Shane: Chapters 4–6

All three of them were subdued and quiet.

He turned to mother and his voice took on a bantering tone.

They were enjoying themselves even though I could feel a bit of constraint behind the easy joshing.

At the pasture gate he slipped off the halter, turned the horse in with a hearty slap, and tossed the halter to me.

He never shirked the meanest task. He was ever ready to take the hard end of any chore.

There were times when he would stop and look off at the mountains and then down at himself and any tool he happened to have in his hands as if in wry amusement at what he was doing.

What he lacked alongside father in size and strength, he made up in quickness of movement, in instinctive coordination of mind and muscle, and in that sudden fierce energy that had burned in him when the old stump tried to topple back on him.

We were, in some subtle
 way, his folks. Though we had taken him in, you had the feeling that he had adopted us.

We would have enough fodder to carry a few more young steers through the winter for fattening next summer, so father rode out of the valley and all the way to the ranch where he worked once and came back herding a half-dozen more.

All six were wandering up the road, straggling and separating.

Except for his foreman, Morgan, and several surly older men, his hands were young, easy-going cowboys who made a lot of noise in town once in a while but rarely did any harm and even then only in high spirits.

We liked them—when Fletcher was not there driving them into harassing us in constant shrewd ways.

Sometimes, riding in sight on the other bank, they might even wave to us in their rollicking fashion.

But I conjured up all manner of adventures for him, not tied to any particular time or place, seeing him as a slim and dark and dashing figure coolly passing through perils that would overcome a lesser man.

I would listen in what was closely akin to worship while my two men, father and Shane, argued long and amiably about the cattle business.

They would wrangle over methods of feeding and bringing steers up to top weight.

He was still alert and watchful, instinct with that unfailing awareness of everything about him. I came to realize that this was inherent in him, not learned or acquired, simply a part of his natural being.

Yet why was he sometimes so strange and stricken in his own secret bitterness?

When I did he leaned forward and spoke earnestly.

The first people there were three or four miners who had come prospecting after the blow-up of the Big Horn Mining Association about twenty years before, and had found gold traces leading to a moderate vein in the jutting rocks that partially closed off the valley where it edged into the plain.

Sometimes he served as a sort of magistrate in minor disputes.

We homesteaders had been around only a few years and the other people still thought of us as there by his sufferance.

Frank Torrey from farther up the valley was a nervous, fidgety man with a querulous wife and a string of dirty kids growing longer every year.

The long unpleasantness was sharpened now after the summer lull. The issue in our valley was plain and would in time have to be pushed to a showdown.

But I used to watch Shane closely myself and wonder how all the slow-climbing tenseness in our valley could be so focused on one man and he seem to be so indifferent to it.

Yet he went about his work as usual, smiling frequently now at me, bantering mother at mealtimes in his courteous manner, arguing amiably as before with father on plans for next year.

They slowed to a walk about fifty yards off and with a show of nonchalance ambled the rest of the way to Grafton’s, dismounting and looping their reins over the rail in front.

The other was new to me, a sallow, pinch-cheek man, not much older, who looked like he had crowded a lot of hard living into his years.

Will hesitated, looked kind of funny, and scuttled past me into the store room.

Every line of his body was as taut as stretched whipcord, was alive and somehow rich with an immense eagerness.