by Janet Dailey
“There are a lot of hard decisions a man has to have the stomach to make, some more unpleasant than others. Angus was warned and given the chance to leave the Triple C alone, but he came back to take more cattle. If you let one man walk over you, then two will, then three, then four … so many that you won’t be able to stop them. You have to stop the first man, or they’ll all eventually come. Angus made it clear that he wanted to bring the Triple C to its knees”
“It started because I had taken his daughter.” Chase spoke in a flat voice, devoid of emotion.
“No.” Webb didn’t accept that. “The farmer, Anderson, has a son about your age. If O’Rourke’s girl had started slipping off to meet him, Angus would have turned a blind eye and shrugged it off as part of being young and impetuous. But you are a Calder, and Angus used you as an excuse. You became his justification for stealing Triple C cattle. If it hadn’t been you, he would have found something else. And he would have kept on stealing because it made him feel big. Angus hated being small.”
Chase took in a breath and let it out, turning a cynical glance out the window. “I can’t say that I feel big right now … or proud.”
“There was nothing good about what happened today.” Webb felt easier in his mind. A man had to face up to things without liking them, which was what his son was doing. “You can’t go through this world without being scarred. That’s part of life. You aren’t living in a paradise. There’s always dirty work to be done, but don’t ever send someone else to do it for you.”
Webb was satisfied with his son’s attitude and lapsed into silence to let Chase think over what he’d said. So far the road to manhood had been relatively smooth for his son, but it was going to get rougher and lonelier. Webb had traveled it once himself, so he knew what he had to prepare his son for.
Just before the evening meal, the telephone rang in the den. Webb waved Chase back into his chair. “I’ll answer it.” He walked to the extension on his desk and picked up the receiver. “Triple C.”
“Webb? This is Sheriff Potter,” said the slow-talking voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, Sheriff. What can I do for you?” Webb sat his drink down and moved behind the desk to sit in the swivel chair, leaning back to gaze sightlessly at the ceiling of the den.
“I thought you might like to know that Angus O’Rourke was found dead in his barn today. Hanged,” he drawled heavily.
“Committed suicide, did he?”
There was a long pause before the sheriff answered. “That’s the way it looks to me.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it is,” the sheriff confirmed in a sigh. “Well, I just thought you’d want to know.”
“I appreciate the call.”
“Any more problems with those rustlers?”
“No. I guess they’re going to leave us alone.”
“Good. Take care now, Webb.”
“You do the same.” He replaced the receiver with a thoughtful look, glanced at Chase, but made no comment.
Chapter XIV
The scissors lay beside her on a table, but Maggie bit the dark thread with her teeth and set the spool aside. Moistening the frayed end of the thread to a point, she ran it unerringly through the eye of a needle; then her fingers rolled the end of a thread into a knot. The button didn’t exactly match the others on the suit jacket, but it was the closest she had been able to find in her mother’s sewing basket. Her mind was empty, blessedly blank, as she held the button in place with a thumb and forefinger and ran the needle through the cloth, its silver point pushing up from the thread hole of the button. It was a simple task to sew on a missing button, requiring little concentration, something that could be done automatically, but it was infinitely better to be occupied. She could drift, feeling no pain, no grief, no bitterness or hatred, just numbness while the silvery needle flashed in and out of the button.
A pickup drove into the yard, breaking the stillness. Her gaze lifted from the suit jacket to the front window. It was probably Culley coming home from town, she thought absently. But it was a tall, loose-striding man who was approaching the porch steps. Her fingers lost their rhythm with the needle, and its sharp point jabbed into a sensitive fingertip. All the tangle of hot emotions returned to burn her into consciousness as she sucked at the red spot of blood on her finger. When Chase Calder knocked on the screen door, it thumped against its frame.
Maggie neither moved from her chair nor looked up. “Come in.” There was no trace in her voice of all that seethed inside.
The door was opened, that sound followed by footsteps entering. They hesitated, then came the rest of the way into the room and stopped by her chair. She could see the brown toes of his boots as she knotted the thread and picked up the scissors to snip it in two.
“Hello, Maggie.” His voice was quiet.
“There was a button missing on the suit.” She poked the needle and thread into the strawberry pincushion and draped the jacket over the arm of the chair. “I had to sew it on because my father is going to be buried in it. It’s the only suit he owned.” Maggie stood up, her fingers still tightly gripping the handles of the scissors.
Chase had removed his hat and was holding it in front of him. His broad chest lifted as he took a deep breath and brought his gaze up to meet the dark green of hers. “I’m sorry about your father, Maggie,” he said grimly. “If there is anything I can do—”
His hypocrisy sent the blood rushing hotly through her veins. “There is nothing you can do now! If you wanted to do something to help, why didn’t you stop them from hanging him?!!” she raged. Shock flickered across his carved features. It made her taunt him with what she knew. “I saw you with your father and the others. You didn’t think anybody else was here to watch you hang him, did you? But we saw it all!!”
He turned his head aside, showing her a hawk-like profile. A muscle worked along his jawline as he appeared to struggle to control some emotion. Then he swung back to look at her, nothing showing in his expression, neither regret nor sorrow.
“I wish you hadn’t.” There was no break in his voice, all feeling repressed. She faced him, staring at a stranger, not at a man in whose arms she had lain so many times. Inside, she was coiling like a rattlesnake preparing to strike. His eyes grew narrower, probing in their intensity. “You heard your father admit that he was the one who had been stealing our cattle.”
“He didn’t do it alone!” Maggie flared. “What about the others? Are you going to hang them, too? I’m part of it. I knew about their raids. I even covered for them. Are you going to hang me, too?”
The admission caught Chase unaware. Until that moment he had believed she knew nothing of her father’s involvement in rustling Calder beef. A cold sense of betrayal ran through him.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he demanded.
“What would you have done? Turned me over to your father?” She was trembling with the rage that boiled inside. It hammered against her control, seeking an outlet, an escape. “What do you suppose he would have done to me? Strung me up beside my pa?”
Chase bristled. “My father wouldn’t have lifted a hand against you. He wouldn’t intentionally harm a woman.”
“That’s where he made his mistake!” She shook with fury, her hand tightening on the scissors. “You should have gotten rid of all of us! All of us! Do you hear?!!”
Something warned him at the last second. Perhaps it was the steel blades of the scissors flashing in the sunlight or the slight movement of her head that signaled her strike. But as her hand arced toward his stomach, Chase hunched away from it and flung up his arm to knock the scissors off target. The blade points ripped into his shirtsleeve and raked a diagonal slash the length of his forearm. It felt as if a hot iron had been laid across his skin, but there was no time to consider his wound.
He grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the scissors and wrenched it backward until he heard her gasp of pain mixed with the animal sounds of corne
red rage, and then her fingers unwillingly loosened their grip. A wide band of blood was already staining his shirt red and running onto the back of his hand when he took the scissors from her and pushed her backward, away from him.
A violent swing of his arm threw the scissors to the far side of the room. The action sent a raft of pain shooting up his arm. It produced an involuntary grimace as he clamped a hand over the throbbing wound and felt the blood pulsing from it to seep between his fingers, warm and sticky.
“You crazy little fool!” He glared at Maggie, holding his bloodied arm. In the state she was in, there was no hope of reasoning with her, but he couldn’t blame her for the bitter hatred she felt over what they’d done. He scooped his hat off the floor and jammed it onto his head as he turned and walked out, blood dripping from the ends of his fingers.
In the cab of the truck, Chase pulled the handkerchief from his back pocket and wrapped it around his arm just below the elbow. Holding one end in his teeth, he pulled the knot tight in an effort to apply pressure to the wound and stem the flow of blood. His whole arm felt like it was on fire.
When he finally arrived at the Triple C, he was gritting his teeth against the pain. He drove directly to the first-aid dispensary and parked in front of it. The bleeding had practically stopped, but the bottom half of his sleeve was saturated with blood and it had started to cake on his hand and fingers. He climbed out of the truck, gingerly holding his forearm.
“Hey, Chase!” Buck came trotting toward him. “Webb’s been looking for you. Where have you been?” Then he noticed Chase’s arm and the questioning smile was wiped from his face. “Holy shit! What did you do to your arm?”
Chase ignored the questions and continued on his way to the first-aid office. “Come on inside and help me get it fixed up.” Buck hurried forward to open the door and Chase walked directly to the sink, tugging at the knotted handkerchief. When it was loose, he turned to Buck. “Rip the sleeve off at the elbow. The shirt’s ruined, anyway.” The front of it was all smeared with blood.
The material tore easily at Buck’s pull and fell around his wrist. Chase unbuttoned the cuff and tossed the blood-wet sleeve into the wastebasket. Turning on the faucet, he held his arm under the water to wash off the worst of the blood. The force of the water beating against the ragged wound rekindled the fiery pain. Chase was white around the mouth before he was through, and a little shaky in the knees.
Grabbing a chair, he pulled it up to the sink and sat down, resting his arm on the counter. “You can finish it,” he told Buck and took off his hat to hook it on the spindled top of another chair. Blood had started to ooze slowly from the jagged slash.
Buck looked at it and shook his head. “What did you do? Get in a knife fight with somebody?” He dabbed at the ugly wound.
“Will you just shut up and take care of it?” He ground out the demand, fighting the waves of weakness that washed through him.
“This looks deep, Chase.” There was a worried look of concentration on his friend’s face. “Maybe I should take you into the doc and have it stitched.”
Chase flexed the fingers in his hand and made a fist. It hurt like hell, but he couldn’t feel any damage to the muscles or nerves. “If it has to be sewed, you can do it. You’ve stitched up enough animals; you should know how it’s done.”
Buck hesitated, uncertain. “You might need a shot for tetanus.”
“No, the scissors were clean.” Besides, he’d bled enough to eliminate any risk of infection.
“Scissors?” Buck looked at him with raised eyebrows. “A woman did this?”
“Would you get the damned sutures out of the drawer and sew this up! And stop asking questions!” Chase snapped.
“All right. You don’t have to bite my head off.” Buck recoiled with mock exaggeration and walked over to a cupboard where the sterilized needles and suture thread were kept. Before he started to sew up the wound, he glanced at Chase. “This is going to hurt. You know that?” At the glaring answer he received from Chase, Buck shrugged to indicate he’d been warned and inserted the needle into the flesh to make the first stitch.
Sweat broke out on his forehead as Chase clamped his teeth shut against the waves of pain. His arm quivered with the effort of trying to remain motionless, aided by the iron grip Buck kept on it. Each breath bordered on a groan.
“Did you hear Angus O’Rourke hanged himself yesterday?” Buck inquired to make conversation.
“Yeah, I heard.” Chase wished he’d chosen a different subject. “Damn it, I could use a drink.”
“They oughta keep some whiskey in here,” Buck mused, then spared a second to grin. “‘Course, these cowboys would come running in here every time they bruised their finger.”
“Aren’t you finished yet?” Chase asked through his teeth and glanced over to see Buck tie off the last stitch and step back to admire his handiwork.
“I bet I would have made a good surgeon,” he declared as he began expertly bandaging the wound.
“Not with your bedside manner,” Chase denied. “You get too much pleasure out of other people’s pain.”
The door opened as Buck applied the last strip of adhesive tape to hold the gauze pad in place. Chase glanced over his shoulder, then let his gaze slide away without meeting his father’s.
“I saw the truck outside.” Webb Calder wore a frown at the bandage running the length of Chase’s forearm. “What happened?”
“I cut myself. Buck overdid it in the bandage department.” Chase attempted to make it sound like a minor wound, but he was slow rising to his feet, unsure of their support. “I guess he’s practicing to become a doctor.”
Buck took the hint and discreetly gathered the instruments before Webb noticed them, concealing them in the folds of a towel. He carried them to the far side of the room to stash them for the time being. He heard Webb question Chase about where he’d been and strained to catch the low answer.
“I went to see Maggie.” Chase picked up his hat and examined the inner sweatband. “She was there—both she and Culley. They saw us—all of us.”
Webb breathed in deeply and let it out in a troubled sigh. “I didn’t know.”
“No.” Chase put his hat on, setting it on his forehead first, then pushing it down on the back of his head. “I’m going away for a week or two.”
His father let the statement ride for a minute or two, then asked simply, “Where?”
“I thought I’d take a packhorse and head up into the mountains, maybe check some fences.” Chase studied the pattern of the floor tile. “I guess it never would have come to anything. Maybe I knew that from the beginning.”
It took Buck a minute to realize Chase was referring to Maggie O’Rourke. He pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he guessed she had been the woman with the scissors. The other part about her seeing them, he hadn’t figured out yet. At first he had thought Chase meant the girl had seen her father hang himself, but when he’d added that she’d seen them, it hadn’t made sense. What would Webb and Chase be doing there? But he’d said “all of us.” Webb and Chase had gone somewhere yesterday morning. He’d seen them load up their horses and leave together. Nate had taken off, too—and Stumpy. Buck decided it might be interesting to find out who else had disappeared at the same time.
“If you feel it’s necessary to go away, I won’t try to stop you.” But Webb didn’t sound pleased.
“I need some time to think things through.” Chase didn’t back down.
“When will you leave?”
“Now—this afternoon, as soon as I get some things packed.” Cradling his injured arm against his waist, Chase moved past his father and out the door of the dispensary.
By four o’clock that afternoon, he was riding out of the ranch yard on a liver-colored chestnut, a bedroll tied behind his saddle and supplies loaded on the spotted packhorse he was leading. He headed toward the small range of mountains that intruded on the western edge of the Triple C.
The next day was Thursd
ay, the day that Doc Barlow regularly had his clinic opened. When Maggie walked out of his examining room, nobody thought it was odd that she looked so white and strained or that she didn’t speak to anyone. The poor child was burying her father the next day. Wasn’t it terrible that Angus had committed suicide, leaving two youngsters orphaned? Their tongues wagged in pity.
Culley was waiting for her at Tucker’s café. Tucker was the only one who actually knew the truth about the way their father had died. Culley had informed him the day it had happened. Tucker had turned white as a sheet and questioned them to find out if Calder knew he had been involved. Culley had angrily denied the insinuation that his father had given Calder any names. But Tucker had seemed equally worried about what Calder might do to them and agreed that no one would believe their story.
When Maggie slipped into the booth where Culley was sitting, he asked, “Did the doc give you some pills to help you sleep?”
That had been her excuse for seeing the doctor. She wasn’t ready yet to tell her brother that she was pregnant, so she let him believe the other reason for a while longer. “Yes.”
Tucker brought her a piece of apple pie and a glass of milk without bothering to ask if she wanted anything. “How are you feeling?” He had assumed the role of a distant relative, a kind of Dutch uncle to the pair.
“Fine.” She nodded and glanced uncertainly at the pie.
“It’s on the house,” he assured her, then moved away as another customer entered.
“Tucker and I have been talking,” Culley began, leaning forward in a somewhat earnest manner. “And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what we’re going to do now that Pa is gone. I found Aunt Cathleen’s phone number in an old address book of Mom’s. I called her a little while ago to tell her about Pa … and to ask her if you could come live with her.”