Boomer

“Then,” Grant said, measuring his words, “may I ask why you came here?”

The implication that she had come for selfish reasons was clear, but she made no show of understanding. Instead, she opened her black cloth purse and drew out a folded legal-size document, then stood up in a kind of dowagerlike dignity and placed the paper on the cot.

“I came to deliver this,” she said gravely, then suddenly she turned away and, without another word, walked quickly from the room.

The room seemed amazingly empty after she had left it, and the emptiness magnified itself with every receding click of her spool heels on the sickroom stairs. Several minutes must have passed before he at last remembered the paper. He picked it up with his good hand, shook it out, and held it to the fading fight to read. And as he read, a subtle insanity seemed to seize him and the impulse to laugh aloud, bitterly, was almost uncontrollable.

In sudden anger he balled the document in one hard fist and hurled it to the floor between the two cots. On the other cot Dagget stirred restlessly, as if disturbed by some unseen, intangible violence in the room. He fixed his slitted, suspicious eyes on Grant's face, and then some instinct carried the gaze to the balled paper, and he swooped it up in one hand and spread it to the light.

“This seems to be your lucky day, after all,” he said dryly. “It's not every day a man gets half the mineral rights from a lease like the Mullers'.” His eyes narrowed down still further, and his frown deepened. “Did Rhea do this?”

Grant nodded numbly.

“You'll be a rich man when that well comes in,” the marshal said thoughtfully. “That won't keep you out of prison, but it can get you a good lawyer. That, together with saving the life of a deputy U. S. marshal, might get you a light sentence.”

“I don't want the money,” Grant said coldly. “I'm not taking it.”

To his surprise, Dagget's face grew hard, his voice snarling. “You fool, Rhea Muller's not offering you money, she's offering you a partnership! Maybe she did use you at first, but you can't blame her too much for that. She's a girl in a man's world, and her looks and brains are all she's got to fight with. But you think about this, Grant—think about Turk Valois and what happened to him when he let his pride get the upper hand. You'd better think about that for a long time before you start doubting and distrusting and hating, until it becomes a disease like it did with Turk!”

Dagget raised himself up on one elbow, breathing hard. “You've got a proper right to half of that lease—without you, Valois would have exploded the rig all over the Creek Nation—but she didn't have to give it to you. She didn't have to give you a damn thing that she didn't want to.”

Suddenly his face went lax and the anger seemed to leak out of him like blood through an open wound. “Well,” he said wearily, “what are you going to do?”

There was nothing he could do. Rhea was gone.

The gloom of winter twilight was beginning to come down on Kiefer and the silence in the sickroom was a cold and brittle thing. Perhaps an hour elapsed with not a word passing between the two men, and finally old Doc Lewellen came back to light the coal-oil lamps and stoke up the fire in the oil-drum stoves.

Grant's mind went back over too many wasted years, and he had never known such emptiness as existed in the sickroom at that moment. It seemed that all his life he had been searching for something that he really wanted—not a farm, not money—but a sense of permanency. And security—not the kind that Ortway's bank notes could buy, but something he had worked for and earned. And a family, maybe. But it was like wishing for the moon, now that Rhea was gone, for everything had been focused on her.

Then out of the outside darkness he heard a sound that made him catch his breath—the hurried, almost dancing click of spool heels on the sickroom stairs. Dagget had heard it, too, and was listening intently. Even Doc Lewellen heard it and turned toward the door with a kind of suspicious scowl. And then the door opened and Rhea was standing there.

“I just wanted to tell you,” she said, looking directly at Grant, “that I've waited a long time to get what I wanted. I can wait a few years more.”

Dagget grinned with some of his old familiar savageness. Old Lewellen stared, then turned awkwardly and began fumbling loudly at one of the oil-drum stoves. But the thing that Grant noticed most was that the feeling of emptiness was no longer in the room.