Read Online The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner - Free Book Online Page A

sucked a back tooth and looked bored, but Elsa reached back and gave Eva a hand. Men ought to consider that a girl with her waist squeezed at least four inches too small couldn’t move very freely. Still, she supposed Eva could have left the corset a little looser.
    â€œGet all prettied up?” Bo said.
    â€œI didn’t even stop to eat,” Eva said. “Just on account of you and your noise.”
    â€œWhat were you doing, then? You had time for a ten course meal.”
    â€œYou needn’t act so nasty,” Eva said. “I didn’t keep you waiting long.”
    Bo clucked to the team, lifted his derby and ran a hand over his hair, tipped the derby on again at a cocky angle. “No trouble at all. Do the horses good to have that hour rest.”
    â€œOh, an hour!”
    â€œCut it out,” Jud said genially. “We’re moving, aren’t we?”
    He moved Bo’s shotgun case from under Eva’s feet and folded the buffalo robe on the floor so that her feet wouldn’t dangle. Eva was always complaining that all seats were made too high for short people.
    As they drove along the road the mist was rising from a slough on the left, and a half dozen ducks turned and swam away into the tules as if pulled on wires. “Getting close to bird season,” Bo said, and watched them with a nostalgic eye.
    The grays lengthened out in a mile-eating trot across the flats. Flickertails jerked and ran and sat up with absurd little hands hanging on their chests. The light cloud of dust behind them hung a long time in the still air, so that turning at section corners they could see it for a quarter of a mile behind. They sang, the grays went crisply, perfectly matched, heads up and tails arching a little, the mist melted from above the sloughs and the sun burned warmer. They were pulling into the carnival grounds at Devil’s Lake at nine-thirty.
    Jud lifted Eva down, straightened his vest. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything doing till later,” he said, and looked at Bo.
    â€œI wouldn’t think so,” Bo said. “Not till afternoon, anyway.”
    â€œI thought you started shooting at ten?” Eva said.
    Bo wagged his jaw at her. “What? Little Eva remembering the time something starts?”
    â€œHow about a stroll through the carnival?” Jud said.
    Eva looked around her at the long grass. “It looks wet,” she said.
    Jud kicked into it, inspected his toe. There were tiny drops of water across the waxed yellow shoe. Under the trees there was still a dewy early-morning smell. “I’ll carry you,” he said. “Over in the grounds it’s dry.”
    Eva giggled. “I don’t trust you. You’re so lackadaisical you’d probably drop me in a puddle.”
    â€œYou’ve got us mixed up,” Bo said gravely. “That’s what I’d do if I was carrying you.”
    Eva stiffened, but his face was bland. “Come on then,” she said, and stuck her hand in Jud’s high elbow.
    Absurdly short and imposingly tall, they stepped through the grass toward the packed carnival street and the tents set in a long semicircle around the fringe of cottonwoods. Elsa, watching them, heard the early shouts of barkers, the sodden thump of a maul on a stake. She saw the gaudy flashes of color from kewpie dolls and pennants and prizes in a concession tent open to the sun. A merry-go-round squawked for a minute into a fast two-step and then stopped, and there were six shots, sharp and steady, from an unseen shooting gallery. Along the road from town people were beginning to come on foot and in buggies.
    â€œYou shouldn’t tease her like that,” Elsa said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œShe might think you meant it.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œThat’s all the more reason for not saying things like that.”
    Bo grunted. “She gives me a pain. Just because Jud gives her a little whirl,