Stands a Calder Man (54 page)

“Where're you goin'?” Nate wandered over and combed the horse's mane with his fingers, eyeing Webb in a side look.

“Town.” He snugged up the cinch and wrapped it around and through the ring.

“What for?”

“I got some questions to ask Pettit.”

“Can't it wait?” It was already growing dark outside. ‘There's a dust storm fixin' to blow in.”

“Nope, it can't wait.” Webb took up the reins and stepped a booted toe into the stirrup.

“Then I'll come along with you,” Nate volunteered.
wanting to find out why it was so all-fired important for Webb to talk to Doyle Pettit.

“Thanks, but I don't need company.” He walked the horse past Nate and out the opened barn door into the ranchyard.

The black and billowing dustcloud was casting a long, dark shadow across the land, shutting out the sun's rays and turning the day into a false dusk. He rode most of the way to Blue Moon ahead of the storm, but it caught up with him five miles from town. The storm enclosed the horse and rider in a blowing shroud of dust. Its accompanying wind whipped the horse's scrubby tail between its legs as the buckskin lowered its head, pinching its nostrils together to shut out the clogging dirt particles, and plodded blindly down the road. Webb turned his collar up and tied a kerchief around his nose and mouth, hunching his shoulders against the sandblasting wind.

The buildings were all shuttered and boarded when Webb rode into town. Some of them were permanently closed and some were just battened down against the storm. The street was littered with blowing papers, rolling cans and bottles, and tumbleweeds. Shingles were torn off roofs to become flying missiles.

There was a Closed sign on the bank. Webb turned his horse down the alley that ran alongside it, the near building breaking the fury of the wind. A light showed in a rear window of the bank. Webb dismounted by the back door and took a gun and holster out of his saddlebag, strapping it around his hip. The buckskin sidled closer to the building, taking advantage of its shelter from the storm.

When Webb tried the back door to the bank, the knob turned freely under his hand. He pushed it open and stepped inside, pulling down his kerchief and breathing in dusty-smelling air.

The source of light in the darkened building came from Doyle Perth's private office. The door was ajar and Webb walked to it, nudging it open. The howling
wind thrashing around outside had covered any sound Webb had made. Yet when Doyle Pettit looked up from his chair behind the desk, he didn't look surprised to see him.

A whiskey bottle was sitting in front of him, more than half empty, and a glass was in his hand. The stubble of a beard growth was on his cheeks, and his shirt looked as if it had been slept in. He stared at Webb through liquor-reddened eyes. His mouth flashed briefly with a smile that belonged to the Doyle Pettit Webb had known all his life, and intensified the contrast between that man and the broken, desperate person now sitting behind the desk.

“Hello, Webb.” Even his voice was peculiarly flat, as if Doyle had stopped caring about living. “I knew you'd show up sooner or later. I'm glad I don't have to wait anymore.”

“You know my wife is dead,” He stepped into the room, but didn't take a chair, even though there was one empty in front of the desk.

“Yes, I know.” Doyle couldn't hold his level stare and looked down, reaching for the whiskey bottle to refill his glass. “I don't expect you to believe me, but I am truly sorry about that.”

“Before Kreuger died, he said you had warned him that I might burn his place,” Within the statement, there was a demand for an explanation.

“It wasn't exactly that way.” Doyle lifted the bottle in Webb's direction, silently offering him a drink, but Webb shook his head in mute refusal. Doyle's hand was trembling as he raised the glass to his mouth and took a quick drink. “He believed you would do something like that, and I encouraged him to keep thinking it.”

“So you burned it, knowing he would blame me,” Webb guessed.

“I paid a couple of drifters to do it, but I ordered them to stay until the fire was out to make sure it didn't start a range fire,” Doyle said, as if that precaution in some way made up for the other.

“You knew Kreuger would come after me. You knew he'd try to kill me. That's what you wanted him to do. Why, Doyle? Why?” Webb demanded coldly.

The chair creaked noisily under his weight as Pettit leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “I'm finished. I've lost everything.” He dragged his gaze down to look dully at Webb. “The bank, the lumberyard, all my land—even Dad's ranch. I've lost it all. I could see it coming and I was desperate to stop it. I always wanted to be big, Webb.” His eyes came alive with the zeal of ambition. “I wanted to have it all—money, land, power, and everything that goes with it. I was almost there, Webb, but I needed to lay my hands on a lot of cash or some assets I could borrow against.”

“You were after the Triple C.” The wind was rattling the glass panes in the window, its incessant howl always in the background, but Webb's attention never strayed from the man behind the desk.

“You've got to believe me, Webb, if there'd been any other choice I would have made it. I wouldn't have taken the ranch.” He tried to explain. “With you out of the way”—Doyle avoided the word “dead”—“it would have been a simple matter to have myself appointed as administrator of your son's estate. I would have kept it for your son. If I could have just gotten a loan on the Triple C, it would have carried me through this. I'd have paid it back.”

“So you sicced Kreuger on me to get me out of the picture.” The line of his jaw was inflexible. He had no sympathy for Doyle, not when Lilli was lying in her grave because of him.

“You don't know the hell I went through that day after the trial.” His head sagged and bobbed to the side as Doyle lifted the whiskey glass again. “I kept wondering whether you were alive—and wondering whether I could live with myself if you were dead. It's almost a relief to see you standing there. I know you don't believe that, but it's true.”

Rage spilled through Webb as he knocked the glass
from Doyle's hand with an angry sweep of his arm. “I could kill you for what you've done.” The bitter words sifted through his teeth in a low growl.

Doyle absently wiped at the whiskey splattered on his shirt. A sad smile was on his face when he looked up at Webb, towering over the desk. “It would be an act of mercy if you did. I'm ruined. These last couple of days, I've thought a lot about suicide, but I haven't got the guts. I guess that's why I've been sitting here waiting for you to come.”

When he'd strapped on the gun, it had been with killing in mind. Now Webb stepped back from the desk and smoothly pulled the gun from its holster. Doyle was sitting back in the chair, his wrinkled white shirt making an easy target. Webb flipped the gun, gripping it by the barrel, and laid it on the desk blotter.

“You've always persuaded someone else to do your dirty work. If it wasn't Kreuger, it was those drifters you hired to burn his place.” His low voice was riddled with contempt. “If you want to die, you're going to have to pull the trigger. I'm not going to make that easy for you, too.”

He swung away from the desk, his shoulders and back rigid as he walked to the door. “Webb, no!” He heard the sob in Doyle's voice, and kept going. “Don't leave me! Come back!”

He was in the hallway, reaching for the knob to the back doorway. He hesitated only a second, then yanked the door open and plunged into the false darkness of the duststorm. It swirled about him, obscuring the buckskin pressed against the building, its head hanging low. Webb picked up its trailing reins and began leading it out of the alley. The howling wind was punctuated by a popping sound. It could have been anything—the snap of a shingle tearing loose from a roof, or the crack of a bottle breaking against a foundation.

Crossing the street, Webb led the horse down the alley and ended up behind Sonny's place by the house where Simon had his practice. He put the buckskin in
the shed in back of the cabin and let himself into the cabin. Simon hadn't returned, probably holing up somewhere until the storm blew over. Webb poured himself a drink and stretched out in a chair, letting grief take over his expression and empty his features. At some point he fell asleep.

It was the silence that wakened him. The blasting storm had rolled on. As he stood up, he arched stiff and cramped muscles. His first thought was to get back to the ranch so Lilli wouldn't worry about him; then he remembered she wouldn't be at The Homestead. A heaviness dragged at him as he went out to the shed and saddled the buckskin.

When he led it outside, he saw the sheriff coming and paused. “Pettit's dead,” the sheriff announced, his glance running over Webb's face to judge his reaction. Nothing showed. A gun was tucked in the waistband of his pants. The sheriff took it out and showed it to Webb. “Is this yours?”

“Yes.” Webb took it and slipped it into his empty holster. Turning, he stepped into the saddle and adjusted the reins.

“Pettit left a note. Don't you want to know what was in it?” the sheriff asked. “There was a message for you. He wanted you to forgive him.”

Webb made no comment as he nudged his horse forward. Maybe Lilli could forgive him, but Webb couldn't. There were tears at the back of his eyes for the woman he'd lost. It was a grief he'd have in him for a long, lonely time. He pointed the buckskin toward the ranch and gave the horse its head.

From the front porch of The Homestead, Webb watched the early-morning sunlight glisten on the river's surface as it curled through the sprawling valley and around the ranch buildings. The cotton-woods were budding green and the vast grassland beyond was showing its spring colors. Overhead, the sky was a sharp blue, finally washed free of dust a few years ago when the rains came to signal the end of the killing drought.

He pulled his gaze from the upthrust of range to glance at Nate Moore. His stance was loosely hiplocked while he rolled a miserly cigarette, taking care not to lose a scrap of tobacco. There was something comforting about watching this cowboy building a smoke: a carrying-on of the old ways to keep a tradition going.

Three saddled horses were tied near the bottom of the porch steps, patiently waiting for their riders. The roundup crew and its accompanying remuda and chuck-wagon had left an hour earlier when the sun broke over the eastern horizon.

“When we was in town for the doc's funeral, I heard the old Beasley place north of here was bought by some sailor, home from the war, name of O'Rourke.” Nate passed on the information as he scraped a match against his pants and carried the flame to his cigarette.

“I met him.” Webb nodded. “He came and introduced himself to me. His tongue was a little too glib for my liking.”

Some of his pleasure in the morning went out of him as his mind turned to thoughts of Simon Bardolph.

He'd been a good friend. Maybe that's what made his death seem so senseless. Some drunken cowboy had decided to find out how fast his truck would go and slammed into the back of Simon's buggy, killing him instantly.

“Yeah, I guess O'Rourke talks like his cows are only going to have heifers.” Nate grinned. “It's a poor piece of land he's got—a lot of rough country and not much water.”

O'Rourke hadn't been here during the prolonged drought. And it was something that those who stayed and weathered it out didn't talk about. But of the nearly eighty thousand homesteaders who had come to till the dryland, over sixty thousand had abandoned their farms and moved out. It had turned into a massive exodus, leaving deserted farms and towns in their wake and more than two hundred failed banks.

So much had changed in such a short time. Anyone going into Blue Moon would find it hard to believe it had once been a boom town, a thriving community bursting at its seams. Most of the buildings had been burned when a transient had started a fire in a vacant store so he could keep warm.

The roadhouse was still standing, owned by a man named Jake. It had turned into a Montana version of a speakeasy, catering to the hard-drinking cowboy crowd that once again populated the region. Another building had been converted into a gasoline station, grocery store, and post office. The hardware store across the street had started carrying a dry-goods section when Ellis's emporium had gone up in smoke along with the livery. The railroad had abandoned its tracks into Blue Moon. It was just another wide spot in the road again.

All traces of what had been were wiped out. But the land still bore the mark, and it would never be the same again. Except where there was a source of water to irrigate, it had reverted to livestock range, domain of the cattleman. But the native grass never came back to the areas where the plow had turned the sod—that rich, high-protein grass that put hard weight on cattle. New,
tough grasses were sown on the millions of eroded acres, but it wasn't the same. The difference was starkly apparent when contrasted with the preserved range of the Triple C where the grassy plains survived.

The front door burst open and a young boy with a mop of dark hair and bold brown eyes came hurtling onto the porch. Webb turned, catching the boy and sweeping him into his arms to ride high. Chase was five years old, going on six, and eager for each new experience. When he looked at his son, Webb caught glimpses of Lilli in the boy's boldness and determination, even though Chase didn't have her coloring. It tightened his throat and stung his eyes—and deepened the love he had for the boy.

“I told Buck I was gonna rope a calf. I can, can't I?” he demanded eagerly.

Webb had made it a point to take his son with him whenever it was possible. This would be his first roundup, but certainly not his last.

“As much as you've been practicing, I don't see why you can't.” Webb smiled, then became conscious of someone standing in the background.