“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.
“Simon sent a message to us this afternoon.” She hadn’t mentioned it till now, but it seemed appropriate that she had waited. “The town well has been contaminated, and he asked us if we would send all the water we could spare.”
“I’ll have the boys fill up all the barrels we’ve got and take a couple wagonloads in tomorrow morning,” he said. He looked at her, and for a second, he almost felt as if he were being sucked into the midnight depths of her blue eyes. A little moan came from him as he brought his face close to hers. “Sometimes, Lilli, I wish I could just crawl inside you and have you all around me. I envy the closeness our son is enjoying. All warm and safe inside you.”
Her hand cupped his lean cheek. She felt the dampness of that tear and pressed her lips against his mouth, kissing him fiercely and loving him with a force equally ardent. For a man so powerful, he was amazingly gentle that night.