Summary:  A murder on a cattle drive; Joe vanishes and Ben is forced to face the ghosts of the past, bringing his family into terrible danger.  Only Hoss’s stoic perseverance and Adam’s selfless heroism can save the life of the youngest Cartwright.  My response to an SJS challenge in which we were given the first few paragraphs.

WC 26,000  Rated: T

His Father’s Son

Joe always forgot how cold the middle of the night could get when he was sitting still, doing nothing but watching a bunch of cattle. The moon shone full and round, and the stars sparkled like the lake water on a sunny day—all of which would have been just fine if he’d been in a buggy with Hattie Miller. Even the crisp cold of the breeze that kicked up would have been fine then, because it would have given him an excuse to put his arm around her.

Instead, here he was, all by himself with a bunch of dumb cattle, and Hattie Miller was undoubtedly at home and sound asleep, just like anyone else with a lick of sense. But at least he had Hank Murray to keep him company for middle watch. Hank was new to the Ponderosa, and not much older than Joe, but he’d worked at pretty near every ranch between Kansas and California. At least, that was what he said, and even if he was stretching the truth, there was no question that he was good at what he did. Not that Joe had any plans for nodding off, but it was nice to know that if he did, Hank would be fine.

He yawned as he scanned the moonlit pasture for Hank, who had been assigned to keep watch with him. He wasn’t over by the rocks where he’d been a few minutes ago. He must’ve gone to tend to his personal business, Joe decided. Nothing wrong with that. His thoughts were just drifting back to Hattie Miller when he heard something that made him sit up straight. A couple of the cattle raised their heads. “Easy, now,” Joe whispered. All it would take was for one or two to spook, and things could get bad fast. He held his breath as he nudged his mount’s sides, trying to move as quietly as possible. He wanted to call out for Hank, but he’d be more likely to waken the herd and the sleeping cowboys than to get Hank’s attention from wherever he was.

“Joe!”

Joe’s head snapped around. He didn’t recognize the voice, but it sounded harsh, hoarse, and full of pain. Without thinking, he drew his gun. All traces of sleepiness vanished. “Who’s there?” he hissed.

“Joe!” The voice was closer.

“Who’s there?” He still didn’t see anybody.

“It’s me.” A dark figure—on foot—stumbled toward him.

“What the—Hank?” Frantically, Joe looked around. The herd wasn’t moving, but that didn’t mean everything couldn’t change in a second. He couldn’t just leave them, but something was wrong here. He was about to call out when Hank fell, landing solidly against one of the cattle, and that was all it took. The beast heaved itself up with a deep, startled moan. In the next instant, it was as though the earth itself was rising up with a roar. Joe shouted in an effort to divert the herd, and the peace of the night gave way to the thundering of hooves, the clashing of horns, and the yelling of cowboys.

It seemed forever before the herd was settled. Nobody was sleeping now; they were staked around the herd, watching. They’d be slower tomorrow as a result, but it couldn’t be helped.

Pa rode up next to him. In a low voice, he asked, “Did you see what spooked them?”

“It was—Pa, have you seen Hank?”

“Hank?  Hank Murray?”

Joe nodded. “Something was wrong. He was supposed to be over on the other side, but he was coming over here, and he was on foot. He fell on one of the cattle and startled it.”

Pa shook his head. Even in the moonlight, Joe could see him frowning. “If he was down when it started. . . .” He didn’t need to finish.

“We should go back anyway, Pa. Even if we’ve just gotta bury him.”

Pa nodded. He barked orders to the nearest men and turned to Joe. “Show me where he was.”

They rode in silence to where Joe had been keeping watch. “He was right here,” said Joe at last. “He was walking real unsteady, and he was calling me, and then he fell.” He considered the place where he’d last seen Hank. “Maybe he got himself out of the way.” Pa allowed himself a small smile that Joe knew was a credit to his hopefulness. Adam always said that Joe would believe for something long after any sensible fellow would have given up and gone home.

“Joe!” The voice was hoarser, weaker, but unquestionably the same.

“Hank!” Joe was off his horse in a flash, with Pa right behind him. “Hank, where are you?” His eyes strained in the darkness.

“Here.” There, in the shadow of a rock, lay Hank.

Pa knelt beside him. “Just take it easy,” he said in that soothing voice Joe knew so well. “Joe, get me your canteen.” Joe obeyed, and Pa held it to the injured man’s lips. “Take it easy, now, Hank. We’ll get you back to camp.”

“No.” Hank reached up as if to grab Pa’s vest. “Joe….”

“I’m right here, Hank.” Joe bent over him. Then, he whispered, “Pa?” Pa nodded as if he’d seen it, too.

Hank’s face was bruised and bloody. Joe had seen men trampled by cattle, and they didn’t look anything like that. Hank looked like he’d been beaten by somebody’s fists.

“Hank, what happened?” asked Pa.

“Joe.” The word was more breath than sound.

“I’m here, Hank. What happened?” Joe tried to get a good look at the man’s injuries.

“Be… careful.”

“Careful of what?”

“Looking… for… you.”

“Who’s looking for Joe?” Pa asked. “What do they want?”

“Careful.”

Pa glanced at Joe. “Just save your strength now, Hank. We’ll talk when we get you back to camp.”

Hank reached up and caught hold of Pa’s vest. He tugged ever so slightly, and Pa bent lower. The injured man whispered something Joe couldn’t hear. Then, his hand dropped, and his head fell back.

“Is he—” Joe broke off as Pa nodded. They sat silently beside the dead man for a respectful minute. Then, Joe asked, “What did he say, Pa?”

“Let’s just get him back to camp,” said Pa. “Bring my horse over here.”

Joe did as he was told. Once they’d loaded the body onto Pa’s horse, he asked again, “What did he say?”

Pa turned to him, his eyes somber.  “He said—they wanted you.”

“What else though?”

Pa shook his head.  “Nothing else.”

Joe knew he hadn’t mistaken the almost imperceptible hesitation in Pa’s voice, but he didn’t get a chance to question further because Pa was suddenly brisk and business like.  “Let’s get back to camp.  Whoever did this to Hank could still be out there.  On your horse, Joseph.  Let’s get on back to the men.”

 

Chapter 2

“You don’t have to do that you know.”  Ben laid his hand on his youngest son’s shoulder as the boy leaned over the sheet of paper spread on the desk, pen in hand, brow drawn into a troubled crease.  “I’m going into Virginia City.  I’ll send a telegraph.

Joe dipped his pen in the inkwell and pursed his mouth.  “A telegraph’s not the same, Pa.  I want to write.  Explain things.  Hank was my friend.  He told me all about his ma and his sisters, I feel like I almost know them.  I want to let them know how much we all thought of him too, and…”  Joe’s words wavered.  He gave a small shake of his head.  ‘It…it seems only right,” he finished lamely.

“He was owed some pay.  I’ll make sure it reaches his family.” For a moment, Ben was tempted to say more, but Joe’s gaze was focused on the blank sheet of paper in front of him and he didn’t notice his father’s troubled indecision.  Ben waited another moment before giving his son’s shoulder a gentle squeeze and heading for the door, the furrow in his own forehead mirroring Joe’s.  There he paused again and looked back.  Once more he opened his mouth to say something, but Joe was scratching intently at the paper with his pen, oblivious to all else, face obscured by untidy brown curls.  Something akin to pain contracted briefly in Ben’s middle.  Joe was seventeen; a man grown in so many ways and yet still so young.  Did a father’s desire to protect his children ever go away?  Ben sighed and stepped out into the warm sunlight, so engrossed in his own thoughts, he failed even to notice his two older sons, sitting on the porch, cups in hand.

“Coffee, Pa?”

Ben looked around, half surprised to see them there.  He shook his head. “I need to ride into town, Hoss.  Talk to the sheriff about Hank Murray.”

Adam raised an eyebrow.  “You only got back last night, Pa. Thought you’d want a break from the saddle.  Let me ride in and talk to Roy.”

“Thanks, Adam. I think I need to deal with this myself.”

He hadn’t been aware that his distraction was written so plainly on his features, but the consternation on the faces of both his sons told him they’d noticed.

Hoss tilted his head.  “Is there something else bothering you, Pa?”

Ben looked from Adam to Hoss and back again.  “Listen, boys, there’s something I need you to do.  Keep an eye on your brother while I’m gone, will you?   He’s in the house…writing a letter to Hank’s family, so if you could just…find some chores around here, that way you can keep an eye on him without him getting… well, upset about it.”

He could see his clumsy plea had confused them.

Hoss’s face crinkled.  “Is Joe in some kind of trouble?”

Ben shook his head. “No.  I mean… I hope not.  I’d just like you to keep an eye on him while I’m gone.  Make sure nothing happens.”

“Like what?”  Adam’s voice held a note of caution.

“Just keep an eye out for strangers, and make sure Joe stays here, close to the house.”

“You think someone’s after him?”

Ben hesitated again.  “I don’t know, Adam.”  He glanced behind him as if to make sure Joe wasn’t there, listening.  “It’s just that, before Hank died, he mentioned a name to me.  The name of a man I thought had been dead for fifteen years.”  He tightened his lips.  “It would just put my mind at rest to know you two were watching out for you brother.”

Adam put down his coffee cup and leaned forward. “What man?”

“No one you know.  His name was Sam Mitchell. This may all be a big mistake. The sooner I talk to Roy, the sooner I’ll know.”

“Who was he, this Sam Mitchell?”

“A small time crook from New Orleans.  Like I say, it doesn’t make sense.  I’m sure there’s a sensible explanation, but until then…”

Hoss nodded.  “Until then, you’d like us to keep Joe where we can see him.  Right under our noses.”

Adam still looked wary.  “Have you said anything to Joe?”

“No.”  Ben shook his head.  “He’s already upset about what happened to Hank. You know how worked up he can get when he’s upset. I want to wait until I’ve talked to Roy before I dangle any half-baked suspicions in front of Joe or, like as not, he’ll go rushing off half cocked and land himself in a pile of trouble, just like he always does.  So, don’t let him saddle that horse, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Hoss gave his father a reassuring grin.  “Relax, Pa.  We’ll keep Joe outa trouble, I promise.  Me and Adam, we’ll just find some chores hereabouts to keep us busy.  That barn could use a good clean for a start.  You up for a spot of muck-shifting, brother?”

Adam considered the question with an expression of gravity.  “I think maybe I’ll leave that to you, younger brother, while I focus my attention on fixing the broken tailgate on the buckboard.”

Ben’s face finally relaxed. He even managed a half-hearted smile.  “Thanks, boys.  I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

*******

Hoss tossed a final forkful of clean straw into a stall and straightened his back. “Reckon it was no bad thing being stuck here in the yard.  This barn sure needed a good clean.”

Adam wiped greasy hands on a rag and nodded.  He’d fixed both the tailgate and the sticking pulley in the loft.  “If Joe ain’t finished that letter yet, we could take a look at that broken wagon shaft.”

“You reckon he’s still at it?”

Adam gave a shrug.  “He was on his third attempt last time I stuck my head around the door.  Must be hard to know what to say. ”

Hoss pulled a face.  “Bad business that. Beating a feller to death.  You don’t reckon Pa thinks this Sam Mitchell done that to Hank, do you, Adam?”

Adam’s mouth tightened.  “Sounds a bit heavy-handed for a small time crook.  But Pa didn’t really say much about what happened, even when they got back last night.”

“Little Joe didn’t say a lot either.”

“No, he’s taken it hard.  He and Hank had gotten close these last few weeks.”

“Well, maybe if he’s finished that letter he’s so set on writing, the three of us could slip off down to the lake this afternoon.  Do some fishing.  Cheer him up.”

Adam gave a small smile.  “That’s not such a bad idea.”

“But first I need to find me some grub!”

Adam’s small smile broadened into a grin.  “Well it’s important we get our priorities right, isn’t it, younger brother?”

Hoss grinned.  “You betcha!”

*******

“How you doing Joe?”  Hoss poked his head around the door.  The room was silent.  A faint smell, vaguely familiar, tickled his nostrils.  “Joe?”

The desk was empty.  Joe must finally have finished his letter. Adam followed his brother into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Joe?”  Hoss strode to the stairs and called up.  “Joe!”

“Hoss.”  Something in Adam’s tone sounded a warning.  Hoss looked where his brother was looking.

Joe’s letter lay on the desk, unfinished, his pen abandoned in the middle of the page.  Ink from the nib had spread outwards in an untidy stain. Only after he had registered the dark blot spoiling the page did Hoss notice that the chair behind the desk was upturned.  Cold fingers prodded at his heart even as he reminded himself that his younger brother was a creature of high passion, prone to flinging down his pen in a fit of pique, and perfectly capable of overturning flimsy items of furniture when his patience wore thin.

“You check upstairs, I’ll look out back.”  Adam was already halfway across the room as he spoke.

Hoss took the stairs three at a time, but even as he checked the empty rooms, a niggling puzzle fell into place in his head and he knew he wouldn’t find Little Joe upstairs, nor would Adam find him in the outhouse or anywhere out the back.

“That smell!” he said, as he and Adam met back in the center of the great room, neither of them now pretending that the situation hadn’t suddenly become serious.

“What smell?”  Adam nosed the air and frowned and Hoss knew he had caught a whiff of it too.

Hoss dropped down on his hands and knees by the desk and sniffed, like a hound after a scent.  A few seconds later he climbed back to his feet holding a shred of frayed fabric to his nose.  His mouth set in a hard line, he passed it to Adam.

The torn fragment might have been small but the scent was pungent.

“Ether!” said Adam, his face grave.

“Dadburnit, Adam!”  Hoss’s voice was a harsh whisper.  “We were supposed to be keeping an eye on him!”

“They can’t have been gone long.”  Adam thought fast.  “When did I last look in on him?  Less than an hour ago.”

“How did they get past us?”

“Back door’s unlocked.”

Hoss muttered a curse.

“But listen, Hoss.  They used ether.  They didn’t kill him.  Wherever he is, they’ve taken him alive.”

“Kidnapped him?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe.  Get out the back and see if you can find any tracks.  I’ll find someone to ride into town and get Pa; tell him what’s happened.  Then I’ll saddle up our horses.  They can’t have gone far.  Damn it, Hoss, we’ve just got to find them!”

Chapter 3

A harsh cold light filtered on the brink of consciousness, penetrating the soft cocoon of sleep.  Slowly, he drifted upwards from a deep red darkness.  Sounds, unwelcome and vaguely familiar, pulled him towards the surface as if from the bottom of a warm silent lake. It was comfortable in the warm darkness; he wanted to stay.  But the sounds were insistent.  They tugged, unrelenting.  And in the borderland between oblivion and wakefulness, the half remembered sounds became recognizable, took on shapes, gathered meaning, became words.

“Take it easy, Joseph.  Easy, boy.  You’re going to be all right.”

All right?  What did that mean?  He was going to be all right?  His brain stumbled again.  He wasn’t all right.  He couldn’t open his eyes.  And he wasn’t all right because his throat hurt and there was a foul taste in his mouth, and worst of all, he was choking on something sour.

His face was wet.  Something hard and unforgiving pressed into his cheek.  Finally engaging the muscles of his eyelids, he forced them open, blinking in some discomfort as the light battered his eyes.  Several facts hit him all at once, none of them pleasant.  The object digging with metallic hardness into his face was an enamel basin, and the reason he was choking and his face was wet was because he was throwing up into it, copiously.

“You’re going to be all right,” said the disembodied voice again.

In the land of red darkness and bright lights, Joe had somehow imagined the voice speaking his name to be his father’s.  Now he knew it was not.  Nor was it Hoss’s or Adam’s, or even Doc Martin’s.   As his present condition precluded raising his head to see who it was, he could do nothing but lie helplessly, vomiting into a basin held by a complete stranger.

He was forced to let his eyes close again; they hurt too much.  His brain was spinning, thudding against the inside of his skull as though it were trying to escape.  The violent contractions in his stomach just kept on coming.  The unknown voice repeated the assurance once again.  “Take it easy.  You’re going to be all right.”

He didn’t recall drifting back into sleep; not until he awoke a second time, and replayed the whole miserable scenario over again, but this time with an empty stomach, which hurt even more.  A man’s hand held a tin cup to his lips.  He gulped gratefully at the cool water but every mouthful came straight back up.  In the brief moments when he wasn’t retching uselessly, he was seized instead by a racking cough.

“It’s the ether,” said the man’s voice.  “It’ll pass.”

Ether?  Yes, he remembered now.  A damp rag clamped over his face, a steely arm tightening around his torso, an overpowering stench in his nose and throat.  At the memory of the smell, his stomach made another involuntary contraction.   His struggling fingers, clawing with frantic desperation at the hand smothering him, had grown thick and numb, his limbs as heavy as wet sponges, his head too much of a weight to support.  He’d been writing a letter. He remembered that too now.  A letter to Hank’s mother.  Around him the room had rippled, grown dim, shadowy, blurred.  As though he was slowly sinking beneath the surface of the lake…

He awoke for the third time, once again with no memory of having fallen asleep.  His brain pounded, his throat burned and his lungs felt as if they’d been turned inside out and scoured, but at least the coughing and the gagging had ceased, even if his head and stomach were still rising and falling independently on a pitching swell of nausea.  Every breath brought a potent reminder of the vileness of the ether.  Cautiously, he opened his eyes.

Not daring to move his head even an inch for fear of triggering another bout of sickness, he could see enough to know that he was lying on his side in a covered wagon, on some kind of camp cot.  The pitching sensation wasn’t entirely in his imagination.  The rattling wagon swayed and bumped as it moved.  Sunlight filtered through the canvas. The air was hot and stuffy.

“How are you feeling?”

It was the same voice that had offered him assurance before. A man’s voice.  Light.  Friendly. An unfamiliar accent.

“Thirsty,” said Joe, in a husky whisper.

A three-legged stool and a pair of legs clad in dark brown drill appeared in his line of vision.  A man’s body dropped down on the small seat and held out the same tin cup Joe had seen earlier.

“Take it a sip at a time,” said the voice.

With a sinking sensation, Joe realized he would need to move his head to drink.  For a few moments he debated whether the reward was worth the risk, but with a thirst too fierce to ignore, he maneuvered himself with infinite caution onto one elbow, groaning aloud as the wagon jolted and swam around him.

“Don’t worry,” said his companion, “you’ll soon be back to rights.  Just a hangover really.”

Joe reached for the cup with clumsy hands.  A fair portion of the water spilled straight down his bare chest, cold against his skin.  It took his lethargic brain a few seconds to grasp the significance of the sensation, and to realize that, beneath the plaid blanket covering him, the rest of him was naked too.

“Like I said, small sips.

“Where are my clothes?”  His head felt as if it was stuffed with wool and his voice sounded the same.

“I’m afraid they were somewhat spoiled.  Our on board laundry facilities are limited.  But never fear, you can have fresh clothes as soon as your condition is suitably recovered.”

Joe’s sluggish brain struggled to process this answer.  He sipped from the cup, holding back with an effort the urge to gulp greedily.  When the first mouthful showed no signs of reappearing, he risked another.

“Good,” said the man.  “Things are definitely looking up.”

Finally, still with caution, Joe raised his head and looked into the face of his mysterious attendant.  A face as affable as the voice; pleasant – handsome, even – framed by thick brown curls not unlike his own, except this man’s were streaked lightly with grey.  A strong, clean-shaven jaw.  Warm brown eyes lit with a spark of humor, edged with small crinkles.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Sam Mitchell.  Doctor Sam Mitchell.”

“Doctor?”

“That’s right.  Listen, I’m sorry about the ether.  Didn’t think you’d react so badly.  It won’t last long, I promise.”

Joe frowned.  “Why did you do it?”

“I needed to talk to you.  Away from your family.”

Joe took another careful sip of water, scowling into the cup as he tried to force his muddled head to focus clearly.

“Couldn’t you have dropped me a note, or knocked on the door, or something like that?”  His mouth still tasted of ether in spite of the water.  He fought down an urge to gag.  Sam Mitchell reached out and took the cup from his hand.

“Lie back down.  That’s enough for now.  You can have some more in a while.”

“Where are we?”

“About thirty miles east of the Ponderosa.”

“Thirty miles.”  Joe lowered his head onto the pillow, not to oblige his strange companion but because it felt as if it might burst if he didn’t.  “Where are you taking me?”

“Where would you like to go?”

Joe’s brow furrowed deeper.  “Home.”

Sam Mitchell laughed.  “Of course you can go home.  Soon.  If you still want to.  But first we have to talk, you and I.”  He gave Joe’s shoulder an encouraging pat.  “But it can all wait until you’re feeling yourself again.  There’s no hurry now.  We can take all the time we need.”

 

Chapter 4

“Well?”

Hoss took off his hat and rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his big hand.  He looked at his brother and pulled a helpless face.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Adam.  If you want to hide your tracks, the best way to do it is to find the busiest road out of town.”

Adam pursed his mouth in frustration and glowered at the dirt beneath his feet as if he could force it to yield up its secrets that way.

Pa drew a deep breath in a concerted effort to stay calm.  “What do we know?  Two men, we think.   A twelve foot wagon pulled by a couple of mules.  Someone in town must have seen it pass.”

Adam kicked at a loose stone with the toe of his boot.  “Hundreds of wagons pass this way.”

“Only so many in a single afternoon though.  Let’s ride back into town and ask around.”

Adam looked gloomy.  Hoss gave a shrug.  “Better than standing here wondering.”

Sheriff Coffee met them as they made their way back into the hustle and bustle of the town.

“I was just coming after you, Ben.”  He turned his horse to head back with them, fishing in the pocket of his shirt as he did so.  “This reply just came from the New Orleans Police Department.  Thought you’d want to know what they said.”  He passed the paper to Pa.  “Sam Mitchell didn’t hang, Ben.”  Roy Coffee’s face was grave.  “After you left New Orleans, there was an appeal. The murder charge was dropped.  Mitchell went to prison for fifteen years.”

Pa halted his horse in the middle of the street.  “Why didn’t I hear about that?”

Roy checked his horse too.  “Don’t know, Ben.  Guess you were busy making your way back here.  Lord knows you had enough to be thinking about with your boys so sick.”

Fifteen years.  Adam sifted back through his memory.  Pieces fell easily into place.  The summer he was fourteen.  All three of them sick with fever.  Pa away.  Hoss about seven or eight, Joe hardly more than a baby.  Marie, distraught.

“Fifteen years?”  Pa’s brows came down sharply.  “So he’d be out again now?”

Roy nodded.  “You think he’s responsible for this?”

Hoss screwed up his face.  “Sam Mitchell? That’s the name Hank told you, ain’t it, Pa?  The small time crook from New Orleans you told us about?  What’s he want with Little Joe?”

Pa exchanged glances with the sheriff.  Roy rubbed a hand over his mustache.  “Guess you ain’t told them then?”

Pa nudged his horse forward again.

Adam saw a muscle twitch in his father’s tight jaw.  “What happened, Pa?”

Pa kept riding as if he hadn’t heard, but Adam knew he had.

“Pa?”

Pa took a deep breath.  Still without looking at anyone, he said, “Sam Mitchell was a doctor.  But he was also a crook.  A real clever fraudster.  Used to con the folks he was doctoring.  But like I say, he was real smart and no one in New Orleans suspected what he was up to.”  Pa’s expression didn’t alter but his voice dropped and took on a sharp edge of bitterness.  “Except Marie.”

“Marie?”  Adam frowned.  “What did she have to do with it?”

“Folks liked Sam Mitchell.  He was friendly, intelligent, witty, always happy to oblige.  Nobody suspected he was anything more than the charming, dedicated doctor he claimed to be.

“A couple of months before I met Marie, he arrived in New Orleans and started paying attention to her.  At first she was flattered.  But as the weeks went on, she became troubled by some of the things he said and did, so she told him she didn’t want to see him any more.

“I knew nothing of this at the time.  She never mentioned him to me.  We were married and came back here and everything was fine.  Or so I thought.

“About six months later, he came here, to Virginia City, to find her.  It was like he was obsessed.  His behavior was more than just a nuisance.  At one point, he even tried to abduct her then claimed it was all a misunderstanding.   Roy will remember.”

Sheriff Coffee nodded gravely.  “I sure do.  But he was careful to stay inside the law.  Most folks thought he was a real nice feller too.  And of course, him being a doctor, they loved that.  Especially one as amiable as he made out to be.”

Pa’s face was grim. “I wanted rid of him.  After the abduction attempt, Marie got scared.  That’s when I found out about all the things he’d told her back in New Orleans.  Stories about people who’d been swindled, boasts about the doctors having powers over their patients.  I was worried enough to talk to Roy.  He contacted a detective in New Orleans.  Before long, there was enough evidence to arrest him.  He was escorted back to New Orleans to stand trial.”  Pa gave a tight shrug.  “I thought they’d hanged him.”

The sheriff saw the question in Adam’s mind before he spoke it aloud.

“Marie’s information helped uncover witnesses who claimed Mitchell had deliberately overdosed a couple of his patients to get at their money.  It amounted to murder.  Only, seems now the evidence wasn’t solid enough.  He didn’t hang after all.”

Hoss gave a puzzled shake of his head.  “What’s all that gotta do with Little Joe, Pa?”

Adam caught a swift glance pass between Pa and the sheriff.  It was Roy who answered.

“That man’s got a grudge against your pa, Hoss.  And he’s got a conniving mind.   Some folks are plain raving mad and there ain’t no mistaking their condition, but others, well they’ve got their madness honed to a such a fineness you can’t see the blade ’til it cuts you.  There’s something twisted inside Mitchell and it’s all the more dangerous for being hidden behind a charming smile. The man’s a snake.”

“Pa?  You all right?”  Adam had heard Roy’s words but he had been watching Pa’s expression as it paled and his mouth drew thin.

Pa’s voice sounded stretched, as if his throat had tightened around the words.  “I’ll be all right when we get your brother back, Adam.  Let’s start asking around.  Someone here has to have seen something.”

 

Chapter 5

Joe tucked an unfamiliar shirt into unfamiliar pants and wrapped a belt with a fancy buckle around his middle to hold the outfit together.  The clothes were roomy but not a bad fit.  Joe imagined they were Sam’s own, although they had the feel and smell of new fabric about them.  There was a jacket too.  Brown like the pants.  He sat down on the edge of the bunk to pull on his boots.  At least they were his own.

He was still queasy but at least his stomach was finally under control.  A lingering taste of ether permeated his every breath.  It fueled the waves of nausea still pitching inside him, like the swell on a troubled sea.

The wagon had stopped.  The sun was sloping down in the western sky.  His second evening away from home.  He remembered nothing about the first one.  Smoke from a camp fire drifted in under the canvas, and the smell of food cooking.  At the thought of food, he swallowed hard, sucked in a deep breath and the moment passed.

“We’ll talk over supper,” Sam had promised him.  “I’ll explain everything then.”

Joe frowned to himself as he thought about Sam’s words.  How did you explain drugging a man and carting him away against his will?  It was a puzzle because Sam seemed a decent enough feller, likeable even.

Unlike Brady.

It was Brady who had been driving the wagon.  Joe had only glimpsed him only briefly, hadn’t even spoken to him yet, but something in the cold black eyes and expressionless face had instantly put Joe on his guard.  When they’d finally jolted to a halt a short time ago, Brady had thrust his head inside the wagon and stared hard at Joe.  Joe had expected him to say something, but he’d simply stared in cold muteness before withdrawing his head again and setting about unhitching the mule team.

“That’s Brady,” Sam said.  “Don’t mind him.  He’s a man of few words and even fewer social graces.”

Brady was mopping stew from a bowl with a thick chunk of bread when Joe finally slid his still fragile body out of the wagon.  Brady’s back was against a rock, his long legs stretched in front of him.  Even sitting, he looked huge.  As big as Hoss, Joe decided, maybe even bigger.  His dark, close-cropped hair had thinned almost to baldness over the top of his head.  His eyes looked as if they had seen everything and sneered at it all.

“Do you want some food?”  Sam nodded his head at his own bowl of half-eaten, thick brown stew.  Joe recoiled.  “No?  Well how about some coffee?”

Joe lowered himself carefully to the ground beside the camp fire and Sam passed a tin mug of coffee into his hand.  Joe took a tentative sip.  The strong, hot liquid tasted surprisingly agreeable.

“You’re looking better,” said Sam, resuming his meal. “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about.”

Joe gave a wary nod.

Sam’s mouth curved in a lopsided smile as he chewed.  “I’m sorry about the melodrama.  I needed to get you alone, away from your family.  There’s no way Ben Cartwright – your pa – would let me talk to you otherwise.”

“You know my father?”

“Let’s say we’ve met.  Some years ago now.  Under circumstances that were less than happy.”  Sam gave a light laugh.  “I knew your mother.  Back in New Orleans.  Before she married your father.”

“My mother?”

Sam gave a wistful nod.  “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever had the privilege to meet.  I’m sorry you didn’t know her for longer, Joe.”

Joe sipped his coffee, puzzled.  The longing on Sam’s face as he spoke of Marie was uncannily familiar.

Sam put down his plate and drew his knees loosely up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them.  “I…I guess it’s best if I don’t beat about the bush.  I owe you an explanation for what’s happened.  When you hear what I have to say, I’m hoping you’ll understand why I had to go to such lengths.”

The coffee was good.  Exactly what he’d needed, Joe decided.  Every mouthful made him feel a little more like his old self.  He took another sip as he waited for Sam to go on, but after his earlier confidence, Sam now seemed hesitant, nervous even.  Joe couldn’t make him out at all.  Over by the rocks, Brady shifted, setting his cup down on his plate with a clang. Sam threw him a look of annoyance then switched his attention back to Joe.

“The thing is, Little Joe…

Joe blinked down at the dark liquid in his cup.  Despite feeling stronger, a sense of numbness persisted, as if his brain was still fumbling to find the sharp edges.

He realized Sam had stopped speaking and raised his face.  His eyes met Sam’s and even through his dulled senses, he could see the unease in Sam’s expression had turned into something approaching desperation.

“The thing is, Little Joe… I’m your real father.”

*******

The light of the moon cast a pale glow through the taut canvas covering the wagon.  Joe lay on the cot and listened to the sounds of the night and the deep rhythm of his own heart, loud in the darkness.  Sam had insisted Joe take the bed while he and Brady rolled in their blankets by the fire, and Joe had been grateful for the solitude. After everything Sam had said, more than anything, he needed time alone.

He hadn’t reacted at all at first, when Sam made his startling announcement.  The words had been clear enough, but they’d made no sense.

“The thing is, Little Joe… I’m your real father.”

Then he’d laughed.  Not a wholehearted laugh, as if Sam had said something genuinely amusing; not even an incredulous snort of derision; more like the response reserved for occasions when a polite laugh is deemed the appropriate response.  The pronouncement was so ludicrous, it barely deserved acknowledgement.

Yet something in Sam Mitchell’s face had frozen the sound in his throat.  That desperation he’d recognized seconds before was now shot through with pain.  The nausea Joe had thought past suddenly welled with renewed urgency in his gullet and he’d had to swallow hard several times before he could force out the single word.  Even then it had erupted as a strangled squeak.

“What?”

They’d carried on staring at each other in a silence that roared like a stampede in Joe’s ears.  Finally Sam had spoken again, in a voice as tight as Joe’s.

“I am, Joe.  I’m your real father.”

Alone in the wagon, Joe curled his body and squeezed his eyes shut, as though he could fend off reality that way.  But closing his eyes just made it all the easier to picture Sam’s face again, suffused with earnest anxiety.

“I already have a father. What are you talking about?”

Sam, his arms still locked around his knees, had rocked back and forth, his fingers twitching nervously.

“It’s like I said.  I knew your mother, Joe. Before Ben Cartwright ever came to New Orleans.”

Joe’s eyelids sprang wide again and he stared blankly into the darkness.  Even the memory of the conversation made him feel physically sick.  It couldn’t be true, could it?

“Didn’t it ever occur to you, Joe?  About your birthday?”

“What do you mean?”  His heart had started to beat so rapidly, it had been difficult to force his voice out evenly.

“They were married in late September.  You were born in May. That’s not even eight months.  Don’t tell me you never thought about that.”

Joe’s hands had started to shake then.  He’d had to press them hard against his legs to hide the trembling. Of course he’d thought about it.  Plenty of times.  He’d even mentioned it to Adam once, when he was ten and old enough to wonder.  It wasn’t the kind of question a ten-year-old could put to a man like Pa.  Adam had just thumped him on the back and grinned.  “You always were trouble, Little Joe, from the day you were born.  You just came early; took everyone by surprise, especially your mama.  There she was, down by the lake, and suddenly, without warning, you were on your way.  That’s why you were so small when you were born.  Pa says it’s only your pig-headed stubbornness that kept you alive.  I guess that’s why we call you Little Joe.”

“I just came early,” said Joe, wondering why his voice emerged as barely more than a husky whisper.

The way Sam had looked at him then had made Joe’s insides turn over.  His pulse drummed too loudly in his head.  Sam’s face swam in a grey mist.

“Are you all right?  Lie down for a moment.”

Hands gripped his shoulders, pushed him backwards.  Joe resisted.  He took a couple of deep, shuddering breaths. The mist slowly evaporated, the drumming faded in his ears.

“I’m all right. I’m all right!”

“I’m sorry, Joe.  You’re still not well.  I should have thought.”

Sam’s face was close to his own, a face that expressed every emotion with an easy to read clarity.

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow, when you’re feeling stronger.”

Joe shook his head.  “No.  Just say what you have to say, now.”

*******

A faint breeze, barely discernible, shivered through the canvas, as though a ghost had drifted past.  Hot tears burned behind Joe’s eyes as he thought back to the conversation beside the camp fire.  Why was he crying anyway?  For the tarnished memory of his mother?  For a man he had loved, who had lied to him for seventeen years?  For the brothers he now doubted?  What was the gaping, gnawing darkness that had opened inside him?  Grief?  Fear?  Anger?

“I was in love with your mother, Joe, don’t get me wrong.  I was as much in love with her as it’s possible to be.  I’d have gone to the ends of the earth for her, if she had asked me to.  I loved her more than any woman I’d ever met, and I love her still now.

“But she broke my heart, Joe!  She broke my heart.  When Ben Cartwright came along, she found a better man than me, but never one who loved her as much as I did.  How could I compete with him?  He had wealth and charm, and he promised her the fairy tale life she’d always dreamed of.  I was just a poor doctor.

“She was carrying my child and when she left, she took that away with her too.  You, Joe!  She told me to forget her, but how could I?  The woman I loved more than my life!  And my own child!  How could I forget?  I did try, I really did.  I built up my practice and for almost two years I lived a life that was only half a life.  In the end I couldn’t bear it and I followed her west, to Virginia City.

“Was that wrong?  Was it wrong to want to see her again, and to see you?  Maybe it was, I don’t know.  All I know is it was something I had to do.  I don’t really know what I expected.  I knew it would be messy, of course, but I hadn’t bargained on how vindictive Ben Cartwright would be, or how much power he held in that half built shanty town in the god-forsaken middle of nowhere!

“I should have left again, but seeing Marie – and you – I just couldn’t do it.  I tried to talk to her.  To explain.   I’ll be honest, Joe, I tried to persuade her to leave him and come away with me.  But Ben Cartwright had me arrested on some trumped up charges, and I was dragged back to New Orleans to stand trial there. He tried to have me hanged for murder.  But I never murdered anyone, and the charges were dropped.  They still sent me to prison though, for fraud and theft.  Fifteen years, Joe!  Fifteen years!  And all that time I thought constantly of you and your mother.

“Finally I was released.  That’s when I found out Marie was dead.  All those years and I never knew!  But you, you were still alive.  I just had to see you.  Let you know who I was.  Who you really are.  You understand that, don’t you?  You need to know the truth. Ben Cartwright’s not your father; I am.  And I’ve always loved you, Joe.  Always!  In spite of everything.  I just wish I could have told you all this earlier.”

Joe pushed his face into the pillow to muffle the anguished moan that forced its way into his throat.

Sam Mitchell had to be wrong.  He just had to be.  Pa was his father; how could it be any other way?  That deep, resonating voice speaking his name; the raised eyebrow humoring his shortcomings; the big, capable hands lifting him onto a pony, stroking his hair, clasping his shoulder; where had there ever been any clue that Pa wasn’t his real father?  He would have known it, surely?  Deep down inside, he would have sensed it.  Wouldn’t he?  There was that bond, indefinable but real, always there.  No matter what else happened in the world, the one thing he had always been sure of was his father’s love.  But now… now the universe had suddenly twisted.  The things he had been certain about yesterday now slipped from him like water through a clenched fist.

Doubt was insidious.  Once it found a crack and sneaked in, it took root swiftly, spreading nasty little suckers into every crevice, prying out all the little niggles that had seemed insignificant before, nudging them into an impassable line of questions that refused to be ignored.

Of course he could explain away the discrepancy in the date of his birth. Plenty of marriages were arranged in haste, weren’t they?  Wedding days discreetly moved forward to spare the gossip.  Nothing unusual there.  And, as Adam had said, he’d been born early.  Babies arrived before their due dates all the time, everyone knew that.

And what of the lack of family resemblance?  He looked like his mother, plenty of people said so.  Nothing more than a whim of nature.

Trouble was, he did look like Sam Mitchell.  Build, complexion, features, all similar.  And more.  The vague feeling of familiarity Joe had felt the very first time he heard Sam speak, saw his face, it now made sense.  As if a piece of a puzzle he had never known was missing, suddenly slotted perfectly into place.

And where did it leave him? What was he supposed to do now?

“You need time to take all this in.” Sam’s face had been tense with apprehension.  “It’s come as a shock to you.  You need time to think it all over, of course you do.   Ben Cartwright’s the only father you’ve known until now, but…”

He’d stopped then and given Joe the ghost of a hopeful smile.  “But, given time, maybe… maybe we could get to know each other better.  Maybe then…”

Maybe?  Was it possible?  Could he learn to love another father?

Sam’s hand had reached out, tentatively resting on his shoulder.  “Four days from now, we’ll be in Austin.  All I ask, Joe, is that you give me those four days before you decide.  That’s all.  When we reach Austin, it’s up to you.  If you want to head straight back home, we’ll wire your pa and I’ll buy you a ticket back to Virginia City.  No more pressure from me, I swear it.  On the other hand, if you decide I’m not so bad after all and you want to get to know me better, we’ll wire your pa to say you’ve decided to do some travelling.  How does that sound?  Just think about it, Joe.  Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking

 

Chapter 6

Once again, Joe pen’s hovered over a sheet of blank paper while he chewed uncertainly at his bottom lip.

“I can’t do this, Sam,” he’d said that morning, ruffled and troubled after a night of miserable uncertainty.  “Just up and disappear.  Pa and Adam and Hoss, they’re going to be worried about me.  They’re going to be trying to find me.  I have to go back.”

“We’ll telegraph,” Sam had reminded him.  “We’ll explain.”

“No.  I can’t explain it in a telegraph?”  Joe had shaken his head, resolute.

“A letter then.  Write a letter and we’ll mail it in Austin.”

Joe’s brow had dinted.  “I don’t know, Sam.  Seems to me I ought to go back.”

Sam had stared hard into his coffee cup.  When he’d looked up, he’d said, “Do you believe what I told you, Joe?  About your mother and me?  About what happened?  About you being my son?”

Joe’s weary hand had scrubbed at his bloodshot eyes.  “I don’t know, Sam.  I don’t know what to believe right now.”

“That’s why you need to give yourself more time.  You mustn’t try to make your mind up right now.  You might as well ride with us as far as Austin.  There’s nowhere else to go.  See how you feel then.  A boy your age, surely there’s places you want to see before you settle down for a lifetime on the Ponderosa.  A few months of traveling, wouldn’t you enjoy that?”

Joe had hesitated.  “I’ve always wanted to see New Orleans,” he’d admitted, slowly.

Sam’s face had clouded then.  “New Orleans?”   He’d chewed the inside of his mouth.  “New Orleans holds some bad memories for me.”

“I’d like to see where my mother came from.”

“Yes.”  Sam had sighed. “I can understand that.”  He’d forced a bright smile back to his face.  “Well, if that’s what you really want, let’s go there.  And to hell with what people think!”  He’d flashed Joe a grin.  “We can do that, Joe, you and me.”

Brady had appeared beside them at that moment.  He’d fixed Joe with a blank stare then turned to Sam.  “Mules are hitched up.  Ready to head off when you are.”

Joe had watched Brady’s back as he wandered back to his mule team.  “I get the feeling he doesn’t like me much.”

“Brady?” Sam had given a quick laugh.  “Brady doesn’t like people generally. It’s nothing personal.   He’s had a tough life.  Spent a lot of it in prison.  One thing you learn in prison is not to trust.  But he’s been a good friend to me; the best.  Saved my goose on several occasions.  He just needs to get to know you.”

Joe had turned back to the wagon.  Sam had called after him.  “Joe?”

He’d looked back.

“Joe, just tell me one thing.  Honestly.  What does your heart say?”

“My heart?”

“Don’t you think there’s something… something special between us?”

Joe had studied Sam’s face for a long moment, and the unease inside him had crawled deeper as he recognized again how like his own it really was.

“I don’t know,” he’d said, finally.  “I need time to think, Sam.  I just don’t know.”

 

So, once again, Joe bent his head over a letter, and struggled to find the right words.  The light was fading beyond the canvas and he could no longer see clearly enough to write. He hoped what he had said would convey what he really meant.  Carefully he folded the paper and slid it into the envelope Sam had given him.  Tucking the envelope into the pocket of his jacket, he climbed down from the wagon.

Sam looked up from his seat by the fire.  Brady was cooking bacon.  For the first time in two days, Joe felt stirrings of hunger.  He sat down on the ground next to Sam

“All done?” asked Sam.

Joe nodded.   “I hope he’ll understand.”

Sam wrapped an arm around Joe’s shoulder.  “You won’t regret it, I promise.  I’ve got seventeen years to make up to you.”

Brady turned his cold, expressionless gaze on Joe.  Ignoring him, Joe let himself relax against Sam’s arm for a moment.  “Bacon smells good!”

Sam gave his shoulder a companionable squeeze.  “I’m glad you’re hungry at last.  You’re obviously feeling better.”

Joe acknowledged that with a nod.  “For the first time in days, I can’t taste ether on my breath.”  He pulled a face.  “I still don’t get that, Sam.  Why did you have to drag me off like that?  If you’d just talked to me…”

“You reckon your pa would have bought that? I tell you, Joe, he’d have done everything in his power to keep me away from you.”

Joe hesitated.  Much as he hated to admit it, he knew Sam was right.  Pa was over protective, to a fault.  Joe could picture the stony expression on Pa’s craggy face, the low warning rumble in his voice.  “Maybe.”

“No maybe about it.  And your two brothers.  You see, I asked around.  Everyone said it.  The Cartwrights are the closest-knit family in the territory.  What chance would I have stood?  But I’m still sorry.  If I’d have known how bad you’d be, I’d have thought of something else.”

“Never again, Sam, promise?”

Sam gave his swift laugh.  “No, of course not, son!  Never again.”

 

Chapter 7

Hoss had had the first stroke of luck, in the Bucket of Blood.

“Yeah,” said the bartender, nodding, “there was a couple of fellers in here only a week or so back, asking after you boys and your pa.  Couple of your Ponderosa hands were in here.  They told ’em your pa was off on a cattle drive up in the hills.  They were saying as how they’d hire some horses; try and catch up with your pa.”

Tom at the livery stables was brushing down a tall grey gelding when Hoss burst in.  “You got trouble?” he inquired.  “You look worked up about something.”

“You could say that, Tom.  Listen, you had a coupla fellers come by here with a wagon and a couple of mules?  Left them here with you?”

“That’s right.”  Tom lowered the brush and leaned back against the side of the stall, nodding.  “Said they needed a couple of horses to take them up into the mountains for a few days.  Decent enough fellers.  Gave me a good tip.”

“And did they come back for the wagon?”

“Yup.”  Tom nodded again.  “First thing this morning.  The big feller came in.  Brought back the horses and took his wagon.”

“Big feller?”

“Yeah, real big.  Bigger even than you, Hoss.”

“What about the other feller, what did he look like?”

Tom scratched his head as he thought back.  “Smaller.  Curly hair.  About my age, I’d guess.  Big smile.  Can’t really tell you more than that.”

“That’s a real big help, Tom.  Did the big feller say anything about where they were heading?”

Tom shook his head.  “Sorry.  What’s the urgency?”

“They killed a man.  And they kidnapped Little Joe.”

Tom paled.  “You’re kidding!”

“Wish I was.  Listen, Tom, you hear anything else, you tell me, right?”

“Sure will, Hoss.  Hope you find Little Joe real soon.”

*******

Adam had the next stroke of good fortune.  Two separate sightings of the mule wagon heading east out of town.   After that, for a while, their luck ran out.

“Pretty empty country, headin’ east from here,” Hoss said, over a beer in the saloon, as they argued their next move.

“Unless they turn south,” said Adam, stating the obvious.  “Or north.”

Hoss pursed his mouth and frowned.

“Maybe it’s empty country they want,” said Pa, and his two sons exchanged puzzled looks.

“Why would they want that?” asked Hoss.

Pa gave an impatient shrug.  “Why are they doing any of this?”  He banged his half-finished drink down on the bar.  “I’m going to speak to Roy again.  See if he’s got any more ideas.”

“There’s something Pa’s not telling us,” said Adam, watching his father hurry across the busy street.

“Aw, he’s just worried about Little Joe.”  Hoss wrinkled his nose.  You know, if them fellers was kidnapping Joe for money, why was there no ransom note when they took him?”

“Maybe they’re still planning on it.  Could be holed up somewhere close by, right now.  There’re some mining camps on that side of town.  You and I should take a ride out in that direction and find out if anyone’s seen a mule wagon come by.”

Hoss nodded.  “Anything’s better than sitting around doing nothing.  We can round up a few of Joe’s friends to give us a hand.  The more pairs of eyes out there, the better chance we got.”

But even with more pairs of eyes, they turned up no clues. When two more days of fruitless searching brought no fresh leads,  Adam began to wonder how long they could go on scouring endless miles of mountain and desert before hope turned to hollow despair.

As they climbed wearily from their saddles outside the hotel on the second evening, Roy Coffee came hurrying to meet them.

“A wire, Ben.  Came in an hour ago.  Mule wagon with two men fitting the description of Mitchell and his buddy, spotted this morning, about ten miles south of Stillwater.”

“Stillwater?”  Pa looked back down the street as though he was thinking of mounting up again there and then, and heading off to Stillwater.

“It’s late, Pa,” said Adam, pointing out the obvious. “It’ll be dark in less than an hour.  And these horses need a rest.”  He could see the conflict going on behind his father’s eyes as he acknowledged the sense in his son’s words while fighting the desperate urge to act on this sudden turn of fortune.

“Two men?”  It was Hoss who picked up on the significance of Roy’s words.  “Not three?”

“Doesn’t mean Joe’s not with them.”  The fierce determination in Pa’s voice defied them to contradict him.  “He could have been inside the wagon.”

There was a silence then that was just a little too long before Hoss gave a vehement nod of his head.  “Yeah, that’s right.  They coulda had him tied up inside that wagon.”

“Every town east of here has their descriptions, Ben.  If they show up anywhere, I’ll hear about it.” Roy did his best to look reassuring.

Adam laid his hand on Pa’s arm.  “We should get some food and rest, Pa.  We need to be on the road by sun up.  You go on inside.  Hoss and I will see to the horses.”

 

Chapter 8

Joe was laughing for the first time in days.  He hadn’t intended too.  His heart was still troubled with how Pa and his brothers would be worrying, and by a niggling sense of betrayal; as though he had had a choice about leaving with Sam Mitchell.  But it was hard not to like Sam, and hard not to laugh when he told stories.  His sharp sense of humor made even tales of his grim days in prison entertaining.  In spite of what had happened, Joe found himself instinctively warming to Sam.

That in itself deepened his sense of treachery and opened the lid on a morass of confused emotions in which he floundered through the hours of darkness, and any moments in the day when his mind wasn’t otherwise occupied.  He tortured himself with unanswerable questions.  Had his mother known that he was Sam Mitchell’s son and not Pa’s?  How could she not have known?  What kind of a relationship had it been anyway?  Had she and Sam still been carrying on together when she met Pa?

Why had he never asked Pa more questions about his time in New Orleans?  Sure, he knew his parents had met there, and he knew they’d wasted no time getting wed, but he was vague about timescales and dates.  The details had never been of great interest to him.  Had Pa wanted to spare her the shame of a child out of wedlock?  Was that why they had married so swiftly?  He hated himself for even thinking such terrible things about his mother but the questions would not stop haunting him.

Would his mother have told him the truth when he was older?  And what about Pa?  If he had known all along, then he’d been lying to Joe all this time.  Whenever Joe thought about that, a hot mixture of anger and resentment burned in his blood.  And did his brothers know?  Joe felt sure Adam could know something like that and keep it a secret forever.  But not Hoss.  Hoss could never keep secrets from Joe.  And Hoss had been only a small boy when Pa married Marie.  But Adam, he’d been old enough to understand, old enough to know when something didn’t add up.

“What’s wrong, Joe?  You worrying about your family again?”

Joe dragged his attention back to Sam.  They were eating supper again, by the fire.  Aware he’d lost the thread of Sam’s conversation, he smiled ruefully.  “I guess I am.”

Sam pulled a bottle of whiskey from inside his jacket, uncorked it, and tipped a generous amount into his half finished coffee.  He offered the bottle to Joe.  Joe shook his head.

“Go on,” said Sam.  “Take your mind off your troubles.”

Joe gave him half a smile and reached for the bottle.

“You got a girl?” Sam asked.

Surprised by the question, Joe’s cheeks flushed involuntarily.  He took a swig of the whiskey and gave a quick shake of his head. “No, not really.”

Sam gave a knowing smile.  “That’s not what I heard.  Hattie…something or other, wasn’t it?”

Joe’s color deepened.  “Hattie Miller,” he acknowledged.

“That’s right.  Hattie Miller.  Pretty, is she?”

Joe thought of Hattie’s wide blue eyes, her pale, perfect skin that always reminded him of rose petals, cool and sweet-smelling.  So far he’d touched nothing more than her hand, except in his dreams.  But he wasn’t about to confess those to Sam; not yet anyway.

“How do you know about Hattie?” he asked, with the hint of a frown.

Sam shrugged.  “I was asking around, in Virginia City.  Someone mentioned Hattie.”

“Who did you talk to?”

Sam shrugged again.  “No one in particular.  Relax, Joe.  I wasn’t spying on you.  You have to remember, the last time I saw you, you were just a baby.  I only wanted to find out what kind of a man you’d grown into.”

Hearing Sam refer to him as a man, Joe was mollified.  His pa and brothers treated him like a child most of the time.  He took another generous swig of whiskey as if to confirm Sam’s faith in his adult status.  “What else did you find out about me?”

“That you’re a very popular young man.”  Sam’s eyes glinted.  “Especially with the women.  How fast you are with a horse.  And with a gun. In fact, I found out that you’re pretty much universally admired!”

Joe’s cheeks flushed warm again.  “Oh, come on!”

“I’m not kidding you, Joe.  Seems people have a deal of admiration for you Cartwrights.  Funny thing was, the more people spoke about you, the prouder I felt.  As if I had anything to do with the way you turned out!”  Sam laughed and shook his head.  Then unexpectedly, his face turned solemn.  “But seriously, Joe, you really are everything a man could wish for in a son.  You don’t know what it means to me, finding you at last, having you here like this.”

The awkward silence that followed Sam’s admission was broken by the appearance of Brady, stepping out of the shadows on the other side of the fire.  Joe had no idea where he’d been.  He had a habit of sloping off on his own whenever the wagon stopped.  Joe was always relieved to find him absent.  When Brady was around, he never felt entirely comfortable.  The calculating eyes boring into him, the ripples of resentment floating in the air between them.  Like now.  Brady paused in the ring of firelight, the flames flickering in the darkness of his eyes the only movement in their cold, expressionless depths.

Joe looked down at the whiskey bottle in his hand and passed it back to Sam.

“I think maybe I’ll turn in.”

Sam started to protest, but Joe was already on his feet, Brady’s stare following on his heels like a cold shadow as he climbed into the wagon.  Under normal circumstances, Joe would have chosen to sleep in the open, with the vast arch of the distant stars above him, and the bright glow of the embers to lull him into slumber, not in the stuffy confines of the wagon, but he had an illogical desire to be away from Brady; something about the man made Joe’s skin crawl.

The whiskey should have numbed his mind, helped him sleep; instead he felt more agitated and restless than ever.  Even liquor couldn’t dull the persistent ache of doubt and guilt.

Outside, Sam and Brady’s voices rose and fell in muted conversation.  It was the first time Joe had known Brady to speak more than a few words at a time, although the hum of their dialogue was too low for him to make out what it was they were discussing.  He found himself wondering about Brady.  He and Sam seemed unlikely companions, Brady huge and formidable, Sam full of warmth and charm.  What was the bond between them?  An unlikely friendship had been forged in that prison.

Brady’s voice rose momentarily.  “I don’t want him here!  Things were just fine before he came along!”

Sam responded with something Joe couldn’t catch.  Brady gave a snort of derision.  “So you keep saying, but how do you know that?  His mother was nothing more than a fancy whore!  Why are you so sure the boy’s even yours?”

Joe’s face burned hot.  He swallowed hard and turned his back on the two voices, but Brady’s still carried through the thin wall of the canvas with unguarded clarity.

“Put him on the stage, Sam.  When we get to Austin.  Buy him that ticket and send him home again.  We don’t need him complicating our lives.”

Sam spoke in his softer tones.  Joe caught only his own name and his mother’s.  Then Brady broke in again.

“Don’t give me that!  You want revenge!  You want to get your own back on Ben Cartwright!  The best way to do that would have been to kill him, I already told you that.  I was ready to do it, you know I was.”

Sam’s answer was sharpened by annoyance. This time, Joe heard every word.  “How does killing him pay him back for everything he took from me?  He stole the woman I loved, he stole my son, and he stole fifteen years out of my life.  Now he can know what it feels like to lose something he holds dear.  Death’s too good for him, Brady.  Let him suffer!  And suffer all the more knowing his beloved son is here with me because he’s chosen to be, of his own free will!”  Sam seemed then to remember himself because his voice dropped again and Joe missed his next words, but Brady’s response sliced through the darkness, fine-edged with anger.

“I told you, Sam, I don’t want him here.  Send him packing in Austin or you go on without me.”

Joe sensed movement outside the wagon and then Sam’s voice came again, much closer this time.

“Don’t force me to choose, Brady!  You might not like my answer.”

Brady retorted with an oath.  Sam threw back another.  Joe felt the slight shift of the wagon as a man’s weight rested on the tailgate and Sam’s voice spoke softly into the darkness of the interior.  “Joe?”

Joe closed his eyes and kept very still.  There was a prolonged silence.  Sam sighed. Joe heard him walk away.  Opening his eyes again, he stared miserably into the blackness.

*******

A sullen cloud of irritability pressed down around them all the next morning.  It was Brady’s turn to walk alongside the wagon.  Taciturn as always, the stony blackness of his eyes measured Joe’s every movement with surly resentfulness.   Sam drove with a dark scowl on his face.  Joe, hunched next to him on the driving seat, doubted any whiskey could be left in last night’s bottle judging by the volume on Sam’s breath.  His smiling charm had evaporated into a blanket of despondency.

Hardly a word had passed between them since they’d set off after a breakfast marked by its ominous lack of courteous conversation.  It was Joe who finally broke the brooding silence.

“Sam?”

Sam lifted an eyebrow.  Joe took that as an indication he was listening.

“Listen, Sam, I want to tell you something.   I’m glad we met.  I want you to know that.” The muscles in Sam’s jaw tightened as though he predicted what was coming next.  Joe pushed on.  “But maybe this isn’t such a good idea, you know, the three of us, this wagon?  Maybe it would be better if I went on back.”  He paused and drew a deep breath.  “We could still see each other, you and I.  Perhaps you could find somewhere nearby.  We could meet up sometimes.  My pa wouldn’t have to know.”

His words hit a wall of rigid silence.  Joe chewed at his lip. “I just think maybe it would be for the best.”

Sam’s eyes remained fixed on the dusty trail in front of them.  His face gave nothing away.  Joe began to think he was being deliberately ignored.

“Is that what you want?” said Sam at last.

Joe hesitated only for a moment.  “I think it’s for the best,” he repeated, lamely.  “We’ll be in Austin tomorrow.  I can take the stage back to Virginia City.”

Sam gave an ungracious shrug.  “If that’s what you want,” he muttered, without even looking at Joe, and they lapsed back into stiff silence.  After few more uncomfortable minutes, Joe jumped down from the seat and kept pace with the mules on foot, staying a good ten paces in front of Brady.

Austin couldn’t come soon enough.

*******

In the small hours of the morning, he awoke with a jump.  It had been a tense day, with less than a dozen words between them after Joe had made his announcement to Sam.   At supper, Sam produced another bottle of whiskey, but showed no inclination to share it, and Joe would have refused if he had.  Slipping away at the earliest excuse to the merciful solitude of his bed, he hadn’t expected to fall asleep easily, but his restless nights and long days on the trail had left him wearier than he’d imagined.  For once, he was spared the torment of thinking.

But now something had disturbed his rest.  He jerked awake, instantly confused to see the canvas in front of his face lit from inside by the intimate glow of yellow lamplight instead of the translucent brightness of morning sunlight.  Something else, familiar and threatening, nudged his rousing senses.

He made to roll over and a hand clamped itself firmly over his face.  The back of his throat choked with fumes, heady and nauseating. Too late, his brain registered the danger he’d half understood.  Ether!  Already filling his nose and mouth, fogging his brain.

Like a wild animal caught, he bucked and lashed out with a violence born of panic, and for a moment, breathed free air again.

“No!” he gasped in desperation as the wagon swam in the lamplight.  “No, Sam!  You promised!”

Something hard and heavy – a knee perhaps – crushed his chest.  Confused from sleep and the first mouthfuls of stupefying ether, he flailed blindly and a hand seized his left wrist and pushed his arm down.  Sam’s voice spoke close to his ear, chilling in its quiet coolness

“Lie still.  I’m not going to hurt you.  This is for you your own good.  It won’t be as bad this time, I promise.  I won’t give you as much.  Just trust me, Joe.  It’s only for a day or two.  Just until we get clear of Austin, that’s all.  Trust me, Joe.  I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

The cloth was back over his face.  Around him the canvas walls undulated like billowing sails in a wild storm.  He couldn’t hold his breath because he was choking, and he couldn’t push the weight from his chest because his limbs were too heavy. His pinioned arm belonged to someone else.  His other arm – where was his other arm?  He could no longer feel it.  His mind was still fighting, but his body was already succumbing.

“Relax, Joe.  I’m not going to hurt you…”

Sam’s face blurred, swam in and out of focus, bloated and hazy.  Joe’s mind struggled less and began to float on a warm sea of golden lamplight.

“…not going to hurt you…”

Sam’s face was slipping, melting into the expanding glow around him.  His words dissolved into meaningless lumps of sound.  Joe’s eyelids closed slowly; the yellow brightness faded into a soft well of ruby darkness as all conscious thought fell away.

*******

He came to again with a disturbing sensation of having floated in and out of garish dreams and unpleasant realities that hovered just outside his memory.  A familiar and troubling odor hung thick in his throat and coated the inside of his mouth.  His brain thudded against the walls of his skull. Light, stark and unforgiving, stabbed at his aching eyelids.

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and blinked in the cold half light of early morning.  He was staring directly at a bottle, and a wad of folded fabric, their outlines indistinct and wavering.  For several seconds, his brain remained blank, then awareness washed through him like a cold wave.  Ether.  Sam had done it again!  The pain in his chest, the pain in his head, the nausea in his throat and his belly, they were there because of that.  He groaned heavily and lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the hard light.

Austin.  He remembered now. They had been only hours from the town.  He was going to take the stage home from there.

How long had he been asleep?  Joe blinked, trying to clear the lingering fog from inside his head. He had no idea how long he had drifted in his disembodied state of unconsciousness.  Carefully he tilted his head and looked around him.

The wagon was as it had always been, except that, lying next to him, head pillowed on his doctor’s bag and breathing heavily, was Sam.  An empty whiskey bottle lay upturned near his head and another, almost empty, was still cradled in his hand.  Even above the all pervading stench of ether, Joe could detect the powerful scent of the liquor.  His stomach muscles clenched and his throat grew tight.  With another deep groan, he heaved himself clumsily out of the bed and onto his feet.  Immediately he wished he hadn’t.  The wagon pitched like a floundering ship beneath him.

He could see open sky beyond the opening in the canvas.  Lurching towards it, he tumbled out, his limbs as wobbly as the legs on a newborn calf.  He had a brief impression of a mountainside and a pink sunrise as he hunched on the ground and threw up into the dirt.

He was desperately thirsty.  Raising his head, he looked about groggily for some water.  There was a pail on a stool at the front of the wagon.  With an effort, he dragged himself back to his feet. Groping his way along the side of the cart, he steadied himself against a wheel and gulped several hungry mouthfuls.

Where was he?  With his wits returning gradually, he could at last take in his surroundings.  He had been right in his first impression.  They appeared to be camped on a high ridge.  He could see other mountains in the near distance.  The sun was just nudging over the brow of one as he watched.  Even in his befuddled state, the apparent lack of any recognizable road or trail puzzled him.

He took another mouthful of water and poured the rest of the scoop over his head in an effort to dispel the lingering stupor.  “Just for a few days.  Just until we get clear of Austin.”  Sam’s words still echoed in a far corner of his confused brain.  He rubbed at bleary face.  It seemed likely Austin was now behind them.

He shivered in the early morning chill and thought about his jacket.  It must be in the wagon still.  Along with his boots.  He was going to need them if he was going to make his escape.

The plan hadn’t come to him consciously, but he knew without a doubt that he had to get away.  Before Sam woke.  Before he could force any more vile ether into Joe’s lungs.

First he had to find his boots.  He turned from the pail and his heart plummeted as a dark shadow loomed around the end of the wagon.  Brady.  How could he have forgotten Brady?

“Feeling poorly by any chance?”

Joe tightened his jaw.  The water he’d drunk too fast churned in his stomach.  He swallowed hard.  “Where are we?”

“Beautiful spot, ain’t it?” Brady’s lip lifted in a sneer of contempt.  “I was raised not far from here.  I know this country well.  I know all the best places.”

“Listen,” said Joe, willing his voice and his stomach to remain steady, “I’m prepared to leave.  I’ll walk away now.  I know you don’t want me here.  Well, I don’t want to be here either.  So, I’ll go.  While Sam’s asleep.  I’ll make sure he doesn’t find me again.”

Brady crossed his arms and looked down at the ground, a scornful smile twisting his mouth.  “You think Sam won’t find you again?”  He shook his head in mock wonder at Joe’s apparent slowness.  “He’s spent fifteen years dreaming about you and your slut of a mother.  At least she had the decency to die in the meantime.”

Joe’s throat constricted so he could barely force the words out.  “My mother wasn’t a slut!”

“Wasn’t she?  For a respectable woman, she sure did a lot of entertaining on her back!  What would you call it, kid?  Face it, your ma was nothing better than a trumped up floozy, and it’s about time you and Sam acknowledged that.  Save us all a deal of trouble.  Any number of fancy gents or miserable four-flushers could have spawned you, boy.  Why Sam’s so fixated on you, I don’t know.  But he’s not going to let you walk away from him.  I would have thought that was obvious even to a soft-brained shave tail like you.”

Brady took a couple of small steps closer, his vast bulk lowering darkly over Joe.  “He’s not going to give up looking for you, Joe.  Not while you’re still alive.”

Joe took a clumsy step backwards and bumped into the water pail.  It didn’t fall but the water slopped up the sides of the bucket and splashed cold over the back of his legs.

“I should’ve made sure you died, the night of the stampede.”

Joe frowned in spite of himself. “What d’you mean?”

Brady’s lip curled. “Should have finished you off then.  Like your nosey friend.”

An icy fist closed around Joe’s heart.  “Hank?” he whispered.

“Was that his name?”

“You didn’t have to kill Hank.  It was me you were after.”

“He almost spoiled our surprise.  Pulled a gun on us.  Sealed his own fate.  You were supposed to come with us that night.  That was the way Sam had planned it, but then that interfering boy…”  Brady gave a low chuckle.  “I kinda hoped you’d go under those hooves, like your meddlesome friend.  Would’ve saved us all this trouble.”

“Hank didn’t go under the hooves.”

Brady raised an eyebrow.  “Didn’t he?  How did he die then?”

“You.  You killed him.”

Brady gave a shrug as if the manner of Hank’s death was neither here nor there.  Joe flicked a glance to his left, the only escape route left to him.

“So now you’re going to kill me?”

Brady gave a small snort of derision.  “I’m not going to kill you, boy.  Of course not!  Sam would never forgive me if I hurt you.”  He grinned at the confusion on Joe’s face.  “What sort of man would kill the son of his best friend?  No, I’m not going to kill you.  You’re going to die trying to run away.”

Joe’s breath came hard and fast in his chest.  He shook his head.

“After all, you’re still confused and disoriented by all that dope you swallowed.  And this is a steep mountain.”  Brady jerked his head to the right.  “That’s an awful big drop down there.  Of course, I’ll try to stop you before you fall, but you’ll fight me, and I’ll lose my grip.  It’s going to devastate me, Joe, watching you tumble all that way down to your death.”

He took a step closer and Joe drew back involuntarily, losing his balance against the stool behind him.  He went down in a heap with both stool and bucket, barely aware of the cold water soaking through him as Brady reached down and grabbed him by the shirt.  Joe heard the fabric rip and felt Brady’s grip loosen.  Seizing his opportunity, he lunged sideways and scrambled inelegantly to his feet.

A long arm stretched out and gripped a handful of his hair.  Joe yelped with pain as Brady hauled him back and wrapped a thick-muscled arm tightly around his throat.

Brady was built like an ox; Joe was weak from days of drug-induced stupor and lack of food.  Holding his writhing prey just clear of the ground, Brady took a few steps forward and Joe froze in Brady’s arms, drew in a sharp gasp of air, and pressed his body backwards into the bulk of the big man behind him as his stomach lurched and his head swirled.

They had reached the edge of the ridge.  Immediately in front of them, the mountainside sheered away in a near vertical drop, at least three hundred feet.

“Told you this was a good spot,” said Brady as he released his arm from Joe’s neck and thrust him forward with a hefty shove to his back. “Goodbye, Joe!”

There was no time even to think.  Joe’s bare heels scraped on the edge of the cliff, then the ground was gone from under him and he screamed out in terror as he tumbled into space.

“Sam!”

The sky spun, the world wheeled.  He plummeted into nothingness.

 

Chapter 9

“I’m sorry, fellers.”  Perched on the corner of his desk, the sheriff surveyed the three Cartwright men from under his dark brows, and shook his head.  “Yeah, we got the message from Roy Coffee, but I ain’t seen anything of the wagon you’re after, or the men you’re trying to find.  Austin’s a busy town.  If they passed through without causing any trouble, there’s every chance I coulda missed them.”

Pa opened his mouth to press the matter, but Adam laid a restraining hand on his arm.  “Come on, Pa.  No sense wasting time here.  We should get out and ask some questions around the town.”

They were all three bone weary; their horses too.  Outside the sheriff’s office, Adam stretched his stiff muscles and nodded his head at the hotel across the street.

“Might as well start there.  I need a drink.”

Hoss gave a nod.  “And something to eat.”

Pa stared down the street.  “I’m going to check the telegraph office.  Maybe there’s news from Roy.”

Hoss and Adam exchanged glances.  Hoss touched his father’s shoulder.  “Listen, Pa, you need to give yourself a break.  Come and get some food first.  We’re not going to be any good to Joe if we drop dead of exhaustion.”

Pa flashed him a distracted look.  “We’ve not been much use to Joe at all yet,” he pointed out, and shrugged Hoss’s hand away.  “You boys go and get some food in and I’ll be along as soon as I’ve found out if there’s any news.”

Adam and Hoss were already on their second beer when Pa appeared in the hotel lobby and made his way over to their table.  Adam pushed a glass in his direction.  Pa sank down in the chair and stared at the drink with blank eyes.

“Anything from Roy?”  Adam tried not to let the empty expression on Pa’s face alarm him.  They were all worried about Joe, of course they were.  Desperately worried.  But right now, Adam was more concerned about Pa. They had been riding hard for days, with little rest and less sleep.  Pa looked ashen, his face gaunt.

Pa shook his head.  “No. Nothing from Roy.”

Something in the way he said it made Adam crease his forehead in a bemused frown.  “Something else then?”

Pa stared at his beer and said nothing.  At that moment, their steaks arrived.  They were all hungry.  They’d eaten nothing since breakfast almost ten hours before.

“Let’s eat,” said Pa, his voice bereft of emotion.

The food was good, but Pa ate like a man condemned, with no hint that he tasted anything he put in his mouth.  He left half his meal untouched, and although Hoss and Adam shared some desultory words about their journey and what they should do next, Pa contributed nothing to the conversation.

“Maybe we should start asking around,” said Hoss when they had finished eating.  Pa, why don’t you stay here, try and get some rest?  You look all in.”

To their surprise, Pa gave a slow nod.  “Yes,” he said.  “I might just do that.”

“What’s up with him?”  Hoss stared after his father as he mounted the hotel stairs, like a man walking to his death.  “He ain’t right, Adam.”

Adam frowned.  “He’s making himself sick.”

Hoss rose from his chair.  “The sooner we track down that little brother of ours, the better.  Why are we sitting around here?  Someone in this dadburned town must have seen them!”  He stopped when he saw the look on his brother’s face.  “You ain’t getting no ideas about giving up on him, are you, Adam?”

Adam twitched his mouth.  “When do we give up, Hoss?”

His brother stared at him out of blue eyes clouded with the dust of days of worry.  “Not yet, anyways.  Not while there’s any hint of a trail. Come on, we’ve got some tracking to do.”

“I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”

Hoss shot his brother a hard look.

Adam gave a half-hearted shrug.  “Alfred Lord Tennyson.”

“Yeah?”  Hoss leaned over and hauled Adam from his chair. “Nobody never got nothing done by ’crasinating on their backsides.  Hoss Cartwright!”

*******

Pa wasn’t asleep when they returned to the hotel, weary and dispirited; he was in a chair by the window.  A single sheet of notepaper hung limply from his fingers.  A few weak strands of moonlight filtered between the buildings and through the dusty panes of glass.  As Hoss lit the lamps and the soft glow pooled out, Pa looked up, his face as wan as the moonlight.

“You all right, Pa?”  Hoss unbuckled his gun belt and dropped it on the end of the bed.  Adam set his on the table.  Still Pa didn’t speak.

“We’ve turned up a few possibilities.”  Hoss, forced his voice to sound bright.  He wondered why Pa hadn’t asked.  Until now, he had pushed to hear every detail of the smallest clue about Joe’s possible whereabouts.  Now he just sat, staring with hollow eyes.

“What’s the letter, Pa?” asked Adam.

For a moment, it was as if Pa hadn’t heard.  He didn’t move, his expression remained unchanging.  Then he let out a long sigh and looked down at the paper in his hand.  Slowly he raised it and held it out to Adam.

“I guess you should see this.”

Adam reached out and took the proffered sheet. Even from a distance, Hoss recognized Joe’s characteristic handwriting.  His heart made a painful leap halfway into his mouth.

“Read it out,” said Pa, “so Hoss can hear it too.”

Adam glanced sharply at Pa, then down at the letter.  “September twentieth,” he began, and drew a deep breath.  “Dear Pa.  First of all I have to tell you that I am all right…”

A wash of relief flooded through Hoss so that he let out an involuntary whoop of delight.  “He’s alive, Pa!” he burst out, grinning, before the look on his father’s face silenced him again.

“You don’t need to worry that I have come to any harm.  I am with a doctor.  His name is Sam Mitchell.  He knew you and Mama in New Orleans.

“Pa, this is a real difficult letter to write.  I do not want to hurt you and I sure don’t blame you, but something has happened that I need time to think about.  Sam Mitchell says he is my real father.  I do not yet know if this is true, but I hope you understand that I need time to work out what to do.

“As I write, we are about three days out of Austin.  Once there, I will make a decision about what to do next.  If you are reading this letter, it is because I have decided to stay with Sam, at least as far as New Orleans.  You know how I always wanted to go there. 

“Pa, none of this changes how I feel about you, or about Adam and Hoss.  I will write whenever I can and let you know how I am and where we are.  Maybe you could write back. I hope to be home again on the Ponderosa in the spring or early summer.

 “I sure am going to miss you all, and the Ponderosa.  Please give my love to Hoss and Adam and know that, whatever happens, I will always be your loving son.  Joseph.”

A somber silence filled the room as Adam stopped reading.  Pa’s head was in his hands.  Hoss looked at Adam, saw the almost imperceptible shake of the head his brother gave him, and dropped his gaze to the floor.  It was a long time before Pa stirred, and when he spoke, his voice sounded too small for his big frame.  And dry, like his throat was full of dust.

“It was left with the telegraph operator.  A man paid him money to hang onto it for five days.  If no one collected it in that time, he was told to mail it.”

“Did he describe the man?”  Adam’s voice was as emotionless as Pa’s.

“About thirty five, forty years old.  Built like a bear.”

Adam nodded.  “Mitchell’s companion.”

The unspoken question burned in the air between them.  In the end, Hoss could bear it no longer.  “What does he mean, Pa?  About Sam Mitchell being his real father?”

Pa leaned back in the chair in an attitude of complete exhaustion.  There was an unfamiliar expression in his eyes that scared Hoss, haunted and desolate.

“I am Joe’s father,” he whispered.

*******

From the murky depths of his whiskey-induced coma, Sam Mitchell heard a wild cry of terror pierce the fog of his drunken stupor.

A voice was calling.  Outside the wagon.  Brady’s voice, shouting his name.  Unmistakably urgent.  And the sound of footsteps thudding closer.  It wasn’t like Brady to be worked up about anything.   Sam dragged himself to his feet, trying to ignore the hammering of his brain.

“What is it?”  He and Brady came face to face at the foot of the wagon.  The big man’s face was pale, his breath came hard and fast.

“It’s Joe, Sam.  He went over the edge!”

“What?”  Sam swayed, suddenly faint, and gripped the boards of the wagon.

“He was staggering around like he was drunk.  I saw him too late.  He just went too close to the edge.  Must have been that ether you gave him.”

“Where?  Where did he fall?”

Brady pointed.  “Just there.  By that rock.”

Sam was already stumbling to the edge of the mountain, his legs slow to respond. Falling to his knees at the cliff edge, he leaned out, giving little heed to Brady’s shouts of warning.

A dizzying, near vertical drop fell away below Sam, broken here and there by an uneven outcrop and a few spindly shrubs that had defied the odds and clung tenaciously to the forbidding rock face.  Sam’s stomach made an unpleasant flip.

“Sam, come away!  Before you fall too!”  There was fear in Brady’s voice.  Sam made to rise, turning backwards, then stopped.  With a strangled gasp, he leaned forward again, his body swaying unsteadily in the empty air above the ridge.

“Sam!  What are you doing?  Come away from there!  You’ll fall!”

“Brady!  I can see him!  He’s caught!”

“Sam, get back, please!”

“He’s caught!  On a rock or something.  I can’t see.  About forty feet down.”  Sam slid backwards, away from the edge. “I have to go down there, Brady!”

Brady shook his head in horror.  “Go down!  Are you mad?  He’s dead!  He’s bound to be dead!  Was he moving?”

“I couldn’t see.”  Sam shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  But we can’t leave him there.  Help me get the rope from the wagon.”

Brady held back.  “It’s nowhere near long enough!”

Sam threw his hands up in desperate impatience.  “Then find anything else we can tie together!”  He started back towards the wagon.

Brady snatched at his arm.  “No, Sam!  It’s madness.  You’ll both be killed!”

Sam shook off his hand.  “Take the tethers off the mules.  Use sheets, blankets, anything you can think of!  Rip off the canvas if you have to!”  Sam looked behind him and saw Brady hesitating.  “Do it, Brady!  Just do it and hurry!”

 

Chapter 10

Joe opened his eyes and saw the sky, still rose-tinted with the remains of the sunrise.

Why wasn’t he dead?  He should have been dead.

The mountain top.  He remembered that.  He remembered looking down, his belly freezing.  Then falling.  Breathlessly falling through empty space before the world went dark

So why wasn’t he dead?

There was rock at his back, digging into his spine.  And rock pressing into his cheek.  A taste of blood in his mouth.  He tried to turn his face and jerked involuntarily as he glimpsed the sheer drop still below him.

Confused, he closed his eyes and swallowed hard.  Opening them again, he glanced upwards.  Slowly comprehension dawned in his numbed brain.  The steep, stark walls of the mountain towered over him and plunged away in a giddy drop beneath him.  Somehow he was suspended, hundreds of feet in the air, wedged tightly against the rock.  But how?  He should have been lying at the bottom.  In broken pieces.  How was he here, stuck to the rock?

He was lying on his side, right arm trapped beneath him from the elbow up.  Only his forearm and hand were free to move.  He groped with fingers that were reluctant to respond and felt the edge of a narrow shelf, protruding only a couple of inches beyond his stretched out body. Was that what had saved him?  A shelf, barely a foot wide?

If he moved, he risked falling.  The shelf was too narrow.  But he couldn’t just lie there.  Sit up, he told himself.  You’ll see everything clearer if you sit up.  Maybe there’s a way back to the top.

He flexed the arm trapped below him in an effort to rise.  His vision swam.  A rush of nausea swelled through him in a shuddering wave.  When that receded and the mist cleared from his head, he was trembling.

Something wasn’t right but he couldn’t work out what.  Why couldn’t he move?  Was he injured?  If he was injured, why wasn’t he hurting?  He could definitely taste blood.  He’d already swallowed some.  Why could he taste blood and not feel the pain of a wound?

He shivered harder.  The shivering made the sickness return, made his head spin again.  “Help!” he whispered into the empty air in front of his face.  “Please help!”

*******

A tiny stone hit his cheek, rousing him from semi-consciousness.  He blinked, confused.  He had no idea how long he had been lying there.  Minutes?  Hours?  Nothing had changed.  The nightmare was still complete.

“Joe!”

He frowned.  It seemed impossible but he was sure someone had spoken his name.  He made an attempt to twist his head upwards, and caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m coming Joe.  Just hold on.”

Sam!  Joe had no idea how Sam could be so near and he was too numb to try and make sense of it.  “Just hold on,” Sam’s voice had said.  For some reason, Sam’s ignorance struck Joe as funny.  So funny he almost laughed.  Sam didn’t know what he was talking about.  Joe wasn’t holding onto anything.  He was just kind of hanging there.  That seemed amusing too.  Joe’s face twisted into a grimace of a smile.

“Must be God,” he muttered out loud and gave a giggle that turned into a broken hiccup.  He imagined God holding him pinned to the mountainside by a single finger.  The image seemed funnier the more Joe thought about it.

“Joe?”

He must have closed his eyes then, floated for a few seconds.  When he opened them again, Sam was crouching on the ledge, close beside him.  Very close because the ledge was so narrow.

“Joe?”

“Sam.  What are you doing here?”

“Come to get you.”

Joe tried to shake his head.  The effort made his eyes close.  “No good.  I can’t move.”

“I’m going to help you.  Listen Joe, your leg’s broken.  It’s going to hurt.

Joe frowned and made another attempt at the head shake.  “No.  It doesn’t hurt.  It’s fine.  Don’t worry.”

Sam reached out and Joe felt his hand press on his right calf.  “Can you feel that?”

“Uh huh.”

“Does it hurt?”

Joe gave a crooked grin.  He wished he didn’t feel so exhausted.  What was the matter with Sam?  Why was he asking stupid questions?

“’Course not!”

Sam leaned over, closer to his face.  Joe could smell something strong, something familiar as he spoke.  “It’s the ether, Joe.  That’s why it’s not hurting.  That’s good.  It’ll help when we pull you up.”

Whiskey, that was the smell!  Joe remembered then.  Sam asleep with a whiskey bottle in his hand.  Why was that memory somehow troubling?

Sam straightened up.  Joe, peering up at him through blurred eyes, saw he had a rope tied around his middle and he was fumbling at the knot with fingers that looked to Joe’s fogged brain like they were struggling.

“I’m going to tie this onto you, Joe, and Brady’s going to pull you up.”

Brady?   Joe’s eyes flicked to the cliff then back to Sam. “No,” he muttered.  “Brady…pushed me.”

Sam had the rope untied.  He was leaning forward again, preparing to wrap it around Joe’s middle.  He stopped and stared at Joe’s face.  Then he turned his gaze upwards to the top of the mountain.  Finally he looked back at Joe and his mouth was set in a hard straight line.

“Well, he’s going to pull you up now.”

There was nothing Joe could do to help or prevent his fate.  His body refused to comply with the simplest instruction.  Sam reached down to thread the rope beneath him.

Joe wasn’t sure what happened then.  Sam’s hand tugged gently at his side and once more he was overcome by a powerful rush of swirling giddiness and a rising tide of nausea.  His entire body jerked in a violent spasm.  Sam, caught off guard, was knocked backwards.  He didn’t even make any sound.  Through the mist, Joe had a brief, frozen image of his look of startled surprise; his eyes wide, his open mouth forming a perfect “Oh!” as he toppled backwards.

And then he was gone.

“No-o!”  As if from a long way off, Joe heard his own wavering cry of horror.  The fog was still thickening in his brain; the sky was speckling; consciousness was spinning away.  Sam was gone.  Help was lost.

 

Chapter 11

“Are we doin’ the right thing, Adam?”  Hoss set down his beer on the table in front of him and looked at his brother with dull eyes.

“I don’t know, Hoss.  I don’t see what else we can do.  Joe says he’s fine.  He’s promised he’ll write.  And when he writes, we’ll know where he is.  Then, maybe, we’ll be able to find him.  Until then, we’re just stabbing around in the dark.”

Hoss fell silent again, staring moodily into his beer.  Adam tried to relish the silence.  They had done so much talking, so much arguing in the last twenty hours that the silence should have been a blessed relief.  But somehow it wasn’t.

“What are you thinking, Hoss?”

Hoss shook his head.  “Jus’ can’t get what happened to Hank Murray outa my head.  You don’t beat someone to death by accident.  And whichever of them done that, Joe’s still there, with them both.”

Adam’s mouth tightened.  “We have to stop thinking the worst.”

“I feel so danged useless!”

Adam gave a brief nod.  “Yeah, so do I.  But we’ve got Pa to think about too.  We’ve just got to try and get some sense of normality back.  We’ve done everything we can.  And Joe’s made a choice.  Maybe it will turn out for the best, after all.”

Hoss leaned forward across the table, an uncharacteristic vehemence in his voice. “You think he knows them fellers killed Hank?”

“It doesn’t follow that they’re going to hurt Joe.  What would they gain by it?  If they were after money, we’d have heard by now.  Maybe he really does believe Joe’s his son.”

“Yeah, well Joe’s no business to think so!” Hoss banged his glass down on the table.  “I don’t understand any of this, Adam!”  He rose from his seat so violently he almost turned his chair over.  Adam picked up his hat and hurried after him, out of the saloon.

“Hoss, slow down, will you?”

Hoss stopped in the middle of the street, his big shoulders slumped.  “I’m sorry, Adam. Little Joe’s my brother and I just can’t think of him any other way.”

“He’s my brother too, you know.”

Hoss gave a defeated shrug. “Yeah, I know that.  I just don’t want to give up on him.”

Adam put a hand on his brother’s huge shoulder. “We’re not giving up on him.”

Hoss gave a heavy sigh.  “Yeah, I guess I know that too.”  He raised his head and looked back down the street in the direction of the hotel.  “Reckon we’d better be getting back.  If we’re heading on back to the Ponderosa first thing tomorrow, we’ve got an early start.  And we don’t want Pa worrying about where we’ve gone.  Wish we coulda persuaded him to come on out for a breath of fresh air.  He ain’t left that hotel room since we arrived in this town.”

They started back slowly.  Suddenly Adam reached out a hand and gripped Hoss’s arm.

“Hoss, look.”

Hoss’s eyes followed his own.  Adam felt the muscles tighten in his brother’s big forearm.  “Well, I’ll be…!”

Rolling down the center of the street, large as life in the afternoon sun, was a wagon, pulled by two mules.

*******

Brady slumped in the chair in the sheriff’s office, his giant frame sagging beneath its own weight.

“I’m telling you, they’re dead!” he insisted.  “We were camped up on Blackstone Ridge.  They were drunk.  The boy went over the edge and Sam went down after him, trying to help.  Then he fell too.  I tried to stop him, but Sam’s as stubborn as both them mules put together.”  Brady dropped his head into his hands and shook his head.  “I told him we shoulda left the boy.  He’s brung us nothing but trouble.  Sam and me, we were doing just fine on our own.”

“Where’s Blackstone Ridge?”  Pa couldn’t keep the desperation out of his voice.  Adam was only surprised he hadn’t already grabbed Brady by the throat to wring the information out of him.

“About twenty miles south east of here,” said the sheriff.  He turned again to Brady. “You want any leniency from a jury over the killing of that Murray boy, you better do all you can to cooperate now.”

“I already told you, it was the stampede killed him.  He was good and alive when he ran off from us.”

Pa took a threatening step forward.  “Hank’s death was nothing to do with that stampede.  He was deliberately beaten and he died of those injuries.  Now you take me to where my son fell.”

Brady groaned.  “What’s the point?  It’s a three hundred foot drop.  The boy’s carrion by now.”

“Dead or not, you’ll take us there or I’ll swing for you, I swear it!”

“On your feet, Brady!”  The sheriff pulled a set of handcuffs from the drawer of his desk.  “We’re taking that wagon back out to Blackstone Ridge.”  He looked across at his deputy, waiting by the door.  “And we’re gonna need plenty of rope.  See what you can find.”

*******

The sun was starting to slip down behind the mountain by the time they reached the summit of the ridge, their journey silent for the most part.  The sheriff had been grim-faced as they left the office.  “If he can show us where they went over, we’ll have a better idea where to search for the bodies,” he explained.

“There’s a chance they’re still alive, ain’t there?”  Hoss had not been prepared to give up.  Not yet.  But the sheriff’s face had answered for him, and after that Hoss had fallen silent too.

“Over there, by that flat rock,” said Brady, secured by a chain to an iron ring on the side of the wagon.  He turned his eyes away as though the sight of the cliff edge pained them.

The sheriff sucked his teeth.  “If they went down there, it’s not going to be easy.”  He walked to the lip of the ridge and sank down on one knee.  The three Cartwrights did the same.  In silence, they gazed at the sickening drop beneath them and although nobody said as much, they knew they were all imagining the same terrible moment.

“Joe!” whispered Pa, his voice breaking beneath the pain.  He stepped back from the edge, unable to contemplate the yawning void that had swallowed his son so completely, and stood with his head hunched down into his shoulders.

With the sun behind them, the mountainside below had fallen into shadow.  Only Hoss’s sharp gaze noticed the tiny pale smudge, way down the precipice.  He screwed his eyes, trying to work out what it was he was looking at.  It didn’t look like a rock, and it was too pale to be a clump of brush.

“Adam,” he muttered, hardly daring to believe what his eyes were telling him.  ‘Look.  Down there. There’s a body.”

Pa spun round again.  For a moment, no one moved, then Pa’s voice said, “Whose?”

Hoss shook his head.  “I don’t know.  Can’t tell.”

The sheriff jumped to his feet in a sudden flurry of motion.  He was at the wagon and had Brady by the shirt front almost before anyone could draw breath.

“Did you see, Brady?  When they fell?”

Brady tried to shrug his hand away, refusing even to raise his head. The sheriff looked back at the Cartwrights.  “He said Joe fell and Mitchell went after him to help him.”  He turned back to Brady.  “That’s what you said, wasn’t it?  Back in my office.  You said Joe fell and Mitchell went down after him?  Is that Joe down there?”

Brady hunched his shoulders and stared fixedly at the wagon.

“Lord help you, Brady!  If you don’t want to hang, man, tell us who it is!”

Brady raised a sullen face and glared at the sheriff with venom in his eyes.

“Well, it ain’t Sam!” he spat, and tugged his arm his arm free with a violent jerk.

The sheriff was already clambering into the back of the wagon and Pa was there beside him.  Adam hurried to help. Only Hoss was left on the edge of the ridge, his blue gaze still fixed on the shape of a man stretched across the treacherous rock face way below.  Hoss could barely make out the shelf that held him, no more than a thin dark line running horizontally across the cliff.  Hoss’s heart hammered to see it.  How could anyone stay balanced on so narrow a ledge?  Was there some kind of fissure there, invisible to Hoss’s eye, that held Joe wedged?  Hoss found himself praying there was. He could hear the three men behind him, barking orders, scrabbling with ropes, unhitching the mule team, yet he stayed where he was, his unflinching gaze fixed on his brother so far below, as though he could keep Joe from falling by the sheer unblinking strength of his eyes.

Adam crouched down by his side.  He poked his head over the cliff as if to reassure himself that Joe was still there.  Hoss, finally dragging his gaze back to the mountaintop, saw how white his brother’s face was. He also saw the rope knotted around Adam’s body, snaking back to the mule team, and a coil of narrower cord over his shoulder.

“I’m going down after him Hoss.  Watch the rope, will you?”

Hoss nodded without speaking.  He looked behind him.  Pa and the sheriff had positioned the wagon and were now securing the end of a second rope to the axle.  When they were happy with the fastening, Pa picked up the heavy coil and hurried down to join his two sons.

“Are we about right?”  His eyes flicked nervously between the wagon and the cliff edge.

Hoss leaned back out, noted Joe’s position once more and looked back at Pa.  “Right on target, I’d say.”

Pa gave a tense nod and began to pay out the rope.  Hoss watched it snake down the steep drop.

“Yep,” said Hoss.  “It’s made it.  Less than two feet away, I reckon.”

Pa fed out the remainder of the rope.  They watched the line by their feet draw tight.  Hoss climbed to his feet and took hold of the rope holding Adam and gave his brother a sharp nod.  “We’ve got ya, Adam.

“Adam.”  Pa reached out and seized his son’s wrist in a tight grip.  Hoss saw their eyes meet and for a moment neither of them said anything.  Pa’s hand squeezed.  “You be careful, son.”

Adam gave a curt nod.

“And… whatever you find… down there…”  Pa’s voice faltered momentarily.  “Whatever you find, you bring your brother back with you, you understand?”

Adam’s mouth was a taut line.  He nodded again.  Despite his pallor, there was determination in his face, although Hoss was close enough to see the flicker of fear in his brother’s eyes as he picked up the guide rope from the ground, took a deep breath, and stepped backwards, leaning his body out over the void of space.

 

Chapter 12

Alone on the mountainside, flitting in and out of confused wakefulness, the passing hours stretched to eternity.  Only the gradual return of full sensation to his body and the arch of the white ball of the sun across a bleached blue sky told Joe the day was gradually drawing on.

First there was fear and then there was pain.  And at some point the two merged and became indistinguishable.   He could not pinpoint the pain.  He thought it might be his leg that was hurting, but then his head was hurting too.  And his chest.  And his back.  It hurt to open his eyes; it hurt to breathe; it hurt to swallow.  If he tried to move, the pain rose to a screaming crescendo and exploded in bright lights inside his brain.

The fear was a pain of its own.  Every time he forced open his eyes and saw the emptiness of the sky in front of him, it drove sharp nails into his belly and up into his heart.  The mountain, high and unrelenting, terrified him; that drop into the belly of space beneath him terrified him; and terror clutched at him every time a spasm of pain gripped him and wrung him like a torn rag.  But mostly the fear was of loneliness; the fear of dying here; a long, slow death, suffering and alone.

He had long given up wondering why his body still clung of its own inexplicable accord to this empty rock face.  He had given up wondering at all.  All there was left was the pain, and his mind was so tired, even the pain had begun to detach itself.  Exhaustion numbed even the fear.  As the shadows crept over the mountain, Joe opened his eyes one more time, saw the darkness approaching, and felt nothing.

*******

Adam had never been afraid of heights, but then he had never dangled precariously on a rope hundreds of feet in the air.  It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.

The lower he dropped, the darker the mountainside became, and the smaller he felt.  Close to, the rock was not smooth, but an uneven wall, jutting outwards here and curving away there.  His hands were already burning from sliding down the guide rope, but the fear of the mountain was nothing compared to the fear that gripped his throat when he thought about Joe and what he might find when he reached his brother.

“Whatever you find, you bring your brother back with you…”

Pa’s voice played over in his head as he lowered himself foot by foot into the abyss. When he looked up, he could see Pa’s head, outlined against the sky, watching his descent, and he could picture Hoss, feeding the rope that held him. If he trusted anyone to dangle him over a three hundred foot drop, thought Adam, he trusted Hoss.

He paused twice to look below him, trying not to let the dizzying drop distract him from the focus of his attentions, Joe’s prostrate form, unnervingly stretched on a shelf so narrow, if he had tried to roll onto his front, he would undoubtedly have fallen.

Was that why he was lying so still?  Was he conscious and aware of his own terrible predicament; his back pressed so tightly to the rock because he dared not move?  Or was he oblivious, trapped in some way Adam couldn’t yet see?  Brady said he had been there since sunrise.  That was a long time.  Yet, thought Adam, if he’d clung on that long, he could surely cling on a little longer.

The third time he looked, he was close enough to see Joe’s face, in profile, partially obscured by the tangled mop of his untidy hair.  In the failing light, his brother’s face looked ghostly pale.  He was lying on his right side, his back pressed into the rock behind him, his right leg below the knee protruding at an angle nature never intended.  Adam could now see clearly the shelf on which he was lying.  He baulked at its width, but it extended beyond Joe’s head by a good three or four foot.  His guide rope would bring him down on the ledge about eighteen inches from Joe’s tousled head.

His feet found the shelf.  He breathed a deep sigh of relief and let his arms relax for a few seconds.  Looking up, he raised his hand and gave a wide wave.  Pa’s arm returned the signal.

Quickly he fished up the dangling guide rope and tied it loosely around his waist above the other knot.  Joe would go back up on that rope.  All Adam had to do now was get that lifeline secured around his brother’s middle and the mule team would haul them back up that mountain as if they were no more than sacks of potatoes.  Easy!

“Joe?”  He sank down on his hands and knees, unpleasantly aware of the stomach-chilling drop on his right hand side, and crawled the last few inches to his brother’s head.  He laid a hand on Joe’s hair.  His heart hammered hard in his chest, and not simply from the exertions of his descent down the mountain.  “Joe?  Can you hear me?”

Joe groaned softly.  Adam muscles went weak with relief.  He gave his brother’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.  “You had me scared, little brother!”

The most important thing, Adam reminded himself, was to get Joe secured with a rope.  Everything else could wait.  He untied the loose knot of his guide rope and leaned across to thread it between Joe and the rocks behind him.

Joe’s body flinched.  Adam hesitated.  Something wasn’t right. There was no space to pass the rope behind his brother’s body.  Supporting Joe with his right arm, he slid his left hand behind Joe’s back.

Once again, Joe’s body recoiled, squeezing Adam’s hand into the rock. Joe let out another low moan.

“Joe?”  Adam peered back along his own shoulders to look at his brother’s face.  It was creased with pain.  “You with me, kid?”

Joe’s eyes opened.  They stared straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to Adam’s presence.

“Joe, it’s me.  Adam.”

At last he saw something flicker in the depths of Joe’s eyes.  The boy’s mouth shaped his name, then his head twisted just a fraction.  He blinked up at Adam’s body, hovering above him, and his gaze became puzzled as it traveled slowly to meet his brother’s.

“Adam?”  This time the sound came out.

“Yeah, it’s me.  I’m going to get you out of here, kid.”

Joe blinked at him, confused.  Adam repeated the words.  “I’m going to get you out of here.  I’ve just got to get this rope tied around you.”

The confusion cleared.  After a moment, Joe’s head made a slight nod.

Adam’s hand was still pinned behind his brother’s back.  He slid it carefully downwards, feeling Joe wince.

“Does your back hurt, Joe?  Can you tell me where?”

Joe frowned.  It took him a moment to process the answer.  “Don’t know,” he muttered, his voice thick and slow.  Then his body jerked and he let out a wavering cry.

Adam froze.  He knew now what was wrong with Joe’s back.  He also knew why his brother was pressed so tightly to the face of the rock.  Beneath his fingers, fastening Joe to the cliff was a wooden branch, as thick as a broom handle

Adam’s stomach did a tight somersault.  He closed his eyes for several seconds and took a deep breath, his fingers still resting against the offending object.  “Joe,” he said quietly, “I’m going to have to move you, and I think it might hurt.”

Joe was still trembling from the last onslaught.  Keeping his left hand where it was, and very still, Adam moved his right hand across Joe’s front, gently pulling his shirt out of the way.  The boy’s muscles flinched warily as he ran his hand beneath Joe’s belt, his mind carefully working out the possibilities as his eyes measured the likely angles the branch would have taken as it pierced through Joe’s side.

His hand met only smooth, unbroken flesh; not telltale spike protruding.  Joe was impaled, but the branch, or tree root, or whatever it was, had not gone right through him.  Adam let his right hand rest back on the ledge in front of Joe

“Adam, what’s happened?”  His brother’s voice was little more than a dry murmur.

“Nothing, Joe.  You’re going to be fine.  I just have to move you a little.  You ready for this?”

He caught the tiny nod and drew another deep breath.  He wasn’t at all sure how he was going to achieve what he needed to do.  He was at the wrong angle to get the hold he needed to pull Joe free.  Worse, from the little he could feel with the limited space he had for his left hand, the branch had grown out from its crevice in the rock at an upward angle.  To free Joe he was going to need to lift him as he pulled.  It made Adam’s own insides turn cold to imagine what damage might already have been done inside his brother.

What he needed, he thought, was a saw.  But he didn’t have a saw.  He had only his hands, and a shelf that was too narrow, and a brother who was going to die if he didn’t do something soon.

“All right, Joe, you’re going to have to help me.”  He took hold of Joe’s free left arm and wrapped it around his own right shoulder.  “I’m going to lift you a little way. I want you to hang onto me as tight as you can, do you hear me?”

Joe gave a small grunt.  Whether it was an acknowledgement or a grunt of pain, Adam wasn’t sure.  Leaning forward, he got the best grip he could manage around his brother’s body and pulled slowly, in the direction he desperately hoped was the right one.

Joe’s arm clenched across the back of his neck as the muscles in his body convulsed in protest.  Locked in a contorted embrace, his sharp cries of anguish drove directly into Adam’s left ear and straight into his heart.  In the terrible seconds that followed, Adam wasn’t sure who suffered more; Joe, as his back gradually eased free of that hideous spike, or Adam, knowing the agony he was inflicting on his brother.  Worst of all, he wasn’t at all confident the attempt would succeed.  The narrowness of their perch meant he could pull only with his arms and shoulders, and once he’d begun, he didn’t dare stop.  He could see the bloodied spike lengthening painfully slowly as he heaved Joe clear, but he knew that if he let go of his brother now, his weight would take him straight back down, to be impaled a second time.

He could hear Joe gasping.  His own shoulders and upper back were on fire with the strain.  Joe’s body was rigid in his arms.

“Stop!  Adam, stop!  Please!  It hurts…too much!”

Adam gritted his teeth.  “We’re almost there, Joe.  Just hang on in there, kid.  We’re almost there.”

He had no idea if that was the truth.  The wooden spike was emerging only fraction by painful fraction.  “Please!” he heard himself whisper, unsure whether he was addressing God or the inanimate object protruding so obscenely from his brother’s back.

Joe’s body went limp.  Adam adjusted his grip in time to stop him sagging backwards as a sickening fear tightened in his gullet.  “Joe?” he breathed, twisting his head in an attempt to see Joe’s face.  But his brother’s head had drooped; all Adam could see was a tangle of disheveled curls.

“Don’t you dare die on me, Joe!” he said in a fierce voice.  “Not when we’ve come this far, you hear me?”

He felt the sudden lack of resistance. Joe’s body slumped forward.  Staring at the space behind him, Adam saw the barb in all its gory totality; the sheared stump of a young shrub.  Joe’s weight must have snapped it apart as he fell, leaving a pointed spear protruding from the fissure in the rock.  He looked down in alarm at the corresponding hole in Joe’s lower back.  Blood was already welling up beneath his torn shirt and soaking down into the seat of his pants, a dark stain rapidly spreading.  Adam knew he would have to move fast.

Forcing himself to stay calm, he took up the spare rope again, threading it swiftly beneath his brother and knotting it with hands that were trembling.  There was no time for relief.  Blood was already pooling on the rocks.  Hurriedly Adam tugged the torn shirt from Joe’s shoulders, bundled it against the ragged wound and tied the sleeves around his brother’s waist, beneath the rope.

A foot or so behind them, the shelf was a whole precious couple of inches wider. Hefting Joe beneath the arms, Adam hauled him back.  Joe stirred and moaned.

“Sorry, little brother.  I know it hurts.”

Joe muttered something unrepeatable.  In spite of their dire situation, Adam started to laugh, but the laughter wobbled in his throat and turned instead into something resembling a shaky sob.  He swallowed down a fleeting moment of uncontrolled panic.

“Didn’t know you knew words like that, little brother,” he said, with forced jocularity.  “Just lie still a moment while I see what I can do about your leg.”

He couldn’t go around Joe in the confined space they had.  Once more he had to clamber over him, balancing on his knees, one leg either side of Joe’s hips.  He tried to sound light-hearted as he slipped the spare rope from around his neck.

“Good thing you’re such a shrimp, little brother.  If you’d been Hoss, I’d have needed scaffolding to do this!”

Joe made a brave attempt at a laugh as he peered down with bleary eyes at Adam, kneeling astride him.    “If you were only Hattie Miller right now…”

His voice may have been slurred and little more than a whisper but Adam could have cried with relief for his brother’s unquenchable courage.  As it was, he did his best to sound reproachful.

“You’re an incurable reprobate, you know that?” Rubbing sweat from his eyes with his sleeve, Adam gritted his teeth and pulled his brother’s twisted leg straight.  Joe sucked in breath in a hoarse gasp.  Carefully Adam secured the broken limb to Joe’s sound leg, using the spare rope.  Edging backwards, his mouth tightened at the sickly yellow pallor of his brother’s exhausted face.

“Hattie Miller, eh?” he said in a bright voice.  “I didn’t know there was anything going on between the two of you.”

“Isn’t really.  Not yet…”  Joe’s eyes were glassing over, his voice no more than an indistinct murmur.

“We need to get you back to Virginia City soon, little brother, so you can continue to woo her with your charms.  Before someone else snatches her away.”

Joe eyelids closed and his mouth twitched in a faint smile.  Then his eyes flicked open once more and there was a sudden, feverish earnestness in their depths.

“Adam.”

“What is it?”

“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“Leave you?”  Adam took the hand that was groping, half-blindly, for his.  “I’m not planning on going anywhere without you.”

Joe’s hand relaxed in his grip.  They had been here long enough, thought Adam.  Time to make their ascent back up this mountain.  The shadows were deepening; there was already a chill in the air.  He leaned down so he could hitch Joe off the ledge, and his brother spoke close to his ear.

“How did you find me?”

Adam eased Joe gently into his arms, cradling him against his own body.  “Brady.  He said you’d fallen.  Showed us where to find you.”

Adam reached up and gave three firm tugs on the rope that held him.  Joe frowned with an effort.  “Didn’t fall,” he whispered.  “Brady pushed me.”

 

Chapter 13

As soon as the signal came – three tugs on the rope – Hoss tightened his sweating palms on the leather harness and urged the mules forward.

“Easy!” yelled Pa.  “We don’t want to smash them into the rocks.”

The sheriff was at Hoss’s side.  The two men exchanged glances.

“They’re both coming up,” said the sheriff.

Hoss pressed his lips together and said nothing.  They unspoken question hung between them.  Was Adam bringing up a brother still breathing, or a lifeless carcass?  He had been down there a long time.  Hoss hoped that was a good sign.  Surely, if Joe had been plain dead, Adam would have simply wrapped a line around him and had them haul him up.  Surely Adam fussing meant Joe had to be alive.  But then Pa, hanging over the cliff to try and follow progress, called back that Adam seemed to be having trouble freeing up Joe’s body, and Hoss’s shoulders slumped.

It was a relief to be doing something.  Anything.  Better than standing around helplessly, just waiting, none the wiser.  At least they would know soon, one way or the other.  Hoss focused his mind on the mules.  It was up to him to make sure Adam and Joe had a safe ride back to the top again.

“That’s good!” called Pa.  “About thirty feet. Nice and smooth!”

“You heard him, girls,” said Hoss to the mules, “nice and smooth.”

“Twenty feet!”

Hoss’s stomach tightened involuntarily as his brothers’ ascent drew closer.  When Adam appeared over that ridge, what would they see?  He tried to push the dread away.  One thing at a time.  First they had to get Adam to the top.  Just concentrate on the job in hand.  He would know soon enough.

He was almost level with the wagon.  The sheriff was at the head of the second mule.  The rope was taut behind them.

Not long now, thought Hoss.  A few moments more and…

Something solid smashed into his face.  Glittering colors exploded in front of his eyes.  He staggered backwards, colliding with the mule he was leading, and felt the earth beneath his back. He had a momentary impression of the sky below him, then the world righted itself.  Eyes streaming, he felt a hoof graze his cheek and scrambled out of the way, just in time.

Blood was spurting from his nose.  He pressed a hand to his face to try and stem the flow as his scattered senses regrouped and he scrambled, on instinct, back to his feet.  Through vision still blurred by tears of pain, he saw the sheriff, also picking himself up from the ground, heard him yell a warning, turned his eyes to see Brady, head down like a charging bull, thundering towards Pa at the edge of the cliff.  Between his hands, Brady held a six foot plank.  It took Hoss’s stunned brain a moment to register that his hands were still cuffed, the chains still fastened to the solid length of wood he had ripped from the wagon by brute force.

“Pa!” he bellowed, staggering forward, hand still cupping his smashed nose.

A gunshot rang out.  Hoss saw Brady stumble but keep on running, saw him collide with Pa, saw both men topple, saw Brady, arms flailing, scrabbling to hold onto Pa as he lost his balance, saw Pa break loose and tumble backwards as Brady disappeared with a loud cry of protest, over the edge of the precipice.

Hoss’s gaze was focused on Pa, now lying on the rim of the cliff, but the sheriff’s yell of alarm woke his brain.

“The mules!”

Hoss swung around.  The sheriff, gun still in hand, was lunging for the startled animals who had backed up, tossing their heads and were now stamping indignantly as they headed off in the other direction.

At least Pa was still alive.  His bellow, echoing the sheriff’s, rang in Hoss’s ears as he made a grab for the rope stretched tight behind the mutinous team and hauled back with every ounce of strength in his body.

*******

Adam gave a sharp cry of alarm as the rope above him slackened without warning, plunging him ten feet.  Acting on a reflex, he tightened his grip across his brother’s chest as the ropes holding them swung wildly, throwing them with force into the solid wall of rock.  There wasn’t time to twist his body so his legs could absorb the impact; instead it was his shoulder that collided with a resounding thud.  He heard Joe’s anguished gasp even over his own his own breathless grunt of pain.

Swinging like a pendulum out of control, they plummeted another couple of feet. What was going on up there?  In desperation he lifted his face, bracing himself for a second collision with the unforgiving mountainside and saw the shadow hurtling towards them.  There was barely time to utter an involuntary oath.  His body coiled instinctively, but there was nowhere to go.

Air rushed past, close to his face, like the brush of a hand.  His eyes squeezed shut of their own accord.

“Pa!” He could clearly hear the terror in his own voice.  They swung once more into the rocks, but this time, somehow, without even thinking, he managed to fend off with his feet.  “Pa!”

“Adam!”  The answering shout came from above.

Adam’s face flipped upwards.  His heart was trying to force its way out of his throat.  And there were his father’s head and shoulders.

Their crazy momentum slowed.  Adam felt the gentle upwards tug once again, but his heart still raced.  He adjusted his grip on Joe, only now aware of the slump in his brother’s body.  “Joe?” he whispered, but Joe, cradled against him, was silent and limp.  Only the spreading warmth of the blood oozing through the makeshift bandage around his middle, seeping into Adam’s own side, reassured Adam he was still alive.  Somehow that was cold comfort.

Steadily they rose.  Soon Adam was near enough to pick out the details of Pa’s face; the dark shadows of his eye sockets; the tense set of his mouth.  Closer still and he could see the glimmer of perspiration on his brow and top lip, and feel the hands gripping the shoulders of his shirt, reaching to take Joe from his arms.  Then Hoss was there too, pulling him over the edge of the rocky slope, hauling him away from the perilous rim.  There was blood all over Hoss’s face, splattered across his shirt front, but there was no time to wonder about that.  Pa was leaning over Joe, tugging at the rope around his middle.  Adam fumbled with the knots of his own as he crawled to his brother.

“Is he alive?

Pa gave a terse nod.  “Yes, he’s breathing.”

That was all Adam needed to know right then, but even that sapped every last morsel of strength out of him.  His limbs, a moment before capable of supporting two men, were suddenly as weak as if his muscles had turned to water.

But it no longer mattered.  Pa was there, and Hoss.  Then the sheriff was there too, all crouched around Joe.  The sheriff had found a doctor’s bag from somewhere.  Adam’s brain seemed to have liquefied too.   It was some moments before he recalled Pa saying that Sam Mitchell had been a doctor.  He heard his own voice telling them to mind Joe’s broken leg and the hole in his back

“Are you all right, Adam?”  It was Hoss speaking into his ear.

He raised his head.  He didn’t remember lowering it, but it was resting against his knees.  “Yes,” he said, surprised to find his teeth were chattering and he felt as cold as if he’d just been pulled from the lake.  Hoss’s face was close to his.  Once again Adam registered the blood.  “What happened to your face?”

“Brady.”

“Brady?”

Hoss nodded.  “He broke free. Smashed me and the sheriff out of the way and nearly took Pa over the edge with him.  Just flew at us like a mad man.  Don’t know what got into him.”

“He pushed Joe over the ridge.  I guess he was worried we’d find out.”

Hoss glanced over at his younger brother and his face darkened in an angry scowl.  “If I’d known that, I’d have dropped him over the edge myself and sung him a tune as he went down.  Listen, we’re gonna take Joe up to that wagon.  Reckon you should give yourself a break and ride in there too.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Adam assured him, battling to contain the tremors still shaking his body.  “I’ll be fine.”  As if to prove his point he made to rise and his legs gave out beneath him.  He looked up into Hoss’s big, blood-smeared face, wrinkled now with concern and managed a crooked smile.  “Just give me a few minutes.  I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the head for heights I thought I had.”

 

Chapter 14

They had rescued Joe from the mountain but there was nothing any of them could do to rescue him from the nightmare of the days and nights that followed.  His leg would heal well enough, said the doctor.  It was a good clean break.  But that ugly hole in Joe’s back, that was another matter entirely.

“I can stitch up the outside,” he told them, with a gloomy shake if his head, “but as for what’s on the inside…”

“We got him back only to lose him again,” said Pa, his voice full of bitterness, as Joe trembled on the threshold of eternity and they kept vigil at his bedside, expecting every ragged, labored breath to be his last.

Hoss looked down on his younger brother’s face, pale and gaunt as a wraith.  Sweat filmed his waxen skin, his eyelids and lips were a pale shade of blue, deep shadows gnawed at his wasted cheeks and eroded his sunken eye sockets.

“No,” he told Pa.  “He’s going to hold on.  Jus’ like he did on that mountain. I know he’s going to hold on.”

They waited and prayed, and slowly, little by little, hour by hour, the tide began to turn.  Joe’s breathing grew easier, his pulse steadied and became stronger, his fever subsided.  At last he fell into a deep quiet sleep.

“I guess it wasn’t his time,” said the doctor.  “He’s a lucky kid.”

There was still a long haul back to full health, they all knew that.  But finally they could think about returning home and picking up some semblance of normal life again, at least for the older three Cartwrights.  For Joe, there remained weeks of recuperation, confined at first to his bed, and then for short spells, to the couch downstairs, or a makeshift bed on the porch.

It all should have been good, but something was wrong and Hoss wasn’t certain exactly what it was.

First there was Joe.  Lying quietly, accepting all the enforced limitations without demur.  A good thing, surely, Hoss tried to persuade himself, watching his younger brother smile patiently as Pa adjusted his pillows for the fourteenth time in an afternoon.  So why did he feel a niggling sense of unease whenever he looked at Joe’s composed face?  What was it about his brother’s acquiescent behavior that was vaguely disturbing?  Usually when Joe was laid up for more than a couple of days, he was as restless as a wild colt in a pen.  Yet he submitted to every inconvenience, every ministration without a murmur of protest or bad grace.  To Hoss’s mind, the model invalid was altogether too perfect.

Then there was Pa.  Laughing too much; joking too loudly; a shade too exuberant, a shade too interested; full of a cheer that never reached his eyes.

“Adam,” Hoss said, as he rode side by side with his brother, one morning several weeks after the incident up on the ridge, “something’s not right.”

Adam looked round at his brother, his eyes shadowed beneath a troubled brow.  His mouth tightened.  “I know,” He said.  “I’ve noticed it too.”

*******

“Hoss, give Joseph a hand back up to his room.”

They had finished dinner.  Joe still couldn’t sit at the table with his leg pinned straight as a rod, but he could eat with a tray on his lap, stretched out on the couch, and at least it felt almost normal.  Almost, but for the wearisome artificiality around the table, like an invisible film stretched tight with guarded politeness and meaningless joviality.  Hoss was beginning to find these times together exhausting.

“It’s still early,” said Adam, glancing from Joe to his father.

Joe looked up from his position on the couch and gave a compliant shrug.  “It’s fine.  I don’t mind.”

“He needs his rest,” said Pa, his brow flickering a warning signal.

Hoss exchanged a swift glance with Adam.  “Maybe,” he said.  “But maybe we should have a talk first.”

No mistaking Pa’s brow this time.  It lowered by a full inch.  “A talk?”

“Yeah.”  Hoss rested his forearms on the table.  “Adam and me, we reckon it’s time we got some things straightened out.”

Pa looked at Adam, his eyes narrowing.  “What things?”

Maybe Pa expected Adam to answer, but it was Hoss who pressed on.

“There’s a shadow hanging over this house.  And we’re all pretending it ain’t there, or maybe we’re all hoping that if we keep on ignoring it long enough, it’ll just pass over and fade away.”

Pa’s shoulders stiffened.  “I don’t know what you’re referring to, Hoss.  Things have been difficult, sure, with Joe being sick, but we’ll soon be back to normal.”

Hoss gave a resolute shake of his head.  “I ain’t referring to Joe being sick, Pa.  Not directly. I’m talking about what happened before he got sick.”

It was Joe’s turn to look wary.  “I already told you what happened.”

“Yeah, you told us what happened, sure, but that ain’t my meaning either.  I’m talking about the thing we just ain’t talking about.  I’m talking about Sam Mitchell.”

Both Joe and Pa fell silent.  Joe flicked a nervous glance at his father, then looked away.  For the first time in weeks, the passive lack of emotion in his expression was replaced by a surly resentment Hoss finally recognized.

“He’s dead, Hoss.  Why should we talk about him?”

“He might be dead, Joe, but his ghost is alive and well and haunting this family!”

“Hoss!” Pa’s voice was edged with a cautionary chill.

“I’m sorry, Pa, but it’s true.  Ever since you read that letter of Joe’s, you ain’t hardly mentioned Sam Mitchell’s name once!”

Pa’s jaw flexed.  His eyes frosted over.

Adam spoke softly. “Hoss is right, Pa.  We need to talk this over.”

Pa stared at them both without speaking.  His eyes flashed dangerously.  Still without saying a word, he rose from his chair and crossed the room in a few giant strides.  As he reached the stairs, Hoss scraped his chair around and looked directly at Joe.

‘Ain’t you ever gonna ask, Little Joe?”

Joe went white. “Ask what?”

“Dadburnit, Joe!  You know what!  You ain’t been acting right since Adam dragged you back up that mountain!  Well, if you won’t ask, I sure as heck am gonna!  Pa!”

Pa froze at the foot of the stairs.  He looked back slowly, his face almost as bleached of color as Joe’s.

“What’s the truth, Pa?  Let’s straighten this out now, once and for all.  Is Sam Mitchell Joe’s real father?”

Pa stood rooted to the foot of the stairs.  Joe stared at Hoss out of eyes stricken wide with horror.

“I’m going to bed,” said Pa, his face as hard and as icy as a winter chill.  “I’ll see you all in the morning.”

He managed three treads before Joe said, “Pa?”

Pa hesitated once again, but this time he didn’t look back.

“Was Sam Mitchell my father?”

Pa turned slowly.  Leaning back against the stair rail he crossed his arms in front of him and fastened his iron cold gaze on Joe.  “The truth, Joseph?”  He gave a small shake of his head.  “The truth is… I don’t know the truth!  I only know what I’ve always believed to be true.  Is that good enough for you?”

Joe’s face flickered.  Pa’s eyes didn’t flinch.

“Did my mother never say?”

Pa hesitated for a fraction of a second, but his expression remained stony.  “I never put the question to her.  I never felt the need.  We trusted each other.”

The statement, matter of fact as it was, had the ring of a reprimand.  Hoss saw Joe had felt the stab; sensed the smart it left, saw the tears spring behind his brother’s anxious eyes.  Joe blinked them away, but his voice betrayed him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought he was dead.  I never imagined he’d reappear.  So what purpose would it have served?  I’m your father, you’re my son.  I’ve always believed that, Joe.  It’s been good enough for me.  If it’s not good enough for you, I don’t know what else to say.”

Pa stood waiting while Joe stared back at him out of wounded eyes.  And when Joe said nothing, he turned and walked away, vanishing around the bend in the staircase towards his bedroom.

*******

Damn Hoss!  Damn Pa!  Damn them all!  He had tried to make it all right again.  He had tried not to think about Sam, and Brady, and Hank, and the whole wretched mess.  He had tried to co operate; tried to be the dutiful son; tried to put away the gnawing sense of betrayal, the anger, the disappointment, the grief.  But they would not go.

“Joe.”  It was Hoss again.  Why couldn’t he let things be? Joe held up a hand and shook his head.

“Not now, Hoss.  Please, not now!”

Hoss looked at Adam.  His older brother gave a quick shake of his head.  Hoss bit his lip.

Joe fumbled for his crutches.  Adam and Hoss rose at the same time to help him.  Adam got there first.  He placed the crutches into Joe’s groping hand.  Joe struggled to his feet, trying not to wince at the pain the movement still cost his back.

Hoss reached out to steady him.  “Here, let me help.”

Joe shrugged him away.  “I don’t need any more help from you, Hoss.  Look where your help’s got me.”

Adam, in an obvious effort to remain reasonable, said, “We have to talk about this Joe.  You and Pa, you’ve been keeping everyone at arm’s length ever since we found you again.”

Joe’s face darkened to an angry scowl.  “What did you expect?  You think everything can just go back to how it was?”

“No, I didn’t say that.  Hoss and I just think you and Pa need to work this through somehow.  It’s not going to go away simply because the two of you refuse to talk about it.”

“That’s easy for you to say!  It’s not happened to you; it’s happened to me.  Pa hasn’t been lying to you your whole life!”

“And he’s not been lying to you either, Little Joe, so why you saying that?”  Hoss paced behind the sofa and back again, as if physical movement would help ease the exasperation he was feeling.  “He already told you he never believed Mitchell’s claims.”

“But he doesn’t know, does he?  That’s the point!”

Somehow, amid the raised voices, Adam managed to keep his calm.  “Pa trusted Marie, Joe, why can’t you?”

Adam!  With an answer for everything.  So smug.  So clever.  So…so knowing!  Joe shook his head in helpless frustration.  Why did Adam always make him feel completely inarticulate?

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Joe was acutely aware that his sulky reply made him sound like a ten-year-old, but he was terrified his voice was about to reveal the gaping hole of misery he’d kept so well hidden these past weeks.  Any moment now and it would wobble out of control – he could feel it going – and he desperately didn’t want that to happen.

“Oh well, there’s a surprise!” said Adam, and Joe winced at the biting irony in his voice.  “So what do you plan to do?  Carry around a giant chip on your shoulder for the rest of your life?  Strikes me there’s more than an ounce of self pity to all this, Joe!”

“You don’t know anything!”

“Oh, don’t I?  Well, I know when you’re behaving like a spoiled kid.”

“I’m not a spoiled kid!  It’s just…”

“Just what?  What exactly are you expecting from Pa?  Some stranger appears and tells you he’s your father, so you decide to punish the man who’s loved you and raised you for seventeen years?”

“No, of course not!  Only…”

“Only?”

Joe screwed his face and lowered his gaze to the carpet.  “Only…” Adam was doing it again.  The words rolled so glibly from his tongue, they somehow robbed Joe of the ability to string a coherent sentence together in response, even if he could have forced the words past the treacherous lump that was swelling in his throat. “Only…it… it hurts!”

Adam gave him a hard look.  “What?  And you think Pa’s not hurting too?”

A pain, knife sharp, stabbed hard through Joe’s middle.  He looked up in surprise and heard his brother’s scathing laugh.

“No, of course not!  You haven’t given any thought as to how Pa’s feeling.  It’s all about you, isn’t it Joe?  It’s always all about you!”

He never planned it to happen.  Something inside him just blew.  Boiling tears scalded his eyes and blurred his vision, and a fury born of impotence exploded outwards.  He heard the sharp smack of bone on bone as his fist collided with Adam’s face, and his brother flew backwards.  There was an instant of complete confusion as the armchair toppled, Adam’s body tumbling after it, and Joe, fists still flailing, followed him down.

It was Pa’s voice, bellowing in his ear that drove back the blind madness.

“Enough, Joseph!  Stop now before you kill someone!”

The hot mist dissipated.  He heard someone sobbing in great angry gulps and realized it was him.  Adam’s face emerged out of the fog, blood smearing his face, his top lip all crooked and puffy.  Pa hauled Joe back to the sofa and pushed him down roughly.  Too roughly.  Joe yelped as pain speared through his back.  Pa seized his broken leg and dropped it onto the sofa.  Joe gasped again.  The room dipped and swayed and gradually righted itself.  Too late he became aware that the shameful tears he had been trying to control had spilled over in his rage.  He threw up an arm to cover his face.

“What in tarnation do you boys think you’re doing?  Have you got no sense?”

“It was my fault,” said Adam, his voice distorted by his swollen lip.  “I goaded him.  He hit me.”

Joe, scrubbing his face dry on the sleeve of his shirt, peered out from beneath his arm.  Adam was still sitting on the floor, in front of the upturned chair, fingering his injured mouth with cautious fingers.

“He’s on crutches, for heaven’s sake!”

Adam raised an eyebrow.  “I didn’t ask him to hit me!”

There was a moment of silence, then Hoss said anxiously, “You all right, Joe?”

Joe silently cursed his broken leg.  But for that, he would have got up and walked out of the house.  As it was, he was stuck on this couch at the mercy of his family.  He turned his head, still cradled in his arm, into the back of the sofa.

Pa sank down next to him, on the edge of the seat.  He felt his father’s hand on his raised arm.  He was tempted to shrug it aside but for some reason, he didn’t.  He let it lie there.  He imagined their glances of exasperated weariness, Adam rolling his eyes, Pa looking stern.

It almost made him jump when Pa’s voice said gently, “It hurts me too, you know, Joseph.”

Damn!  So Pa had been listening.  He hadn’t gone into his bedroom and shut the door after all.  He’d waited just out of sight and heard everything they’d said.

“You know, the night Hank was killed and I heard Sam Mitchell’s name again, it was like being shot in the gut. And a whole load of other painful wounds opened too.  Thinking of him with Marie; remembering how he’d come out here after her; how he tried to steal the two of you away from me.  And then, when we found out he had you, that he’d taken you away… I was terrified.  Terrified that I would never find you again.  Terrified that he’d turn you against me.  Terrified that you’d choose him over me.  It hurt real bad, Joe.  Real bad!”  Joe heard the catch in his father’s voice, but Pa pushed on.  “And…and then I got your letter.”

Joe tried to say something but it was no good.  He felt himself crumbling the moment he opened his mouth.  He shut it again and pushed his face harder into the back of the chair.

“I thought I’d lost you, son, I thought I’d lost you forever.” Pa’s hand massaged his arm with a gentle motion; the tough, capable, tender hand that he had taken for granted for so much of his life.

“I… I just don’t know, Pa…”  So much to say and that was all he could manage!    He sounded, even to himself, like a feeble child.

“What don’t you know?”  There was a quiet desperation in Pa’s voice.  “You know I’ve always loved you.”

The way Pa said it, it sounded like it ought to be enough.  A month ago, it might have been.  Joe took a deep breath and willed his voice to stay steady. “I always believed in you, Pa.  I… I don’t know… how to get that back.”

This time Pa didn’t answer straight away, but his hand stayed firm on Joe’s trembling arm.

“I’m the same man I always was,” he said at last.  “And nothing will ever persuade me that you’re not my son, because I know – deep down in my heart – that you are. I can’t prove it to you, and I can’t make you believe in me.  You have to know it in your heart too.”  Joe heard his father’s moment of hesitation then.  “What does your heart say, Joe?”

What did his heart say?  It felt so bruised from hurt and anger, confusion and resentment, all he’d done for weeks now was nurse its pain.  But underneath all that, was there a still small voice, waiting to be heard through the turmoil?

He lay very still.  Around him, the room was silent.  He felt his shoulders slacken of their own accord and the arm shielding his face fell back, limp.

“Sam asked me that,” he said, into the silence.  Half puzzled, he let his gaze drift slowly to his father’s face. Something unfamiliar flickered there.  Fear?  Surely not!  Pa was always so certain, so strong.

“What did you tell him?” asked Pa.

“I told him I… I couldn’t answer him… I didn’t know.”

“And now?  Do you know now?”

The frown eased on Joe’s brow.  “I think so,” he said.  He looked into his father’s eyes and the pain melted from his face.

There was no still small voice, no gentle whisper of wisdom into his ear.  There was something else instead. There was a sense of being home.  A sense of belonging.  A sense of peace.

He was, after all, his father’s son.

The End

 

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