This Calder Sky Read Free

his patented smiles, he respectfully touched a finger to the pointed brim of his Stetson.
    â€œGood morning, Mr. Calder.” Angus O’Rourke sounded deliberately cheerful and carefree.
    â€œAngus.” The stone-faced man with the hard eyes simply nodded in response to the greeting.
    Irritation rippled through Angus. He was angry with himself for not calling Calder by his first name, and putting them on equal terms. The man had a way of making him feel worthless and a failure. Hell, he was a rancher, too, the same as Calder … in his mind. But Angus hid his bitterness well.
    â€œIt’s a fine day, isn’t it?” he remarked with a broad, encompassing sweep of the clear sky. “It’s mornings like this that make you forget the long winter behind you. The meadowlarks out there singing away. Wild-flowers are sprouting up all over, and those little white-faced calves all shiny and new.” It was a few seconds before he realized his prattle was making no impression on Webb Calder. Again, Angus checked his angry pride and hid it behind a smile. “You remember my son, Culley, and my daughter, Maggie.”
    Webb Calder acknowledged the boy’s presence with a nod. The black-haired boy paled under the look and mumbled a stiff, “Morning, sir.” Then Calder looked at the girl.
    â€œShouldn’t you be in school, Maggie?” It was a question that held disapproval.
    Actually, her name wasn’t Maggie. It was Mary Frances Elizabeth O’Rourke, the same as that of her mother, who had died four years ago. But having two women in the family with the same name had been too confusing. Somewhere along the line, her father had started calling her Maggie, and it had stuck.
    She shrugged a shoulder at the question. “My pa needed me today,” she explained.
    The truth was she missed more days of school than she attended. In the spring and fall, her father claimed he needed her to help on the ranch. Maggie had grown to realize that he was too lazy to work as long and as hard as he would have to by himself. The ranch wassuch a shoestring operation that they couldn’t afford to hire help, so her father took advantage of her free labor.
    During the winter, the tractor was broken down half the time, which meant they didn’t have a snow blade to clear the five-mile drive to the road where she could catch the school bus. When her mother was alive, she’d saddled the horses and ridden with Culley and Maggie to the road on those occasions, then met them with the horses when the bus brought them back in the afternoon. But it was always too cold and too much trouble for her father.
    Maggie no longer missed going to school. She had outgrown her clothes and had little to wear, except blue jeans and Culley’s old shirts. At fifteen, nearly sixteen, she was very conscious of her appearance. She had tried altering some of her mother’s clothes to fit her, but the results had been poor at best. None of her classmates had actually ridiculed the way she dressed, but Maggie had seen their looks of pity. With all her pride, that had been enough to prompt her into accepting the excuses her father found for her to stay home.
    Her mother had been adamant that both of her children receive an education. It was something Maggie remembered vividly, because it was one of the few issues that the otherwise meek woman wouldn’t be swayed from, not by her husband’s anger or his winning charm. So Maggie kept her schoolbooks at home and studied on her own, determined not to fail her mother in this, as her father had failed her so often.
    The disapproval that was in Webb Calder’s look just reinforced her determination to keep studying. Maggie made no excuses for what her father was—a weak-willed man filled with empty promises and empty dreams. All the money in the world wouldn’t make her father into the strong man Webb Calder was. It was a hard and bitter thing to