than he was.
Doc Lewellen glanced at them from the corner of the room where he was scrubbing his hands at a makeshift washstand. “Jim Dagget must be goin' soft,” he said dryly. “I didn't expect to see you two so soon.”
“How's the boy?” Grant asked.
The doctor wiped his hands on a flour-sack towel and began fastening his soiled cuffs. “He's full of opium now. Likely he'll be sicker from that than from the gunshot wound.” He got into his coat, buttoning it all the way to his scrawny throat. “How come the marshal let you go?”
Grant ignored the question and walked quietly to the boy's cot, but Rhea still did not look up. “You look like you could use some sleep,” he said.
At last she raised her head and fixed her cool gaze on Grant's face. “There'll be time for sleep... later. What happened to the timbers?”
At a time like this, with her brother full of opium and in the hands of a whisky-soaked quack, her principal concern was still with the well. Grant smiled stiffly. “The timbers are bought and paid for; they belong to us.”
Surprise jarred her out of her frozen calm for a moment. Grant's smile felt like a crack across the face of an earthen jug, but he held it and inclined his head toward the runner. “Valois paid for it.”
She glanced quickly at the runner, her eyes narrowed and suspicious. Valois caught and held her gaze for just a moment, but both their faces were blank, and Grant could not guess what they were thinking. “Thanks,” Rhea said briefly. “You'll get your money back when we're spudded in.”
“I'd like to have that in writing,” Valois said, and high color appeared suddenly in Rhea's face.
“You'll have it in writing,” she said stiffly, and looked away, but the dollar-sized circles of crimson still burned in her cheeks.
On the other side of the sickroom there was another occupied cot, and Grant became aware of Kirk Lloyd's gaunt face and the pale, humorless eyes watching them. “So you're awake, are you?” Doc Lewellen said, but made no move toward the cot.
“And still alive, no thanks to your filthy bandages,” the gunman said bleakly, but his steady gaze was on Rhea. He shifted himself on the sagging cot and studied her with brazen admiration. “You're lucky that crazy brother of yours is still alive,” he said at last. “I don't usually miss.” Then, in the same voice, “Am I under arrest?”
No one made a sound. Somehow, it didn't seem decent to speak to this man who had tried to gun them down a few hours before. Lloyd laughed abruptly, but the sound quickly degenerated into a spasmodic fit of coughing.
Still he had his bleak gaze fixed on Rhea Muller's face, and he lay for a moment quietly admiring what he saw there. “I don't know how you swung it,” he said finally, “but Farley won't take kindly at bein' made to look a fool. You've got your job cut out for you, lady, if you mean to go on fightin' him.”
For the first time Rhea turned and looked at this man who had tried to kill her brother. Nothing changed in the smooth, stonelike contours of her face, no hate flamed up in her eyes. She studied the man coldly, thoughtfully, and at last she said, “You hired your gun to Farley, but you sound as though you hate him.”
The man's eyes narrowed, and Grant could see that Lloyd would not soon forget those kicks that Farley had delivered while the gunman had been helpless. He eased himself down on the cot and gazed flatly at the naked ceiling. “That's puttin' it mildly,” he said at last quietly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A COLD, SLASHING wind swept through the Glenn Basin that day. There had been no snow for three days— since the night they had brought Bud Muller home from Doc Lewellen's sickroom—and the ground was frozen and wind-dried to the hardness of iron ingots. Tall, dead weeds in the draws rattled like bones, and the mangy patches of buffalo grass that carpeted the land were powder dry, brittle, incendiary, and dangerous.
Most of the rigs in the basin had fire watches out that day, but the Muller lease was more watchful and tense than the others. Since sunup Grant and Turk Valois had been riding the boundaries, watching sharply for the faintest whisper of smoke to the north. This kind of weather was made for men like Ben Farley. A spark could set off the entire lease, burn it out, delay construction beyond all hope of meeting the deadline.
For once Grant was glad that Valois had hired on, for two sets of eyes were not too many to cover that wide expanse of grass. And all of them knew that it was time—past time, maybe—for Farley to make his next move.
From behind a stand of naked blackjack Grant swept the northern boundary with a searching gaze, from Slush Creek to the derrick, to the dugout, to the bunkhouse, and for a moment he watched the derrick builders climb like monkeys in that flimsy lacework of wood, fifty feet above the frozen ground.
The derrick itself was almost finished; Rhea's dream was nearing reality. Zack Muller was dead. Bud Muller limped about the bunkhouse with a bullet hole in his side, but every minute brought Rhea's dream closer to being true, and that, Grant thought grimly, was the thing that mattered. And yet he found his gaze returning to the dugout door again and again, searching for a glimpse of her.
Even now, as he sat the shaggy claybank stallion on that gusty hilltop, Grant could not be sure why he stayed here risking his neck by the hour for a woman who wouldn't even look at him unless she wanted something. If this was love, he'd rather have nothing more to do with it. He had been happier on the Missouri farm, womanless, or on the trail in the company of cowhands like himself.
It was a strange thing, this feeling that a man could have for a woman, and perhaps there was no logical explanation.
He hunched a bit deeper into his windbreaker. Then, as he started to rein the claybank around, he saw a rider approaching from the direction of Sabo. Grant frowned and forgot everything else for the moment. Even from that distance, as the horseman rode through the scrawny line of gaunt cotton-woods, Grant sensed that danger was approaching.
Instinctively, he reached into his windbreaker for the comforting feel of his revolver, then he hauled the claybank around and quartered across that stretch of barren land to cut the stranger off between the creek and the dugout. Away to the south, near the far corner of the lease, he saw Turk Valois standing in his stirrups, one hand shading his eyes. Grant started to pump his arm, a signal that would have brought the runner up from the south, then he realized that this might be a trick that would leave half the lease unguarded, and he motioned for the runner to stay where he was.
Now, as the strange horseman rode out of the frozen draw, Grant could see the hunched, gangly figure leaning heavily on the saddle horn. He made a small sound of surprise and nudged the claybank to a faster gait. The rider was Kirk Lloyd, Ben Farley's imported gunman.
The gunman's face was even more gaunt and drawn than Grant remembered it, the skin stretching like yellowed rawhide drying over a hickory frame, the mouth a thin line, the eyes hollow and feverish. How he had escaped the sickroom Grant didn't know, and at the moment he didn't care. He grabbed the .45 from his waistband and approached Lloyd with the revolver in his hand.
“That's far enough!” he called as soon as he was within shouting distance.
The gunman gave a bare suggestion of a shrug, dropped the reins, and let his animal stand. “One day,” he said bleakly, “you're goin' to grab your gun and I'll be ready.”
“I can wait,” Grant said steadily. “Now haul your animal around and head back across the creek.”
But Lloyd shook his head and almost grinned. “I'm a special visitor. I got an invitation from the Muller girl.”
Grant came a little straighter in his saddle. It must be true, for not even Lloyd would have tried so brazen a lie. But Grant found it hard to believe.
“Rhea couldn't have talked to you. She hasn't been off the lease for three days.”
Lloyd lifted his head as though it were an effort. “I didn't say she had. Turk Valois came to see me yesterday at Doc Lewellen's place. He said the Muller girl sent him.”
Grant hesitated, remembering that Valois had gone to Kiefer the day before to buy groceries. Beyond that, he did not want to think. “All right,” he said, motioning shortly for Lloyd to lift his hands. Quickly he reached inside the gunman's coat and drew out an oak-handled .45. “We can see soon enough if you're lying.”
They dismounted in front of the dugout, Lloyd climbing slowly, painfully out of the saddle, holding his left elbow hard against his side. The door to the dugout opened and both men stood for a moment, staring.
Rhea, wearing the white dress that Grant had seen once before, stood in the doorway, straight as a lance,
