Calder Pride Read Online Free

the immense blue sky that awed most men seeing it for the first time. “But it’s a hard land, full of extremes. It can be brutally cold in the winter, and blazing hot in the summer. Why, I’ve seen it so bone-dry that a body could stand ankle-deep in dust. Then you got the storms that rain lightning and turn the ground into a quagmire that’ll suck your boots off. Yep, this land breeds toughness into a man, or it breaks him.”
    The man nodded as though he understood. “It’s a big country, wide open and empty. A man could lose himself out here with no one the wiser.”
    “I don’t know about that. A stranger would get spotted right off,” Potter told him. “We don’t get that many out here.”
    “I don’t suppose you do.” The stranger glanced inside the building, then back to Potter. “Is this your place?”
    “No. It belongs to Emmett Fedderson.” He pointed to the small sign above the door that listed Emmett as the proprietor. “He’s around back with the Calders. There was a nasty head-on collision last night on the highway. It killed one of the Triple C ranch hands outright, but the Anderson boy walked away from it with little more than a scratch. Naturally, he was drunker than a hoot owl.”
    The stranger’s expression never changed, yet Potter felt his interest lift. “Oh? Which one of the Anderson boys was that?” he asked, as if he knew the family.
    Which Potter was ready to bet a whole month’s pension check that he didn’t. Potter gave him a sly look and ran his thumbs under his galluses. “show me just who’s asking?”
    The gray eyes turned cool for a half a second. Then the stranger reached inside his windbreaker, pulled out a wallet-sized leather case, flipped it open and held it out.
    Potter looked at it. “Logan Echohawk. Treasury Department.” He thought about that for a moment. He’d never had much dealings with the federal boys, though he’d always heard those FBI men were arrogant bastards. The Treasury Department, that was another matter. Just about everybody Potter knew—on both sides of the law—considered Treasury agents incorruptible.
    He chortled in satisfaction. “I figured you for one side of the law or the other. You see, I was sheriff here for more years than some men live. Folks always thought I sat around too much doing nothing. But you can learn an awful lot from just looking and watching. You get to know who’s just plain rowdy and who’s gonna be trouble. Usually you can even figure what’s gonna set it off.” He realized he was rattling on, something he had done a lot more these last few years. Not many people listened to him, though. But the stranger did. He was listening closely, sifting through the bits and pieces just like Potter himself had done. “It was Neil Anderson’s youngest boy Rollie that caused last night’s wreck. Which boy are you after?”
    “Latham Ray Anderson.” He returned the identification to his pocket.
    “Lath, huh.” Potter tugged on his galluses. If he had been in his favorite chair, he would have rocked back to think about that. “I can’t say I’ve heard his name mentioned in years. That boy had a belly full of anger, though,” he recalled. “He hated the farm, and the way his pa made him work like a dog on it. He hated having nothing and naturally hated anyone who did have anything. It didn’t surprise me when hejoined the Army straight out of school. In fact, I was kinda relieved. Lath had a streak of mean in him that always worried me. Every now and then you run across ones that just seem born with an instinct for violence. Some of the bad ones grow out of it. I was hopin’ the Army might knock it out of Lath. I guess they didn’t. What did he do?”
    “We just want to ask him some questions,” the stranger replied. Potter could tell the man wasn’t about to divulge any more information than that, ex-sheriff or not.
    “He hasn’t shown his face around here in years—not since his brother Leroy’s