Gus McCullough's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Gus McCullough stood in the yard of his homestead and counted the men who had ridden out on him. Three in two weeks. The last one, a lean drover with a chewed hat, had looked at the sagging barn and the empty pasture and laughed before he swung back into the saddle. No bunk. No pay ledger. No name worth writing home about. Gus was twenty years old, three miles east of the river, and he meant to build the finest cattle ranch the frontier had ever seen. He could read a sick steer from a hundred yards, a trick the old hand up north had beaten into him. None of it mattered if he had to work the land alone. He was staring at the barn door when the speckled dog came out of the brush. Ribs showing, ears up, eyes fixed on him like it had already picked its man. Gus crouched and held out the last of his jerky. The dog took it clean, then sat. He ran a hand along its flank and felt the working muscle under the dirt. A cattle dog, and a good one, judging by how it held his eye. "You'll do," he said. It followed him to the porch and lay down like it had always slept there. Clara Hartwell came around the side of the cabin with a bucket in each hand and stopped when she saw the dog. She set the buckets down and knelt to it, her white skirt dragging in the dust she never seemed to mind. She had come out from town two months back to keep house for her aunt and had stayed later and later at Gus's fence line until one evening she just stayed. The cabin behind her stood three stories of fresh timber, the porch he had raised himself, the kitchen she had scrubbed until the boards went pale. She looked up at him, hand on the dog's head, and smiled the way she had the first morning she woke under his roof. "He found us," she said. Gus felt the ring in his pocket, the plain band he had traded a colt for last week. Not yet. Soon. "Clara," he said, "ride into town with me tomorrow." He told her plain. A dog to work the herd. A woman who meant to stay. A cabin with three bedrooms waiting to be filled. He would post a notice at the feed store under both their names, hers as much as his, and any hand who rode out now would find a homestead, not a bachelor's gamble. She stood and took his hand and said yes before he had finished asking. The next morning two brothers signed the ledger by noon. By dusk they were mending the south fence, the dog already circling wide, driving Gus's first four head toward the water.