The Floor of Heaven Read Online Free Page A

not strike him as a promising match. But Charlie, as he would recall in his typically straightforward way, “wanted her and wanted her badly.” He went to work “with a brave heart and a face lined with brass.” Charlie pointed out to the old Yankee gent that while there was no denying that since his eleventh birthday he had spent a good deal of his days cowboying and living an adventuresome life on the range, he had managed to work his way up to being a top hand. You don’t achieve that position without earning respect, or becoming comfortable with responsibility. With no less diligence, he also convinced Mamie that his love was not simply impetuous but genuine.
    Three days after they met, Mamie and Charlie were engaged. Three days after the engagement, they were married. With both Charlie’s mother and Mamie’s parents attending, the wedding dinner was held in the Phillips Hotel in Wellington, Kansas, a town not much bigger than Caldwell but with a decidedly more respectable reputation. And three days after the ceremony, Charlie saddled up to lead an outfit of twenty-five men, one hundred horses, and six wagons back down to the LX ranch in the Texas Panhandle. He left his new “girl-wife,” as he affectionately liked to call young Mamie, behind with her parents.
    The abruptness of their separation—not even time for much of a honeymoon—did not sit too well with Charlie. He was torn. He needed a job, especially now that he was a married man. Staying in town, he’d have no way to make a living. Besides, David Beals was the best man he had ever worked for, an honest, broad-gauge cattle man. Mr. Beals was counting on him; it wouldn’t do to let him down. Resigned, Charlie rode off.
    He spent a hardworking spring down in the southeastern corner of the panhandle in charge of a roundup crew roping and branding some three thousand cows that had been grazing along the Pease River. When he could, he wrote to Mamie. Her letters were more frequent, but their arrival was always bittersweet, each crisp page lying in his hand as if it were a tangible piece of the unlived life he’d left behind. It was an anxious, unsettled time, and the thought increasingly crossed his mind that the cowboy life had lost its charm.
    Late in July, he started back to Caldwell with a new herd bound for the stockyards, and he had never ridden up the trail with such a sense of eagerness or anticipation. His reunion with Mamie that September was pure joy; she was even prettier than she had loomed in his campfire memories.
    But no sooner was he reunited with his bride than the order came from Mr. Beals to take the outfit back to the panhandle and get another drove. Charlie didn’t want to go. The pleasures of sharing a feather mattress with Mamie were a lot more appealing than the prospect of bunking down with a herd of foul-smelling big-horned steers. Still, Charlie decided he’d better obey.
    Brooding, his mood growing more and more keyed up, he went to town and supervised as the cook and a few hands loaded the wagon up with chuck. When it was done, he gave the order to move out, and men and horses started toward the territory line. It was a tense, largely silent departure.
    Yet it was only as the outfit approached Bluff Creek that Charlie fully realized the extent of his displeasure. He couldn’t go west. He couldn’t bring himself to lead his horse across the creek bed and out of Kansas. He felt no need to explain himself to anyone. He simply told Charlie Sprague, a good, responsible hand, that he was turning everything over to him. Then he gave the boys a farewell wave, circled his horse around, and galloped back to Mamie.
    CHARLIE DECIDED he’d become a merchant. First morning back, he woke up next to Mamie, and the comfortable warmth of her body curved around his made him realize he’d never return to his itinerant cowpunching life. Yet he knew he still had to earn a living. And then, before he had time even to worry too much about