Free Knight in a White Stetson by Claire King Page B

out will you give me a call back? I’m at my mom’s house. Okay. Well … okay. See you. By the way, that bay of yours oughta not be rode for a couple days. I quicked her left front hoof just a little.”
    Sammy? She was planning to use Sammy this weekend to move the heifers to the Little Sheep pasture. She’d have to start shoeing her own horses again. It was safer. And cheaper. She’d just have to find the time.
    Another beep.
    “Calla, Clark. I thought we might have dinner tonight. You pick a spot and I’ll meet you. I’d hate to have to come all the way out to the ranch and then have to bring you home. This sports car doesn’t get the mileage it should. I think I’ll talk to the rental company when I take it back. I’m going to tell them I want credit for the extra mileage. Call me at your convenience on the cellular—555-2270. Bye.”
    “I know your number, Clark,” Calla said out loud. She unbuckled her chaps and tossed the heavy leather onto the kitchen table. Another beep.
    “Calla, this is Dick Dupree. Just calling to remind you about our meeting this afternoon. Four o’clock. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” A long pause. Calla thought the message might be over, but it wasn’t. Unfortunately. “And, Calla, why not invite your dad to come on in with you? I’d like to run something up the flagpole and see how it flies.” Beep.
    A bad debt, a bad check, a halfhearted dinner invitation and a threat. She should never have got that machine.
    Foreclosure. It wasn’t imminent, she knew from her own set of books, but Dupree, the family banker for as long as Calla could remember, was ready to put the screws to her. He’d been hinting at it for months.
    Dupree had been skeptical when Calla took over the cattle operation. And when Judy McFadden Bishop died and left the ranch to her daughter, he was positively beside himself with worry. He’d wanted to put the ranch in trust for her, under her father’s care, until she was twenty-five. But Jackson didn’t want to run the ranch, and he told the banker so. Dupree then suggested the bank hold the ranch in trust and hire a ranch manager for her until such time as she was mature and settled and married enough to handle it. Calla had hit the roof.
    But he’d been a good enough banker, overall. When she’d needed the down payment on a new stacker three years ago, he’d only made her beg a little. And he didn’t say much when the registered bred heifer market went down the tubes in ‘97, even though he’d warned her about it—something to the effect of don’t count your chickens, she vaguely recalled. That was the problem with Dupree. He was always talking in cliché. She could hardly remember what he ever had to say.
    But she was careful about the loan payments. They were late most months—and the balloon payment at the end of the year kept her up nights—but she always managed to make them. He couldn’t complain.
    But he had been complaining, Calla acknowledged. For months, now. She went to the refrigerator and pulled out the pitcher of cold tea Helen kept fresh for her.
    What did Dupree want? Surely not the ranch. It had been in her family for more than one hundred years, and even Dupree wasn’t foolish enough to foreclose on McFadden property. The outcry from neighboring ranches would be deafening, and Dupree would lose many of Calla’s fellow ranchers to the big Boise banks. He’d been in small-town banking long enough to know that, surely.
    Besides, he’d have to do something pretty shady to foreclose on a good note. He’d have to wait until she missed—if she missed—the balloon.
    But he wasn’t waiting.
    No, something else was going on. Dupree had been edging her toward some kind of cliff for months. If she wasn’t careful, she’d drop right off.
    She took her tea and trudged up the stairs. She hadn’t been back to sleep after her conversation with Henry in the barn last night and she was beginning to feel it.
    How in the world had