“You find out vhy you don’t have babies,” Stefan repeated his earlier demand.
“I will,” she agreed flatly. A silent dread was on her. If the cause turned out to be Stefan’s impotence, it would ruin him completely.
Again silence came between them as they traveled toward their home. Lilli had always thought she knew Stefan so well—all her life. But that had been as a child and a young girl. His quietness came from hiding inside himself so others wouldn’t know his failures and weaknesses. He was uncertain and indecisive, his actions swayed and colored by those dominant individuals around him. He wanted to be what he saw in other men. It was their attitudes and behavior he adopted, taking their lead in a situation and pretending it was his own. If Franz Kreuger hadn’t been with him that morning, Lilli doubted that Stefan would have shot Webb. He was driven to act by his perception of what Franz Kreuger would have done in his place.
Then Lilli became caught up in her own confusion. Was she finding fault with Stefan, making much out of his weaknesses, to justify the love she felt for another man? There was only one clear certainty in her mind. She did not love Stefan in the way that a woman loves a man. She cared for him deeply the way a person cares for a close family friend. She owed him much for looking after her when her parents died, although she had been the only one left for him, too. And she owed him a wife’s loyalty. If there was a persistent voice inside her head that kept asking if she didn’t owe herself some happiness, Lilli tried not to hear it.
That evening after Stefan had fallen asleep, Lilli slipped out of bed, taking care not to disturb him, and stole outside into the night. The coolness of a night breeze wrapped its arms around her, stirring the thinness of her long nightgown. She turned her eyes to the west, the longing in them deep and sharp. Webb lived somewhere over there. Why had she been so damned noble and refused to see him? Why had she denied herself a few moments of stolen pleasure in his arms?
He was so close, but so far. She lowered her head, knowing she would never take the step to lessen the distance. She stood there, uncertain whether she was being incredibly strong or merely stupid.
21
Squatters were a problem for all the ranchers, but the size of the Triple C made it the most vulnerable. For the last four years, Webb had been locked in a running battle to keep them off his land. There were a few shooting scrapes, but most of them left without a fuss once their presence was discovered. He’d set up patrols in an effort to ward off squatters before they crossed his fences and keep the occasional rustling of beef by the starving families to a tolerable level.
There were other ranchers that came down hard on the squatters, Ed Mace foremost among them. It might have been more accurate to say Hobie Evans. Stories had circulated that Hobie was quick to use his rifle, and there had been enough woundings to give validity to the stories. Webb knew there were grumblings among his own men that he was being too lenient with the squatters instead of teaching them a lesson to pass on to others of their kind. But he couldn’t look at those squatters’ wives without thinking of Lilli.
He’d seen her in town a few times and been tempted a thousand times to seek her out these last five years. But she had rejected him twice, turning down the love he wanted to give her. Webb wasn’t about to open himself up a third time. A man had some pride.
And a lot of loneliness. Another wreath had blackened the front doors of The Homestead two years ago with his mother’s passing. Pneumonia, the doctor had said, but Webb suspected she just didn’t have the will to fight the illness. Not even Bull Giles’s constant company had filled the void that had been created when his father died. With her death, Bull had packed up and left. He had looked old—old and very tired.
So now Webb was the sole occupant of the big house. He spent no more time in it than he had to, not liking the hollow sound of his footsteps in the empty rooms. With a late-afternoon sun angling on the ranch buildings, Webb crossed from the barn to the new commissary. Prices for supplies at Ellis’s store had risen to the point where it had become practical to set up a private store at the ranch, buying food and equipment at cost from suppliers and selling the excess to the men and their families for slightly higher prices, but still less than what Ollie Ellis charged.
The increased prices for goods were about the only effect the war in Europe had on the area. It was all happening far away—on another continent. The news of battles was old by the time it reached Blue Moon, and the names of the places in Germany and France were unknown to most Montanans, except for the immigrant settlers whose roots and families came from those places.
But the grain and beef from the area fed the American army and became their contribution to the war effort, exempting cowboys and farmers alike from the draft. Some boys from the area went off to war, but most of those were sons of immigrants, eager to prove their loyalty to their new country. Life went on as usual for everyone else, the First World War in Germany becoming merely another topic of conversation and speculation.
Halfway to the store, his steps slowed as he observed Ruth coming out of the schoolhouse. Virg Haskell was waiting for her, taking the books and papers she was carrying and falling in step beside her like some schoolboy walking a girl home. It wasn’t the first time Webb had noticed the man hanging around Ruth. The sight of them together stirred a vague feeling of dislike. Webb couldn’t fault Virg Haskell in the work he did on the ranch; yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some kind of weakness in the man’s character, even if it hadn’t surfaced. Ruth was a fine woman. She deserved someone better than a common drifter like Virg Haskell.
The barns and corrals were just ahead of Nate as his weary horse plodded toward them, blowing out the dust that clogged its nostrils. Slumped in the saddle, sapped of energy by the searing August heat that had turned the range prematurely brown, Nate felt as weary as his mount. Things didn’t look good out there. When he noticed Webb crossing his path, he checked his horse’s direction and aimed it toward his boss and friend.
Listless as his body was, his eyes retained their keenness. Nate observed the interest Webb was paying to the couple walking away from the schoolhouse, and the displeasure that tightened his mouth. Nate guessed, with a degree of wry cynicism, that it was a case of Webb not wanting her, but he didn’t want anybody else getting Ruth, either.
A second later, Webb recognized the horse and rider plodding toward him with heads hanging low and stopped to wait for them. The horse and rider were a matched pair, their dust-covered bodies streaked with muddy sweat.
Nate didn’t waste his breath on preliminaries. “You’re gonna have to be movin’ the cattle to the north range sooner than you figured. They’re walkin’ off weight trying to find graze.”
The announcement made Webb absently look at the dry and cracked ground at his feet. He had hoped the other sections of the range would hold out another month at least. The north range was well watered and had a fairly good stand of grass. It would have been good winter forage, considering the poor hay crop they’d had.
“It’s that bad out there, huh?” It wasn’t a question, just a protest against the facts.
“June’s usually our wet month. Bet we didn’t get more’n a half-inch. And the sky’s been bone-dry since then,” Nate reminded him. “If you think the grass is in bad shape, you oughta see those drylanders’ fields. They ain’t growin’ wheat this year, but they’ve got a helluva crop of thistles.”
Webb took the news without any outward reaction, but another kind of grim frustration registered inside him. In the previous years, the drylanders had struggled from one growing season to the next. A lot of them had given up when they had proved out the term of their claim, and sold their homesteaded land to the next man willing to try his
luck—and there never seemed to be a lack of those. The Reisners, Lilli and her husband, hadn’t been among the ones to quit the land. That much Webb knew, but he’d heard nothing to indicate their lot was any better than the next man’s.
This season there had been near-drought conditions which might be marking the beginning of a dry cycle. Webb glanced skyward at the haze that filtered out the blue to a dusty color. It was hot and dry—so dry that the perspiration evaporated almost as soon as it broke on the skin, or else became caked with the dirt to clog a man’s pores.
“We’re going to start the fall roundup early this year and sell all the steers of marketable age. I don’t want to carry anything extra through the winter and use up what grass we’ve got,” Webb stated. The cattle prices were high right now with the war in Europe, and he intended to sell his cattle while they had weight on them and could bring top price.
The big Belgian mare stood docilely while Lilli dragged the harness off its tall back and set it on the ground. When she moved to its head, the mare lowered it and tried to rub the bridle off, butting against Lilli’s chest. It staggered her backward a step before she tiredly recovered her balance and unbuckled the cheek strap. The bridle was loose in her hands as the mare spat out the jangling bit and walked to the water trough.
Gathering up the harness and bridle, Lilli hauled them into the shed and draped them on their hooks. She paused to chip off a piece of salt from the new white block and let it melt in her mouth as she walked outside. She flopped down in the shade of the shed, exhausted by the dry heat.
Her skirt was pulled up around her bent knees, hoping for some air to circulate and cool her skin. Petticoats were too suffocating in this scorching heat and too cumbersome in the fields. Lilli had abandoned them after her first week in the fields doing a man’s work because they couldn’t afford to hire anyone. The family they had befriended had moved on, and they hadn’t found anyone else willing to work for room and board.
She tiredly supported her head with an arm propped up by a knee. She was so tired she could cry, but there didn’t seem to be enough moisture to use for tears. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache from pulling the weeds out of the wheatfields so they didn’t steal what precious moisture the ground contained. Her arms, face, neck, and part of her chest were so brown from the constant exposure to the sun that it was impossible to tell where the freckles ended and the tan began.