The collected stories of Jean Stafford by Stafford Jean 1915-

Author:Stafford, Jean, 1915-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Manners and customs
Publisher: New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Published: 1969-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

*ir W COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

Menzies and Rod, who came with us to the hitching post where we had left the horses. As we sauntered through the red dust under the amazing alpine sky, I was breathless, filled with trepidation that I was going to do something clumsy and cause this paragon, who had not once looked in my direction, to despise me. So emphatic had been his immediate effect on me that, as if I had already committed the blunder and excited his disdain, I angrily shrugged my shoulders and said to myself, "Oh, to hell with him! He's nothing but a Science Lodge grind." But something quite else happened; when I had mounted Chiquita, my squatty little pinto cow pony, Rod took a blue bandanna handkerchief out of his pocket and, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, began to wipe the red dust off my boot and the edge of my jodhpurs, and when he was through—in my heady reveries later on I was to find it significant that he cleaned only one boot, so that my horse concealed him from the rest of the party—he looked up and gave me that inebriating smile and, in a secret voice, for my ears only, he said, "You'll be there on Sunday, won't you? You won't go off to Denver, or anything like that?" It never occurred to me to give him a flirtatious reply; I realized, with awe and with self-consciousness, that Rod had outgrown boyhood and the games of boyhood.

On the five-mile ride home, I was glad that Camilla and Daddy questioned Mother about him, because my voice would have come out as a croak or a squeak. Mother said he had told her that he was of Norwegian descent and came from Buffalo, and that he was going into his second year at Harvard Medical School. His family for generations had been landscape gardeners and horticulturists, and he had come out to the Science Lodge because, through his father, he had become interested in plant pathology ("He's very keen on viruses," said Mother), and Dr. Miles Houghton, eminent in the field, was on the staff this year. It was then that Camilla expressed her pity for the girl who married him, but Mother said, "I don't think he's in the least like that. His looks wouldn't mean a blessed thing if he weren't so awfully bright and nice. I think his character is very well put together."

It was a storybook summertime romance, woven in the mountain sun and mountain moonlight, beginning that first Sunday

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