The Loop Read Online Free PDF Page B

cattle. He would have the library order special books he’d heard about and get livestock magazines shipped all the way from Europe. His father thought some of the articles the younger Henry read to him too newfangled but he was always smart enough to listen. It was at his son’s urging that he switched from a commercial to a purebred Hereford operation. And the more he handed over decisions, so the more the herd thrived.
    Buck grew up with all the confidence and not a little of the arrogance such status can give a child. No ranch was bigger than theirs, no rancher smarter than his daddy. There were some who expected - and others who secretly hoped - that the legendary Calder drive might dissipate in this third Henry’s veins. Instead, it seemed to redouble. He had two older sisters and two younger brothers but it was clear from the start that he was the only proper heir to the empire.
    Buck went to college in Bozeman and learned all about genetics. And when he came back, he helped take everything a step farther. He started keeping an individual file on every animal they reared, charting its performance in minute detail. Birthing ease, mothering skills, weight gain, disposition and much more were scrutinized and ruthlessly acted upon. The progeny of those who made the grade flourished; those found wanting went swiftly to the wall.
    As a philosophy, it differed little from the one to which ranchers and farmers had adhered for years. Weeding out poor stock was hardly revolutionary. But the rigor with which it was applied on the Calder ranch was. Buck’s changes improved performance dramatically in every area and soon had stockgrowers talking across the state. The first Henry Calder died content that his line would stretch strong and glorious to the century’s horizon.
    But Buck had only started. With the old man gone, he argued that they should switch from raising purebred Herefords to Black Angus. He argued that they made better mothers and soon everyone would be going for them. His father said he must be out of his mind. It would be throwing away everything they’d worked for all these years. But Buck persuaded him to let him try raising some Black Angus of his own, just to see.
    Almost immediately his small herd was outperforming the Herefords on every count. His father agreed to switch the whole herd, and within a few years, their reputation for purebred Black Angus surpassed all competition. Calder-bred bulls and the richness of their seed were renowned throughout the West and beyond.
    With his own seed, the young Buck Calder was somewhat less discriminating. He was generous with his favors and traveled widely to bestow them. There wasn’t a decent whorehouse from Billings to Boise that he hadn’t graced with a visit. He would boast that a real man had three unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of women.
    There were two kinds of women he pursued and the ones he dated knew nothing of the ones he paid. What made this surprising was that several of the former had brothers or male cousins who knew all too well about the latter. One or two of these young men had indeed witnessed Buck unbuckling and roared at the Calder motto, coined in his cups one bawdy night, that all you had to do with women was ‘Buck ’em and chuck ’em’.
    His friends’ silence on these matters, born less of loyalty perhaps than fear of self-incrimination, allowed Buck to be seen, throughout his twenties, as nothing worse than what some still quaintly called a ‘lady’s man’, which did little to prevent him simultaneously being seen, except by bad sports and the inordinately perceptive, as Hope’s most eligible bachelor.
    By the time he turned thirty, most women his age, including those he’d so excited at high school, had sensibly looked and found elsewhere. All were married and most were mothers and Buck by now was dating their younger sisters. Like his father before him, his eyes came at last to settle on a young woman