Summary: It’s a race against the clock as the three Cartwright brothers use whatever’s on hand to prepare a dinner for twenty!

Rated: Family Friendly  Word count: 1800

 

Chopped

Blank faces stared at the large, tightly bound roll on the table in front them.

Clearing his throat, Adam Cartwright spoke up first. “Barbed wire?”

“You said something sharp and pointy,” his sixteen-year-old brother, Little Joe, replied defensively.

Hoss started snickering and Little Joe frowned. Adam slowly folded one arm across his chest, rested his head in his other hand, and sighed deeply; looking for all the world the picture of a martyred saint.

“Sticks, Little Joe,” he said finally. “I meant sticks. How am I supposed to make skewers out of barbed wire?”

“How should I know? I’m in charge of keeping you stocked up on supplies, not cooking.”

Hoss fell back into one of the small chairs surrounding the kitchen table and began to laugh so hard his brothers almost considered joining him. Almost.

Ignoring the loud chortles, Adam opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by a now red-faced Little Joe.

“How was I supposed to know what you meant? ‘Joe I need something sharp and pointy, quick?’ That’s all you said, so that’s what I got!”

Adam held up a hand in surrender and glanced nervously at the pocket watch he’d set on the shelf above the stove. “Okay, we’ve got less than thirty minutes. There’s no time to whittle sticks now, just go get a pair of wire cutters and I’ll see what I can do.”

Little Joe rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Where are the-”

“Find them!” Adam roared.

Adam sent Hoss a withering glare, as Little Joe scurried out the side door. Hoss took his oldest brother’s cue and quickly wiped the smile off his face. “Hey, don’t look at me, older brother. I’m doin’ just fine on my part.” With those words a worried look came over Hoss’s face. “Maybe I’d better go check on them biscuits though.”

Adam tried not to show his alarm as Hoss made a mad dash for the outdoors. Having to prepare a dinner for twenty people had left the three brothers little room to spare in the oven, so Adam had placed Hoss in charge of making campfire biscuits. Following on his brother’s heels, they raced around the back of the house to where they had set up a large campfire. Upon arriving, Hoss squatted down near the coals, and using an iron hook, lifted the lid.

“See, they’re just fine,” Hoss said proudly, as he slid on a glove and picked up the steaming biscuits for his brother to examine. It only took him a few seconds to see that Adam was not smiling. “What’s wrong?”

Adam’s veins bulged as he ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Please tell me there’s more.”

Hoss stood up and fidgeted nervously. “More?”

“Hoss, we’re supposed to serve twenty people that’s why I told you to use the giant cast iron pot.”

“Well, I only heard you say, cast iron so I grabbed this here pan. And I thought you said ten people, not twenty.”

“You only made six biscuits!”

“Well, they’re big. I figured we could cut ‘em in half.”

Adam muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously vulgar, though Hoss couldn’t quite make it out. “Calm down, big brother, I’ll make more.”

“There’s no time!” Adam said, spinning around and marching toward the house. A sudden thought struck him and he turned on his heel so quickly that Hoss collided with him. There was a loud crack followed by groans as Hoss rubbed his eye and Adam his jaw. Hoss’s eye was already swelling when Adam spoke. “Hoth, make thure the table ith thet for twenty, not ten.”

“What’s the matter, Adam, did you bite your tongue? Adam . . .”

Adam stormed toward the house, rubbing gingerly at his jaw. His tongue was throbbing, and his heart was racing. How their pa had thought they could pull off this dinner without Hop Sing was beyond him. He tried not to think about the fact that while he and his brothers had spent the day polishing, scrubbing, and slicing, their pa had been in Virginia City, dressed in his finest suit entertaining a group of railroad delegates. Piper’s Opera House was putting on a gala performance with music and dramatizations in honor of the delegates. Adam had to admit that having the new rail line come in would do wonders for both Virginia City and the Ponderosa, but as the day wore on, he vowed that next time, he and his father would switch places.

Entering the kitchen through the side door, he stopped short, a twisted mess of barbed wire blocking his path.

“Joe!” he yelled.

“I’m working on it,” Little Joe answered, his voice coming from somewhere near the table.

“What happened?” Adam demanded.

“When I loosened the roll it went everywhere.”

Adam waded his way to the table, and something
resembling a mix between a sob and a hysterical laugh emanated from his lips.

Little Joe, with torn clothes and full of cuts from head to toe, was furiously working with a pair of now mangled scissors, trying to cut smaller pieces off the barbed wire.

“Thtop!” Adam commanded and grabbed the scissors from the boy’s hands. “I thaid wire cutterth not thithorth.”

“What?” Little Joe blinked in confusion.

“Never mind,” Adam screeched, “jutht get thith wire out of here. All of it!”

In the end, it took all three of them, struggling together to get the wire out of the house. They’d almost made it the barn, when Hoss stopped, sniffing the air. “Hey, what’s that . . .”

Adam was halfway back to the kitchen before Hoss finished his statement. A cloud of black smoke was billowing from the open doorway and windows, but he didn’t hesitate to wade through it. A moment later, he rushed out clutching the handle of a flaming pan. He quickly dipped it into one of the nearby rain barrels. Hoss and Little Joe looked on sympathetically before tiptoeing into the barn.

Adam stood with his hand submersed in water, as he conteplated going inside, packing his bags, and leaving for Mexico. He grimaced as he pulled the blackened pan out of the water. He only had about ten minutes before the delegates were supposed to arrive and he doubted that serving half a biscuit was going to do anything to help get them timber contracts they were after. He let go of the pan and it hit the bottom of the barrel with a thunk similar to the one he felt in his stomach. There was one last hope, and yelling for Hoss and Little Joe, he headed back into the smoky kitchen. His brothers came on a run and he started handing out orders.

“Little Joe, you go make thure the table ith thet for twenty.” He waited a moment for Hoss to translate and then told his middle brother to gather up all the carrots and potatoes they had cut up earlier that morning. Looking frantically around the room full of dirty dishes, he finally spotted a clean one. Grabbing Hop Sing’s largest frying pan, he quickly added a few dollops of leftover bacon grease. The overheated oven, had the grease popping in no time, and Adam began throwing in the meat he had cubed earlier for skewers.

“Throw in those vegetableth,” he told Hoss, as he ran down the cellar steps.

Taking no chances on this dish burning, Hoss stirred ferociously as he waited for his brother. Adam returned with a shout of triumph just as Little Joe dashed in from the dining room.

“Done,” said the teenager. His eyes widened as he watched Adam uncork one of their pa’s most expensive wine bottles.

“Adam that’s-” Hoss started, but Adam silenced him with a fierce glare.

“It’th the leatht pa can contribute,” Adam said.

Hoss and Little Joe took a step back from their wild-eyed oldest brother as he approached the stove top and held the bottle of wine over the sizzling pan. Neither of them even considered mentioning the scorch marks left on the ceiling when the wine erupted into flames a moment later. Adam continued to work like a mad man and soon the flames had died down and the pan was bubbling. He began tossing in any spices, or herbs within reach. Little Joe started to feel sick to his stomach, but when Adam threw in a few spoonful’s of butter, Hoss’s stomach growled.

Adam glanced up at the pocket watch. Only two minutes to go. He knew the vegetables would be underdone and the meat too red, but he hoped the tasty wine would make up for all of that. He ordered Little Joe to get a dish big enough for him to pour his conglomeration into. Little Joe ran from the room and was back a moment later with the large bowl of apples they kept on the living room table. He quickly dumped the apples into the sink and Adam followed him to the dining room. With only one minute to spare, Adam shouted for his brothers to put anything on the table that was fit to eat. By the time horses could be heard entering the front yard. The dining room table was laden with undercooked stew, two cans of beets, one jar of pickles, a dirty bowl quickly wiped and filled with apples, and a plate of large biscuits that had been cut into fourths.

The sad state of the table was not what caught the attention of Ben Cartwright as he entered the room. It was the sorry condition of his three sons, with their clothes torn, dirty, and slightly singed. Hoss’s right eye was swollen shut, and Little Joe looked as if he’d fought with a broken window and lost. A large bruise graced the left side of Adam’s jaw, and his right eye was twitching in rhythm with the large grandfather clock near the front door.

“Boys?” Ben said.

“Hi pa,” Hoss ventured, “. . . are the men comin’ in?”

The three brothers watched the emotions play across their father’s face. Confusion, fury, amusement, sympathy, and back to confusion all in the space of about ten seconds.

“Uh,” Ben said finally. “The men . . . oh, they . . . they decided to stay in town . . .the hotel offered to fix up a banquet for them . . .later tonight. I came back to see if you boys wanted to join us.”

No one moved an inch for the space of the next several minutes, except for the occasional twitch of Adam’s eye. The sound of the kitchen’s side door slamming shut finally broke the silence.

“Oh, and Hop Sing was in town,” Ben said. “He got back early from San Francisco, so I gave him a ride home.”