Free Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden Page B

night.”
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    At the time of the party, they had been in Elkhead under a month, and they reveled in their new social life. Carpenter and Perry were engaged in a serious but gentlemanly rivalry over Ros. Bob, despite his reserved temperament, was making his intentions clear. Ferry was less overt. He knew that Bob, with his collegiate good looks and promising career prospects with the Moffat Coal Company, was the more likely suitor. His own future in the cattle business was uncertain.Still, he may have hoped that he could win Ros with his quick mind and appealing personality. In any case, the competition didn’t interfere with the two men’s friendship. If anything, it brought them closer together.
    Virtually every Sunday until the worst of the winter weather, Bob made the forty-five-mile trip from Oak Creek to Hayden. It was another ten miles on horseback to Oak Point, then he and Ferry rode the final five miles together to the Harrison ranch. Bob’s daughter-in-law, Ruth Perry, said, “It is remarkable that there was any courtship at all, given the distance.” Bob’s father, Sam, was known for his relentless work ethic, and “he was not one to give anyone much time off.” Frank Harrison, Jr., observed the suitors at dinner each week with lively interest. Looking back on those months as an older man, he described Ferry and Bob as “ young fellows with tail feathers blooming .”
    At the time, Frank Jr. was also trying to impress the women, as was virtually every other unmarried man in the vicinity. The county fair in Hayden, held at the end of the summer, attracted residents from all over Routt County, and the town and the fairgoers dressed for the occasion. The streets were ablaze with “Old Gory,” as one of Dorothy’s schoolchildren called the American flag. The students all had haircuts and looked “positively stylish.” Everette Adair was wearing a bright red satin shirt and sash, a tan plush sombrero, high-heeled boots with jangling spurs, and his flashing rings. Frank whispered to Dorothy in awestruck tones, “That shirt put him back seven and a half.” Lefty Flynn, a strapping former Yale fullback from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had come west with the dream of becoming a cowboy, had bought the Harrisons’ first ranch and “was the second best in the costume line—he had on a leather waistcoat embroidered in highly colored beads, front and back, & leather sleeves! Lefty had proved that Colorado isn’t always dry—& was having a time.” Although the state had banned alcohol in January 1916, four years before national prohibition, liquor flowed freely in Oak Creek and was not hard to come by in outlying towns.
    The teachers picked up some packages at the post office, includingone from Bob, which contained bunches of sweet peas for the women to wear that day. Then Frank escorted them to the fairgrounds, paid their entrance fee, offered to buy them pink lemonade, and secured good grandstand seats for the competitions. “I never saw such instinctive courtesy as these people have,” Dorothy said, not considering that—nine years younger than they were—he might have amorous hopes of his own.
    Dorothy and Ros watched the bucking horses, the ladies’ race, and a relay race in which saddles were changed “in the twinkling of an eye.” The festive mood darkened when a horse swerved and crashed through a fence, rolling down a bank. The rider escaped with a few broken bones, but the horse had to be put down. Frank accompanied the women to lunch at the Hayden Inn, and later, they ran into Isadore Bolten, a Jewish émigré from White Russia—Elkhead’s most unusual bachelor. Carpenter had told them about Bolten’s near mythic journey to the American frontier. His mother had died when he was a little boy, and he had learned the cobbling trade from an uncle. In his late teens, he wandered through Europe, stopping in libraries to read whatever he could find about the American