Free Stands a Calder Man by Janet Dailey Page B

bigness of the sky.
    There was a difference in him that came from living his life in the outdoors. His features were browned by the sun, making Stefan appear pale in comparison. He looked proud and vigorous, his shoulders squared, not stooped like Stefan’s. He was strong and rugged, like this land, possessing an earthiness that Stefan didn’t have.
    With a mute shake of her head, Lillian realized that it wasn’t fair to compare Stefan with the cowboy. Stefan was easily fifteen years older. Perhaps when he hadbeen in his prime, the differences wouldn’t have been so marked. Besides, it wasn’t wise to begin building up images of that cowboy in her mind.
    And it was equally foolish to stand around daydreaming when there was so much work to be done.
    Riding fence was a lonely job, but Webb had never minded the loneliness of it, the long days with only his horse, the land, and a big chunk of sky for company.
    While the mouse-colored dun horse walked along the fenceline, Webb reached out to check the tautness of the wire wherever it appeared to be slack, and test the posts to make certain they were solidly in the ground. His actions were automatic, leaving his mind free to wander along its own trails.
    The horse’s stride made long swishes through tall grass already making its early-summer change from green to yellow. The sound and the color prompted Webb to try to conjure up a picture of this land covered with golden stalks of wheat. It was a tame sight that didn’t seem to belong in this wild, open range.
    For the last two months, the grumblings in the bunkhouse had centered on the drylanders, the term being given to the homesteading farmers. They were being called a lot of other things by the cowboys, too—bohunks, nesters, and honyockers. Since spring, these immigrants had been arriving by the trainload. Homesteads were springing up on the plains like weeds, threatening to take over the rich grasslands that had been the ranchers’ domain.
    Webb didn’t like the idea any more than the next cowboy, but he’d become more philosophical about it. In his father’s time, this country had been the last area of free range for the cattleman. Now it was the last area of free land for the farmer. It had always been so in the settling of the western lands. First came the trapper, then the rancher, and finally the farmer. No amount of resistance by the established order had ever changed the outcome. The invasion of the plow had begun.
    With that historical perspective, he regarded hisfather’s continuing efforts through his political connections to halt or check the flow of homesteaders pouring into the area as both futile and unrealistic. Five years ago, his father had forecasted the coming of the farmers, and Webb couldn’t understand why he was fighting a war that was already lost.
    As the mouse-colored horse topped the gentle slope of a hill, its head came up, its ears pricking with sudden interest at some object on the other side of the fence, outside the Triple C boundaries. Webb felt the horse’s sides expand to whicker a greeting to the team of draft horses in the wide hollow of the adjoining section of land. They were leaving a brown wake behind them, a straight swath through the grass.
    It was strictly reflex that caused Webb to rein his horse to a stop. The rattle of harness chains came clearly across the silence of the rolling plains. Coming into view behind the muscled haunches of the draft team Webb saw, first, the man driving them, then the plow, a descendant of the famed sod-buster that had tamed the prairies of the Midwest. The old iron plow of early settlers couldn’t cut through the densely matted sod that was baked rock-hard by summer heat and frozen solid by winter’s cold until a man named John Deere invented a plow with a revolving blade and a steel moldboard that was able to cut the sod and turn it over.
    There were refinements, but the principle was