Page 45 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Suddenly she jumped up, grabbed the broom, and began furiously sweeping the floor. When we left she said, “When I looked out that door, the barn was going ‘round and ‘round. So I grabbed the broom to help hold me up. I just couldn’t let those men see the way that tobacco was affecting me. They’d still be laughing if they’d known.”
One day a neighbor, Archie Davis, came by the cabin and Rose, Jack, and I went with him on his old pickup to get a load of wood. I thought this would be another opportunity for Rose to see more of the countryside since we were going into the forest.
Archie’s truck was an old one with wooden spokes on the wheels. Going up a hill and around a sharp turn, one wheel crumbled - just came all to pieces. The three of us sat or stood around while Archie attempted to put the wheel back together. A young sheepherder came by and asked us to his camp for lunch.
The sheep were grazing all over the hillsides and down in the canyon. There were always two men at each camp, but one of them was the cook. After the cook prepared the meal, he ate, then went to stay with the herd while the other man came in to eat his lunch. After finishing, the herder returned to the sheep and the cook came back to the camp.
This was the situation that day - the cook was on his way back to camp when he detoured to invite us to lunch. We accepted with alacrity because it was well past noon.
We all four went up to camp, where the meal had been cooked over a campfire, and
partook of dutch-oven biscuits, pinto beans, fried mutton chops, hot chili, and Arbuckle coffee. Arbuckle coffee was bought by the owners in one-hundred-pound bags of whole coffee beans and was possibly the cheapest coffee in the world - certainly the cheapest tasting.
Even the cook enjoyed Rose as she tried to practice her college Spanish on him. She said,
“O-o-o-oh, este chile es-es-es-hot-hot-hot!”
After Rose and I cleaned up the dishes, Rose tried to ride the burro. Of course he was bridle wise (or trained to turn in the direction in which the reins were pulled across his neck), but Rose had a rein in each hand, held far apart, and burro kept running into the trees.
As soon as he’d eaten, Archie returned to the truck to resume work on the wheel. When he called that he was ready, we went with him on up the hill, helped him fill the truck with wood, then walked down the hill while he drove on up looking for a place wide enough to turn around. Jack ran on ahead of us, but Rose was lagging behind.
I called to her, “Rose, come on. Archie will be down at the foot of the hill and we won’t be there.”
She was looking around all over the ground with a troubled frown between her eyes.
“Anabel,” she said, “I see these beans all over the ground, but I don’t see a single bush.”
I hooted in glee, then explained to her what she’d seen. Her first response was, “Oh,