Chugwater

Of course everything to the north was just black everywhere you looked.

And got around Chugwater to Wheatland I said.

kind of showers on the little sprinkles now and then, turned on the windshield wipers.

And then when you got a little bit farther, it suddenly turned into a total downpour.

You were a little to the east, but no matter.

They moved across to Chugwater along here, see, and followed along the Laramie Range there.

The whole Lodgepole camp on the move?

All of them.

Nash full of questions he doesn't know how to ask, and Grimvald seeming wholly disinclined to volunteer any explanations.

Soon they pass through the skeletal town of Chugwater.

barely more than a train stop and a general store, surrounded by a handful of farms and ranches.

Here they stop briefly, and as Grimvald steps into the general store to purchase a few essentials, Once more Nash considers fleeing, hopping onto the train as it loads cattle bound for the Omaha stockyards, and leaving Father Grimwald behind him forever.

And at last he slides the stock car door most of the way shut to keep out the wind and curls up in a corner, falling into a ragged sleep.

He sleeps long, but not deeply, troubled by dreams of Father Grimwald, priest turned conjurer, now inhabited by something he should never have conjured, climbing into the stock car with him, leaning down in the gloom to kiss him, as something roils and froths in his dead grey mouth.

And every time he starts awake, he thinks with despair that such dreams will trouble him for a long time to come, and that no matter how far he flees, he can never be sure that what he left in Chugwater will not follow him there. . .

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I think that's the windiest damn place I've ever lived.

I think Chugwater is.

Yeah, you wear the wind socks always sideways.

I think it's a chain even, and you're just out there.

August 1st, 19 blank.

Clarence Chugwater looked around him with a frown, and gritted his teeth.

"'England, my England!' he moaned.

Clarence was a sturdy lad of some fourteen summers.

He could smile and whistle simultaneously, in accordance with Rule 8, and only those who have tried this know how difficult it is.

He could spore, fell trees, tell the character from the boot-sole and fling the squaler he did all these things well but what he was really best at was flinging the squaler clarence on this sultry august afternoon was tensely occupied tracking the family cat across the dining-room carpet by its footprints glancing up for a moment he caught sight of the other members of the family england my england he moaned it was indeed a sight to extract tears of blood from any boy scout the table had been moved back against the wall and in the cleared space mr chugwater whose duty it was to have set an example to his children was playing diabolo beside him engrossed in cup and ball was his wife reggie chugwater the eldest son the heir the hope of the house was reading the cricket news in an early edition of the evening paper horace his brother was playing pop and ta with his sister Grace and Grace's fiancée, Ralph Peabody.

Alice, the other Miss Chugwater, was mending a badminton racket.

Not a single member of that family was practicing with the rifle, or drilling, or learning to make bandages.