Stands a Calder Man (49 page)

He nodded briefly, a faint smile of understanding showing on his mouth. She knew most of those people and felt she owed them something, a brother's keeper
sort of thing. She began playing with the baby, and Simon let the subject end with her request.

Senator Bulfert was a weekend guest at the ranch, stopping on his way to Helena. On this occasion, he was alone, unaccompanied by his aides. It seemed to change the tenor of the visit. The usually loquacious and loud politician appeared subdued and less talkative.

At the conclusion of dinner, Webb noticed the senator reaching into his vest pocket, bulging with cigars. Aware that Lilli didn't like the smell of cigar smoke, he suggested they adjourn to the den for coffee. Lilli excused herself from joining them to check on the baby.

Webb poured a glass of whiskey for each of them and passed the florid-faced man one. There was a flash of the man's professionally jovial smile as he lifted his glass in a silent toast.

“Better enjoy this while you can,” he declared. “Those Temperance ladies are going to get their wish.” The senator breathed out a disgusted sound and stared at the whiskey he swirled in the glass. “All those saloons Carry Nation busted up in Butte. Thought that movement for Prohibition would end when she died. Hell! It turned her into a martyr.”

“The Congress isn't really going to outlaw liquor.” The proposition was too unrealistic.

“It's all part of this moral fervor that's sweeping the country because of the war,” he grunted, then eyed Webb with a twinkling look. “I hope you got some friends in Canada to keep your cabinet stocked for personal use.”

“I know a couple people.” Webb smiled. “We don't sell as much cattle to the reservations up there as we used to, but we've still got connections.”

“Good.” He sipped at the whiskey, then gave Webb a cigar and cut off the tip of one for himself. “Giles is dead.” The statement came with no advance warning.

The match flame was halfway to his cigar. Webb stopped, taking the cigar from his mouth to stare at the politician. “Bull?” Disbelief ringed his voice. “When?”

“Three months ago, before Christmas. Just found out about it myself.” He puffed on the cigar. “Never was the same after he came back. Started drinking heavy and stopped hanging around with the old crowd. That's why it took so long to hear about it, I guess. He'd a made a good politician—a big, lumbering ox, but smart as a whip,” he concluded and swallowed another gulp of whiskey, as if in a silent toast to the man.

Webb did the same and watched the flames crackling in the fireplace. Since his mother's death, there had been no word from Bull. Now there wouldn't be any.

“What do you know about this attorney, Doyle Pettit?” With a narrowed look. Bulfert eyed Webb through the smoke of his cigar.

Webb's head came up, some instinct telling him this was the purpose behind the senator's visit. “I've known Doyle all my life. He took over the TeePee Ranch when his father, Tom Pettit, died about ten years back, and he owns a couple businesses in town. Why?” He was scant with his information until he learned the reason for the question.

“I had a look at the property rolls a couple of weeks ago. He's got title to, or claim to, nearly three-quarters of a million acres.”

The size of Pettit's holdings surprised Webb, but he didn't show it. He finished lighting his cigar with a new match, shook out the flame, and tossed the dead match into the fireplace. Doyle had amassed a lot of land very quietly—through the bank he owned, obviously, buying up the claims of homesteaders who had given up. He remembered Doyle's land scheme of buy and sell, buy and sell.

He looked at the map on the wall. Doyle Pettit. That fun-loving, always smiling boyhood friend who laughed and rarely fought. He'd always been something of a show-off, buying the first automobile in the area and
wearing spiffy clothes, free with his money, buying drinks for his friends and quick to loan a ten-spot to a hard-up man. Doyle had always managed to become the center of attention. Quietly, so quietly, he had obtained control of nearly three-quarters of a million acres—almost the size of the Triple C.

The man had always been something of a peacemaker, never liking arguments or hard feelings. He rode the fence, never taking sides. The ranchers regarded him as Tom Pettit's son, one of them, and the drylanders looked on him as their friend.

The longer Webb looked at the map, the more uneasy he felt. It made no sense to think Doyle's massive land acquisitions were a threat. They'd known each other too many years. They hadn't always been close, but Doyle just wasn't the kind to move against another man. That wasn't his way. Yet Webb was bothered by the discovery of how big Doyle had grown in such a short period of time.

But his comment to the politician revealed he'd known of it. “When this boom started, Pettit began speculating in land,” he admitted.

“If this drought keeps up”—a wryness touched the expression on the senator's face—“he's going to find out he owns land in a dozen other states. The wind's blowing away what he's got here.”

Webb's mouth twitched in silent and bitter agreement. Inwardly he was thinking, Thank God for the grass that covered Calder land and held the soil together.

The heavy buffalo robe was bunched around his chin, warming the air Simon breathed, his head bobbing in sleep. His black medical bag sat on the floorboards of the buggy near his feet, with the buffalo robe draped over it as well. Even though automobiles were a faster form of transportation, Simon Bardolph preferred his horse and buggy. It might be slower, but there were fewer breakdowns; it could travel cross-country over terrain an auto couldn't traverse; and if Simon fell
asleep, as he usually did, he could be sure of the horse staying on the road and not crashing into some ditch.

The ewe-necked gelding stopped in front of the shanty where a small light glowed in the window. It turned its head and whickered quietly at the man sleeping in the buggy. The sound stirred no response. With almost a disgusted snort, the horse laid back its ears and launched a kick at the buggy, jolting its owner awake.

Simon opened his eyes with a frowning reluctance and looked around for a blank minute before recognizing Kreuger's place. He pushed aside the buffalo robe and shivered at the early-evening coldness. A horse blanket was stowed in the rear of the buggy. He shook it out and draped it over the gelding, tossed some grain into a nose bag, and slipped the bit out of its mouth before putting the grain bag on. After the horse was taken care of, he lifted his black satchel out of the buggy and walked to the shanty.

Franz Kreuger opened the door when Simon knocked. The smell of sickness was in the small and drafty shack. Simon supposed he would never get used to the odor. The cloth curtain that usually partitioned off the sleeping quarters had been removed to let the heat from the cookstove reach to the farthest corner where the bunks were stacked.

Simon had called on the family too many times to waste his energy exchanging pleasantries with Franz Kreuger, because the gesture wouldn't be returned. As he shrugged out of his coat, he looked over at the two older children lying in their parents' bed, and his third patient in a lower bunk. A gaunt and hollow-eyed Helga Kreuger was sitting on the edge of the bunk, attempting to spoon broth into the slack mouth of her son.

As he approached the bunk with his bag in hand, the woman was forced to suspend the feeding by a coughing spasm that had a distinct, consumptive sound to it. It sharpened his gaze, sweeping the woman in a cursory examination. She was wasted and had thin, dark circles
under her eyes. The hardship in her life had aged her until she looked old enough to be the grandmother of these children. Simon didn't like the sound of that hacking cough. After he had checked the youngsters' conditions, he intended to examine their mother.

He stopped beside her, conscious that Franz Kreuger was hovering close by. “How's Gustav?” He smiled briefly at the wan and anxious face of Helga Kreuger before he turned his attention on the boy. A second later, he heard the rattle in the boy's lungs. Everything inside him froze for a pulsebeat. Violence was alien to his nature, but it gripped him now. He turned savagely on Kreuger. “Damn you, Kreuger,” he swore, and curled his fingers into the man's shirt front. “I told you to contact me immediately if they got worse!”

“They are no worse than when you saw them last,” Kreuger denied hotly, his dark eyes pinpoints of loathing and distrust.

Helga Kreuger was on her feet, alarm taking away what little color she had. “Gustav is not worse, is he?”

And Simon realized that she was so desperate for her son to get better that she had refused to acknowledge he had gotten worse. Sanity returned to him and he released his hold on Kreuger's shirt to turn back to the child.

“His condition isn't good,” he said gruffly, understating the situation.

“He'll get better, though,” she murmured and looked at her child anxiously.

“I'll do everything I can.” It was the most Simon dared promise. It would be tough pulling a healthy child through, and the Kreuger children were undernourished and weak. Miracles weren't taught in his profession, and he had a feeling that's what it was going to take.

It had happened other times. In the outbreaks of typhoid fever, Simon had seen all but one or two members of the family die, but it was never easy for him to accept, especially when the victims were children.

There was always the feeling that there should have been something else he could have done—that for all his knowledge, there was still something he didn't know but should have.

That's what Kreuger thought when all of his children save one were buried within a week. Simon had tried to shut his ears to the man's accusations. Kreuger was convinced that it was because he was poor and couldn't pay the doctor for his services that Simon hadn't done all he could, sure that if his name had been Calder rather than Kreuger the result would have been different.

Tired and frustrated and plagued by the guilt that haunted him every time he lost a patient, Simon leaned on the table in the middle of his cabin's small kitchen. Dirty dishes from two weeks ago sat in the sink, the last time he'd eaten a meal in his own home and office combined. He looked around at the mess.

“I hired a girl to clean the place for me, but her family pulled up stakes last fall. I haven't gotten around to finding someone else.” He apologized to Doyle Pettit for the untidy state of his living quarters.

“If you want, I can find someone for you,” Doyle volunteered affably and sipped at the bitter black coffee Simon had poured for him. “You really should take a week off and rest. You look terrible.”

“Playing doctor, are you?” Simon smiled tiredly.

“What's on your mind, Doc?” Doyle Pettit leaned back in the straight chair, loose and at ease. “I know you didn't ask me to come by just to pass the time of day—not a man as busy as you are. So there must be something bothering you.”

“It's Kreuger—or more specifically, Kreuger's wife. She's got tuberculosis, and this climate—the cold and the dust—are just aggravating her condition. He needs to get her out of here if he doesn't want to end up burying her, too.” He ran a hand through his hair, rumpling the ends. “I've tried to explain it to him, but he thinks I've got some conspiracy going with Calder to
drive him off the land. I can't get through to him. He just won't listen to me. But you—he's more likely to believe it coming from you.”

Doyle frowned, concern etched in his features that were usually drawn in such carefree lines. He swirled the coffee in his cup, studying its black color. “I don't know if anything could separate that man from his land. That place is almost an obsession with him. Out of all those that came that first year to stake a homestead claim, he's one of the few left. I don't know what keeps him going.”

“Hate.” Simon supplied his belief. “A hatred not necessarily of Webb Calder as much as a hatred of what he represents, a big landholder. There are times when I wonder if he didn't choose his place simply because it butted up to Calder land.”

“Could be,” Doyle conceded and drank from his cup. “I'll have a talk with him about his wife, but I don't know if I'll have any more success than you did.”

Simon hoped he did. Something told him that Kreuger was near the breaking point. Most men would have quit by now. All he had was a hardscrabble farm that was getting blown away. The drought and the dust were working on everyone, fraying nerves and shortening tempers. Add to that the grief Kreuger had to be suffering. Put those things with his intense resentment of Calder, and at some point, the lid was going to blow.

“Have you seen Webb lately? How's that new baby of his doing?” Doyle shifted the subject to a lighter topic.

“I was out to The Homestead about three weeks ago, before all this started. Everyone was fine, including young Chase.” The thought of the healthy baby brought a hint of a smile to Simon's face.

“You know what, Doc? You and I should take a trip back east and find ourselves a couple of wives. When I think about Webb having a son, I get downright envious,” Doyle declared without looking the slightest bit serious. “I probably should talk to him about
making provisions for his son's future. That's something my father never did for me. He left me a ranch and a lot of debts, and that's about all.”

“I guess none of us think we're going to die.” Simon laughed without humor and lifted the coffee cup to his mouth.

Spring came and brought relief from the winter's cold, but not the drought. Everyone said it couldn't last another summer. Banks made loans to the drylanders so they could buy seed and plant their wheat. June was the rainy season. Everyone waited, watching the sky and holding their breath.

The clouds came, scented the air with the sweetness of rain, then vibrated the dry ground with the loudness of their thunder. Suddenly, they split open and rain fell in driving sheets. The jubilance was wiped from Franz Kreuger's face as he stood outside his shack, drenched within minutes, and watched the torrential downpour carry away the top layer of soil and the young shoots of wheat.