Charles Goodnight sat until past midnight, studying the fire in his kitchen fireplace. Winter was always severe on the plains, but this winter was unusually severe. It drizzled and then froze; drizzled and then froze; by Christmastime, there had been three big snows, which was rare. The cowboys rode long days, trying to keep the cattle from drifting too far from his range. Goodnight himself was in the saddle fifteen hours a day, most days.

His wife, Mary, was gone visiting a sister; otherwise, he would have been chided for working too hard. With Mary gone, the kitchen was about as much of the house as he needed to use. There was a cookstove as well as the fireplace, but he rarely cooked, himself. Now and then, he singed a beefsteak, and ate it with strong coffee. Muley, his ranch cook, had a kitchen in the big bunkhouse, where the cowhands ate. Muley, like many ranch cooks, was intolerant of suggestion or restriction. Every once in a while, when Goodnight took a meal with his cowboys, he was in the habit of speaking his mind. But if Goodnight made a habit of eating with his ranch hands too often and putting in his two cents about the food, a habit that visibly annoyed Muley, the result would be that Goodnight would rise up someday and fire Muley for insubordination. It would be a severe aggravation if he had to fire him.

Adequate ranch cooks were at a premium in the Panhandle. He would have to go to Amarillo, if not farther, to find a replacement.

The fire in the little kitchen fireplace gutted and blew, as the wind sang over the chimney.

Northers had been almost constant for the past month.

Day after day, the plains would be coated with a thin sheet of ice, as a result of the freezing drizzle.

Goodnight rarely slept more than three hours a night. The bulk of the night he spent in the kitchen, drinking strong coffee, figuring a little, and thinking. When Mary was home, she slept her eight hours, like a log. If she woke at all, it was usually to complain that he was burning too much kerosene in the lamp.

"I can't figure in the dark," he told her often, pointing to his account books.

"Nor in broad daylight, either," Mary said.

"Figuring ain't your strong point, Charlie.

If all you're going to do is think, then turn off that lamp and sit in the dark and think. You don't need light to think by, do you?" Often, he obeyed rather than quarrel; it was dangerous to quarrel with Mary, when she was sleepy. If the quarrel got too vigorous, she might wake up, in which case she would press the quarrel all through the next day. She was capable of pressing one for a week or more, if she was aggravated enough. Such quarrels were a great waste of energy, and a good reason for spending as much of life as possible on horseback. Once a quarrel broke out, it was like a prairie fire-- neither reason nor patience could extinguish it.

Mainly, it had to be left to burn itself out. Many times he had thought such a quarrel burned out, only to have it flare up again as a result of some chance remark, and consume another hundred acres of his time.

But Mary wasn't there to complain about his extravagant waste of kerosene, this time. No one was there. In rummaging through his desk that afternoon, looking for a hardware bill that he had evidently mislaid, he came across an old brand book, dating from the days long before, when he and his partner, Oliver Loving, had first ranched in Colorado.

Perusing it now in the kitchen, with the fire guttering and the wind singing, was a chastening experience, testament to the uncertainties of the cattle business and of human existence as well. Not only was his old partner, Oliver Loving, dead, but so were a large majority of the cattlemen and trail bosses whose brands were recorded in his book. Those who weren't dead had mostly gone bust in the cattle business. They were farming now, or selling hardware in the small towns scattered about what had once been the great open range. Many of them had been good and able men; competent, resourceful, and good companions on the trail. But they hadn't lasted. Some got busted up by half-broken horses. Some drowned in foolish, impatient attempts to cross unfordable rivers. Others had taken sick and quickly and quietly expired.

Perhaps they worked in the rain and sleet too long; the next day, they had a sniffle, the sniffle became pneumonia, and they died.

The book contained over four hundred brands.

As he turned through its pages, Goodnight kept a little tally of those brands that were still active, used by the same cattlemen who had used them during the trail-driving days. He found only eight brands whose owners were still alive and in the cattle business. Those were the toughest of the tough, or the luckiest of the lucky.

Goodnight knew himself to be among the luckiest of the lucky; he had fought Indians for over twenty years and never received a scratch.

Bullets had killed men fighting at his very elbow, but no bullet had ever struck him. He had taken herds across almost one hundred waterless miles, and not starved. He had raced to turn stampedes, in pitch darkness, over broken country on unreliable horses, and had not once fallen or been thrown. He had been in barrooms and other crowded situations with outlaws who would shoot you if they didn't like the way you removed your hat; yet, he had removed his hat pretty much as he pleased and had never been shot.

He knew he was fortunate, not merely because none of his own blood had ever been spilled in battle, but because he himself had spilled only a minimum, considering the circumstances under which he had to operate. He had killed three Comanches and one Kiowa, and hung three determined horse thieves, a modest tally by the standards that had prevailed on the frontier in his youth.

A man like Woodrow Call, a lawman most of his life, had far more on his conscience, when it came to taking life, than he himself had.

It was Call, mainly, that Goodnight had on his mind, as he sat in the kitchen by the little fireplace. That night, after consuming his lightly singed beefsteak, he had taken his rifle from behind the door and cleaned it. He did the same with a .44 Colt he had carried daily until a year or two before, when the spread of the settlements had made such a frontier artifact unnecessary, unless one was on a trip. Goodnight knew that it had mainly been the fact that he was there, on his ranch with his wife and cowhands, that had encouraged the first trickle of settlements into the Panhandle.

Thereafter the trickle had increased; soon the trickle grew until there were towns and villages and sufficient law that sidearms gradually ceased to be a part of everyday dress.

All his cowboys still wore pistols, of course; they claimed they kept them to use on snakes, but in fact, few of them could shoot well enough with a pistol to hit a rattlesnake in under ten shots at point-blank range.

The cowboys wore the guns from wi/lness, Goodnight supposed. They wanted to feel that they were living in a West that was still wild. It was harmless nostalgia, for the most part; as long as they didn't injure themselves or the livestock, he put no strictures on their use of firearms.