Page 46 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

don’t tell your mother - or Van.”
A short while later Peggy and Leon were both at the Gibson homestead, and Margaret and Earl Cornelius asked us all to come to their cabin for a get-together. Their log cabin was so elegant it put the rest of us to shame.
They had a thirty by forty-foot cabin made of logs so big it took only five or six on each side. The logs were peeled and varnished, and really looked beautiful. The floor was constructed of short lengths (some pieces only a few inches long) of oak flooring from the saw mill. Margaret and Earl were the only homesteaders I knew who had hardwood floors.
The cabin was all one big room with curtains for partitions, but the curtains could be pulled back to make one big room again. The living room section had a big beautiful fireplace.
When Rose and I arrived, Peggy and Leon were already there. A neighbor, Joe Ashley, whom I had met before, and his nephew Richard joined us later.
The floor had been cleared, and we started dancing to an old crank phonograph. I still was not too sure of myself, but Leon was an excellent dancer and I found myself dancing mainly with him. Rose was also an excellent dancer and caught on quickly to the western style of dancing. She and Leon should have been dancing together, but I think the business of “the liar” still rankled with him.
Later in the evening someone suggested we have a dance marathon and we did. Leon was again my partner, and he was so
determined to win that we ended the dance (as winners!) with my feet on his and with him carrying my weight. It’s a good thing I didn’t weigh then what I weigh now!
And you might say he won the marathon alone - and with a millstone around his neck (or on his feet).
The following morning Rose wanted to ride one of their horses. They had two - a small pinto, and a large gray mare. She chose to ride the pinto, but he had spent too much of his life following the big mare around: Rose reined him to the other side of the pasture, but when he looked up and saw how far he was from the old horse, he returned at a dead run, bumping into the mare’s side and pinning Rose’s knee between the two horses.
We stayed about two more days and each day Rose examined her knee which turned black, blue, yellow, and deep purple. She was hoping it would stay until she returned home so she could tell her family she got it riding wild horses.
One night as Rose was writing in her diary, she asked me how to spell “lobing”, and I told her I’d never heard of it.
“Oh, yes, you have,” she said scornfully. “What we were doing on that horse this afternoon.”
I still didn’t have a cabin on my claim, so Van and Pete Reed (the son of the optometrist homesteader) went up there to cut the logs. They cut small ones so they could be more easily handled. All the logs came from my section.