by Janet Dailey
There was a time when he first came to this empty country to begin his practice that he would have raced down the steps to treat an injured patient, but he’d since learned to ration his energy. It was rarely a life-or-death situation, so he neither took his time nor rushed.
The cowboy had an assortment of injuries including a dislocated shoulder, some busted ribs, and broken fingers, plus a deep cut that required some stitching. Those were the injuries Simon could treat; the multitude of bruises would have to heal on their own. Niles had been worked over thoroughly, and looked worse than the injuries indicated. Simon was taping up his ribs and shoulder when Webb walked in.
At first, Webb didn’t even recognize Shorty Niles. Both eyes were blackened and swollen to mere slits, the purpling bruises spreading across the rest of his facial features. His chest was swathed in bandages. Red blood was seeping to the surface of the bandage on his forearm. His puffy lips were split in several places and a couple of front teeth were missing. The only clue to the man’s identity was the shortness of his stature.
“What happened?” Webb asked the doctor, then glanced at Slim Trumbo, who also bore some marks of battle.
“He isn’t as bad as he looks.” Simon Bardolph secured the bandage and handed Shorty his shirt. “Although I guarantee you he hurts like hell.”
“How did it happen?” Webb repeated his question, addressing it strictly to his two men as Slim helped Shorty ease his shirt on. Both men avoided looking at him.
“They got into a fight in town,” Simon volunteered as he repacked his medical bag and closed it up.
“Who with?” The doctor shrugged at Webb’s question and Slim shifted uncomfortably under his steady regard, darting glances at Shorty. “They nearly beat your face into a pulp, Shorty.”
Shorty Niles said something that sounded like “personal,” but with his missing teeth and battered mouth, it was difficult to understand his words. Slim handed the cowboy his hat.
“You were with him, Slim,” Webb stated. “You tell me what happened.” Again he had the feeling something was being kept from him as the cowboy glanced at his injured buddy.
“You know how Shorty is,” he hedged. “Somebody said something to him that he didn’t like and he laid into ’em. ‘Fare I knew what happened, they were swarm in’ all over him.”
“Who?”
Slim shrugged nervously. “Just some nesters,” he said without naming names. “Kreuger and his friends?” Webb guessed.
Slim looked down at his boots and glanced at Shorty. There was a faint negative shake of the cowboy’s head, warning Slim to keep silent.
“We didn’t catch their names,” Slim mumbled, and tried to joke his way out of the question. “They didn’t exactly take time to introduce themselves.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Webb stated and gave them both a hard, cold look. Suspicions were already forming in his mind. “You might as well admit it was Kreuger, and go ahead and tell me what he said.”
“He said something Shorty didn’t like, that’s all,” Slim insisted. “I’d better be gettin’ Shorty over to the bunkhouse.”
“What was it Kreuger said?” Webb demanded. Their secretiveness convinced him it was something he would find personally offensive. They would have openly admitted if it had been against the ranch or cowboys, but they were trying to keep the subject from him. “Was the remark aimed at my wife?”
Slim licked his lips and didn’t say anything, but Shorty spoke, as clearly as he could, “Da bastard was tellin’ lies.”
“Slim. What did Kreuger say?” Webb challenged.
“Just a bunch of crap about you messin’ around with her when she was still married and that you got shot by her husband. He was just callin’ both of you names. Shorty tried to shut him up and—” He stopped, looking uncomfortable. “Nobody listens to Kreuger He’s just a bag of wind.”
“Yeah.” It was a hard, dry word that confirmed what Webb had been suspecting. Anger burned slowly in him, gathering heat and gradually expanding to spread through his system.
Simon nodded to the cowboy to escort the injured man out of the room. This time Webb didn’t try to stop him, possessing enough details to fill in the rest of the story.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any good whiskey in the house, would you, Webb?” the doctor inquired. “I could use a glass—purely medicinal, of course.”
“There’s some in the den.” It was an offhand reply, given without actual thought to the subject. Webb was thinking about Franz Kreuger. His hands were tied. The drylander wouldn’t listen to reason, and the fight he’d had with him last fall obviously had made no difference, so it was futile to think he could silence him. Kreuger was going to continue to spread his malicious talk, and there was nothing Webb could do about it except keep it from Lilli if he could. “How’s Lilli?” As he asked the question, he was struggling to control his anger and frustration, removing his hat to rake a hand through his hair.
“She’s going to be fine.”
“What was wrong with her?” An inquiring eyebrow was lifted at the doctor.
“I’ll let her tell you.” Simon smiled faintly. “I’ll help myself to some of your whiskey while you go upstairs and see her. I know she’s been anxious for you to come home.”
Simon Bardolph lingered a moment in the living room to watch Webb Calder climb the stairs. There was a glimmer of envy in his eyes as he turned to walk to the den.
25
It was dawn. The entire eastern horizon seemed ablaze with the fiery orange light of the rising sun as it began its scorching track across the sky. According to the calendar, spring had come and gone, but the Montana land hadn’t known its green colors. The countryside was still wearing its brown mantle of hibernation, slumbering under its dead covering of dry grass in the middle of summer.
With a coffee cup in hand, Webb stood at the dining-room window and watched the sun come up through the dusty pane. The ever-constant dust was a chafing reminder of the drought that gripped the land. It weighted the air, refracting the sun’s rays and creating spectacular sunrises and sundowns. It seeped through cracks and left a film of powdery grit on the tops of furniture. Dusting was a futile chore, because an hour later, the grit would be back.
There had been a few times when clouds had darkened the sky and teased the dry air with a hint of moisture. Thunder had rolled in taunting chuckles and sheets of lightning had splintered from the thunder-heads. Then the gray clouds had briefly spit at the panting land and raced elsewhere to play their cruel tricks. Streams were dry and the rivers were shrinking.
All through spring and most of the summer, they had been constantly moving cattle. Webb couldn’t run the risk of grazing any section of the Triple C range down to bare earth, so they kept shifting the herds from one section to another. In between those times, the men were constantly checking on the range conditions in other areas, determining where the water supply was stable and where it was within reach of available graze.
Everything was paper-dry. The entire ranch, six hundred square miles of it, could go up like a tinder-box. All it would take was one spark. Smoking and campfires of any kind were forbidden. Patrols and fire watches had become part of the ranch routine. Where no natural firebreaks existed in a section, they were created.
Dust storms were becoming common. They came in a dark wall of wind that shut out the sun and prematurely darkened the sky. Dirt rolled into billowing clouds that hugged the ground, whipping along anything that wasn’t nailed down.
Webb tipped the coffee cup to his mouth and drained it. A wry slant tilted his mouth as his thoughts turned back to that evening so long ago when Bull Giles had warned him he’d always have to fight to keep the ranch. He had never expected to be involved in a full-scale war with Mother Nature.
He heard the clatter of horses approaching The Homestead, their iron-clad hooves thudding over stone-hard dirt. Turning from the window, he started to walk to the table to leave his cup and begin another day’s work. The s
ight of his sleepy wife entering the dining room stopped him.
Her auburn hair was loose and disheveled, lying about her shoulders in tousled disarray. There was a Madonna-like radiance about her sleep-softened features that reached out to him and gripped his throat with an aching tightness. Damn, but it was true. The pregnancy had made her more beautiful, more desirable. She was tying the sash of her robe, knotting it above the protruding bulge of her stomach.
“Good morning.” Leaving the cup on the table, he walked to her and let his arms circle her, gathering her in close. He kissed at her lips, feeling their pliant giving. His hands moved randomly over her shoulders and spine, enjoying the feel of her essentially slim body.
“The boys are outside.” Lilli could hear the familiar shuffle of hooves and chomping bits as she fingered the collar of his shirt, tracing its opening. “I thought I’d be able to have a cup of coffee with you before you left.”
“You make it hard for a man to leave his house.” He resisted the stirrings in his loins and withdrew his arms to take hold of her hands, kissing her white knuckles before letting them go. “You’ll take care of yourself?”
“Yes.” She smiled at him, amused by his persistent concern. “Ruth is coming over this afternoon so we can finish the quilts for the babies.” With Webb gone so much this summer and spring, Lilli had developed a close friendship with the blond-haired Ruth. It had started simply as a sharing of common concerns, since both of them were pregnant for the first time and their husbands were absent a great part of the day. It grew from there.
“I don’t like leaving you alone so much.” Especially now that she was approaching the end of her term.
“You have enough on your mind. Don’t be worrying about me and little Chase Benteen Calder.” She laid a hand on the top of her stomach, absently caressing it. The day she’d found out she was pregnant, Lilli had told Webb she wanted to name their baby after his father if it was a boy.
“That’s going to be a funny name for a girl,” he teased and tapped the end of her nose with his finger.
She laughed, and the smile lingered on her face well after the front door had closed behind Webb.
The kerchief was tied up around his nose and mouth to filter out the dust churned up by the cattle. As they reached the chosen section of range, Webb pulled his horse back with the other riders to let the cows scatter and drift. His dark eyes were squinted against the stinging dust, watching the dull red hides of the Hereford cattle encapsulated in a tan haze. The dry, brittle grass under his horse’s hooves crackled and rustled like straw.
A pull on the reins stopped the bay horse. It bobbed its head and snorted loudly to rid its nostrils of the clogging dust. A dry, keening wind whispered through the dead stalks of grass that held the soil in place. Webb gripped the point of his kerchief and tugged it down around his neck. He had stopped his mount on a high bench of land that gave him an overview of the surrounding countryside. To the east, he could see the fenceline snaking over the plains to mark the ranch boundary. The other side belonged to drylanders. His range was in pitiful condition, but it was nothing compared to the wheat farmers’ land.
The crops in the fields were stunted from lack of moisture, more thistle growing than wheat. But it was the acres that were plowed and left fallow that sickened Webb. The wind was blowing the dry earth away, drifting it into dirt dunes, piling it into mounds, then tearing them down again. All along the fenceline, dirt was deposited in drifts like black snow; in places, it was piled high enough to reach the bottom strand of wire. It was a bleakly ominous sight. If a torrential rain came now, the topsoil would be washed away, and a man didn’t have to dig down very far in this country before he ran out of dirt.
Under his breath, Webb muttered a savage assertion. “I’m glad my father’s not alive to see this.”
His horse shifted restlessly beneath him as another horse swung its rump into it. “Did you say somethin’, Webb?” Nate asked, pulling down his kerchief to speak.
The shake of his head was curtly negative. The saddle leather creaked as Webb half-turned to look at the other riders. Dirt lay in a dark film across their foreheads and cheekbones, but their kerchiefs had left a mark across the lower half of their faces where the dust hadn’t been able to settle in thick layers.
Virg Haskell had taken off his hat to mop the sweat from his forehead. He used the hat to point at the sky. “Looks like we got a lonely raincloud headed our way.” He continued to watch the dark patch looming closer. “Funny-looking, isn’t it?”
It was changing colors. What had started as a dark gray blot now had an obscene green cast to it. A growing dread began to take hold of Webb as he stared at it. When the angle of the sun’s light caught it and gave it a silver sheen, there wasn’t any more doubt.
“It’s a cloud of ‘hoppers.” Webb tightened his grip on the reins, announcing what some of the other, experienced hands were guessing.
As the living blanket of insects came overhead, the whirring and clacking sound grew louder. Webb’s horse moved restively, nervously swiveling its ears. The grasshoppers began dropping onto the ground, falling out of the sky like hailstones. The range-wild cattle were still in a loose bunch when they were suddenly pelted by the falling insects. Their panic was immediate; the lead cow stampeded to the east and the rest followed, lumbering into a run that shook the ground.
Before the riders could spur their horses after the stampeding herd, the onslaught of grasshoppers hit them. There was a confusion of plunging and rearing horses, whinnying their fright at this noisy rainstorm of crawling things. They beat down on his hat as Webb hunched his shoulders and tried to line his horse out to ride away from the deluge. The precious grass was already being blanketed by the insects, chomping noisily and voraciously on every twig and blade in sight.
The boundary fence couldn’t hold back the stampeding cattle. Posts snapped and wire popped under the pressure of the panicked beasts. An eternity passed before the riders got control of their mounts. By then, the surrounding land was covered with grasshoppers three inches deep. They struck out after the cattle, their horses wading nervously through the insects and snorting at the slippery footing.
No one spoke. No one said a word. The grasshoppers were everywhere, covering every inch of ground, every blade of grass, and every thistle stalk. The weight of them bent tall plants to the ground. The noise of the chewing jaws and whirring wings was an eerie sound as they set about denuding the earth of all its vegetation.
The riders had to constantly brush the clinging insects from their clothes. Their appetites were such that they’d eat anything, and did.
The devastation was widespread and complete. In the seven days that it took to round up their scattered herd, Webb saw firsthand how much the grasshoppers destroyed. Because of the bigness of the Triple C, the damage they suffered was minimal, confined to the east rim section, which was laid bare. But the destructive force of the grasshoppers hit the drylanders hardest—the ones who were already suffering painfully from the drought.
Fields were stripped of their meager stands of wheat. Where there were trees, not a single leaf or young twig was left. Limbs were scattered on the naked ground, broken by the weight of the insects. Gardens that had been nursed along by the women with the rationing of precious water vanished. When all the vegetation had been consumed, the grasshoppers began devouring roof shingles, leather harnesses, clothing, and board fences, indiscriminately satisfying their hunger.
Their numbers were so staggering, they invaded the shacks and ate the food in the cupboards and the curtains at the windows. Animals stood helplessly as the insects crawled over them, while the children screamed in terror, certain they would be eaten next when one landed on them. The determined drylanders battled them, trying to save what little they had left. They tied string around their pantlegs so the grasshoppers couldn’t crawl up their legs. They shoveled the grasshoppers into piles, poured kerosene on them, and set them on fire. They chopped up lemons and mix
ed arsenic with the rinds, then scattered them for the hoppers to feed on; but they ate the poisonous mixture and continued on their destructive way.
When Webb and the other cowboys drove the regathered herd of cattle across the path of devastation to their home range, the aftereffect of the insect hordes was as staggering as their first assault. The air reeked with the odor of the grasshoppers. The water in the few flowing streams was brown and tainted with their waste, totally undrinkable. Any drylander whose well hadn’t already gone dry would now find his precious water supply impotable.
That night, Webb stripped and soaped himself from head to foot to rid himself of the smell and feel of the ‘hoppers. He’d hardly spoken to Lilli at all. It wasn’t until they were lying in bed with the lights out and he was holding her in his arms, the warmth of her body flowing into his, that he began to talk about what he’d seen.
There was no emotion in his flat voice, but a tear tunneled down his cheek. He felt that conflict of emotions, despising the drylanders for what they’d done to the land and pitying them for the devastation they had suffered. And there was gratitude mixed in that so much of his land had escaped the plague, and that Lilli was with him, safe from the horror she would have known with her late husband.
“Thank God the worst is over,” Lilli murmured when he’d finished.
“I doubt if it is.” He stopped staring at the ceiling and turned his head on the pillow to look at her face bathed by the moonlight coming through the window. “What the drought hadn’t ruined, the ‘hoppers did. There’s nothing to hold the dirt anymore. Thousands of acres of dirt will be blown away. But it’s more than that.” He paused and let a finger trace the faint dusting of freckles across her cheekbone. “Those grasshoppers laid eggs; next spring they’ll hatch and they’ll have to be fought all over again. First drought, then pestilence. Where will it end?” he murmured with a frown.
She snuggled closer to him. From the moment he had walked into the house that night, she had known he was deeply troubled and had waited for him to talk. When she tried to imagine what it had been like, she couldn’t. Maybe it was better.