Stands a Calder Man (26 page)

The clouds were flattening themselves close to the barren snowscape, making land indiscernible from sky. The dark plot in the gray picture grew steadily larger as Webb approached it. The smoke rising from the chimney pipe blended into sky. He could smell it in the air, but he couldn't distinguish its wispy trail from the gray-spun clouds.

The snow-covered wagon sat next to the bleached poles of the corral. The wind shelter for the draft team had been closed to create a shed where they could seek protection from inclement weather. At the moment, Webb could see the two mares nosing at the straw scattered in clumps next to the shed, offering them browse. There was a glimmer of light showing from inside the shanty, mostly blocked by the covering over the window.

The black gelding stopped of its own accord near the door, as if sensing this was their destination. Webb's legs were numb and stiff with the cold. They felt like two dead sticks when he tried to dismount, and didn't seem inclined to support him when he did step down. He stamped them to bring back the feeling, with jarring results as pain shot through his body.

“Hello in the house!” he hailed the shack's occupants, notifying them of his presence.

Despite the scarf around his mouth and nose, his face felt numb and his lips were unwilling to form the words. The air was so cold that it hurt to breathe. Much longer out in this cold and he'd turn into an icicle. He moved stiffly to the rear of his horse to unlash the carcass. His call had met with no response from inside the cabin. Webb paused to call again.

“Hey! Anybody home?” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

The door was opened a narrow crack. He recognized Lilli despite the heavy blanketlike shawl wrapped
around her. He stood there for a long second, breathing hard from the cold and the effort of breathing at all. She said nothing in greeting.

“Tell your husband to come outside and give me a hand with this.” Webb finally spoke to break the silence, and bent down to continue his awkward attempt to untie the nearly rigid corpse of the cow. Snow crunched under the footsteps of someone approaching him. He glanced up to see Lilli coming toward him.

“What's that?” The shawl was up around her face, muffling her voice.

“One of our cows. She broke a leg and I had to shoot her.” He grunted as he tugged at a knot with numb fingers. “Thought you could use the meat. It was either that or stick some poison in her for the wolves to eat.” He straightened and looked expectantly toward the house. The door was shut. “Isn't your husband coming?”

There was a long pause before she answered him. “He isn't here.” The blue of her eyes seemed to dare him to say something. Her eyes were all he could see of her face, the rest of it hidden by the dark shawl that covered her hair.

“The horses are here. So's the wagon.” He didn't want to be accused of coming here with the foreknowledge that her husband was absent from home. “Where is her?”

“He went hunting this morning and hasn't come back yet,” she said.

“He went hunting in this weather?” Webb frowned. The cold was a frigid band of steel across his forehead.

“Yes.” She became apprehensive at his reaction.

“All the wild game will have taken shelter with this storm coming. I didn't even see a jackrabbit on the way here,” he stated, impatient at the ignorance of a homesteader who had no practical knowledge of living on the land. “Babes in the woods” was a mild description. “Where do you want me to put this carcass?” Then he realized Lilli wasn't any more knowledgeable than her husband about such things. “It needs to be in a
building of sorts where the wolves can't get to it. Is the horse shed all right?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Can I help?”

“I doubt it.” It was easier for him to show anger toward her; it kept his other feelings at bay. “You can open the door to the shed.”

Without another man's muscle to help him, Webb knew, it wasn't going to be an easy trick to get this carcass inside. The simplest way would be to cut it up out here, but it was too damned cold. He checked the lashings to make sure they were still secure and walked to his horse's head, taking the reins to lead it as close to the shed as possible.

He rolled the carcass off the travois directly in front of the door and glanced at Lilli, all huddled inside her shawl. “Go back inside where it's warm,” he ordered.

“You'll need help.” She showed no signs of leaving.

“Do you know anything about gutting, skinning, and butchering an animal?” he challenged and watched her gaze drop under his piercing look. “That's what I thought. Go inside.”

“I can learn,” she argued.

“Have it your way.” Webb shrugged.

Between the two of them and a rope slung around a rafter beam, they dragged the carcass inside the shed and strung it up. When Webb disemboweled the dead cow, Lilli felt queasy. It was so much larger than the few chickens she'd cleaned. For a few minutes, she thought she was going to throw up. When Webb challenged her to haul the gunnysack of entrails out of the shed and some distance away, she managed to swallow the nauseous lump in her throat and drag them out. The trek into the sharply cold air had a reviving effect. When she returned, he was half-finished skinning the cow, and she was not exactly sorry she had missed the beginnings of it.

“That's good enough for now.” Webb stepped back, looking weary and cold. “I hope you've got some coffee hot.” He attempted to flex his gloveless fingers, but they resisted closing into a fist. There had been enough
body heat left in the animal to keep his hands warm while he worked, but they were chilled and stiff now. He pulled on his gloves before going out in the cold to the shanty. “After I warm up some, I'll go look for your husband.”

“You don't think anything has happened to him, do you?” Lilli raised the heavy shawl over her head. Stefan had said he'd be back by suppertime, which was still a couple of hours away, so she wasn't alarmed that he hadn't returned yet. Stefan had gone hunting on other winter days and come back safely. Even if a storm was coming, it wasn't here yet, so she didn't understand why Webb appeared concerned.

“He's probably all right,” Webb conceded as he opened the shed door and waited for Lilli to go first. “The Lord has a way of looking after babes and pilgrims.” The last was muttered to himself as he stepped outside into a thickening snowfall, stirred now by a fluctuating wind.

Inside the shack, Webb began peeling off his outer garments while Lilli stoked the cooking and heating stove with more coal. He rubbed his arms briskly, trying to stir up the circulation, as he moved to the source of heat. Lilli poured them both a cup of coffee, and Webb warmed his hands with his, aware of the strained silence and quietly studying her.

“You'd better take off that shawl,” he advised. “Or you never will get warm.” She seemed reluctant to forsake the protection of the shawl, but it could hardly have been for the warmth. When she did remove it, she was wearing a long and heavy, high-necked sweater. “That, too,” Webb stated.

She darted him a wary glance that resisted his suggestion. “I always wear this inside. The cold seeps through the walls and I—”

“You can put it back on later, but take it off for now,” Webb insisted. “It's blocking out the stove's heat, so it'll take you a lot longer to get warm.”

Following his sensible advice, Lilli tugged the sweater over her head and folded it to lay it aside. Then she
was taking up her cup of coffee and crowding close to the stove. There was a high color to her cheeks, nipped by the cold, and her dark auburn hair was attractively disheveled. Webb wanted to run his fingers through it and remove the loosened pins that swept the mass of it atop her head. He stared at his cup. His limbs were starting to tingle with needle-sharp jabs radiating from his nerve ends as the cold-induced numbness began to wear off.

“Thank you for the meat.” Her voice came to him, soft and clear, unaffected by any coyness. Webb shut his eyes, tortured by the things he wanted to say and had no right to voice. He breathed in and caught the disturbing scent of her, so near to him.

“Like I said, it was either bring it here or turn it into wolf bait.” He sounded gruff. He had to, or he'd find himself regretting the alternative. He downed a quick swallow of coffee, letting its heat thaw his insides. “Do you know which direction your husband took when he left?” Webb deliberately mentioned Stefan Reisner to remind himself of the man's existence.

“He headed west—toward Franz Kreuger's place.” She wouldn't be surprised if Stefan had stopped there for the noon meal and gone out hunting with Franz in the afternoon.

Webb tipped back his head and drained the coffee from his cup, then handed the empty tin mug to Lilli, his glance sliding away from her. “I'd better ride out a ways and see if I can find any sign of him before the storm breaks.”

“Will you come back?” She held the cup, looking at it instead of him, but he sensed the tension and let his gaze wander over her profile for a long second.

“I guess it will depend.” But he didn't say on what. “Hand me the coal bucket and I'll fill it before I go, just in case I don't get back.” He picked up his heavy, wool-lined jacket and shrugged into it.

He couldn't help thinking that if he hadn't come here, he'd be sitting snug and cozy in the line shack
instead of venturing out into this subzero weather with a blizzard on the way. He'd be better off there, and Webb wasn't concerned about the risks of going out in such weather when he thought that. It was the risk he was taking when he came back, as he knew he would, with or without her husband. He cursed the weakness in him that wouldn't let him stay away from this woman.

When he was all bundled up in his heavy winter gear, Lilli gave him the coal bucket. Without a word, he walked to the door and took hold of the latchstring. He faltered for a second, then pulled the door open with an impatient jerk and pushed himself outside, shutting the door quickly.

The cold and the whirling snow hit him, bringing him up short for a second. The thickening gray clouds were creating a premature darkness, stealing much of what was left of the afternoon. Webb moved briskly to the side of the shack where the coal was piled and filled the bucket, brushing off the snow that had collected on the black chunks.

Lilli must have been waiting at the door, because she was standing next to it when he returned with the full bucket. He set it down and turned to leave again, but the tense silence needed to be broken. He couldn't just walk out without saying something.

His hand was on the latchstring and he looked at the door, his head tipped down as he spoke. “It's getting dark out there. Keep the lantern turned all the way up so a light shows.”

There was a wretched tearing inside Lilli. Involuntarily, she reached for his arm to keep him with her a second longer. “Webb, be careful.” The anxious words rushed from her before she could stop them.

The downward angle of his head shifted slightly in her direction as he looked at the hand on his coat sleeve. She pulled it away as if she had touched something hot.

“Don't you mean ‘Mr. Calder'?” The line of his jaw
was hard, and his voice had a bitter ring. While she was still groping for a response, Webb was out the door and gone.

The black gelding balked when Webb tried to lead it outside. The horse knew the weather wasn't fit for man or beast to be in even if its rider didn't. In the end, the gelding obeyed with its rider's command, but under protest.

Within minutes after riding out from the yard, the horse and rider were enveloped in the grayness. The snowflakes had turned to pellets, whirling around Webb like white buckshot, stinging and pelting. The wind had picked up, drifting the snow on the ground and reducing the visibility to less than half a mile. There wasn't much chance of cutting Stefan Reisner's trail. Between the newly fallen snow and the blowing wind, his tracks would have been covered by now. Webb set a zigzagging course toward some broken country south of Kreuger's place and west of here. It was about the only area where there was still some wild game to be found. The advent of the drylanders had driven most of it into rougher country where plows had little success.

The man should be on his way back now, if he hadn't gotten lost. With luck, Webb could intercept him. The black gelding might not like the idea of being ridden double, but that's what Webb intended—if he found Reisner.

The numbing cold took away all perception of time. It seemed he had been riding through this hell's freezer for a lifetime. Webb was losing the feeling in his legs and had to keep pounding them with his hand to retain any sensation. He couldn't feel the cold anymore and knew that was a bad sign. If Reisner hadn't found shelter, the old man was bound to freeze to death.

The rimrock country was around him when Webb suddenly realized the wind had shifted into the northeast, the thing he'd been both expecting and dreading. How long ago it had changed, he didn't know. He halted the gelding to quickly orient himself. He was
about equal distance from both the Kreuger place and Lilli. There was a good chance Reisner might have gone to his neighbor's since it was a mile closer. It was possible he had gotten a horse there and ridden back to his place. It would explain why Webb hadn't seen any sign of him.

He was faced with two choices—either head for Kreuger's and confirm Stefan Reisner had come that way, or turn around and ride back to Lilli. Now that the storm had hit, he could do one or the other—but not both. He had to get to shelter, and those two were the closest places.

Webb didn't think about it twice as he reined the gelding around and headed back in a straight line the way he'd come. The black horse agreed with his decision and moved out smartly for the shed it had so reluctantly left. Webb hunched a shoulder to the wind and tucked his chin into his chest, letting his hat break the force of the blowing cold.