Darly was limping as he locked the door of the bar. A year before, a kick from one of Pace’s mares had broken his ribs as he was loading her into the trailer, and he hadn’t recovered from it. He was too old. But he dissembled the pain. The high-heeled narrow boots helped, and his painful bending looked like the ordinary stooping posture of a cowboy. However, Darly was not a genuine cowboy, like Pace who had grown up in the saddle. He was a late-comer from the East and until the age of forty had never been on horseback. In this respect he and Hattie were alike. They were not genuine Westerners.

‘You’ve got to help me. We’re neighbours,’ said Hattie.

‘You’re not fit to be living out here. You can’t do it any more. Besides, you’re swacked all the time.’

Hattie couldn’t afford to talk back. The thought of her car on the tracks made her frantic. If a freight came now and smashed it, her life at Sego Desert Lake would be finished. And where would she go then? She was not fit to live in this place. She had never made the grade at all, only seemed to have made it. And Darly – why did he say such hurtful things to her? Because he himself was sixty-eight years old, and he had no other place to go, either; he took bad treatment from Pace besides. Darly stayed because his only alternative was to go to the soldiers’ home. Moreover, the dude women would still crawl into his sack. They wanted a cowboy and they thought he was one. Why, he couldn’t even raise himself out of his bunk in the morning. And where else would he get women? ‘After the dude season,’ she wanted to say to him, ‘you always have to go to the Veterans’ Hospital to get fixed up again.’ But she didn’t dare offend him now.