Chapter 6
Thirty years can make a stranger of a boy.
The orphan from the train was a man now.
And the man had a name the whole county knew.
Otis Dyer, master of the Bar D. His was the largest spread in the Montana high country.
Ten thousand acres of grass and water, won an acre at a time.
Respected he was, by every soul from the railhead to the foothills. Warmed by none of them.
The land he had sworn to own, he owned.
Every promise he had made on that long drive north, he had kept.
He had said he would learn his letters. And he had, by lamplight, slow and stubborn, until he could read a contract closer than the man who wrote it.
He had said he would buy land. And he had bought it, parcel by hard-won parcel.
A fine house stood upon it now, built of squared timber and good gray stone.
Glass filled every window, real glass, hauled at great cost from the East. A wide porch faced the mountains.
It was the house of a man who had wanted for everything as a child and meant never to want again.
And yet, for all of it, not one living soul within those walls would he have thought to call a friend. Not one he would have named a son.
Morning found him on that porch, as most mornings did.
He woke before the dawn, as he had his whole life.
The habit was burned in too deep to break.
There had been a fist on a barn door once, long ago.
The boy who had jumped to it still lived somewhere inside the man.
He rose in the dark. He dressed in the cold.
He came out to the porch with his coffee to watch the day come, alone.
Coffee cooled in his hand. The dawn came up gray and slow over the peaks, throwing long shadows down across the valley.
Cattle moved like drifting shadows across the far pasture.
His cattle, more than he could count in a day's riding.
Smoke rose blue from the bunkhouse chimney, where the hands took their breakfast. All of it was his.
Every fence post of it he had set from nothing, with his own two hands and a will of iron.
He looked out over the whole of it most mornings and felt the grim satisfaction of a debt collected.
Forty years old he was now, and hard as wintered oak.
Iron-gray showed at his temples and in the stubble of his jaw.
His face had weathered to rawhide, brown and seamed and giving nothing away.
His eyes were a flat, cool gray, the color of a winter sky.
They gave away less still. What moved behind them, no man could say.
Otis Dyer had spent thirty years making certain of it.
The clothes he wore were plain and well-made.
He wore them the way a soldier wears armor, buttoned to the throat against the world.
He was a big man, and a still one. He did not waste words, nor motion, nor warmth.
Men spoke careful around him, and quick to please.
The hands jumped to his word and did not grumble after.
In the town, his name carried weight. The bankers stood when he came in.
The storekeeper kept his best by, against the chance the Bar D might want it.
He had earned all of it the hard way. He knew the worth of every ounce.
And not one man of them, in all the county, had ever clapped him on the back and called him friend.
That was a thing money could not buy. It was the one thing he had never learned to ask for.
A good life, the county called it. Otis was not so sure that life was the word for it.
The thought had come on him more often of late, in the gray quiet hours before the hands stirred. It was not a thought he welcomed. He could not seem to put it down.
When he died, all of this would pass to strangers.
He turned the bleak fact over in the dawn light.
Some distant claim of the law would carry it off.
Men he had never met would come and take the work of his whole hard life.
They would divide it and sell it, and never once know what it had cost to build.
The fences he had strung with bleeding hands would fall to people who had not set them.
The herd he had bred up from nothing would scatter under some other brand.
And the name he had carved out of the dirt, the name a whole county spoke with respect, would die with him in the ground.
It would be as though no Otis Dyer had ever drawn breath upon the earth.
That, he found, he could not abide.
A man liked to think his labor meant something past his own short span.
It was the one comfort left to a man with no others.
Otis had no church to comfort him and no faith worth the name.
He had buried whatever faith he might have had in a cold field, beside an old hired man, long ago.
What he had instead was the land. And he had the plain, gnawing wish that it should go on belonging to someone of his own after him.
An heir. A son to take the brand and keep it, and keep the name alive a while longer.
For that, of course, a man required a wife.
The thought sat strange in him. He had never wanted a wife.
He had never wanted anyone, or let himself want them, which came in the end to the same thing.
Women he had known, here and there, in the way of a man with money and no ties.
None had ever touched the cold center of him.
None had come close. He had seen to that.
But want or no, a man could not get an heir alone. And so a wife there would have to be.
He turned the problem over as he turned over any matter of business, slow and cold and without sentiment.
A wife could be arranged. The same as he arranged for cattle, or timber, or a new well dug.
He had no notion of courting and no patience for it.
He had no soft words in him to spend on a woman in any case.
But there were other ways. Out east were women in want of homes.
Out here were men in want of wives. The newspapers carried the trade between them, plain as a notice of cattle for sale.
He had heard the other ranchers speak of it, over fences and at the rail of the saloon.
Mail-order brides, they called them. Sensible enough, to his mind.
It was a clean transaction, the terms set out plain on both sides, with no foolishness about the heart.
So at his desk that evening, by lamplight, he drew out paper and pen. He composed his advertisement as he might draft a contract.
He did not write of love.
The word never once crossed his mind, and would have shamed him if it had.
A steady woman was what he set down that he wanted.
Of good sense and sound health. Not given to nonsense, nor to fits of feeling.
He weighed each word as he wrote it, the way he weighed everything, for its plain truth and its price.
In return, he offered security. A fine house.
Land enough that she would want for nothing money could buy.
Respectability in the eyes of the county.
A roof that would never leak, and a table that would never go bare.
Of his own self he wrote little. And of warmth he promised nothing, for there was none in him to promise.
Long ago, Otis Dyer had taught himself to do without such things.
The teaching had been hard. He did not mean to throw the lesson away now.
A man who needed no one could not be made to suffer for the need.
A man who wanted nothing could not be made to ache for the wanting.
That lesson had cost him his whole childhood.
He had paid for it in the cold and the dark of another man's barn.
He would not unlearn it now, not for a woman, not for anyone.
He read the advertisement over twice by the guttering lamp.
It was honest in its blunt and careful way.
He had not pretended to be more than he was.
He had not dressed himself up in tender words to lure some hopeful girl west. Whatever woman answered, it would come knowing the bargain she was making.
And a bargain plainly made, to Otis's mind, was a bargain fairly kept.
He could give her honesty, if nothing warmer. That was more than many got.
He folded the advertisement and sealed it, and set it aside for the morning post.
Then he sat a while longer in the lamplight, alone in the big quiet house.
The wind worked along the eaves, the way it always did.
He had heard the sound so many thousand nights he no longer rightly heard it.
The rooms stretched dark and empty around him.
Fine, and cold, and still. He had built them all.
He had never once known what to do with them.
There was a parlor he did not sit in. There were bedrooms that had never held a guest. The long table sat twelve and had never sat more than one.
He had built the house big, in the building years, without ever asking himself why.
A man who had slept in a barn stall wanted room, perhaps.
Room, and walls, and a roof that was his own.
But rooms wanted filling, and his stood empty, year upon year.
The fine clock ticked in the hall to no one.
The good chairs waited by the cold hearth for company that never came.
He had built a house for a family, he saw now, though he had never let himself think the word.
He had simply never gotten around to the family.
A man could put a longing off a long time, telling himself he did not want it.
Somewhere east of here, he supposed, a woman would read his words and weigh them.
She would picture the life he laid out on the page.
She would turn it over in her mind and decide in the end that it was enough.
Enough to leave whatever she was leaving.
Enough to come. In time, she would board a train and come west, as he had once come west, into a country she could not yet imagine.
He wondered, for a moment only, what manner of life she was leaving behind that this cold bargain should look like the better one.
The notion stirred nothing in him that he could name.
He told himself it was a sound arrangement, a sensible one, and let the matter rest. Then he rose and turned down the lamp.
He went up at last to his lonely, solitary bed.
He did not let himself wonder what manner of woman would answer a letter so empty of tenderness.
He did not let himself wonder whether she might come west hoping.
The way a boy had once come west hoping.
Hoping for a warmth the man who sent for her had no intention of giving.