“What did he mean about partners?” she asked, vowing to look for a brindle with a frayed tail and a black with a chipped horn.
“Longhorns choose a traveling partner for the drive, and then walk and sleep near the partner. Won’t settle down until they find each other.” They continued riding along the side of the herd, their legs occasionally brushing like magnets drawn together. “The steers also travel in roughly the same position every day. The same animals take the point, the same steers fall into the middle, and the same steers lag behind.”
“Sort of like people,” Freddy said with a smile, inhaling the sweet smoke of his cigar. It pleased her when he laughed. “Dal?” she said when they had rounded the front end and started up the side again. “Do you really think we’ll succeed with this drive? Or is it all just a waste of time?” His long silence made her heart sink.
“We have a chance,” he said finally. “If the weather holds, if the rivers aren’t flooding, if we don’t run shy on good grass and clean water. If we don’t lose too many beeves.”
She ground her teeth together. “We aren’t going to lose any more.”
“Yes, we will. I don’t want to see you and Les lose any more, but we’ll lose some in other ways.” On the far side of the herd, they heard Drinkwater singing softly. “We’ll lose them because sometimes a few stubborn beeves just won’t follow their x’s and lines.”
This time she laughed. “I can’t believe I did that.”
She knew better now, but she still tended to think of the drive as an enormous stage production. Dal was the maestro; she and the drovers were the actors; Luther, Ward, and Jack comprised the audience; the cattle provided the stage business. The story line was clear-cut and tinged with just enough drama to make it interesting. Only the script was ambiguous, offering too vague an outline and too much room for extemporaneous action.
Dal laughed softly when she told him her thoughts, but it was uneasy laugher and his voice was sober when he said, “Make no mistake, Freddy. There’s no script here. This is real, and anything can happen. You worry the hell out of me because you approach life as if it’s a role you’re playing.”
She lifted her head. “What difference does it make, as long as I play my role well?”
“You aren’t playing it well. You lost six steers today,” he said flatly. “You’re going to keep messing up until you stop dreaming and start connecting with what’s real.”
It was like being in the touring company again, standing silently, her cheeks flaming, feeling unjustly maligned while Maestro Delacroix criticized her performance. Anyone could fluff a line… or lose a few steers. She would have explained this except Frisco would have argued that today was not a performance, and she couldn’t think of a convincing rebuttal.
“How did you get interested in acting anyway?”
“A touring company came through Klees when I was nineteen,” she said tightly. “In retrospect, I realize they weren’t particularly good. They only did melodramas. But it seemed magic at the time. I knew that night that I wanted to be an actor.”
And oh how she had loved becoming someone different every night. Standing in the wings, awaiting her cue, she had cast Freddy Roark aside and let someone else take her place. It was that someone else who emerged before the gaslights, the shepherdess or the lady-in-waiting or the grande dame or the shop girl. The someone else was never invisible, never overlooked.
And on stage the worst dilemmas were always solved. The father reconciled with the son or daughter, the prodigal was forgiven, the lovers reunited, the villain was vanquished.
That’s what she loved about the stage, stepping out of herself into a happy ending. And when the applause came, that swell of approval and recognition was an infusion of life’s blood.
“You can’t guess how much I miss it,” she whispered. Since returning to Klees she had been waiting her life away, waiting for another chance, waiting for an opportunity to step before the lights again. But Pa would have killed her if she had run off a second time, just like she had almost killed him when she ran off the first time. So she had stayed in the little house he rented for her in town, dreaming hopeless dreams and watching her life slip away, day by day.
“If we win, you’ll have another chance,” Dal said. He ground his cigar against the saddle tree, then flipped it toward the range. The sweet smoke floated away in the darkness. He flexed his shoulders, rolled his head, then shifted on his saddle. “Time to head in.”