by Janet Dailey
When the wagon drew even with the tar-papered house, Stefan Reisner leaned back in the seat, pulling on the reins to halt the team. As soon as the forward motion had stopped, Lilli swung down from the wagon, unaided, and walked to the rear to begin unloading the day’s purchases from the wagon box. Stefan was slower to climb down, casting a side look at his young wife, as he had done several times before. There was irritation and impatience in his sternly questioning eyes, but he had voiced none of these to her.
“I vill take care of the horses.” Withdrawing his glance from her, he bent to unhitch the team and drive them to the corral.
“Supper will be ready in a few minutes,” Lilli responded.
Lilli deliberately left the woven basket along with heavier packages for Stefan to carry in after he had the team unharnessed. She juggled the two lighter packages in her arms to pull the latchstring hanging on the outside of the door.
The house was stuffy after being closed up all day long, so she left the door open and set the packages on the bed. Isinglass hung in the window opening. When they harvested their wheat crop, they hoped to replace it with real glass. Lilli rolled up the semitransparent covering to let in air and take advantage of all that was left of the waning light so she could conserve their precious supply of kerosene for the lantern.
Newspapers covered the inside walls to provide insulation, glued there with a paste made from flour and water. Two crude shelves attached to the wall stored cooking utensils and tableware as well as their meager supplies. The cookstove was the only source of heat, the range top also serving as a work counter. There wasn’t any table or chairs. The only other piece of furniture in the house was the bed, which Stefan had built. The mattress was stuffed with grasses and rested directly on the wooden slats that bridged the rough frame.
The few clothes they had were still stored in the cloth satchels, although there were wall pegs to hang hats and coats on. There was one trunk, which held the wash basin and water pail. And the warped floor was bare of any covering.
All the refinements and furnishings would come later. For now, it was an attempt to make do with what they had, and get through the first winter. Next year, they’d build a real frame house. Lilli considered herself fortunate to have this little shanty. A lot of the homesteaders, she’d learned, were living in sod homes. One family was even living in a cave they’d dug in a cutbank.
By the time Stefan had taken care of the horses and unloaded the rest of the wagon, Lilli had a cold supper dished onto a plate and waiting for him. Since they didn’t have a table and chairs yet, they had to sit on the edge of the bed and balance the plates on their laps.
It had long been Stefan’s custom to eat without talking. The purpose of a meal was to consume food, in his thinking, not to engage in conversation. That came before or after, but not during. With this single-minded attitude, he cleaned his plate before Lilli was half through with her meal, even though the helpings on her plate were smaller than his.
When Stefan stood up to carry his dirty plate to the metal basin, the buzzing fly that had pestered him throughout the meal switched its attack to Lilli’s plate. She absently waved a hand to keep it from landing on the few bites of food she had left. Leaving his plate and cutlery in the basin, Stefan stopped to light the lantern suspended by a wire from the middle of the ceiling to chase away the purpling shadows of twilight invading their humble abode.
He glanced at Lilli as he took his pipe from his pocket, but her head was bent toward the plate in her lap. After a meal, he always went outside to smoke his pipe. It was part of the daily routine of his life, so it wasn’t necessary to inform Lilli of it.
“Outside I am going to smoke,” he said.
A brief nod was her only response. His teeth bit down hard on the stem of the empty pipe as Stefan tramped stiffly out of the house. He paused beside the wagon and made a slow business of filling the pipe bowl with tobacco and tamping it down. Before lighting it, he studied the match flame to make certain the light breeze would blow the smoke away from the shanty. Lillian didn’t like the smell of smoke. Stefan knew the reason she didn’t, although she had blocked the cause from her mind.
It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t remember, since she had only been seven years old when the tenement building next to theirs had caught fire and burned to the ground, trapping many people inside. It had been a terrifying experience for a child. And long after the rubble of the burned building had been cleared away, the smell of smoke had stayed in the tiny apartment where they had all lived as one family.
The first stars were flickering in the night sky to join the sickle moon watching over the earth. To Stefan, the stars were like old friends that he hadn’t seen since he was a young man in Germany. Most nights he enjoyed watching them grow steadily brighter while he smoked his pipe. This night he was too troubled by his young wife to give them any notice.
Never had there been any serious friction between them. He couldn’t remember feeling anger toward her, nor any time when she had seemed angry with him. There had always been a smooth, gentle flow of affection between them, starting from the day she was born and Reinald had placed his daughter in the arms of his best friend. Her little fingers had tried to curl around his big thumb. The first link had been forged from that moment.
Through the years, Lillian had come to represent all the things a female might be to a man. First, she had been like a niece. When the consecutive deaths of her mother and father had left her orphaned, Stefan took on the role of family and raised her as his own daughter. But the scandal-minded gossips in the building had looked askance at a bachelor living with a fourteen-year-old girl. Their talk had emphasized the conflict of emotions he felt watching her mature into womanhood. It had been to ease these desires as much as a wish to keep her reputation unsullied that Stefan had suggested marriage on her fifteenth birthday. Lillian had agreed calmly and without any hesitation. The transition from niece/daughter to wife and mate had occurred with ease, so that neither of them was uncomfortable with the change.
Yet something had altered that today. As he puffed on his pipe, Stefan was gnawed by a fear he couldn’t define. Lillian was wise to the dangers of the city, yet she seemed to have abandoned all sense of caution since coming out here. She had heard Franz Kreuger telling how that rancher had sent one of his men to threaten Kreuger’s family, so she should have avoided any association with that cowboy or anyone directly connected to the ranch community unless they had established friendly ties with the homesteaders the way Wessel’s partner had done.
Perhaps he needed to explain that to her. The fire in his pipe bowl had gone out. He knocked the bottom against the heel of his hand to empty the dead ashes on the ground. With the pipe once again tucked in his pocket, Stefan entered the tar-papered house.
The dishes were all washed and dried and stacked on their portion of the shelf. Lillian was untying her apron when he came in. She looked away from him as she turned, folding her apron to lay it on the trunk by the basin. Stefan hesitated, then walked to the bed and sat down.
“Come sit, liebchen,” he requested, softening some of the firmness in his tone by his use of the affectionate reference to her. “Ve talk.”
With her shoulders naturally squared and her chin jutting slightly forward, Lillian approached the bed and sat sideways on the edge to face him. Her deep blue eyes showed a surface calm and not what simmered behind it.
“You are angered vith me because of vhat happened today.” Stefan bluntly broached the issue. “But there is much that you don’t understand.”
“Yes, I am angry,” she admitted. “Because you wouldn’t listen to me. What he said to you was true. He had politely insisted on carrying the basket to the wagon for me. It was a gentlemanly act and that was all.”
He listened patiently to her defense of the man and tried not to give rise to the anger that stirred within. When she had finished, he challenged quietly, “What do you know of this cowboy?”
“I don
’t know very much about him,” she grudgingly acknowledged, but qualified it. “Except he treated me with respect. He certainly didn’t do anything to deserve the way you attacked him. He had made no unseemly advances.”
Stefan sat up straighter, stiffening at her criticism. “I vished only to keep any harm from coming to you.”
“Why on earth would he want to harm me?” Lillian argued. “Do you remember when we arrived by train and I spoke to a cowboy waiting at the station? That was the same cowboy.”
“And that was also the same cowboy that tried to threaten Franz Kreuger and his family,” Stefan declared.
“The same one?” Her expression clouded with a bewildered frown. “Are you sure?”
“Franz pointed him out to me. Yes, I am sure,” he stated, and went a step further. “He is also the son of that rancher Calder.”
“How do you know that?” Her frown deepened. “Did Mr. Kreuger tell you?”
“No. The shopkeeper did. He vas most upset that the incident had occurred in front of his store. I heard him apologizing to a lady he addressed as Mrs. Calder. He vanted her to know he vasn’t responsible for vhat had happened vith her son.”
“I see.” The evidence seemed irrefutable, yet Lillian didn’t understand why she was so reluctant to accept that he was the son of the powerful rancher.
“Now you see vhy I didn’t vant him near you.” He was certain she would understand that he had been right to behave as he did.
Lillian didn’t answer immediately as she tried to sort through all the conflicting thoughts running through her head. “I’m sure you believe you were justified.” She gave him that. “But he had said and done nothing mean to me. He was being friendly and courteous.”
“Vhat did he say to you?” Stefan asked patiently. Women tended to be gullible. Perhaps Lillian was acquiring that female trait.
“Definitely nothing threatening,” she insisted. “He remembered speaking to me at the train station and asked if we had found a place nearby.”
“And you told him?” he prompted.
“Yes.” She didn’t regard it as a secret. Then she recalled something else and a flash of uncertainty crossed her expression. “He did ask whether our land was near Mr. Kreuger’s,” she added hesitantly.
“It is obvious that it vas information from you he vas seeking.” Now he was fully convinced he had been right in thinking the cowboy was up to no good.
The idea troubled her. Even though she had only met him twice, she had liked that dark-haired cowboy named Webb. Webb Calder. She knew the rest of his name now.
“It is late.” He laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “The sun is sleeping. That is vhat ve should be doing, too.”
An unsatisfied sigh came from Lillian as she stood up to fetch their nightclothes from the satchels. There were questions in her mind without answers, and Webb Calder was the only person who could supply them.
Stefan closed the door, securing the latchstring on the inside, and rolled the isinglass down to cover the window opening. Lillian handed him his nightshirt and began unbuttoning her dress as he turned out the lantern. In the near darkness, she took off her clothes and slipped on the long nightgown.
By the time she had combed out her hair and plaited it into a single braid, Stefan was already in bed beneath the quilted cover. She laid beside him in the narrow bed, the bony length of his body next to hers, offering companionable warmth.
“Will you finish digging the well tomorrow?” Lillian tried to force her mind away from the cowboy and onto more essential subjects.
“No. Tomorrow I vill go to Franz Kreuger’s farm and help him plow his field so he can plant his vheat,” Stefan informed her. “I vill be home before dark.”
“What about the well? And the table you were going to build?” She turned her head, trying to see his whiskered profile in the darkness.
“Franz vill come to help dig the veil. Then I vill build your table and chairs,” he stated. “Ve must all of us help each other. It is good to have neighbors.”
“Yes.” She rolled onto her side, facing away from Stefan as she unwillingly thought of another neighbor of theirs. “Good night, Stefan.”
“Good night.” His voice already had a drowsy sound to it.
Lillian didn’t find it that easy to fall asleep.
Before first light broke, Webb had roped his horse out of the corral and was throwing on the saddle. There was a light over in the cookshack, which meant breakfast would soon be on the griddle, but Webb didn’t intend to wait around for it.
The anger hadn’t left him in the nearly two days since his run-in with the aging homesteader. The memory of it continued to gall him like an irritated saddle sore. And the last day and a half spent at the headquarters with his father and Bull Giles had only added salt to the wound. He was riding out before his father could order him to spend another day confined in futile discussions.
With the cinch tightened, he dropped the stirrup and swung into the saddle. The frisky gelding made a few crow-hops, then settled into a brisk walk that carried Webb away from the ranch buildings. Away was the only direction he had in mind; the farther the better. Out of earshot of the ranch, he let the horse set its own pace.
Midmorning found him miles from the headquarters of the Triple C with the fenceline of the east boundary in front of him. The gelding sidled along the barrier, waiting for a command from its rider as to the next direction. Webb applied pressure on the bit to check it to a halt and uncoiled the rope tied below the saddle-horn. He dropped the loop over the fence post and turned the horse away from it, taking a wrap around the horn with the free end of the rope.
A touch of the spurs had the horse straining against the partially anchored weight. The wooden post groaned; then the earthen bed gave way at its base. Dismounting, Webb freed the loop from the post and walked his horse across the downed fenceline, then righted the post again, stamping at the loose earth around its base until it was solidly in place.
When he was in the saddle again, he angled the horse toward the southeast. He knew where he was going now, the destination that had been in the back of his mind all along. He pushed the horse into a ground-covering lope and watched the landscape for a long strip of barren earth.
Perspiration trickled down her neck. Lillian paused in the hoeing of her garden to wipe at it with the hem of her apron. A movement in the distance caught her eye. Thinking it might be Stefan coming back from Franz Kreuger’s place, she stopped to take a closer look. He had said he doubted if he would be home until the afternoon, but it was possible they had finished the plowing sooner than he had expected.
But there was just one horse, not a team. And it was being ridden, not driven, so it couldn’t be Stefan. More than that, he was riding diagonally through the young wheatfield. Stefan would never risk damaging the young stalks. Lilli gripped the hoe with both hands as she tried to identify the rider.
The shantylike building belonged to the bleak landscape, churned and stripped of its protective grass. A wagon stood in front of it, but Webb noted that the corral was empty of the horse team. His eyes searched the land without finding any sign of horse and plow. He was about to conclude there was no one about when he saw a figure on the south side of the shack. From a distance, the dark color of her dress had blended in with the landscape. Hatless, her dark hair glinted with the sun’s fire. Something tightened inside him.
She watched his approach, but didn’t come forward to greet him even after he stopped his horse. There was a wariness in her look, a hint of distrust that he hadn’t seen in her eyes before. Still, she didn’t speak. The custom of the range was to invite a man to step down from his horse, but she made no offer.
“Could you spare some water for my horse?” Webb broke the silence with his terse request.
“There’s some in the barrel.” She motioned to the wagon box.
He curtly nodded his thanks and swung out of the saddle to lead his horse to the wagon. Out of the corner of his eye,
he was conscious that she followed him, as if she thought he intended to steal something. She gripped the hoe like a weapon.
Since she didn’t offer him the use of a bucket, Webb took off his hat and ladled a couple of dipperfuls into the upturned crown. When he turned to offer the water to his horse, he was facing her. His glance slid over her and back to the horse as it buried its nose in the hat to suck up the water.
“Did you get your basket home safely?” He baited her with the memory of the incident, feeling someone owed him an apology.
“Yes.” She watched him as if she expected him to sprout horns any minute and was ready to chop them off with her hoe if he did. She tipped her head slightly to one side. “You’re Mr. Calder’s son, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The horse had drunk its fill, and Webb used the moment to empty the rest of the water from his hat. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your last name, Mrs.—” He put biting emphasis on her marital status and moved leisurely to the left side of his horse as if to mount it, but the action brought him within two feet of her.
“Reisner. Mrs. Stefan Reisner,” she said without a trace of guilt or regret.
“Is your husband about?” His gaze made another arc around the homestead.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just wondered.” Webb brought his attention back to her. Then he looked down to her left hand. “You aren’t wearing a wedding ring,” he accused.
“No, I’m not.” Her gaze faltered under the level study of his. “Stefan and I decided we would rather use the money to come out here than buy a ring.”
This time he looked away, struggling against the anger he felt. “You knew that I thought you were single, Lilli,” he muttered in a thick, rough voice. “You should let a man know such things before he goes making a fool of himself.”
“Our acquaintance has been brief, Mr. Calder—” She was a little pale suddenly.