“Membership. I’m a pledge. I’ve been a pledge for six months, almost seven.”

“What have I to do with your qualifying for membership?”

“According to the bylaws, you have to screw a hundred guys. Jesus,” she went on hopelessly, “I’m only about halfway there.”

“A hundred different guys?”

“Of course.” She shook her head with the enormity of the burden. “And it don’t count if a guy’s under eighteen.”

Half a hundred guys. Her experience diminished me a little. But only a little. “Can I see you again?”

“For sure,” she said. “I’m to teach you how to ride.”

“I don’t mean…”

“What good would it do? I just told you…” She sighed.

“Maybe you ought to impact a few changes in the bylaws.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Some of the other girls have trouble too.”

“Is there any way I can help? I mean, if you introduced me to some of those pledges? Maybe if I lied a little about my age…”

“That’s not fair,” she said, a victim of her own integrity.

“There must be some way…”

“I don’t know. Believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“Why don’t we talk more about it…?”

“What’s to talk about? Not that I don’t appreciate…”

“…Tonight?”

“It would have to be in the barn. My grandmother doesn’t like me bringing boys to the house.”

“Barn is fine. We could talk while you’re, I don’t know, cleaning your gun.”

“Well…” she said noncommittally, getting to her feet.

I reached out, clutching her slim ankle.

“What are you doing?” she said. “We got to get back to the horses.”

“Not yet.”

“What do you want?” Was it possible she didn’t know?

“I want you,” I said emphatically, “even if it doesn’t count.”

“You’re sweet, the way you tried to help…”

“You madden my blood.”

“Yeah. Your poor little old lollipop is stretched all out of shape.”

“Isn’t that the sincerest form of flattery?”

She considered the calculation. “Yeah,” she said, “I suppose,” and sank to the blanket beside me.

And then a voice rang out, carrying across the grange and into the barn. “Judd,” came the howl of doom, the resonant whine of my mother. “Judd… are you in there?”

“Goddammit!” I whispered fiercely.

“You ought to answer her.”

“Maybe she’ll go away.”

But she didn’t. She said, “Telephone.” I threw on my clothes, buttoning, zipping, all thumbs.

“I’d better go,” Dawnette said.

“See you tonight,” I called over my shoulder. “Eight o’clock.”

* * *

Two hours later I braked the pickup before the Brown Palace in Denver. “It’s a little late for lunch,” Joseph Grady said. “Can I offer you a drink? And tell you that I’m most pointedly delighted to see you?”