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an upright citizen like Señor Gonzalez, what with being fully paid up and all that, had nothing to feel concerned about. The very next night Gonzalez took Albert aside and, with a patently insincere smile, said he’d been noticing his interest in Lucy and thought they did seem a likely pair. “You’re beginnin’ to feel like a member of the family.” Gonzalez didn’t bother to spell out the rest. Tax rolls never came up again and Señor Gonzalez became downright cordial.
    At night, Lucy gave Albert two choices: sleep outdoors or in the bunkhouse. He chose the outdoors, knowing that nobody snored like an exhausted cowpuncher. But the time came in late fall when it was too cold for sleeping outside—or for Albert to maintain the pretext that he any longer had enough revenue work to provide a steady wage. He knew he had to find a new job, or at least a new territory, and that meant returning for a time to Waco. To Lucy, he made light of the distance between Waco and the Gonzalez ranch and promised he’d make the trip every two weeks. She believed him, secure in his affections and feeling certain he was an honorable man. Gonzalez told him he’d be welcome to stay over for a few days each visit and could have a small room of his own in the main house.
    Both Albert and Gonzalez proved as good as their word, though Albert’s probity was put to the harsher test. No stagecoach line ran directly north from Waco—not that Albert would have had the patience to abide the constant breakdowns from rutted roads or flooded riverbanks, or the tedious stops to deliver mail and to change teams. His only option was to ride the sixty miles to the Gonzalez ranch on Bessie. His very first trip coincided with a late, blistering heat wave, and that meant the descent of a horde of black flies not yet killed off by frost and as relentless in their assault as the sweat that poured down Albert’s back. In the plains area, the water was so muddy that the locals liked to say they “had to chew it before they could swallow it,” and both he and Bessie were parched andsuffering until they could find a clear spring. Thereafter, as the weather cooled, the trips became easier, and Albert arrived faithfully at the ranch every two weeks. In between, he found occasional pickup work in one of Waco’s friendlier printing shops, giving him just enough money to survive. In early spring he got his job back as a tax collector, and his life with Lucy again took on a smooth daily rhythm.
    They ventured beyond the ranch only rarely, usually in response to a neighbor’s call for assistance. When a new settler and his wife in nearby Grandview sent out a call for help in raising their house, they knew that every healthy man within a five-mile radius would feel obliged to show up. Lucy and the other women kept the food and drink coming, while Albert joined the men in cutting the felled trees into logs, using pry-poles as levers in rolling the larger pieces onto an ox-cart, and then, at the building site, lifting them into place so they could be notched. Albert had neither the skills nor the acquired stamina of the others, yet insisted on working as long as they did. “Is this what’s known as ‘fun’ around here?” he gasped to Lucy. “It’s all we got!” Lucy answered with a laugh. “But cheer up—you’re goin’ to love the all-night dancin’ that follows.” A bleary-eyed Albert sank to his knees in mock despair, hands raised to heaven in silent entreaty. “I’m only teasin’, silly.” Lucy said, kissing the top of his head.
    In the tradition of the area, when a family wanted to celebrate some milestone, they’d send out riders to notify the surrounding community that they were throwing a dance. (Once, Lucy told Albert, she’d been at a party where the fiddler had been a negro, a man no one in the area had ever seen before; she’d tried to talk to him between sets, but he quickly moved away.) She and Albert did attend one neighbor’s