Suzanne Lloyd

            I didn’t get much sleep on Tuesday morning because I'd taken such a late siesta on Monday evening. I got up around 1:00 and stayed up doing some research for a poem for two hours.

            The snowstorm started during song practice and kept up all day. Both U of T and OCADU cancelled their classes. The wind was blowing so hard that it was actually coming in through my closed windows and making my place cold even though the heat was on. In the late afternoon it started to rain and by evening all the snow was just a mess of slush. Hopefully the rain will keep up all night long and get rid of all the snow that fell so I won’t have a difficult ride to class on Wednesday. 

            I worked on getting caught up on my journal for most of the day and finally got there in the evening.  

            I had the last of my chicken for dinner with a couple of small potatoes and some gravy and watched the second episode of Rawhide.

            While looking for water the trail drive comes across a monastery where there is a wedding going on. After the padre gives them permission to fill their barrels the wedding gets out and Rowdy discovers that the groom is an old friend of his from the Civil War. Rowdy and Buzz were corporals in the Confederate Army and had been prisoners of war together. Buzz’s bride is Varbena and her father is a wealthy rancher named Justice Cardin. Justice invites the drive cowboys to the wedding party at his ranch. During the festivities Justice’s estranged stepson, Mastic arrives. He had been banished from the ranch years before because he’d become a killer. Since then he has become a very fast gunfighter and has killed sixteen men. Mastic has come because he thinks he has a right to half the ranch. Justice invites him to his office and offers him $5000 to leave. Mastic tells him to get the money but then when he sees there is $70,000 in the strongbox he takes it all and then hits Justice hard with his gun. He leaves the wedding party and rides away but then Varbena discovers that her father has been severely injured. Within hours he is dead. Buzz and Rowdy go after Mastic and find him making a stand at the monastery. There is a shootout. The trail boss, Gil arrives to help. Mastic climbs up into the bell tower and is shooting from there. Gil pulls the rope of the bell causing it to swing and knock Mastic to his death.

            I guess it might be a different trail drive with every show. In this one Gil says that a cooperative of a hundred small ranchers have hired them to drive their cattle.

            The main flaw with the song “Rawhide” is the lyric, “Through rain and wind and weather”. They could have corrected it with, “Through rain, wind or any weather”.

            Varbena was played by Canadian actor Suzanne Lloyd. She played Raquel on the TV series Zorro and Maya the Catgirl on the Twilight Zone episode “Perchance to Dream.