Mistletoe and Holly (20 page)

Bobby John Thomas looked at Benteen. “Is that yore boy Webb?”

There was an imperceptible tightening of Benteen’s mouth as he nodded an affirmative answer. A troubled light flickered in his eyes, put there by a gnawing worry that wouldn’t go away.

“He sure has growed since the last time I saw him,” the railroad agent remarked.

“Yeah.” The abruptness of the response seemed to carry a negative connotation. Benteen didn’t volunteer the information that, so far, Webb had only grown in size. The promise his son had shown in his early years hadn’t yet developed in adulthood.

There was much about the tall, huskily built youth for Benteen to be proud of. At twenty-six, Webb was one of the top hands on the Triple C Ranch. He could ride the rankest bronc, rope with the best of them, and turn his hand to almost anything. Webb never shirked from hard work, so Benteen couldn’t fault him for that. It was responsibility that Webb avoided, accepting it only when it was forced on him. On those rare occasions, he handled it well, making few wrong decisions. But it was that lack of interest in assuming an active role in the management of the ranch that troubled Benteen. The more he pushed Webb about it,
reminding him that the Triple C would be his someday, the less interest Webb displayed.

Lorna didn’t help the situation by insisting that Benteen was expecting too much from their son. It was her opinion that Webb was still too young and needed time to sow his wild oats before taking on any responsibility in running the ranch. Maybe she was right, but he’d been the same age as Webb when he’d driven the herd of Longhorns north from Texas to found the Triple C Ranch. It worried him to think he’d raised a son who was content to take orders instead of giving them. The future of the ranch depended on his son.

Moving his attention from the leanly muscled frame of his big-boned son, the source of his vague anxiety, Benteen half-turned toward the agent. His face showed none of his inner disturbance.

“Ya been keeping busy, Bobby John?” he inquired.

“We’ve been busy, but we haven’t been makin’ much money,” the agent declared on a rueful note.

Benteen’s mouth quirked in a dry line. “That’s always the railroad’s complaint. And it gets harder to swallow every time I see the freight rates go up.”

“It’s a fact.” Bobby John was a loyal company man. “We may haul a lot of cattle out of Miles City in the fall, but we don’t haul enough in or out on a
regular basis. We just ain’t got the people here, or the goods.”

“I suppose,” Benteen conceded.

“That might all change, though.” The comment was made, then left to lie there like a baited hook allowed to settle near a submerged log where a big fish rested.

Benteen’s interest in the conversation was no longer idle, his curiosity aroused by the remark. “Why is that?”

“Some fella plowed him some ground up around the Musselshell River and planted him some wheat. Rumor has it that he harvested forty bushels to an acre.” He saw the skepticism in Benteen’s dark eyes. “He used that dryland method of farming like they developed in Kansas.”

Benteen had a sketchy understanding of the principle involved in such a method. In arid land where there wasn’t a local water source to provide irrigation, crops were planted on only half the acreage while the other half was left fallow. This idle land was plowed and harrowed so no plant life would consume any moisture that fell on it. The next year, that half would be planted to crops. It was a way of conserving the moisture from rain and snow for the next year’s use.

“It won’t work here,” Benteen stated flatly,
regardless of the evidence just given to the contrary. “This is cow country. That’s all it is good for. Besides, I’ve never heard of a farmer yet who could make a living on just eighty acres.” That was half of the one hundred and sixty acres entitled for homestead, and the only part that was productive at any one time under the dryland method of farming.

“That may be true,” Bobby John admitted. “But I’ve heard talk that there’s a proposal bein’ presented to the Congress to double the amount of acreage allowed under the Homestead Act.”

Benteen’s chin lifted a fraction of an inch in reaction to this new information. An uneasy feeling ran through him as he looked beyond the cattle pens of the railroad yard to the grassland.

In the autumn afternoon the stark Montana landscape looked like a sea of tanned stalks. It was the best damned grass any cowman could hope to find. The idea of its being ripped up by a plow and replaced by wheat was more than he could stand. A lot of things were different from the way they had been when he had first arrived in the territory, but this was one change Benteen wouldn’t accept. He’d fight any attempt to turn this cow country into farmland.

“They’ll never be able to push that bill through Congress.” There was a steely quality to his voice,
but the prospect of a battle, political or otherwise, added its weight to the tiredness in his bones.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Bobby John Thomas warned him. “It ain’t just a bunch of land-hungry farmers that wants to see it pass.” But he added no more than that.

Benteen silently cursed himself for speaking without thinking through the opposition. Farmers were the least of his worries. It was the railroads. They were land-poor in this part of the West, owners of thousands of square-mile tracts of land along their right-of-way, deeded to them by the U.S. government for laying track. The railroads would use an enlarged Homestead Act like a carrot to lure the farmers out here and end up selling them land for farms or townsites. They’d create a land boom that would bring settlers in, tradesmen as well as farmers. People needed products, which meant more freight generated for the railroads.

It didn’t take much intelligence to figure it out. The railroads had done the same thing in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, where that prairie sod was now sown with some Russian strain of wheat. But this land wasn’t the same. Methods that worked there couldn’t work here.

The proposal coming before Congress had to be stopped, and stopped swiftly. Benteen knew in his
gut that he couldn’t waste any time, yet the six-week-long roundup had left him in a state of fatigue. Even if he looked the physical equal of his son, he no longer had the resilience of his youth.

“Guess I’d better be gettin’ back to my office.” Bobby John Thomas shifted his position in a show of reluctance to put his words into action, but Benteen said nothing to invite the railroad agent to stay longer and chat. “Give my regards to your missus.”

“I will.” An image formed in his mind of Lorna waiting for him at the hotel in town. He suddenly felt an overwhelming need to be with her. Benteen barely noticed the agent move away, his attention already traveling down another channel. His glance swept the cattle pens and loading platform in an effort to locate Barnie Moore, then came to a stop on his son. Dammit, it was going to be his ranch and his land someday, Benteen thought with a frown of irritable concern. “Webb!” There was an edge to his voice as he raised its volume to make himself heard.

With a turn of his head, Webb looked over his shoulder and saw the single motion from his father that indicated he wanted to speak to him. He swung down from the loading chute onto the platform and handed the long prod to another cowboy
to take his place. As Webb approached his father, he experienced that strange feeling of pride and resentment—pride for the man that Chase Benteen Calder was and the wide swath he’d cut across this land practically single-handedly, and resentment for the same reasons.

He didn’t want to be his father’s son; he didn’t want to be singled out from the other hands because his name was Calder; he wanted to earn his right to command, even though he was born in the position to inherit it. He would rather have been born Webb Smith than Webb Calder, so his was a quiet rebellion—never overt, always subtle—denying himself the right to claim what was his by birth. Webb made it a practice not to assert himself or his opinions with the other ranch hands. In spite of that, all the cowboys, except the older ones who had come north with his father, turned to Webb whenever there was a decision to be made, deferring to him because he was a Calder. That angered him, although he seldom let it show.

Webb knew his father was disappointed in him. He’d been lectured enough times about accepting responsibility. Only once had Webb tried to explain the way he felt, his determination to be accepted because of his ability, rather than rest on the circumstances of his birth. His father had
brushed it aside as a foolish whim, needlessly reminding Webb that he couldn’t change the fact that he was born a Calder. Rebuffed by this lack of understanding, Webb had taken the lonely path, not able to be just one of the boys and refusing to assume the role his father wanted for him. More than once, he had considered tying his bedroll on the back of his saddle and riding away from the Triple C; then he’d think about his mother and he’d stay, hoping something would change.

“Yes, sir?” Webb stopped in front of his father, letting the inflection of his voice question why he had been summoned. He hadn’t addressed him as Pa in more than six years.

There was nothing in his son’s attitude or expression that showed more than casual interest. Benteen probed, hoping to find more. He never knew what the boy was thinking—or if he was thinking. A father should know what was going on in his son’s head. Benteen knew he didn’t.

“I want you to go to the telegraph office and send some wires for me,” Benteen stated. “One of them goes to Frank Bulfert, the senator’s aide, in Washington. In the wire, I want you to ask him the status of the proposal being brought to Congress to enlarge the Homestead Act and what kind of preliminary support it’s getting. Ask for the same information
from Asa Morgan in Helena. The last wire I want you to send to Bull Giles at the Black Dove Bar in Washington with the same request for information.” The lack of interest Webb showed made him feel weary. “Have you got all that?”

“Yes, sir.” Behind the smooth exterior, his mind was running over the possible significance of the information being sought and how it might affect the ranch. “Is there anything else?”

“No.” His lips thinned into a tired line. “Don’t you want to know why this information is important?” Benteen asked, and had the satisfaction of seeing his son’s steady gaze waver briefly.

“I figured you’d tell me when you thought it was right for me to know.” There was no hesitation over the reply, and the invitation to ask the question wasn’t accepted.

Frustrated by his son’s behavior, Benteen half-turned from him, muttering, “Go send the wires, and have the replies directed to the hotel.”

As Webb moved away, spurs rattling with each stride, the aching numbness returned in Benteen’s left shoulder and arm. He rubbed at the soreness, kneading the muscles with his fingers.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” The voice asking the question belonged to Barnie Moore.

Benteen let his right hand slide down the arm
and shrugged aside the nagging ache. “Too many nights sleeping on cold, hard ground, I guess.”

“I know what ‘cha mean.” Barnie arched his back, as if flexing stiff muscles. “Neither one of us is as young as we used to be.” His gaze followed Webb. “I remember when that one was just a pup, playin’ around with my boy. Now both of them is full-growed men.”

Benteen sighed irritably. “I wish I knew where I went wrong with him.”

“Webb?” Barnie frowned at him. “There isn’t a better cowboy on the ranch than him.”

“It isn’t a cowboy I want,” Benteen replied, but didn’t confide the doubts he had about Webb’s ability to become the ranch’s leader. “How many more carloads of steers do we have left?”

Barnie took the cue to change the subject. “About eight or nine, I’d say.” When he noticed the haggard lines etched in Benteen’s features, he concealed his concern by casually rolling a smoke. “No need for you to stick around. We can handle the rest.”

Benteen hesitated, but the constant din at the railroad pens grated on nerves that were already raw. “I’ll be at the hotel if you need me.”

Barnie nodded acknowledgment, although he didn’t look up as he tapped tobacco from the pouch onto the trough of cigarette paper.

When Benteen stopped at the hotel desk to pick up the key to the suite, there was a message waiting for him. “Your wife said to tell you she’d gone shopping, Mr. Calder,” the clerk informed him.

Annoyance flickered across his expression as he closed his fingers around the key and clipped out an automatic “Thank you.”

“Be sure to let us know if there’s anything you need,” the clerk offered, not wanting the hotel to be responsible for the displeasure of a guest as important as Benteen Calder.

“Have someone bring up a bottle of your best whiskey,” he ordered.

A quick smile spread across the clerk’s face. “Your wife has already seen to that, sir. It’s waiting in your room.”

As he climbed the stairs to the suite, Benteen made a silent wager with himself that there would be a fresh cigar waiting for him in addition to the bonded whiskey. He won the bet. It was his wife’s thoughtfulness that softened the hard curves of his mouth more than the cigar and the sipping whiskey. Shrugging out of his jacket, he dropped it and his hat on a chair in the suite’s sitting room and sat down in the second chair, stretching out his legs full length in front of him.

Although the whiskey he’d splashed in the glass
was barely touched, the cigar was half-smoked when Benteen heard the soft laughter of female voices in the hotel corridor. A key was turned in the lock and the door was pushed inward. His instinct was to stand, but a lethargy seemed to have control of his muscles as Lorna swept into the room with a rustle of skirt and petticoats.

Her arms were laden with packages. The young, blond-haired girl who followed her into the suite was similarly burdened. Benteen couldn’t help noticing that Lorna didn’t look that much older than the teenaged girl. She claimed there were gray strands in her dark hair, but they were so few that they didn’t show. Her figure retained its slim, youthful curves and her complexion was china-smooth, showing only fine hairline cracks of age—thanks to the lotions she used to combat the effects of Montana’s harsh climate. No one looking at her would guess at her inner strength, or the hardships she’d suffered in the early years. Her struggle to come to grips with this land had been as great as his own. With Lorna at his side, Benteen felt there was nothing he couldn’t handle.