‘I cannot, I am going to marry someone else.’
Several matrons looked with displeasure at the young horseman with the wild appearance who was clearly importuning a nice young girl. The doors closed and the driver started the engine.
Rosebud gave a frightened whinny and reared high on her back legs. The bus began to move, picking up speed on the rough road that would lead back to the blacktop highway. Craig touched Rosebud in the flanks and rode after it, canter developing to gallop as the bus accelerated.
The mare was terrified of the monster beside her. It snorted and roared at her. The force of the wind increased. Inside the coach the passengers heard a shout.
‘Whispering Wind, come with me to my mountains and be my wife.’
The driver glanced in his rear-view mirror, saw the flaring nostrils and wildly rolling eyes of the horse, and pressed the gas. The bus bucked and jolted on the rough road. Several matrons screamed as they clutched their plump offspring. Linda Pickett rose from her window seat and tugged at the sliding pane.
The bus was slowly outpacing the galloping horse. Rosebud was stricken with panic but trusted to the firm knees that pressed her ribs and the grip on her rein. A dark head came out of a window. Down the slipstream came her reply.
‘Yes, Ben Craig, I will.’
The horseman reined in and was lost to view in the dust.
She wrote her letter carefully, not wishing to provoke an outbreak of his temper, which she had felt before, but just to make her meaning regretfully clear. When she had finished her fourth draft, she signed it and posted it. Nothing was heard for a week. The meeting, when it came, was short and brutal.
Michael Pickett was a pillar of his community, president and chief officer of the Farmers’
Bank of Billings. Starting as a humble teller just before Pearl Harbor, he had risen through the ranks to the post of assistant manager. His hard work, orthodoxy and conscientiousness had caught the eye of the founder and owner of the bank, a lifelong bachelor with no kin.
On retirement this gentleman had offered to sell his bank to Michael Pickett. He wanted someone to continue his tradition. Loan finance was raised and the buyout went through. In time most of the purchasing loans were repaid. But in the late Sixties there had been problems: overextension, foreclosures, bad debts. Pickett had been forced to go public and raise survival capital by offering stock on the market. The crisis had been ridden through and liquidity returned.
A week after the arrival of his daughter’s letter Mr Pickett was not invited but summoned to a meeting with the fiancé’s father at his home, the impressive Bar-T Ranch on the banks of the Yellowstone River south-west of Billings. They had met before, at the time of the betrothal, but in the Cattlemen’s Club dining room.
The banker was shown into a huge office with polished timber floors and expensive panelling, adorned with trophies, framed certificates and the heads of prize bulls. The man behind the expansive desk did not rise or greet. He gestured to a single vacant chair facing him. When his guest was seated, he stared at the banker without a word. Mr Pickett was discomfited. He thought he knew what it was about.
The rancher and tycoon took his time. He unwrapped a large Cohiba, lit up and when it was drawing well pushed a single sheet of paper across his desk. Pickett read it; it was his daughter’s letter.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She told me. I knew she had written. I had not seen the letter.’
The rancher leaned forward, admonitory finger raised, angry eyes set in a face like a side of beef beneath the Stetson he always wore, even in his office.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘No way, you get it? No way any girl treats my boy like this.’
The banker shrugged.
‘I’m as disappointed as you,’ he said. ‘But young people . . . sometimes they change their mind. They are both young, maybe a bit overhasty?’
‘Talk to her. Suggest she has made a bad mistake.’
‘I have talked to her. So has her mother. She wishes to call off her engagement.’
The rancher leaned back and glanced about the room, thinking how far he had come since his early days as a simple wrangler.
‘Not when it comes to my boy,’ he said. Retrieving the letter, he pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk. ‘You had better read these.’
William ‘Big Bill’ Braddock had indeed come a long way. His grandfather had come west from Bismarck, North Dakota, where he had been born, albeit out of wedlock, to a cavalry soldier who had died fighting on the plains. The grandfather had taken a job in a store and kept it all his life, neither rising nor being dismissed. His son had followed in his humble footsteps, but the grandson had taken a job on a cattle ranch.
The boy was big, hard, a natural bully and given to settling disputes with his fists, almost inevitably to his own advantage. But he was also smart. After the war he had spotted the early beginnings of a company opportunity: the refrigerated truck, capable of delivering prime Montana beef hundreds of miles from where it had been raised.
He struck out on his own, starting with trucks, moving into slaughtering and butchering, until he controlled the whole business from the ranch gate to the barbecue. He created his own name brand, Big Bill’s Beef, free-range, juicy, field-fresh and in your local supermarket. When he moved back into ranching, the missing link in the beef chain, it was as the boss.
The Bar-T, bought ten years earlier, was a rebuilt showpiece and the most impressive mansion along the Yellowstone. His wife, a subdued wisp of a woman almost invisible to the naked eye, had produced him one son, but hardly a chip off the old block. Kevin was in his mid-twenties, much indulged, spoiled and terrified of his father. But Big Bill doted on his scion; nothing was too good for his only son.
Michael Pickett finished the papers pale and shaken.