but was up at Deadwood with the beef herd or carrying Huff Johnson’s Gilda over the new mountain trails.

Now the rancher helped Morissa into his shining buggy. “This is a proud day for me,” he said, and the young doctor smiled.

The show grounds lay on a little half-dry creek on the north Sidney table, the long scattering of log buildings and corrals among a few cottonwoods, with the shimmer of dust over it in the hot afternoon sun. Out a ways was what seemed a tent and wagon city of visitors, with a little circle of Sioux lodges, the smoke of their cooking fires twisting upward. Cowboys rode here and there, their loping horses kicking up spurts of dust. Some whooped in little herds of bulls or calves for the contests in cutting, roping, and tying. Horses were brought in, too, those for the races led in, the wild herds loose, sunfishing as they came, turning this way and that, always a fast, wily mare in the lead and quick to slip out at the slightest opening, the others close at her heels.

Morissa was welcomed almost as a betrothed and kissed with Southern exuberance by Auntie Mae and then by Li-Laurie and Li-Annie as Tris called the twins. They had gray eyes, too, but without the stormy darkness of their uncle’s, lighted instead by the baby-soft fluffs of pale curls. The girls already had a following among the young men of the ranch country, one a reserved young Englishman with sun-bleached hair and very good financial connections, Li-Laurie whispered to Morissa, while the colored maid smiled softly as she laid out moon-white dresses for the girls, and Morissa’s india muslin, yellow as ripe com.

After the early supper they all moved across the slanting sunlight toward the big dance pavilion of new pine. The fiddlers and a dulcimer tuned up, and the Sioux came marching up in single file to watch.

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