Playboy Fiction Good-bye to Rootine

Miss Rowena Balfour knows how to shoot, how to ride and how to accidentally steal cowboys’ hearts

- RON CARLSON

Sheridan Hayes had not seen Donnie’s new hat. There was a great deal of loud talk and extended debate about whether he had sat down on Donnie’s black Stetson on purpose, and how could he not see such a fabulous and not-small hat and how could he not see the shine of the silver hatband which alone had cost Donnie R 430.00 cash, which was more than a week’s pay at the Rising H. Sheridan Hayes complicated the discussion deeply by saying—after the excitement subsided and Donnie was in the one-room clinic behind Doctor Wattel’s bungalow on Back Street and Sheridan himself was in the one cell in the jail, his nose still dripping blood— that he hadn’t seen the blinking hat, and further that if he had seen Donnie Gumson’s stupid blinking hat, the blinking hat of a main-street cowboy if there ever was one, he would have not only sat on it on purpose, he would have stood on it marching in place for the rest of the night. He did not use the word blinking. As it was, he did not see the black hat in the dim barroom of the Enterprise Club and he sat on it and then jumped up before any real damage was done, except the insult that results from sitting on someone’s hat, someone who had been sitting by Rowena Balfour, a young woman who had after one year resigned her post as the only schoolteacher in Rootine, an outpost on the Manditory River consisting of almost a thousand souls.