Stands a Calder Man (Calder Saga 2)

“Stefan—” Lillian pulled at the long arm that was keeping her shielded. She appeared confused and shocked by his aggressive hostility toward Webb.

“You don’t understand—” She tried to protest, but he wasn’t in any mood to listen.

“You vill go to the vagon.” Without taking his eyes off Webb, he pushed Lillian to the side. “Franz,” he called to a man in a small-billed cap. “Take her to the vagon.”

Webb made a quick identification of the man taking Lillian by the arms as the hostile homesteader, Franz Kreuger. He swore under his breath, certain that man’s twisted thinking had something to do with the animosity being shown by Lillian’s father.

“I don’t know what you thought you saw,” Webb began curtly, the Indian basket still in his arms. “But I was carrying this basket to your wagon. Your daughter bought it and—”

“She is not my daughter.” The man bristled more fiercely. “She is my vife!”

The announcement was a cold shock. His wife! Webb stared at the man more than old enough to be Lillian’s father. It seemed a sin against nature that a man past his prime should be mated with a woman who had not reached hers.

The cold shock swelled into an icy rage. The man had no right to possess someone as young and fresh as Lilli. It was dirty and sordid, incestuous. Why? Why had she married him? How could she bear to have those old and callused hands touch her?

His hard, accusing gaze searched her out, finding her being helped onto the wagon seat. Her eyes clung to him, her expression mute in its appeal. Webb trembled with the effort it cost him to contain the fury that was looking for any excuse to bury his fist in the old man’s face.

He wanted to crush the basket in his arms, but instead he shoved it at the man rooted in his path. “Your wife’s basket.” His voice was sarcastic.

There was a moment of hesitancy before the basket was accepted, but the fight didn’t leave the man’s eyes. He seemed to expect it from Webb, almost invited it. It was difficult for Webb not to pick up the challenge and fight it out—the winner taking Lilli as the prize.

Tantalized by the thought, Webb quickly sized up his possible opponent. Despite the gauntness of the man’s frame, he had arms like slender oaks. He’d pack some force, but he was too old to last long. It wouldn’t be a contest, and Webb knew it.

“You’d better get out of my way before I forget you are an old man,” Webb warned in a low, thick voice.

He didn’t wait for the man to step aside. Instead Webb moved forward to shoulder his way past him. But as his body shoved at the man, the man shoved back. The force of it pushed him into the wall. Webb hit it hard, shaking loose the dust between the rafters. He started to come away from the wall, his muscles bunched to lunge at the man.

A wiry-framed body pressed him back and pinned his shoulders to the wall. Blinded by a primitive rage, Webb didn’t recognize Nate until the cowboy spoke in a low, urgent tone.

“For crissake, Webb, have you gone crazy?” he demanded. “That’s an old man.”

“Get out of my way.” Webb glared at the whiskered man standing with his fists half-raised only two yards from him, and tried to push Nate aside.

Although Webb was superior in size and weight, Nate was made of tempered steel. “Dammit, Webb,” he grunted impatiently. “I’m as game for a fight as the next man, but look around you. If you take that old man, this whole crowd is gonna jump on you.”

Some part of the warning penetrated his anger-crazed consciousness, enough to pull his attention to the closing circle of homesteaders. An attack on one of their kind would bring the whole pack into the fray. Only a fool would ignore them, and Webb had never counted himself as a fool. He was breathing hard as he relaxed his muscles.

“Okay,” he muttered to Nate.

Nate was slow to let him go. Webb swept the circle with a hard glare, then reached down to scoop up his hat from the board floor. With stiff, jerky movements, he made a show of brushing it off while he centered his cold gaze on the old man, Lilli’s husband.

“Ve vill no more be pushed around. And you leave our vomenfolk alone from now on,” the man ordered tersely.

It grated Webb to be dressed down without cause. “I was raised to have better manners, mister. Around these parts, a man always carries the packages for a lady. You’re a newcomer. But the next time push comes to shove, you won’t be standing up when it’s over.”

He jammed his hat onto his

head and angled off the walk. He heard the clumping of a pair of boots behind him, indicating Nate was right on his heels. Webb ignored the planked walk over the muddy ground and headed straight into the street, going to the hitching rail where his horse was tied. He yanked the reins loose and swung into the saddle, turning the horse’s nose toward the general store. He glimpsed his mother and Ruth in the dark opening of the building. Both of them appeared bewildered and alarmed.

Then he looked over at the wagon where Lilli sat watching him with an expressionless face. There was not a hint of guilt or regret. He felt the anger rising again and dug the spurs into the horse. He rode out of town at a gallop, with Nate only a length behind him.

7

Hues of scarlet and orange swirled across the western sky as the sun lingered for a last few minutes on the edge of the horizon. Its light cast colored shadows on the rolling plains and darkened the wide stretch of ground, stripped of its native grasses. A rutted track divided the bared ground from the field where a new stand of wheat waved its young stalks in the evening breeze.

The team of Belgian mares, Dolly and Babe, picked up their pace as home came into sight. There wasn’t any comfortable barn to welcome them, only a small corral and shed made of green wood. The square house was made out of green lumber, too, its dimensions twenty-four feet by twenty-four feet. The outside walls were covered with tar paper. One window was located in the front next to the door and a stovepipe had thrust its top out of the barely slanted roof, minus any eaves or overhang. A pair of guy wires was stretched across the top of the roof and anchored to the ground on each side so the strong Montana winds couldn’t blow the flimsy house down.

But it was home to the man and woman riding in the wagon pulled by the draft team, a home they had built on land they owned—or would own when the allotted time bad passed and the other necessary requirements had been met to receive the government deed to their homestead. Yet the couple didn’t appear eager to reach the end of the rutted track the wagon traveled. The silence between them was heavy with disapproval emanating from both sides. Not a single mention had been made of the incident that had caused this rift between them.