So Brave, Young, and Handsome Read Online Free PDF

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    “Tell about the lightning strike when all your buttons liquefied,” he’d say, or “How about the boy you met tossing knives in the street,” and Glendon would push himself back from the table and yield up a trail drive or desperado or other narrow shave. Truly if not for Redstart I doubt he’d have come so often.
    But it was Susannah who seemed in some ways to best understand Glendon. Halfway through another cow-oriented narrative she saw an opening and interposed gently, “How did you meet your Blue, then, if I may ask it?”
    He gave her a look both stricken and grateful. “Why, I met her on the seaside, ma’am. On the Gulf of California.”
    “The Sea of Cortez,” Redstart quietly amended. It is the Gulf of California on most maps, but for poetry’s sake Redstart preferred to credit the brazen conquistador.
    “That’s where I met her, anyway,” said Glendon.
    “Please tell about that, if you will,” said my audacious wife.
    Glendon blew through his nose, reached in his vest pocket and withdrew a briar pipe. He would never build a cigarette in the house but a pipe is a courtly smoke. He packed it and scraped a kitchen match against the stovetop.
    “Well, I was fresh out of work, ma’am. I had a gelding named Ribbon and fifty biscuits in a saddlebag. We were drifting west from the rancho country. One day we climbed a hill and there was the sea. My goodness—did you ever go to the ocean, Redstart?”
    “Nope.”
    “There ain’t any preparation for it. It was so pretty I lost my head and galloped Ribbon into a state of resentment. The sea is always farther than it looks. We didn’t get there till the next night. When I took his saddle off he reached down and bit me on the knee.”
    “Chief wouldn’t of bit
me
,” said Redstart.
    “I camped by a spring and watched the sea until a little sail hove up from the south. A fishing rig, an old man working a net and a youngster bailing water off the bottom. I hailed them and they come ashore. ‘You are lucky to have that horse, brother,’ the boy says to me.”
    “Honest? He was the one with the sailboat,” Redstart pointed out.
    “Oh, but Ribbon was impressive,” Glendon replied. “One of the faster geldings in that part of Mexico. Not quite the fastest,” he added. “Anyway they lived up the shore a ways and asked me to supper. I let the boy ride Ribbon home and I went in the boat with the old man. That’s where I met Blue,” he said to Susannah. “She was his great-niece.”
    Susannah said, “What was she like?”
    “Oh, a quick step, lively eyes, you know the things that draw a young man. But awfully quiet,” Glendon said. “I had some Spanish, you know—I’d say something to her and she’d only nod. I wanted to hear her voice but she didn’t let me, not at first.”
    “How old was she then?”
    “Sixteen or thereabouts. She lived with her mother in the town of Oscuro and walked over every day to look in on the old man. Air out his rooms, make supper. I don’t think I heard her voice for a week.”
    Susannah smiled. “Monte wasn’t such a patient suitor as yourself.”
    “Maybe I was too patient,” Glendon replied. “Once I knew her voice, you see, I couldn’t leave. No, then I had to hear her laugh. Another long wait. She’d come watch me work on the old man’s boat. It was coming apart, you could poke your thumb through it in places.He was too stiff to do the repairs himself, but he was a good teacher. I bent new planks and pounded oakum in the seams while Blue came and watched. Every day I tried to make her laugh. I told jokes, made faces—but no, I didn’t get to hear that particular music till I finished the boat and took her out in it. Up went the sail in a rowdy breeze and away we flew. Then she laughed, all right!”
    “I don’t wonder that she fell for you,” said Susannah, her cheeks bright as poppies. She’d fallen for Glendon herself. We all had.
    “Oh, now, it wasn’t entirely me that got to