Lone Calder Star. Janet Dailey

Dallas no chance to object, he relieved her of the sack and shifted it onto his shoulder.

      Strong fingers gripped his arm, checking his swing away from her. She threw a quick, wary look in the direction of the feed store, then said in a low voice that wouldn’t carry, “Get smart. Dump this grain off at the ranch, then climb back in your car and get the hell out of there.”

      “Not a chance.”

      She stepped back, something resembling sadness in the look she gave him. “Like I said, you’re a fool.”

      “Everybody’s entitled to an opinion,” Quint stated and walked out of the warehouse.

      Dallas lingered a moment, half irritated that she had wasted her breath on him. He had already been warned once. She wasn’t sure why she had bothered to do it a second time. He was nothing to her, just a good-looking cowboy new to the area—who had obviously landed on his head a few too many times. But that always seemed to be true of the good-looking ones, she thought wryly.

      But no amount of reasoning could rid her of that heavy feeling she had when she went back into the feed store. When she started toward the computer and the rest of the grain shipment waiting to be added to the inventory, her glance skipped to the dusty windows, catching a glimpse of the cowboy on his way back into the warehouse.

      Her boss Holly Sykes was at his desk, his chair tilted at a precarious angle and the phone pressed to his ear. As loud as the bell in the warehouse was set, Dallas knew she would have heard the ring of any incoming call. Which could only mean Sykes had instigated the phone call. Dallas didn’t think she needed three guesses to figure out who that was. It was bound to be either Max Rutledge or his son Boone.

      That old feeling of resentment left a bitter taste in her mouth when she sat down at the computer and reopened the inventory file. Only half of her attention was on the work before her; the rest was tuned to the one-sided phone conversation.

      “He never blinked an eye when I told him the account was closed,” Holly Sykes declared. “He just pulled out his wallet and said he’d pay cash for it.” There was a lengthy pause while he listened. “No, he didn’t give his name, and I had no call to ask for it with him paying cash.” Another pause followed. “He looked like your ordinary cowboy—tall, dark-haired, on the young side. Didn’t talk like he was from around here.” The third pause was much shorter. “No problem. I figured you’d want to know about this guy.”

      The desk chair screeched noisily as Sykes rocked his considerable bulk forward and hung up the phone. The front door opened and Sykes demanded, “Is there something else you need?”

      Quint paused inside the door. “Do you know of anybody with hay for sale?”

      “Not off the top of my head, but you’re welcome to post a notice on the board over there.” Sykes waved a hand at the bulletin board on the wall by the door. Its surface was already cluttered with a mix of posters advertising the stud services of local stallions and scraps of paper offering to sell anything from vehicles and trailers to dogs and vegetables.

      Quint walked over to the counter. “Do you have some paper I can use?”

      “Get him some, Dallas,” Sykes ordered.

      Feeling oddly reluctant to face the stranger again, Dallas tore a page off the notepad on her desk, walked back to the counter, and handed it to him.

      “Thanks.”

      But there was a coolness in his look that stung. Dallas supposed she deserved it after the things she’d said to him. Yet she found herself missing the easy warmth that had been in his gray eyes all the previous times. She waited at the counter while he jotted his message on the paper, telling herself that the sooner he found out there was nobody around here he could trust, the better off he would be.

      Finished, he walked over to the bulletin board, posted his notice on it, and headed out the door. In big, block letters, he had written: HAY WANTED. Directly below it, he’d put the name of the ranch and its phone number.

      Beyond the windows, dust swirled as the sedan reversed away from the store and swung toward the highway. The minute it turned onto the road, Holly Sykes pushed out of his squeaky chair and walked over to the bulletin board, removed the notice, and retreated again to his desk. He dropped the handwritten message on the desktop and picked up the phone, punched a series of numbers from memory, and lifted the receiver to his ear.

      “Yeah, it’s Holly Sykes down at the feed store. I need to talk to Mr. Rutledge again.” After receiving an obviously negative response, he said, “That’s all right. Just give him a message for me. Tell him the cowboy came back in, wanting to know where he could buy some hay.”

      The receiver rattled back onto its cradle as Dallas turned from the counter. Holly Sykes wadded the notice into a ball and tossed it into the wastepaper basket next to his desk. With a self-satisfied smile, he lowered himself into his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

      “It’ll be a cold day in hell when he finds any hay for sale around here. And I’d bet money on that,” he declared and rocked his chair back.

      A little nudge was all it would take to overbalance the chair and send him flying ass over teakettle. Dallas had to remind herself how much she needed this paycheck. She suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling she wasn’t any different from anyone else in this town. The discovery didn’t set well.

      Paper sacks stuffed with groceries in the rear seat sat atop the bags of grain that Quint hadn’t been able to fit in the sedan’s trunk. More sacks occupied the front passenger seat.

      When he slowed the car to make the turn onto the lane, his glance skipped to the ranch sign, hanging perpendicular to the ground. But it was one of many signs of neglect that he’d noticed about the place. He couldn’t help wondering how much more he would find when he finally ventured farther than the ranch yard and lane.

      Idly, Quint scanned the gentle slope of hills on either side of the winding lane on the off chance he might spot some of the cattle, but there were none to be seen. Considering there was little in the way of graze, other than scrub grass, Quint wasn’t surprised. Years of abuse from overstocking and overgrazing had taken their toll. The land was certainly nothing like the rich grassland of the Calder ranch in Montana with its thick mat of buffalo grass and stands of blue joint. It would require some aggressive land management to turn the Cee Bar into productive rangeland again.

      He rounded a curve in the driveway and the ranch yard opened before him. Automatically Quint pointed the car toward the house, intending to unload the groceries first. But there was something amiss; he sensed it at once and slowed the car.

      The horses weren’t in the corral.

      With a quick whip of the steering wheel, Quint swung the car toward the barn. He braked to a stop in front of it, threw the gearshift into park, and climbed out of the car.

      The instant he took his first stride in the direction of the corral, a male voice barked, “Hold it right there, mister.”

      The voice seemed to be coming from the barn area. Quint made a half turn, and the voice barked again with new harshness, “Damn it, I said hold it right there!”

      In his side vision, Quint could see the double barrels of a shotgun protruding from the opened barn door. But the man holding it was little more than a hatted figure cloaked in the barn’s interior shadows. For the first time in months Quint missed the weight of the Glock he had once carried in a shoulder holster.

      But even if he had been carrying the Glock, he was in no position to argue with a shotgun and Quint knew it.

      “Who are you?” he demanded instead, careful to hold himself motionless.

      “I’m the one holding this shotgun on you, and that’s all you need to know,” the man countered in a cold, hard voice. “Now you just climb back in that car and go tell Rutledge that whatever mischief he was wanting you to do here will have to wait for another time.”

      The man thought he was