At his own request, Frank Wolf was cremated, and Ada and Frank's surviving son, Jess, took the ashes up to the glade of the upper fork of Wolf Creek, where he and Ada had been married and, together, they scattered the ashes. Jess was a perfect gentleman, which Ada found quite surprising. But Frank had told Ada some time earlier that Festus's death had sobered and mellowed Jess considerably, and, by all evidence, Jess's father's death had completed that process. Ada had thought it only right to let Jess know his father had died when his horse had thrown him and fallen on him out on the range, although she hadn't really expected Jess to respond in any way. But the same night he was told, he rode up to the Wolf Creek Ranch lodge and respectfully paid his condolences to Ada.
Frank hadn't spent all of his time that last week riding his fences. He'd gone to Jess's ranch and made his peace with this son. but he'd also told Jess how happy Ada had made him and that if anything happened to him, he expected his son to support her and not give her trouble. Jess had shown up at the ranch stating his intentions to follow his father's wishes. He also told Ada that the biggest reason his father had come to see him was that he'd just been told he had inoperable pancreatic cancer—and he wanted to get some decks cleared before he told Ada.
The fact that Frank had been under a death sentence anyway didn't console Ada all that much, but it gave her pause for thought. Frank had been an expert horseman. Her first response when she heard that he had been thrown was that this wasn't possible with the Frank she knew. Now she wondered if Frank perhaps hadn't welcomed his manner of death.
For the first two weeks of her renewed widowhood, Estelle Hopewell tried to transport Ada beyond the present during the days with her magic tongue and fingers working on Ada's body, and J. Harvey Kincaid took up the torch by night, spinning stories for her in the darkness of his room and searching deep inside her with his throbbing manhood. It was always in Estelle's or J. H.'s rooms, however. Never in Ada's. Ada did find sex a helpful consolation in her second bereavement, but never in her own room, never in the bed she and Frank had shared.
By the end of the two weeks, though, Estelle had grown too jealous to be sharing her own erstwhile lover with another woman, even if it was Ada. And when her pouting and little tantrums couldn't get Kincaid to visit her rooms by night rather than withdrawing to his own rooms with Ada, Estelle made a big production of how Ada's loss showed her that she must reconcile with her own husband, and she flounced out of the Wolf Creek valley in search of the great adventurer in the National Socialist lairs of Europe.
For his part, J. Harvey stayed for a further two weeks, but he was more helpful to Ada in her grief. Estelle had been transcribing his notes for his new book on a daily basis and now he was bereft of help. But in Ada he found what was actually a far better editor. She could type better than Estelle could and she had a better head on her shoulders for enhancing his distinctive, masculine prose, where Estelle had battled with him incessantly in an attempt to give his wordings the ethereal, much more feminine tone of her own work. And in working with Kincaid in this way, Ada herself found new purpose in life and a steadiness and structure to her days that she now needed.
When he heard about Frank's death, William Hagen came down to Wolf Creek, ostensibly to do last-minute detail work on the lodge, but really to give her whatever support he could and to see what the chances were to rekindle the snail-like pace of his decades-long courting of Ada. Once again his timing was way off. He arrived one evening in time to see Ada enter Kincaid's rooms, and when he saw the two together the next morning, he was left in no doubt that he hadn't even made the starting gate this time.
Nothing at all was heard from Ada's current sometimes lover, Peter Fair. Elections for the U.S. Congress were coming up and Peter was being groomed for a run for that office. His kingmaker of a father-in-law had heard the rumors that Peter was womanizing, though. He hadn't narrowed down on Ada, but Ada, in fact, wasn't the only one Peter was dallying with. The father-in-law had lowered the boom, and Peter was cutting all of his relationships cold turkey because he wanted a congressional seat so badly that he could taste it. Sex was one thing. But power was something far more important—especially since, once he was established in the congressional seat, his power would not be as dependent on his wife's daddy as it was now, and power was a great conduit to more sex.
Ada more or less coasted for the next four years, if working her tail off to keep her ranch from going under could be called coasting. The celebrity dude ranch didn't lose its appeal to the national literary and art set as much as that the writers and artists became largely preoccupied with events that swept over American and then throughout the world in the last year of the second decade of the twentieth century.
nearly a year and a half after Ada lost Frank, she suddenly lost another of her old, dear friends. One Friday in October 1929, a distraught George Vaughn called her from Chicago.
"He's gone, Ada. James is gone?"
