Clifton Adams - Boomer

Abruptly, she laughed. The sound was edged with a wild-ness that chilled him. “You wouldn't dare walk out on me! I know all about you—that bank robbery in Joplin—I'll call Jim Dagget the minute I see you getting your roll together!”

Grant stood motionless, looking at her. Here was a Rhea that he had never seen before; here was feminine uncertainty and fear skirting the thin edge of hysteria. “Nobody's ever been able to stop you from doing as you please,” he said stiffly. “I guess there's no use of my trying it now.”

He put one hand on the door latch and suddenly she was on him, her arms about his neck. “Joe, I didn't mean that! I wouldn't call Dagget!”

He had almost forgotten what it was like having a woman, like Rhea, in his arms again, having a woman clinging to him, depending on him. “Joe, you've got to listen to me! I'm afraid of Lloyd—the way he looks at me! You can't leave me here alone with him!”

“You'll have Turk Valois to look after you.”

“Valois!” She spat the word. “He thought he could buy me! I loved him once—or thought I did—but he thought he owned me with his money! And when he had no money...”

“You quit him,” Grant finished.

“No!” she almost shouted the word. “He let me quit him. There's a difference.”

“I guess I don't see it.”

She made a small sound of helplessness and pressed her face against Grant's chest. “I don't want to talk about Turk Valois. He's dead. His manhood went out of him when he lost his money in Bartlesville. Joe, I want you to stay, not because of Lloyd, but because I love you!”

It was the word itself, the shock of hearing it spoken, that chilled his anger, numbed the truths that he should have known instinctively. Clinging to him, her arms tightening around his neck, she said it again. And for a moment he could think of nothing else. Her mouth was fire against his, her body warm, her hair and clothing smelling cleanly of lavender. And he knew that he would never forget her; time would never erase this particular moment, and he would always see her in his mind just the way he was seeing her now.

He could easily forget that she had worn her best dress especially for Kirk Lloyd, but he could not forget how she looked in it as she pressed herself against him and said not once, but twice, “Joe, I love you.” It was what he had wanted to hear, he guessed, more than anything else, and he could not believe that she had ever said it before to anyone else. He could even forget that she had once loved Turk Valois, and that she had permitted Lloyd to look at her the way he had and think what thoughts he pleased—all that vanished in the past.

For a moment, at least. And he held her hard in the rough circle of his arms and her mouth was willing. A thing like this, he told himself, could not be faked or repeated. It was a thing that happened once, only once, in a lifetime, if a man was lucky, and he would not let the past rear up and spoil it now.

For a long time neither of them spoke, and it was very quiet there in the gray gloom of the dugout. Grant was vaguely aware of the clean smell of the earth, and the sharpness of hardwood ashes and lime on the whitewashed walls, but the thing he would remember longest was the fragrance of Rhea's hair, the ghost of lavender.

Only after several minutes had passed did reality slip back into the room. And she asked quietly, her cheek pressed against his chest:

“Joe, will you stay?”

“Yes. If Lloyd goes.”

He felt her body go rigid against him. Suddenly, her eyes flashing, she shoved herself away, and when she spoke her voice hissed like water on a hot stove lid. “Get out! Get away from me!”

Her teeth bared almost wolfishly, and the flush of shame was in her face. “Get out!” she hissed again.

He drew himself up as tall as possible, unaware that this gesture toward self-righteousness might be a bit ridiculous. “All right, Rhea, I'll get out.” But then, as he reached again for the door latch, a strange thing happened. She made no sound but something discomforting happened to her face; a flatness appeared in her eyes, the snarl left her lips, and slowly her expression of rage began to break up and lose its definition. Suddenly she turned her back to him but made no sound. Only after several seconds had passed did he realize that she was crying.

This was the one thing that he had not been prepared for. At her father's funeral she had not cried, nor had she shed a single tear for Bud when the boy lay wounded in Doc Lewellen's sickroom, but now she sobbed, silently, her face turned toward the far wall of the dugout.

Instinctively, Grant started to move toward her, but the impulse was short-lived. He reminded himself bitterly that he had played the fool twice, falling for her tricks like a backwoods dolt, believing her lies. He did not intend to be tricked again. He lifted the latch.

“Good-by, Rhea.” He left the dugout quietly, as one would leave a sickroom.

I'm well, he told himself sternly, standing for a moment on the top step of the dugout. It's like I've been sick of some strange disease, and now I'm well. It's over.

But he did not feel well. He was not even sure that he was glad that it was over, but there was a limit to how much punishment a man's pride could take. Numbly, he buttoned the collar of his windbreaker. The wind slashed over the prairie basin like the backlash of a saber. The sky was a bitter gray, as hard as gun steel; here was a dry, treacherous cold that could freeze a man into immobility without his knowing it. A line day for the end of the world, he thought grimly.

But it was not a new experience. Once before, when he had quit the trail, one of his worlds had ended. And again when he had quit the farm and made himself an outlaw. But somehow this was different from the others; he was not leaving a way of life this time, but a dream, all wrapped up in Rhea Muller. He had known from the first that it was hopeless, but a thing like that doesn't stop a man from dreaming.

He grinned with bitter humor. Joe Grant, a man born less than a month ago on a Missouri creek bank, was no better off than the hard-scrabble farmer who had robbed Ortway in Joplin.

For a moment he let his gaze rest on the near-finished derrick and the reluctant builders working in the bitter cold. Well, with a killer on the pay roll, and with Valois' help, maybe Rhea would get what she wanted, if she knew what that was. And he tried to put her out of his mind as he tramped up the clay slope toward the bunkhouse. But it was not quite so simple as that. Even through his anger he could still see her standing there in the dugout, looking beautiful, yet ridiculous, in that new white organdy dress. A cold, beautiful, ambitious, scheming woman, crying silently, for what reason he could not, or dared not, guess.

As he stepped into the dry, acid heat of the bunkhouse, Kirk Lloyd said, “I was waitin' for you, Grant.”

Grant stopped short, faintly surprised to see that the gunman had made himself so completely at home on the Muller lease. Lloyd had stowed his scant gear neatly beneath his folding cot and was now sitting slouched near one of the oil-drum stoves. In his hand he held his .45, the muzzle pointed carelessly at Grant's chest.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“COME IN, MR. GRANT,” the gunman said dryly, motioning casually with the revolver.

Carefully, Grant closed the bunkhouse door and latched it. He glanced quickly at Bud Muller who had a cot next to the far stove, and the boy said, “What's the meaning of this, Grant? What's this gun shark doing on the Muller lease?”

“Your sister just put him on the pay roll,” Grant said, never taking his eyes from the gaunt, half-grinning Lloyd.

Bud made a short, explosive sound of anger, which was quickly cut off by an exclamation of pain as he lurched up on his cot. “I don't believe it! Rhea wouldn't hire him; why, just three days ago he tried to kill me!”