Free In Open Spaces by Russell Rowland Page A

business. “Well?” I said.
    Dad responded immediately. “Your mother volunteered to go to Alzada to help with the balloting.”
    I looked at Mom, then back to Dad. “The election’s today, right?”
    Mom nodded, sucking her upper lip under her lower one.
    I shrugged. “So what’s wrong?”
    Dad turned, glaring at me, indicating that I should know—which of course I did. He shifted his gaze outside, indicating the storm. Then he wrapped a flour sack around the skillet handle and lifted it from the wood stove. He scraped helpings onto three plates.
    “It’s not that bad out,” I offered. “We’ve traveled in a lot worse.”
    “Not alone,” Dad muttered. This was true.
    “I’ll go with her,” I said.
    They both raised their brows at this suggestion. I actually knew before I even said it that I couldn’t go—that I had to stay and help with the feeding. I shrugged, then sauntered to the table.
    “Why don’t you go, Dad?” I sat down.
    Dad set full plates in front of Mom and me, then one at his place, where he settled. “Son, you know it’s going to take both of us and Bob too to get the stock fed in this storm. We’ll be most of the morning just finding a place to water them.”
    “I’m going,” Mom said, scooping a bite of eggs. “If I can’t vote, I’mgoing to at least do what I can, especially with Jeanette Rankin on the ballot.”
    My mother’s reputation for being tough and independent was well chronicled, and well deserved. It actually began with an event that occurred on the day she met my father. She was in her mid-twenties, and her outspoken, direct manner had apparently scared off several potential suitors, a situation that would have devastated many young women of that time. But Mom had taken a job as a bank clerk in Spearfish. She liked the job and was in no hurry to find a husband.
    One day in the fall of 1897 three men came into the bank and drew guns, announcing a robbery. They demanded that all the cash be stuffed into the worn saddlebags they tossed across the counter. Mom happened to be in the back when they came in, and she ducked down and crept over to the bank manager’s desk, where she knew he had a small derringer stashed in a drawer. She quietly retrieved the gun and stood up, drawing the gun, telling the robbers to get the hell out. They took one look at that little gun and busted out laughing. They told the other clerk to keep bagging the cash. So Mom pulled the trigger. But the gun wasn’t loaded, and the harmless click only amused the robbers more. They laughed louder, and one of them called her Wyatt Earp. So Mom threw the gun at him, nearly smacking him in the head.
    They got away, of course. But the story gave Mom a legendary status. A status that was enhanced when they found out later that the men who robbed the bank were none other than the Hole in the Wall Gang. It was Butch Cassidy and his boys.
    Coincidentally there was a young ranch hand in the bank who was quite taken by the character of this clerk. Dad had also been informed by his boss just a couple of weeks before that he would give himself a much better chance of moving up to the foreman job if he could find himself a wife.
    Little did Dad realize when he married Mom a few months later that she would inspire him to seek more than the position of foreman. They filed their first homestead claim a year later, and the Arbuckle Ranch was born.
    We ate silently Dad and I both aware that the decision had been made. I tried to keep my eyes away from my plate and swallow quickly so that I didn’t see the runny whites mingling among the scrambled eggs.
    “What about Muriel?” Dad asked in a last-ditch effort. “What are we going to do about her?”
    No doubt anticipating this, Mom answered without a pause. “I’ll drop her off at Glassers’. She’ll be fine.”
    Dad nodded—a concession of sorts.
    I hefted a sack of corn onto my shoulder, my gloved fingers stiff after only fifteen minutes in the cold. I