The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [71]
When the time of her furlough from the Gazette approached, he called her to his desk again and laid out before her the timetables of the railroads. She could take the St. Louis & Iron Mountain train westbound as far as Van Buren, transfer there (after a night’s layover at a fair hotel) to a St. Louis & San Francisco (or “Frisco”) train, which would take her north to Fayetteville, or, rather, to Fayette Junction, the terminus of the Frisco’s spur eastward to Pettigrew, where, after a night (at a fair hotel), she could hire a driver and buggy to take her over the mountains a day’s ride (or a day and a half, at most) to Stay More. She ought to be able to make the whole trip, there and back, in a week.
Viridis thanked Tom Fletcher for his concern and his help, but she had already planned her itinerary, and her modus operandi. She intended to put her own Arabian mare aboard the Iron Mountain train, which she would ride only as far as Clarksville, then alight there and ride the mare northward for two days until she reached Stay More.
Tom Fletcher consulted his maps and tables. “But there aren’t any fair hotels in that wilderness,” he said. “And you’re not going to camp out under the stars in this weather.”
She smiled and told him she would manage, without any camping out. She was not taking a bedroll or any equipment other than a spare blanket for extra warmth if she needed it, and a heavy horse blanket for her mare. Her saddlebags—and she was using an American western saddle, not an English riding-saddle—would contain only her changes of clothing, one dress neatly folded, spare jodhpurs, extra shoes, her writing-pads, pencils, and her sketchbooks and drawing-supplies.
“Aren’t you going to be armed?” Tom Fletcher asked, and when she showed him the derringer she kept in her purse, he laughed and said it might deter human molesters but wouldn’t work against an elephant…or, okay, there weren’t any of those, but there were real wolves, bears, and panthers. He persuaded her to accept the loan of a Smith & Wesson revolver, which, he said, would not kill wolves, bears, or panthers but would certainly intimidate them. Since, he warned, facility in the use of a revolver is not easily acquired, he offered to give her some lessons. “Let’s climb into my Ford and drive over to Big Rock and shoot bottles.”
That was their first “date.” Emboldened, a day later he asked her to dinner. Tom Fletcher was a thirty-two-year-old bachelor possessed of a strong, handsome face despite overly bulging eyeballs, and, as we’ve noted, wisdom and humor. He was a first cousin of a Little Rock literary light, then living in England, named John Gould Fletcher, who would later acquire a reputation as one of the Imagist poets. At dinner, in the restaurant of the Capital Hotel, Tom made one last effort to talk Viridis out of her “quixotical quest.” Failing, he declared, “I’m awfully fond of you, Very, and if anything happened to you, I’d kill myself.”
Nothing, really, happened to her, except for a couple of scares. She had the time of her life. Even her horse seemed enlivened by the adventure. The mare, which she’d owned now for nearly a year, was a grandniece of Géricault, her jumping horse of old, and although Viridis did not jump her a lot, she was capable of it. Viridis had named her after a famous French woman painter of the last century who had specialized in horses, Rosa Bonheur, but Viridis had shortened this to the playful “Rosabone,” to which the mare responded. Before her sudden interest in Nail Chism, Viridis spoke only to Rosabone. Tom Fletcher pointed out to her the similarity between “Rosabone” and “Rocinante,” the wretched horse of Don Quixote.
Rosabone did not balk at being loaded onto a cattle car of the Iron Mountain train; it was an enclosed car, albeit an unheated one, and Viridis draped her liberally with a thick horse blanket.