Stands a Calder Man (39 page)

“She's married, Webb.” It took a great deal of courage for Ruth to say that.

“I am well aware of that.” He gave her a cold, impatient look, as if angered that she had reminded him of the fact.

This friction between them was intolerable. Ruth crossed the space separating them with a rush of quick little steps to assure him that she hadn't spoken to hurt him. She stopped when she reached his side, lifting a hand to rest it tentatively on his forearm and claim the attention he'd turned away from her.

“I'm sorry, Webb. I had no right to say that.” It was
simply that she had lived so long in hope that he would forget Lilli—and that, when he did, he would finally turn to her.

For a long second, Webb looked at the hand on his arm before he lifted his gaze to her face. The muted coloring of her hair and eyes appeared nondescript, yet despite the blandness of her features, he saw something that appealed to a weakness in him. Everything about her was leaning toward him, wanting to please him and wipe out that coldness.

As he set his drink on a side table, Webb wasn't conscious of the silent debate he had with himself. Then he turned to Ruth and heard her quickened breath with a certain detachment. When he took her into his arms, he wasn't seeking the gratification of his male needs. There were women who took care of that for a living.

He wanted to bury himself in the softness of a caring woman and find a respite from this consuming loneliness. She was yielding in his arms, her body pressing itself to his length. Her lips were pliant to the demands he made of them. All things were as they should be, but it wasn't enough.

The lonely ache became more intense, tinged with a bitterness. Her kiss couldn't fill the emptiness inside him. Webb became disgusted with himself for using her without a care for her feelings. His hands lifted to her shoulders to push her from him. He tightened his grip and forced Ruth away from him. The sight of the little girl-hurt look in her expression turned him from her, and Webb reached for the drink he had so recently discarded.

“I shouldn't have done that, Ruth,” he said grimly and heard her make a little wounded sound. “You have my apology and my word that it won't happen again.”

“No, Webb—”

He brutally cut across her protest. “Ask Virg Haskell to supper. He'll appreciate the invitation more than I do.”

There was a kind of finality in the silence that
followed. It was several more seconds before he heard her slow footsteps carrying her out of the room. He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass in one burning swallow, but it deadened nothing.

As she dipped the damp cloth into the basin of water, Lilli cast a worried glance at the unconscious man in the bed. His face was unnaturally flushed and his skin was afire to the touch. Stefan mumbled in his native German tongue, fever carrying him to the point of delirium. She wrung out the cloth and pressed its wetness over his face, trying to cool him.

It had begun so innocently yesterday morning with a throbbing in his head, a stomachache, and diarrhea. Stefan had insisted on going out to the fields, overriding Lilli's suggestion that perhaps he should rest. That night, he was so weak Lilli had had to help him into bed. In the night, this raging fever had claimed him.

Her hearing strained to catch sounds outside the shack. She thought she heard something, but it was so faint she wasn't sure whether she had imagined it or not. She turned her head, glancing at the blond-haired woman by the stove, heating some broth so they could force some nourishment into Stefan.

“I think I can hear a buggy. Check and see if it's the doctor, Helga,” Lilli urged the pregnant wife of Franz Kreuger.

“Of course.” Helga Kreuger left the stove and walked to the door to look outside.

Frightened by how rapidly Stefan's condition had deteriorated overnight, Lilli had gone to their neighbor for help that morning. She hadn't wanted to leave Stefan alone for even that short period of time, but she had to send someone for the doctor. Franz had ridden into town to fetch him, and Helga had left her children in the care of her oldest daughter and returned with Lilli to help however she could.

“It is Franz,” she confirmed. “The doctor is with him.”

“Thank God,” Lilli murmured and blinked at the tears to keep them at bay. This fever seemed to be shrinking Stefan right before her eyes, sinking in his cheeks and shriveling his gaunt body.

When the young doctor entered, he didn't waste time with preliminaries and went straight to the bed. His eyes were already making their examination of the stricken man as he opened his black bag. He didn't appear surprised by what he saw; rather, the straight line of his mouth seemed to indicate it was what he had expected.

Lilli was reluctant to leave the bedside, but Helga Kreuger took her by the shoulders and led her to the other side of the single room. She pushed a cup of broth into Lilli's hands.

“You need your strength, too,” she insisted.

It was easier to accept it than make the effort to argue. Her hands encircled it as Lilli moved to the window. There were glass panes in it, virtually the only improvement they had made in the shanty. A film of dust coated the glass and blurred her view of the fallow field outside. A swirling wind ran across the dry ground, kicking up dust devils to spin and swoop in wild abandon. The air was so dry it sucked up any moisture it found.

Off to the side, Lilli could hear Franz Kreuger and his wife speaking to each other in low, unintelligible voices. Her mother had been this sick before she died—different symptoms, but there was still the smell of death. It was something Lilli couldn't forget. Until this moment she had been too busy caring for Stefan to let her mind dwell on the possibility he could die. All her attention had been devoted to making him better; now her thoughts were turning to what would happen if he didn't recover.

Her mind flashed to memories of her parents' deaths, the grief and the anguish, the endless number of things that had to be done. If Stefan died, she'd have it all to do again—finding the money to pay for the coffin,
arranging for his burial, and going through all his personal belongings. If he died—she'd be free to go to Webb.

The instant the thought leaped into her mind, Lilli was sickened by it. It was a terrible thing to be thinking at a time like this. She despised herself for it and stamped out the seed before it could grow by brutally reminding herself of her face in the mirror and the sobering fact that years had passed without Webb's making a single attempt to see her. He was bound to have forgotten her long ago.

She lifted her gaze to the dust-laden sky. Her lips formed the silent words, “Stefan, forgive me.” There was a sound from the corner of the room where her husband lay, and Lilli turned to look at the erect figure tending him. She walked to the foot of the bed and searched the expressionless face of the physician.

“What is it, Doctor?” She asked for an answer that would rid her of these gnawing fears.

He seemed not to want to meet her probing eyes. “Where do you get your drinking water, Mrs. Reisner?” He swung a raking look over her, catching the signs of youth the sun hadn't burned out. “You are his wife?” His patient was considerably older, although he'd learned that was hardly uncommon among some of these immigrant marriages.

Lilli nodded affirmatively to that question and answered the first. “We have a cistern outside.”

“Your husband has typhoid fever,” he announced grimly. “Which means your water supply has been contaminated. With the lack of rain we've had this year, it's a situation that's going to become more prevalent, I'm afraid. This isn't the first case I've diagnosed.”

Typhoid fever. The words numbed her with their ominous portent. Vaguely she was aware of Franz Kreuger intervening and demanding that the doctor give Stefan something to make him better. Most of his reply was lost as she tried to come to grips with the news.

“... keep bathing him to bring the fever down and make sure he gets plenty of liquid,” the doctor instructed. “I have a couple other calls to make, but I'll stop back here toward evening. We'll see how he's doing then.”

Lilli went through the motions of seeing the doctor to the door and thanking him for coming, but she seemed to be existing in a vacuum, devoid of any feelings or sensations. Nothing made any impression on her, not even the abrasive Franz Kreuger.

The Montana weather had been up to its old, cruel tricks. A big bruise had shown up in the sky and sent the smell of rain over the country. Rain fell in sheeting buckets for forty minutes and no more, but not everywhere, just in one small area where the headquarters of the Triple C Ranch were located. It turned the parched ground into a quagmire, which made it impossible for Webb to use the automobile to drive into town and shorten the trip.

Instead, he saddled an Appaloosa-marked bay to make the long ride. Not three miles from The Homestead, the grass was tinder-dry. The black clouds were already chasing across the sky, leaving as quickly as they had come, tormenting the dry earth with their fragrance of rain.

A dry wind was blasting the weathering buildings of Blue Moon with its burden of dust. There was a fine coating of it on everything. Few people were on the street, walking with their heads down and faces turned away from the wind. With his eyes slitted against the stinging dust, Webb noticed the motley funeral procession slowly making its way to the new cemetery on the grassy knoll just outside of town.

The long, dusty ride had left him with a dry mouth and throat. He turned his horse into the hitching rail in front of Sonny's place and swung down, looping the reins around the post. When he went inside, he found the restaurant by day, bar by night nearly as deserted as the street. He took note of the occupants, recognizing
Hobie Evans lounging against the bar. Pushing his hat to the back of his head, Webb sat down at one of the tables.

“Just coffee,” he told the dried-out girl who had made a move to come out from behind the bar to take his order. She looked to be from one of the homesteading families, working in town to supplement her family's meager income. With this summer's drought, more of the older children had been forced to seek jobs to help support their family. There had been a deluge of them at the ranch, willing to turn their hand to anything to make a few pennies.

Hobie sauntered over to the table and pulled out a chair, turning it around to straddle it, not waiting for Webb to invite him to sit. He sipped the coffee cup in his hand and eyed Webb with a complacent look. “It's been a long, dry summer,” he remarked.

Webb nodded and glanced briefly at the girl when she brought his coffee and set it on the table in front of him. She paused, her features drained of any expression “Want anything else?”

“What she means is”—Hobie leaned closer to murmur his explanation so it would go no farther than the table—“for two bits and the price of a shot, she'll make that coffee stronger.”

The hypocrisy of the situation wasn't lost on Webb. When the drylanders had come, they had been righteously opposed to the serving of alcoholic beverages in their midst, yet one of their daughters was willing to break the rules for a quarter.

“I'll drink it as it is.” He refused the offer to have it laced with whiskey. The girl shrugged indifferently and wandered back to the bar.

“I'll bet for a little more money a fella could buy more than a drink from her,” Hobie watched her leave. “If he didn't mind gettin' hung up on those skinny ribs. ‘Course, honyockers aren't my cup of tea, but I didn't know but what you might still have a taste for them.”

With a man like Hobie Evans, it was better to ignore his coarse and snide remarks. Any comment would
wind up encouraging more of the same. Webb drank his coffee, hot and thickly black.

“I noticed a bunch of wagons leading toward the cemetery when I rode into town. Who's getting buried?” He changed the subject.

Hobie shrugged. “Some honyocker. Some fever bug is laying 'em down right and left. More power to the fever, I say. Maybe we'll finally get rid of some of those bastards. It should've happened a long time ago.”

“A fever?” An eyebrow lifted in a silent demand for a more specific answer.

“Yeah. The sawbones was in here earlier, trying to get a bite to eat, but some scrawny drylander dragged him away on a sick call.” A kind of grin lifted a comer of Hobie's mouth. “The doc looked worn to a frazzle, said something about their water being contaminated. He's wastin' his time with the likes of them. If a hundred more of 'em died, it wouldn't be too many to suit me.”

Webb lost his taste for the coffee and the company. He scraped the chair backward to stand and tossed a coin on the table to pay for the barely touched coffee. “Hobie, when you die, you're going to be all alone. The sad part is—you won't know it.”

Leaving the restaurant, he untied the reins and started to mount his horse; then he caught the sound of voices raised in song being carried by the wind, and paused. Snatches of the melody came to him, enough to recognize the mournful hymn “Rock of Ages.”

He wondered about the Reisner well, whether its water was contaminated, but it did no good to wonder. There was nothing he could do about it. He had no right to do anything about it. His boot went into the stirrup as he swung onto his horse and reined it away from the hitching rail to head for the depot.

The black shawl covering Lilli's head was whipped by the gritty wind, but she didn't bow her head as shovels of dirt began falling on Stefan's coffin. People filed past her: friends, neighbors, all offering her their sympathy.

They seemed to expect her silence and the dullness of her eyes.

No one asked what she planned to do, but she had made her decisions. She was putting the farm up for sale. Franz Kreuger was going to harvest what wheat was in the fields on a share basis. After that, she was leaving. There was no more reason to stay, with Stefan gone. She didn't even let herself think about Webb Calder, because that had been too long ago. It was dead, too, like Stefan.