This Calder Sky (Calder Saga 3)

It had always been her dream, yet the present circumstances were all wrong. “But what are you going to do?”

“I’ll stay here and try to keep the ranch going.”

“You can’t do it alone.” Her father had failed with the two of them there to help.

“It won’t be easy,” he admitted with a defensive shrug. “I can use some of Pa’s money to hire me a regular hand, and Tucker said he’d help out. But I want you to take most of the money with you.” When he saw the protest forming, he quickly inserted, “If anybody asks you where you got it, just tell them Pa had some life insurance.”

“I can’t go live with Aunt Cathleen,” Maggie stated firmly.

“Why not? I don’t want you staying here,” Culley declared with a trace of anger.

Her mouth thinned in grim resignation. “Culley, I went to see Doc Barlow because I’m pregnant. I’m going to have Chase Calder’s baby.” Her voice trembled bitterly on his name.

Culley stared at her with bleak eyes before he finally lowered his forehead to his hands, cradling his head as he rocked from side to side. “I knew it. I knew that devil bastard would plant his seed in you.” It was a long moment before he raised his head and sighed. “That’s all the more reason why you can’t stay here, Maggie. Did you tell Doc Barlow who the father is?”

“No. He asked me if it was Chase. He’d already heard talk that I was seeing him.” Her fingers dug into her palms as she simmered with the remembered embarrassment. “I made him swear not to tell.”

“Everybody’s talking because everybody knows—and they’ll guess. Don’t you see, Maggie?” Culley reasoned earnestly. “It will get worse if you stay here. Besides, Aunt Cathleen really wants you to come.”

“But will she when she finds out I’m pregnant?” Maggie questioned.

“Once you’re there, how can she turn you away?” he argued. “And if she does, then you can hop on the bus and come back here. But she sounded real nice on the phone, Maggie. A lot like Mom.” He looked at her with eyes that were haunted and sad, burned with a bitter hatred that would never go away. “I’m trying to do what I think is best. I don’t know if I’m right, but staying here will be no good for you. Leave tomorrow, Maggie. Leave before the Calders hurt you again.”

“I’ll leave, but I’m not running from them,” she insisted.

In two days, Chase reached the mountains. For a week he rode the rocky ridges and pine-studded slopes, looked at the vast blue sky, ever-changing, ever-constant, and thought … sometimes about nothing more significant than the way the sunlight streaming through the trees dappled the ground.

Camped out under the stars wtih the horses picketed in a grassy clearing, Chase puffed on a thin cigar, stretched out on the ground with his head pillowed on his saddle. On a distant hill, a coyote barked, its call the loneliest, saddest sound in the world. The campfire had died until only its red heart was glowing. A star fell, the light of its million years leaving a white scratch in the black sky that quickly disappeared, as if it had never been.

Life did not always turn out the way a person wanted it to be, or even the way he tried to make it. He had taken a girl and made her into a woman before her time. He had ignored her youth, her background, and her father’s resentment toward the Calders, certain these factors could never touch them, that they could be isolated from the world’s unpleasantness. Chase realized that their relationship had been without depth because it denied what each of them were. A thing endures when there is commitment, and collapses when there is none.

Chase flexed his arm. He was able to move it more freely now; the soreness was easing from it. In time, it would heal completely, but there would be a scar.

After two weeks in the mountains, Chase rode out. He made a detour to the north range, a farewell ride to the simpler days that would never come again. He had finally accepted that and turned his horse toward The Homestead without looking back.

When the rider and packhorse were first sighted approaching the main quarters of the Triple C, a ranch hand was dispatched to The Homestead with word that Chase was coming in. Everyone carefully avoided noticing Webb Calder as he strolled toward the barns. There was no one within twenty yards of the father and son, meeting after a two-week separation.

“I see you finally made it back,” Webb observed with a feigned air of only mild interest. But his eyes were sharp in their study of the rider, a heavy beard growth shadowing the rough features.

Chase’s mouth split into a smile, showing white teeth against the dark beard, and there was a glittering brilliance to the deep brown eyes. “I ran out of cigars,” he replied and clicked to his horse, walking it past his father and into the barn with the packhorse in tow.

There was pride in the lift of Webb Calder’s head. His son was back and he was whole. Nate Moore wandered out of the barn and paused briefly beside Webb. He looked back toward the opening where Chase had disappeared.

“Do you have the feeling that he left a boy and returned a man?” Nate asked and moved on without waiting for an answer.

It was several seconds before Webb followed his son inside and walked to the stall where Chase was unsaddling his horse. “Maggie O’Rourke has left. She’s gone to California to live with a relative of her mother’s—a sister, I think.”

There wasn’t a break in the rhythm of the hands unloosening the saddle cinch. “I’m glad for her,” Chase stated and lifted the saddle from the horse’s back. Pivoting, he swung it onto the top of the stall’s partition wall and smoothly met his father’s look across the saddle seat. “It’s what she always wanted—a chance to get away from here and make something out of her life. It’s best.”

“Yes,” Webb agreed.

PART IV

A sky of parting,

A sky in two,

This sky that carries