Chapter 10
Ten
There had been seven children in the old schoolhouse on Grand Springs, when the town was little more than a swing station and an outpost. Beau Hawkins and Ezra Hollis had been two of them.
Ezra had stood out, even back then. He was pudgy and soft, indicative of his father’s wealth, whereas the other boys were lean and nimble. Ezra wore glasses and read a lot. The other boys hated being trapped indoors for those few hours, longing to be outside.
The differences meant that Ezra was the odd child. Horses made him sneeze. He couldn’t throw. And he’d cried when Landon had put a garter snake down the seat of his pants.
And Beau, to his eternal shame, had laughed along with the other boys.
Ezra had joined his father, learning the difference between a note and a mortgage.
By the time Beau had come back from wars and roping, Ezra Hollis was a man of standing.
The Stockmen's Bank of Grand Springs was getting a brick front with a brass rail on the steps and a clerk. In John Hawknis’ time, the bank was a lean-to on the side of the feed store with Ezra Hollis's father sitting behind a table in it.
Beau wondered how many other cattlemen from their school days had walked up those steps with their hats in their hands to ask Ezra Hollis for some help.
He lingered in the waiting place whilst the clerk, another pudgy young man called Pelton, went through a shiny, cherrywood door behind him.
He looked at the framed images - prints of the bank building with a date under it, a smaller frame with a list of names on it.
He leaned in, wondering why these strangers' names from miles away were here in Grand Springs.
“Directors,” Hollis murmured from behind him, making Beau jump. “Some people answer to the Lord,” he paused and tilted his head at the frame. “The bank answers to them.” And he laughed at a joke that Beau didn’t understand. “Come on back. Can I offer you some tea? Coffee?”
Beau declined and stepped into Hollis’ domain.
Cool and dim, a hint of the good tobacco lingering.
Green carpet and a dark, wooden desk littered with papers and ledgers.
His chair let out a squeaking protest when he sat.
"Sit down, sit down,” he waved the air, adjusting himself closer to the desk so that he could rest his elbows on it, “How's that pretty wife of yours settling in? "
Ezra had gone from a pudgy child to a fat man. Brown eyes behind wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and Beau could still remember Ezra the boy crying because he was too slow to keep up with the schoolhouse boys.
"Well enough, thank you."
Hollis chuckled. “You must have some Irish blood in you somewhere, Hawkins, for the luck you’ve had to find such a fine woman. To have someone as good-looking as her answer an ad,” he shook his head. “A fine-looking woman."
Beau’s mouth moved in a facsimile of a smile. He was getting used to the compliments about Della. What he’d never get used to was the covetousness of some of these men. Blue eyes settled over Hollis, who seemed to remember himself.
He straightened a little, dug for a folder amongst the many in front of him, and turned it round. "There it is. I've had it drawn up as we discussed."
Beau set his own ledgers on his lap and opened it. He read it carefully, even as Hollis’ patience began to wear. “I’m sure you’ll find it’s in order.”
“Hmm,” Beau commented, his mind on the figures. They were set out in a neat, schooled hand, every column square, every seven crossed through the middle in the way a man is taught back East. "That's the balance standing?"
"That's the balance standing as of the first."
Beau looked at the number and wished he’d had the time to sit and go over the lines in his ledgers, matching them one at a time.
He’d started, of course, but the numbers swam, and his mind addled.
Despite Duke’s assurances that the ranch struggling was just life, Beau still held firm that the answer lay within his ledgers.
Something he’d missed. If only he’d studied a little harder, instead of laughing at Hollis when he’d cried over the garter snake. Things might be a little different.
He sighed.
"They’re fair terms," Hollis said into the silence. "As fair as I can make them, Beau, and I'll say straight out I've had to work at it. Nine per cent is not what the directors wanted."
"What directors?" Beau frowned, thrown a little as he lifted his gaze.
Hollis pointed at the office door. “The names you saw on the wall out there.
They own the bank, Beau. I just work in it.
" Hollis shrugged. "They're up at Helena, and I send them figures four times a year. They’re ones I answer to when looking at lending out these sums.” Hollis leaned back, and the chair protested again.
He linked his fingers across his wide middle.
"But at the end of the day the choice is yours.
It's your outfit. I've never yet pushed a man into a note, and I don't intend to start with you. "
"I know that.”
And the hell of it was that he did. Hollis had carried him through '84 when a harder man wouldn't have. Hollis had let a payment go over by six weeks that spring and never once mentioned it in a public street.
Beau sat there with the papers in front of him. He was already in a hole. After the roundup count, he knew that he would be hard-pressed to meet this loan payment, let alone any future ones. Good men needed him for work, wages, food. Their livelihood.
And the prettiest smile in the territory, the one that had vanished when he’d shouted at her in the kitchen, relied on him, too. Shame anew filled him. She’d only asked for some help, but she’d pushed into the one place he hadn’t wanted her to see.
Because he should have told her what she was getting into.
Beau shifted in the chair.
"Beau."
"Mm."
"It'll cover the payment coming up," Hollis said gently.
"That's what it's for. It'll clear that, and it puts you into the fall with your head above water, and if the shipping comes in strong in September, you're a different man by Christmas.
You still have ninety days before the first payment is due. "
"Sixty-three," Beau corrected.
"Sixty-three." Hollis agreed. "And do you believe you can meet that payment without this note?"
Beau's eyes came up.
It was a perfectly reasonable question, asked in a perfectly reasonable voice. It still stank to high heaven.
"Taking a loan to meet a loan feels a good deal like burning the fence rails to keep the cattle warm."
Hollis laughed, a short, genuine laugh. He leaned forward. "That's exactly what it is. I'll not insult you by dressing it otherwise." He shrugged. "It's also what four outfits in this county did last year, and three of them are still standing. You’re not the only one this is happening to."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"’Course," Hollis said, "you still have the other option. The one that gets you all het up like a nun in a saloon."
"No."
"Land's moving, Beau. It's moving better right now than I've known it in twenty years, and you're sitting on forty thousand acres. You’re a man who could raise that whole payment off a section of land he's not using and never miss the grass."
"There's no section I'm not using."
"There's the west end."
Beau fixed him with a look. “That’s Crimson Creek ground.”
"I know what it is."
"My father bought that land in seventy-one. The one place on that creek that is shallow enough to cross in a wagon without a bridge. It is the only reason my outfit can move anything west.”
Hollis smiled. “It would solve a lot of problems, Beau.”
“You want to tell me what I’d do the day after I sold that land?”
Hollis raised both hands, smiling. “I’m just letting you know your options. You seem to have the world on your shoulders. Before long, you and your pretty wife will be putting your own boys through the schoolhouse. Be nice if these loan payments were taken care of.”
Beau snapped the folder shut. He could sell the whole lot off. But ranching was all he knew. All he’d ever wanted to do. And John Hawkins would surely turn in his grave if Beau broke up what he’d worked so hard to build.
The ranch’s failing was on his shoulders. John Hawkins had been through leaner times, tougher times. It had started to die almost as soon as Beau had arrived home. Like frozen water melting through his fingers, Beau couldn’t stop it.
Hollis pressed to his feet, chair squealing. “I can see you’re having doubts, Beau. We go way back, and I’m not in the habit of pushing a man into a corner. Why don’t you think on it some more, hmm?”
He took the folder back and squared it on the desk with two fingers.
What Beau could not stand, and had not been ready for, was that Hollis could see the abject failure too, and was being kind about it.
Beau picked up his ledgers, offered his hand. “I think I will, Ezra. Thank you.”
"Beau."
He stopped in the doorway.
"Sixty-three days," Hollis said pleasantly. "Just so we're neither of us surprised."
"I won't forget."
He got down the steps and out onto the boardwalk and into a wind coming up the street with grit in it. He settled his hat on his head, eyes scanning the streets.
You’re not the only outfit this is happening to.
Although offered in comfort, the words merely added salt to the wound. He was John Hawkins’ boy. And he was the only outfit who had a wife who had no idea that in sixty-three days, they could be sleeping under the stars she loved to watch with no roof to his name.