Summary: Hoss Cartwright and Clay Stafford have at least one thing in common – they’re both older brothers to Little Joe.  A Missing Scenes and What Happens Next for “The First Born,” mostly exploring events from Hoss’ and Clay’s points of view.

This story connects to my previous one, “A Visitor from San Francisco,” although my OC appears here only in references.  It’s not necessary to have read the previous story to follow this one.  (If you did read the previous story, this one makes a slight detour, but the larger story will continue more directly in the next installment.) Dialogue in the second scene of Section 2 is taken from “The First Born.”

Rating: G | Word Count: 17,642

1.

Clay Stafford was losing at poker.  He was not a man who liked losing.  Not at poker, not at anything.  It was especially galling to lose at cards to a couple of dusty miners whose current winning run plainly had much more to do with luck than any real skill at the game.

He dealt the next hand around the table, checked his cards, and found that Lady Luck still had no smiles for him tonight.

Clay looked across the crowded saloon, glance landing on the Cartwrights standing by the bar.  Ben had his hand on Joe’s shoulder and they were both laughing at something Hoss had said, the big man’s face wreathed in grins.

Maybe it was even more galling to lose at cards tonight because he’d had the feeling for days now that he was losing at a much bigger game.

Back in New Orleans, it had seemed like such a clear, obvious plan.  He had learned that his long-deceased mother had had a second husband, a rancher named Ben Cartwright.  And not just a rancher, but the man who owned the biggest spread in Nevada.

Like he’d said to the barber when he first hit Virginia City – he always went where the real money was.  When a man had that much land and that much money, there was bound to be some wealth that Clay could get his hands on, one way or another.  He’d signed on as a ranch hand, just to get a sense of the place and the people, and to decide his best approach before he told them who he was.

Oh yes, it had been a fine plan, Clay reflected bitterly as he folded his latest poker hand.  There had only been one flaw in that plan, in fact.

He liked the Cartwrights.  He hadn’t expected that.  And he hadn’t expected what it would feel like to meet Joe Cartwright, the half-brother he’d never known.  He hadn’t expected to see some of himself in this other man, or in the photo of their shared mother that Joe carried in his jacket.  He hadn’t expected Joe to be carrying a picture of their mother.

Clay looked across the saloon again as the rest of the table played out the remainder of the hand.  Lady Luck hadn’t been smiling on him when the particulars of his life had been worked out.  How different it all would have been, if his grandparents hadn’t hidden him away from his mother as a baby.  He had wondered, when he first learned that she’d lived years longer than he’d always believed, if her second husband would still have wanted her if she had come with a child too.  Or if that second husband would have kept the child after his mother died.

It hadn’t taken much time at all, once he met the man, to feel sure that Ben Cartwright would have done both.  He was that kind of man.  The Cartwrights were the kind of family who worked together and laughed together and so obviously cared about each other that it became evident in a hundred ways, in teasing remarks and claps on the shoulder and the protectiveness they all seemed to feel towards each other and especially towards Little Joe.

But that wasn’t the family he’d grown up with.  Instead, the family that life had actually given him—well, hiding him from his mother and telling him that she was dead might have been his grandparents’ worst sin, but hardly their only one.

Over at the bar, Hoss responded to something Joe had said by giving his curly head a swat, and Clay looked down to shuffle the cards again.

No, Lady Luck hadn’t served him well so far, not in life or in this game.

But then, he’d never really believed that a man ought to depend on luck.  You had to make your own odds, in life and in cards.

The prudent voice inside him said that he ought to walk away.  Definitely from the card table and probably from the Cartwrights too, before this all went wrong somehow.  But there was another voice, a reckless, eager one that said all it would take was a little reshuffling of the deck, a little reshuffling of his life, and why shouldn’t he take what the world was trying to deny him?

He was only playing cards with a couple of dusty miners.  How would they know if he gave himself slightly better odds?

He was about to deal the next round of cards when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up to see Joe Cartwright standing there, a sympathetic grin on his face.  “Luck not with you tonight?” he remarked as though he could read Clay’s mind – or, more accurately, the distribution of chips on the table.

“You never know when luck will change,” Clay said easily and then impulsively added, “Deal you in the next hand?”

If Joe joined the game, he’d play it straight.  The prudent voice was loud enough to insist on that.  Joe was smart enough to notice if something was off, and besides – he wasn’t going to risk someone else noticing, and this all going wrong, with his brother sitting right there at the table.

“Come on, Cartwright,” one of the miners said, “bet you’ve got some money you could spread around to a few poor miners.”

“I don’t know about that,” Joe said with a laugh, “you’ve been pulling in those good wages in the mines.”  But he was reaching for an empty chair, clearly about to sit down, and Clay felt something inside him relax.  So it would be no foolish risks tonight.  He might lose some money, but he’d let the sensible voice win out.

Then Hoss’ voice called across the crowd, “Hey, Little Joe!  Come help me tell this story about the time Pa got shanghaied!”

And Joe looked across the saloon at his older brother – and Clay thought, far more than any physical resemblance because there wasn’t much of one, you could tell these two were brothers by the way they looked at each other – and called back, “Yeah, all right, Hoss, I’m coming.”  His hand touched Clay’s shoulder again briefly, he said, “I’ll have to make it another time,” and then he was walking away to rejoin his family by the bar.

Clay looked down at his cards, eyes narrowing.  Maybe he would give his luck a helping hand after all.

And it all went fine, for enough hands to qualify as a real winning streak, long enough that Joe joined a game at another table, long enough that Clay got just a little bit careless.  And when one of the miners suspected, and objected, and tried to draw his gun – well, Clay had never been one to depend on luck in that situation either.  It was skill, and trained reflexes, and a holster designed for a faster draw, that kept a man alive when someone wanted to sight down on him.

And as for the cheating – well, there was nothing anyone could prove, was there?

 

2.

From his seat at the breakfast table, Hoss could tell just from the sound of Little Joe’s boots hitting the steps on the staircase that little brother had not calmed down much  overnight.  Hoss had hustled Clay and the rest of the hands back to the Ponderosa after the shooting in the saloon, after Sheriff Coffee had confirmed that he wasn’t arresting anyone for what everyone agreed was a fair fight, so he hadn’t actually seen Joe argue with the sheriff about Clay leaving town.  But he’d heard him resume the argument with their pa once they got back home.  Joe had finally slammed off to bed, Pa had gone out to the bunk house to talk to Clay, and Hoss had hoped some sleep would cool Joe off.

Instead, here he was the next morning, stomping through the living room, looking like he’d haul off and hit someone if anyone gave him an excuse.

Likely the safest thing would be to let him alone, but Hoss was never too worried by Joe hitting him anyway.  “Hey, Little Joe,” he called, “come and help me eat these donuts.  Hop Sing’ll be plumb offended if we don’t finish the plateful.”

“I don’t want any donuts,” Joe snapped, but stalked over and dropped into his usual seat at the table, to glare moodily at nothing in particular.

“You still got a bur under your saddle about this Clay business?” Hoss asked, pushing the plate of donuts in Little Joe’s direction.

“It’s not right.  Sheriff Coffee is just assuming Clay’s going to be trouble.  And you can’t run a man out of town for shooting in self-defense.  None of us could still live here by that rule!”

“Yeah, reckon that’s true,” Hoss admitted, picking up another donut.  “But you have to admit, little brother, the circumstances weren’t good.”

“Circumstantial evidence doesn’t prove anything,” Joe said, and reached for a donut without appearing to notice he was doing it.

“Have you just up and asked Clay if he was cheating?”

“No, I have not,” Joe said flatly, breaking a piece off the donut.  “Pa already told him to clear out this morning.  I’m not going to insult the man on his way out the door with a question like that.”

“It’s probably safest for Clay too, with the miners worked up over the shooting—”

“I know, I know, Pa said that too.”  Joe threw the donut pieces down on the table, put his head in his hands.  “I just—I’m just so tired of people leaving.”

Hoss couldn’t say he hadn’t suspected this.  Little Joe had picked himself up from a lot of broken hearts, but when Liza left a couple months ago, he’d taken it especially hard.  Or maybe it was the accumulation of all the girls Joe had loved and lost one way or another over the last few years.  Joe had finally seemed to buck up some when Clay hired on, but now this was just making everything worse.  To find a new friend and then have him forced to leave – well, it wasn’t the same situation, but it probably set off some echoes.

Hoss wasn’t sure just what had got Joe so attached to Clay over the last week anyway.  The man was likable enough, if a little stand-offish, but Little Joe sure seemed taken with him.  Maybe it was enough that he was from New Orleans, and Joe’d always had a weak spot about his mother’s city.  Although at least he’d given up that bit where he faked a New Orleans accent.  That had been a weird period.

“Not everyone’s leaving, little brother,” Hoss offered.  “I ain’t planning on going anywhere.”

“I didn’t mean you,” Joe said without lifting his head, in the irritated tone of the youngest in the family, forced to put up with no one understanding him.

“Yeah, I know,” Hoss said, shook his head, and shoved the last of his donut into his mouth.  By the time he finished chewing, Joe had at least got his head out of his hands, even if he was still looking down and absently crumbling the remainder of his own donut.

“Tell you what,” Hoss said.  “It’s Sunday, we ain’t got any work – after church, let’s you and me go out for a long ride.  We’ll pick a direction, go as far as we feel like, get away from everything for a few hours.  Maybe do some fishing.”

Joe mustered up a smile from somewhere, though it didn’t look as though he really meant it.  “Yeah, that’s a good idea.  Let’s do that later, big brother.”  He stood up, brushing powdered sugar off of his hands.  “Right now I want to catch Clay before he rides out.”

“Sure, little brother,” Hoss said, and watched him head for the front door.

At least Joe seemed to have moved on from angry to broody.  Not necessarily better, but less likely that he was going to hit someone who’d hit him back.

It’d be all right soon enough.  They’d go out for that ride, and maybe it’d help.  When you came right down to it, Clay’d only been around for a week.  Joe’d probably be prickly and out of sorts for a few days, but then he’d move on and things would be like always.

 

Clay had every intention of leaving.  He’d had his chance, he’d made his play, and he’d lost.  The Cartwrights were kicking him out at the first sign of trouble, and whatever he’d hoped to gain here was done.  In a way, it was a relief.  There’s a kind of comfort in having your essential beliefs about people and the world confirmed, even if they aren’t very happy beliefs.

He hadn’t seen Joe since the shooting in the saloon – he’d gone off to the sheriff’s office with his father, probably to discuss the legal ramifications of their hired hand shooting someone.  In self-defense, of course.

Old Ben Cartwright had been downright apologetic when he came into the bunkhouse later that night and asked him to leave in the morning.  Apologetic, but the message still amounted to the same thing.  You’re not wanted here anymore.  We’re not going to fight for you, because you’re not one of us.

Well, he already knew that anyway.

He wasn’t sure whether to be glad or not when Joe showed up while he was still saddling his horse.  Maybe it was better to say good-bye, but it would have been easier not to.

He wasn’t all that surprised that Joe was looking frustrated and angry.  The surprising part was that those feelings weren’t directed at him but at the situation.  That Joe didn’t agree with his father, and had told him so.

Clay stared at the young man leaning on the hitching rail.  “You mean – you stuck up for me?  Argued against your father?”  As close as Ben Cartwright and his sons seemed to be, Clay wouldn’t have expected a division between them.  Certainly not over him.

“Why not?” Joe said as though it wasn’t surprising at all.  “What’s right is right.”

Standing up for a principle – sure, he could imagine the Cartwrights doing that.  That wasn’t about him then, but…  “Is that all?”

Joe looked away, blew out a breath.  “No, it’s not all.  I don’t know, we get along pretty good.  Kinda thought we could be friends.”

Slowly, Clay leaned on the hitching rail next to him, turned that over in his mind.  He hadn’t thought – Joe had been friendly, sure, but he hadn’t thought it meant enough to—to really count.  That it weighed anything at all next to Joe’s loyalties to his family.  His real family.

Finally, Clay said, “You remember that picture of your mother you showed me?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see it again?”

Now it was Joe who seemed surprised, and why not – it probably sounded like a very strange request.  “What for?”

“Just let me see it,” Clay said, and Joe reached into his pocket and handed over the photo.  Clay studied the face again, of the woman he’d never had the chance to know.  She looked a little bit like Joe.  Maybe she even looked a little bit like him too.  “You see, this isn’t just the picture of a beautiful woman.”  He looked into the eyes of the photo, and he didn’t know which voice it was that spoke next, the sensible one or the reckless one, to say something that might, or might not, change everything.  “She’s my mother too.”

 

It wasn’t as though the words were hard to understand.  They were ordinary words, not the high-faluting language Adam used sometimes.  And yet Joe stared at Clay, trying to make sense of the sentence and take in its meaning.  “But if she’s—but that’s—”

“She’s my mother too,” Clay repeated.  “She had a husband before your father and—”

But that was just details, history, not the important thing compared to this man standing in front of him.  “But that means—that makes us brothers.  That means we’re family,” Joe said, clasping Clay’s arm.

Clay half-smiled.  “Why do you think I came to the Ponderosa?”

Joe felt a giddy excitement rising up in him, at the return of a prodigal brother he’d never known was missing.  “We have to tell Pa – and Hoss and Adam – why didn’t you say something sooner?  This is—”

“Now wait a minute, Joe,” Clay interrupted, far too calm for the moment.  “This doesn’t change the situation.  Remember I was leaving—”

“This changes everything – you can’t leave if you’re family.”  They’d have to stick by Clay now.  They should have before, but now they’d have to, for his brother—

“I’m not blood to any of them.”

In the excitement of the moment, Joe hadn’t exactly worked out the math on that – as much as he knew that he and his brothers had different mothers, it made so little difference between them that he hadn’t immediately considered what it meant here.  But why did it have to mean anything?  “That doesn’t matter – family is still family.  Now come on,” he said, pulling Clay by the arm.  “We have to go tell them.”

 

3.

All Hoss was thinking about when Joe came bursting back in the door was whether he ought to have saved a donut for him.  He was not expecting Joe to have Clay at his heels.  He was really not expecting the announcement that Joe had a new half-brother.

His first thought was that it could be a lie.  He felt guilty about that pretty quick, but wasn’t it awfully convenient, to claim kinship just when a man was getting kicked out of a place?

He looked at the way Joe’s face was shining and didn’t know whether to hope it was true or not.  Little Joe didn’t need another heartbreak right now.  But it was hard to say whether to take a claim like that seriously.

Pa took it seriously, seriously enough to want to talk to Clay and Joe alone.

And that didn’t sit right with Hoss at all, as he paced out on the front porch, Adam sitting there looking irritatingly calm.  There’d never been a division between them like this.  They were all their pa’s sons, and as for their mothers – well, in a funny way, it was almost like they shared their mothers too.  Sure, each of them had a different photo, a different name they thought of as theirs, but hadn’t Little Joe’s mother Marie been a mother to him and Adam too?  Hadn’t his own mother Inger loved Adam like he was hers?  And hadn’t they all heard the same stories, the same memories from their father, about Adam’s mother Elizabeth?

This new brother, Joe’s brother – it didn’t sit right, that Little Joe could get a brand-new brother and that somehow wasn’t supposed to be his and Adam’s business.  If it was true.

Hoss felt a little better when Little Joe came out of the house too, so Pa could talk to just Clay.  At least it was the three of them together, then.  Joe didn’t look quite so shining anymore though.

“How’d it go?” Hoss asked, trying to damp down his own frustrations to look after Joe.

“I don’t know,” Joe said, leaning up against the porch post Adam was sitting in front of.  He looked back towards the door.  “I thought Pa would have been—more excited, somehow.”

“Kind of a shock, probably,” Adam said, inspecting his fingernails as though this was all just fine and normal.

“He knew she was married before, that she had a baby who died—”

“And you don’t think it’s a shock to have that baby show up?” Adam said, then glanced at Hoss.  “If he really is who he says he is.”

Joe stared at Adam as though this was a completely new idea.  “What do you mean if?  Of course he is.  Why would he lie about it?”

Adam and Hoss exchanged another glance at that, the exasperated glance of older brothers whose younger brother was being an idiot.  Little Joe saw that one, and flushed.

“Yeah, all right, I know there’s advantages to becoming a Cartwright,” he snapped.  “But that’s not what’s happening.  I just—I believe him.”  He shrugged, expression smoothing out again as he looked towards the barn.  “There’s just something—I can feel it, that it’s true.  Or maybe it’s the way he looked at the picture of our mother.”  He shook his head, half-grinned.  “Our mother.  That’s kind of funny to say.”

He didn’t mean anything by it.  Hoss told himself that, and he was going to let it slide by because it was Little Joe and he had a lot on his mind right now.

Adam spoke up, though, the first note of emotion in his voice finally.  “You know, she was our mother too, for years.”

“Yeah, I know, I didn’t mean it like that,” Joe said easily.  “It’s just different, that’s all.”

And he didn’t mean anything by that either.  Hoss had to work a little more to convince himself on that one.

This didn’t exactly feel like the kind of situation where he could shake Joe a mite and make him see reason on some point.  But maybe they just needed to talk a little more, maybe away from everything else.  He cleared his throat.  “So about that ride we were gonna take this afternoon…”

“Oh, yeah,” Joe said, blinking at him as though this was almost as unexpected as anything else today.  “Doesn’t seem right, does it, after everything happening?  To ride away for a few hours, I mean.  We’ll have to do that some other time.”

Right.  That made sense.  He could see that.  Hoss swallowed, and said, “Sure, little brother.”

Adam was looking at him.  Joe wasn’t.  And Hoss started pacing again so he wouldn’t have to look at either of them.

He couldn’t exactly see how it was that a new family member arriving could make him feel like he was losing people.

 

4.

As the next few days went by, Joe wished they weren’t in the middle of the round-up.  It wasn’t every day a new brother landed in a person’s life, and there was so much he wanted to talk about with Clay, so many things he wanted to do.  But meanwhile cattle still needed to be moved, and while the business of the Ponderosa could stop for a few things, it didn’t stop for this.

Adam and Hoss might’ve had some doubts about Clay’s story at first, but Pa believed him, and that was what counted.  And Joe knew—he just knew that the story was true.  He couldn’t explain it to himself any more clearly than he’d explained it to his older brothers.  He could just feel it.

So he made sure he and Clay rode together most days, and even if they were busy with the round-up, that was something at least.  And a week went by that way, until the day Clay didn’t show up to ride out together.

Joe was approaching the chow wagon before it occurred to him that there was no good reason to think Clay was there.  His feet had gone automatically that direction, because when it came to looking for missing brothers, it was the best place to find Hoss.  Joe shrugged to himself and figured he might as well ask Hop Sing if he knew anything anyway.

And surprisingly, he did.  “Mr. Clay, he go to town with supply wagon this morning,” Hop Sing said without looking up from whatever he was stirring.

“He did what?” Joe said, fighting the urge to grab Hop Sing by the shoulders and demand more answers.  Hop Sing would just whack him with his ladle and it would be both unproductive and humiliating.

Hop Sing nodded, appearing unperturbed by the sudden alarm in Joe’s voice.  “Mr. Cartwright, he saying this morning we need more supplies.  Mr. Clay come back little later, take wagon for Virginia City.”

So Pa probably didn’t know Clay had gone – which made sense, since he never would have approved the idea.  The miners had to still be worked up about the shooting in the saloon – what could Clay be thinking going into town right now?

“Thanks, Hop Sing,” Joe said absently, turning to go.  He had to get Cochise.

“We need to tell Mr. Cartwright about Mr. Clay?” Hop Sing asked, frowning at him.

“No—no, don’t worry Pa about it.”  And Pa would probably forbid him from going.  “I’ll take care of it.”

He didn’t know what kind of lead time Clay had on him – Hop Sing hadn’t exactly been precise – but Cochise could travel faster than the supply wagon.  Joe kept hoping he could catch up to him before he got to town, but every turn of the road revealed a distinct lack of a missing older brother.

But still, in the end, he got there in time.  He caught up to Clay before the miners did, and that was what really counted.  What mattered was standing together when a crowd of angry men wanted to confront Clay, and if a little part of Joe’s mind pointed out that it was maybe not the smartest thing to tell a mob that the person they were angry with was his brother – well, the words felt too thrilling to say out loud for him to pay attention to that note of caution.

And the miners dispersed and Clay didn’t appear to think they’d been doing anything foolish or dangerous at all.  He even thought they ought to go over to the saloon and have a drink.  Joe knew better than that and told him so, but all the same – there might be some advantages to an older brother who wasn’t going to lecture him all the time about being careful and staying out of trouble.  He might like not being the most reckless, impetuous one in the family for a change.

 

Clay hadn’t thought he was doing anything all that dangerous when he went to town – although, he was tired of sitting safe and quiet on the ranch, moving masses of cows around, and itching for something that was at least a little more exciting than that.  He hadn’t expected Joe or anyone else to come after him.  And he wouldn’t have expected Joe to throw right into the confrontation with the miners, or to announce they were brothers with so much pride.

It felt good and unsettling and confusing, and maybe that was why he wanted to go to the saloon for a drink before they left town. Or maybe that was just the reckless voice again, the same one that always wanted to seek excitement and court disaster.  The one that always said sure, play another hand of cards, even when they’re looking at you suspiciously.

Joe shot the idea down, proving that at least he had a sensible voice to listen to, but Clay couldn’t make himself give up the idea too easily.  When the last box was loaded onto the wagon, he took one more shot.  “It really is an awfully dusty trail out of town, Joe,” he remarked.  “Why don’t we stop for just one beer?”

Joe laughed, shaking his head, and the affection in the laugh made something inside Clay twist.  “You can’t let a thing go, can you?  You just have to go looking for trouble.”

Clay flashed a smile.  “At least when you find trouble, you know where it is.”

“All right, all right,” Joe said, raising his hands in surrender.  “One beer.  And if anything happens, the two of us will deal with it.”

“Now you’re talking, brother,” Clay said, clapping Joe on the shoulder.

Clay should have been pleased as they headed toward the saloon.  But somehow, he wasn’t.  The sensible voice was telling him that Joe had been right at the start, that they should leave town, and it wasn’t good that the reckless voice had won this argument.  But he was too used to that happening for that to be the main source of his unease.  No, this was something else.  This was about how easy it had been to talk the other man around.  Sure Joe had objected at first, but in the end, he’d been willing to follow where Clay led.

Joe had followed him to town, and now he was following him to the saloon, against his own better judgment.

Clay had never had a younger brother before.  He supposed Adam and Hoss must be used to this, to this strange responsibility for another person who looked at you like you had special answers, special knowledge about the world.  Like you weren’t barely getting along day by day and trying, but mostly failing, to stay out of trouble.

The saloon was quiet, so it looked as though they wouldn’t get into any more confrontations today.  They ordered their beers, stood at the bar, talked about nothing much and listened to a saloon girl and the piano player practicing songs before the evening rush.

It was during the third song that Joe got suddenly quiet.  Clay looked away from the pretty saloon girl and found Joe still watching her, a stricken look on his face.  It couldn’t be about the girl – he hadn’t reacted like this when they first came in.  Clay started listening more closely to the song.  Something about a lost love.  He couldn’t relate – he had always been the one moving on, never being left.  But there was something in Joe’s eyes that said he’d been there.

The singer got to a line about remembering laughter, and Joe turned away, not fast enough to hide a new glimmer in his eyes.

Well, what do you know.  Apparently this younger brother of his was pining after someone.  How had he missed seeing that sooner?

Clay nudged Joe with one elbow.  “What’s her name?”

Joe cleared his throat, said gruffly, “What?  Who?”

“The girl you’re thinking about when you hear this song.”

“No one,” Joe muttered.  “There’s no one.”

“Men don’t cry in their beer over no one.”

“I cry easy, ask anyone,” Joe said hotly.  “It’s a curse.  Can’t help it.”

Clay waited a beat, then asked again, “What’s her name?”

Joe sighed, shoulders slumping.  “Liza.  Her name is Liza.”  He downed the rest of his beer in one swallow, set the empty mug down with a thud.  “Let’s get out of here before those miners realize we’re in here.”

Clay didn’t protest, just followed Joe out the door.  He was busy turning this new information over in his head.  Liza.  He was going to have to find out more about this Liza.

His opportunity came only a few hours later.  They camped on their way back to the cattle run, stopping to eat—but ended up drinking their way through most of a jug of pulque and a lot of stories.  They talked about Mexico and women and toasted everything including each other with a lot of viva this and viva that, and finally, when the moment seemed right, Clay posed his question.  “So.  Tell me about Liza.”

 

Joe froze, took another swig out of the jug – the stuff did grow on you – to cover his sudden tumult of feeling.  He didn’t want to talk about Liza.  He always wanted to talk about Liza.  He never wanted to think about her and all too often it was impossible to think about anything else.  Clay coming had helped these past couple weeks, had given him so much else to think about, but now Clay was bringing her up…  “No, no, no,” he protested, more vehemently than he probably would have done at the beginning of the jug, “I don’t want to talk about her.  Let’s talk more about that Rosita you mentioned, there’s a better idea.”

“No, I want to hear about Liza,” Clay insisted.  “Tell me about her.  Pretty girl?”

“Yeah,” Joe said faintly, memories flooding him.  There’d been a lot of pretty girls, but there had been something about this one.  “Pretty as…pretty as a bluebird flying, or snow on a pine tree.”

Clay chuckled.  “You are Ponderosa through and through, aren’t you?”

The words mostly washed past him, because he already had the feeling he hadn’t quite captured the picture right.  “She was—she stayed with us on the ranch a couple weeks, right?  And Hoss, he gave her this little black kitten.  And that woman, playing with that kitten – it was just about the prettiest thing you ever saw.”  He’d liked her before that, but that was when he’d started falling in a whole different way.  She was pretty, sure, but it was the way she laughed and moved and – everything, it was everything.

“Oh, you’ve got it bad, brother,” Clay said, taking the jug for another drink.

“She was smart too,” Joe said, fingers curling into his palms.  “You know, she argued with Adam?  With Adam, about books or something, I don’t know.  People don’t argue with Adam.”  Pretty, and smart, and she thought he was smart too.  Not a lot of people believed he was as smart as Adam.  But she’d said that, something like that, said he shouldn’t believe he wasn’t a thing just because Adam was it – she’d said it better than that, but he couldn’t quite line up the words right now.

She thought he was tall too, and when she’d looked at him, he’d felt like he was as smart as Adam and as tall as Hoss, or at least like she thought he was, and that was enough, more than enough—

He reached for the jug again, not because another drink was going to help him straighten out his thoughts, but because maybe enough drinks would get rid of them entirely.  There was only one place this was going, only one question Clay was going to ask in the end…

He asked it.  “So what happened?”

“She left,” Joe said past the sharp tightening in his throat.  “I asked her to marry me, she said no, and she left.”

It wasn’t like it was the first time it had happened to him.  There had been a lot of pretty girls, and he’d asked – probably a few too many of them to marry him.  It was a problem he had, he’d recognized that recently after too many heartbreaks, had tried to avoid going that way again.  But there was only so far he could fight his nature, and his nature was to fall in love, quickly and often.  And so far it had never worked out.  Some had left, a few had died, some he’d realized in time weren’t the right one for him after all.

Might be easier if he could just decide that about this one too.

“Sorry, brother,” Clay said, a hand clasping his shoulder.  “How soon was it?  Before you proposed?”

“Two weeks.”  And a day, but he wasn’t quite drunk enough to not know how ridiculous he’d sound, putting it that precisely.

Clay whistled.  “Two weeks?  That’s it?”

“That’s a long time!” Joe protested.  It was longer than he’d waited for just about any girl before.  “Just—not long enough.  She said it was too fast.  Didn’t believe I was serious.”

“How long ago did she leave?”

“Eleven weeks.”

“Oh, that’s bad, brother, if you’re still counting it in weeks.”

“Yeah,” Joe said faintly, and took another swallow of the burning pulque.  “It’s bad.”

 

5.

It was quiet around the camp fire at the cattle drive.  Most of the ranch hands had already bedded down, apart from a few on watch, and even the cattle had settled for the night.  Only the Cartwrights were still sitting around the flickering fire.  Well, Hoss and Adam were sitting, watching their father pace.

“Of all the fool notions,” Ben muttered.  “Riding into town when the mood is this hot – he should have known better.”

“Which one?” Adam asked.

“Both of them!  Clay never should have ridden off, and Little Joe never should have chased after him.  Why didn’t somebody stop them?”

He said somebody, but it felt to Hoss like he meant one of you.  “You can’t stop a person when they don’t tell you they’re going,” Hoss pointed out.

By the time any of them had worked out what was going on, Clay and Little Joe were both long gone.  It had taken talking to Hop Sing at supper to realize what had happened.  Their pa hadn’t been happy earlier, but he hadn’t gotten this worried until evening stretched on with neither one returning.

It had been nearly a week since Clay’s revelation had shook everything up, but cattle still had to be herded and there hadn’t been much time to think about much else.  Maybe that made things worse now.  Sitting around like this gave everyone too much time to think.

“They should be back by now,” Ben muttered, glaring in the general direction of Virginia City.

“They probably stopped to eat something,” Adam said.  “It’s a long trip, hauling a supply wagon.”

Ben shook his head.  “I just can’t understand – just because Clay knew we needed supplies, that didn’t mean he ought to go into town for them!”

“Hmm,” Adam said, tossing a wood chip onto the fire.  “So Clay’s well-intended, reckless, has little regard for his own safety, and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would worry about him.  Sound like anyone else we know?”

Hoss snorted and Ben stared at his oldest son for a moment before surrendering to a chuckle.  “Well, now that you mention it…”  He shook his head, finally sitting down across the fire from his sons.  “I have wondered, sometimes, how that youngest brother of yours ever survived to adulthood.”

“Easy,” Hoss rumbled, “he had older brothers looking out for him.”

“Oh yes,” Ben said with a wry smile, “you and Joe always behave very sensibly together.”

He and Joe did have just a little reputation for getting into trouble together – but it wasn’t anything serious.  Usually.  And mostly not their fault anyway.  “I always brought him home, didn’t I?” Hoss countered.

The words didn’t have the effect he would have wanted on their father, who grew somber again.  “Yes.  Yes, you always did…”

“You know,” Adam spoke up, “Clay didn’t have older brothers to keep him out of trouble, but he’s survived.  They’ll be all right, Pa.  Joe’s smart, and has a knack for getting out of tight spots.  With any luck, Clay has those qualities too.”

“Adam’s right, Pa,” Hoss said quickly.  “I’m sure they’ll be along any time.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Ben said, though he sounded unconvinced.

“Why don’t we all get some sleep?” Adam suggested.  “Lot of cattle to move in the morning, and it won’t do any good sitting here all night.”

“I suppose that’s sensible too,” Ben said reluctantly, rising to his feet.  “All right, I’m off then.  And you boys get to bed too.”

“Sure, Pa,” Hoss said, echoed by Adam’s, “Good-night, Pa.”

They sat by the fire a minute or two more, until their father had disappeared in the shadows deeper into the camp.  Then Adam got to his feet, stretched, and started to walk the opposite direction.

“Hey, Adam,” Hoss called after him – not too loud, not loud enough for Pa to hear, “ain’t your bedroll at the other end of the camp?”

Adam halted.  “Thought I might take a little ride.”

Hoss nodded.  “Along Virginia City way?”

“Maybe.”

“Wait a minute while I get my saddle.”

Because, sure, Little Joe was pretty good at looking after himself.  But sometimes he needed his older brothers too, and Clay didn’t have the same kind of experience on the job.

 

As it turned out, Hoss and Adam didn’t have to ride more than a few miles before they found their missing family members.  They heard them from farther up the road before they could see them, in the form of two voices raised in slightly off-key song.  Hoss might not have Adam’s musical skills, but he could recognize his youngest brother’s voice, and the song too.

“Chickens crowing on Sourwood Mountain, hey-ho diddle-um-day!  So many pretty girls you can’t count ‘em, hey-ho diddle-um-day!”

“I suppose we might have guessed that possibility too,” Adam remarked, pulling up on his reins to let Hoss come alongside, as the unsteady singing continued in the distance.

“Dadburnit,” Hoss said, glaring down the road.  “Don’t they know Pa would be back at the camp worrying?”

“I sincerely doubt it occurred to them.”  Adam gave Sport a kick to get up to a trot.  “Come on, let’s catch them before Little Joe starts in on ‘Careless Love.’  You know he can’t carry a tune when he’s drunk.”

Around another bend in the road, they came upon the supply wagon, Joe and Clay sitting in the seat while Cochise walked tied behind.  They broke off singing when Hoss and Adam rode up.

“Hey!” Little Joe called, with a wild wave of one arm.  “More brothers!  Viva!  Hey—hey, Clay,” he said, elbowing the other man, “we’ve got to—to viva Hoss an’ Adam—”

“Oh, I think we’ve viva’d enough tonight, brother,” Clay said, and going by voice and steadiness in his seat, he didn’t seem as far gone as Joe.  Good thing, since he was the one driving the wagon, but it didn’t make Hoss feel a whole lot of sympathy towards him in the general situation.

“Doggone it, Little Joe, do you know how late it is?” Hoss demanded.  “Pa’s been worrying about you!”

“Why?” Joe asked in apparent befuddlement.  “We were al’right.  We were just—talkin’.  About, you know—about life and—women and—and Juarez!”

Hoss wondered what Joe had been telling Clay about life and women.  He couldn’t even guess what they might have been saying about Juarez.  “Neither of you should’ve been in town, with the miners worked up—”

“Tha’s what I told Clay!” Joe said, waving his arm again, this time for emphasis.  “But it was al’right, we sent those miners off—”

“Then you did encounter the miners?” Adam said sharply.

“Nothing serious,” Clay spoke up.  “Just a few words exchanged.  No shots fired.”

That report was not all that reassuring and, exchanging glances with Adam, Hoss figured older brother felt the same way.

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” Adam said.  “Right now we need to get back to camp.”

“Yessir, older brother,” Joe said, swaying but managing an unsteady salute.

“Yes, sir,” Clay echoed, with a more credible salute.

Hoss narrowed his eyes, studying the two men and then the two horses.  The horses could probably manage the straight road back to the camp without benefit of a driver at all, but even so…  “Maybe I ought to take over driving.”

“No, Clay’s got it,” Adam overrode.  “You and I will ride ahead and make sure there’s no trouble in the way.”

“Yeah, but, Adam—”

“Come on, Hoss,” Adam said, turning his horse.  “You two, stay on the road.”

Hoss grumbled but turned his own horse to follow Adam.  “You sure they’re all right driving that wagon?”

“Clay got them this far,” Adam said, picking up the pace a little until the wagon was maybe a hundred yards behind them.  “Besides, if you sit in the wagon with them right now, you’re going to haul off and hit one of them when they say something dumb.  Better to ride a little and cool down.”

“I wouldn’t hit Little Joe,” Hoss protested, and only recognized his own omission once the words were out.  He scowled.  “Aw, I probably wouldn’t hit Clay neither.  But what’s he doing getting Joe into a state like that anyway?  During round-up, and with Pa worrying?”

“Somehow I don’t think Clay poured the drinks down his throat,” Adam said, voice at its driest.

“Yeah, but—but that ain’t the point!”  Hoss didn’t know just how to say it, and Adam ought to understand this anyhow—  “Clay’s his older brother, that means something.”

“Don’t I know it,” Adam muttered.  “Look, you’re not wrong, but—surely you can’t judge Clay too badly for this.  You and Joe have dragged each other into scrapes far worse than this.”

“It’s different.”  Hoss glared at his horse’s ears until he realized Adam was staring at him.  He turned his head to scowl at his brother.  “What?”

“Is the real problem here that it’s not different?”

Hoss squinted at him.  “I dunno what that’s supposed to mean.”

“That usually it’s you and Joe getting into trouble, and now suddenly it’s Clay and Joe.”

Hoss went back to glaring at old Chub’s ears.  “No.  That’s ridiculous.”

Only it wasn’t, was it?  Adam was just saying something that had been itching at him all week.  That usually it was him and Joe who went off together and came back with a wild story.  Usually it was him and Joe who went riding or played checkers or joked around during a dull round-up or – just a lot of things, and now all of a sudden Joe had all of his attention on Clay, who’d only just ridden up a couple weeks ago…

“It’s ridiculous,” Hoss said again, because Adam was being too quiet.  Sure, they both had always had friends, and sometimes a girl came along and took up a lot of attention – but that wasn’t the same as a new brother.

Adam sighed.  “Joe can be very smart sometimes, and other times he still acts like a dumb kid.”

“Like riding off and getting drunk—”

“Like forgetting we might have feelings about things he does, or not noticing that Clay showing up changes things for all of us.”

“Yeah,” Hoss said in a low voice.  “I guess like that.”

“A new member of the family – it’s like we had a very stable, well-balanced structure, and then we wanted to add in an extra room,” Adam said.  “And we need to work out how much weight the new walls can handle, whether they’re really load-bearing or not, and it’s important to calculate how it redistributes the load of the roof on the existing walls, but all of that’s going to take some time to work out the details…”

He trailed off, and just from his expression Hoss could guess that his own face looked as baffled as he felt.  He could build a decent lean-to, but Adam was getting into specifics he didn’t think he was following, and he wasn’t sure what the point of it all was.

Adam sighed.  “All right, try it this way.  Suppose you got a new horse.”

“Why?” Hoss asked.  “I like Chub.”

“Yes, but suppose you got a new one.  Maybe Pa gives you one for your birthday.  You’d be excited about it, right?”

Hoss frowned.  “I dunno, Adam, I like Chub.  I don’t need a new horse.”

A louder sigh.  “Suppose Little Joe got a new horse.  He’d be excited, right?”

Hoss considered that.  Joe was just as fond of Cochise as Hoss was of Chub, maybe even more – but Joe also got pretty excited when they brought new animals onto the ranch.  “Yeah, all right, he probably would be.”

“Right.  So he’d want to take it out riding every day, and probably sleep in the barn the first couple nights—”

“This must be a real fine horse.”

“Sure, the best you can picture.  But after a while, some time passes.  The excitement starts to settle down, and the horse doesn’t look as shiny and new anymore.”

“All right, sure,” Hoss allowed.  Even the most exciting new animal became just part of the stock eventually.  “I can see it.”

“And then Joe starts to remember how much he always liked Cochise, and all the rides they used to take.  And eventually he gets to a better balance, where he rides both of them and neither one gets left in the barn all the time.  You see what I’m saying?”

Hoss considered.  “I think so.  I think you’re calling me a horse.”

“It’s a metaphor—”

“I know, I know.”  Well, he didn’t know the word for it, but he could see what Adam was driving at.  “You’re saying Joe’s going to calm down about Clay after a while and we’re going to—figure out how to hold up the roof again.  Yeah?”

Adam half-smiled.  “Yes, something like that.”

Hoss nodded slowly.  “Yeah.  All right.”  He thought about it some more, about how things used to be, how they’d become, and how they might be in the future, and something else occurred to him.  “Hey, Adam—it ever bother you, when Little Joe and I go off and, you know…”

“Get yourself into a whole lot of hot water?” Adam said, rolling his eyes.  “No, I can’t say I regret missing those little escapades.”

“Well, I didn’t mean that exactly, I just mean…well, sometimes me and Little Joe seem to sort of, see eye to eye, like, and…”

“We all have different places in the family, Hoss.  I’m comfortable with mine.”

“All right.  Good.”  Hoss nodded, thought a moment more, and said, “It’s like we each hold up different bits of the roof?”

“More or less.”

“Yeah.  So which one of us holds up the bit that means explaining to Pa what happened?”

“Oh, I think we give that one to new brother Clay,” Adam said with a grin.

Hoss grinned back.  “Yeah.  That seems about right.”  His grin faded when he contemplated the morning though.  “Going to be a long day tomorrow, after a night like this.”

“Think of it this way.  However we might feel in the morning, Joe is going to feel a lot worse.”

Hoss brightened.  “Now that you point it out, that’s true.”  There was some justice in the situation after all, and it would mean all sorts of opportunities for teasing the young scamp.  “Thanks, older brother.”  He paused, added, “You know—for all of it.”

“Any time, younger brother.”

 

Clay hadn’t realized he was messing up until Adam and Hoss came riding up the road.  Sure, he’d figured from Joe’s reaction that it had probably been a mistake to go into town.  But after that—well, they’d got out of town all right, and Joe had suggested stopping to eat, and maybe he’d seen that they were getting a little far down the jug of pulque, but they were having such a good evening.

He’d been on his own a long time.  He wasn’t used to the idea that somebody might be waiting up, and worrying.

And he wasn’t used to this idea of being responsible for anybody else, of his reckless side dragging anyone else along and having that actually matter.

He was almost positive Joe would say that Clay wasn’t responsible for him or his choices – and Adam and Hoss hadn’t exactly said differently.  They’d just looked at him, and that was worse.

He’d pulled himself together quick when Adam and Hoss had come down the road.  He couldn’t change how much alcohol he’d drunk, but he could fake it pretty well.  It was a skill he’d needed in wartime down in Mexico.  Joe either didn’t have it, or didn’t think he needed it in this moment.

Clay kept the wagon pointed straight and followed along behind the distant shapes of Adam and Hoss, talking together too low to make out any words, until the camp came into sight.  Along with the silver-haired man waiting to meet them.

Riding in front, Adam and Hoss caught it first.  Ben Cartwright’s deep voice was plainly audible even from where Clay was driving.  “Where have you been?  How do you think it feels looking around and realizing all three of my sons are missing?”

Clay winced.  Three.  Well, sure.  Of course.  He’d been here for only a couple of weeks, and Ben Cartwright wasn’t his father.  He was his mother’s widower and his brother’s father and that made them—well, something, maybe, but not the same thing the others were.

“We just rode down the road a way,” Adam said, swinging down from his horse.

Hoss jerked a thumb over his shoulder, back towards where Clay was guiding the wagon in.  “And look, the prodigals’re returning.  Everything’s all right.  They just got to celebrating a little.”

“Oh, really?” Ben said, hands on his hips, and Clay knew he had about two seconds to get ahead of this.

“I do apologize, Mr. Cartwright,” Clay said quickly, jumping down from the wagon seat.  Joe waved off any attempt to help him down, so Clay just stayed close enough to make sure he didn’t fall over on the way.  That would be all he’d need right now, to drop Ben Cartwright’s youngest son in the dirt.  “I knew you needed those supplies,” he continued, “but I suppose it was foolish of me to go into town.  I didn’t realize the miners worked in shifts and might be on the streets by daytime.  It was very good of Joe to come look after me, sir.”  Drunk or sober, he’d always been good at turning a fast phrase.

Ben’s stance was already softening.  “Well—I suppose—but it shouldn’t have taken this long to get back from Virginia City!”

Joe waved an unsteady hand.  “We just had a few—”

“We got to talking,” Clay interrupted smoothly.  “Lot of catching up to do, you know, Mr. Cartwright.  We lost track of the time.”

“Yes,” Ben said, tone sounding remarkably like his oldest son’s, “I can see exactly what you were doing to catch up.  Well—I suppose you have a lot of years of getting into trouble together to catch up on too.  Get some sleep and be up early in the morning.”

He turned to go, and Clay let out a breath.  Sold it.

“Hey,” Hoss said, frowning, “that’s all he’s going to—”

“Easy, brother,” Adam said, taking Hoss by the arm and steering him away.  “Remember the morning.”

“Yeah—right.”

From a few paces away, Ben turned back, and called, “Oh, and Clay—it’s Ben, remember, not Mr. Cartwright.”

“Right,” Clay said, holding Joe up with one hand and giving a wave with the other.  “Ben.”  So that had been the right calculation too.

 

6.

Clay worked hard at being sensible, responsible and reliable in the days that followed.  He didn’t have much experience at being an older brother, but he could at least be a model ranch hand.

There seemed surprisingly little fall-out from his and Joe’s escapade.  No miners came out in search of them, and Ben Cartwright didn’t resume his lecture the next morning.  Clay heard Adam and Hoss chalk it up to him, Clay, being likable.  He sure tried hard enough to be likable, but he didn’t really think that was why everything had blown over so quickly.  His fast-talking had helped, sure, but more likely Ben was too relieved to have Joe back in one piece to get very angry.

Clay kept an eye on Adam and Hoss in the aftermath too, since they hadn’t been happy with him either – but they seemed inclined to let it all slide, teasing Joe instead of criticizing Clay.

It was ridiculous to feel vaguely envious of that – but he did wonder what it was like, to have people in your life you were so comfortable with that you could stop being careful and polite all the time.

For now, he worked on being likable and polite and not at all reckless, and it seemed like maybe it was working out.  If he didn’t exactly feel like one of the Cartwrights, at least they weren’t kicking him off the ranch either.  He mostly rode out with Joe while Hoss and Adam mostly rode out together, and that seemed to be working out too, except it meant it was a few days before he could find a chance to talk to Hoss alone.

Finally one evening Hoss rode in late, and was still brushing his big black horse over on the picket line while everyone else was busy getting supper, and that seemed like an opportunity to Clay.

He walked over that way, Hoss glancing towards him as he approached.  Clay decided to try for teasing.  “You must really like this horse, taking care of him before you go get supper.”  All the Cartwrights joshed Hoss about how much he enjoyed his meals.

Hoss shot him a look he didn’t know how to read, and said, “I’d take care of any animal after I rode him all day.  Just the right thing to do.”

So apparently they weren’t on a teasing basis, like he’d mostly already thought.  “No, I just meant—”  He broke off as Hoss tossed him a second brush.

“Here, help me out so I can get to supper sooner,” the big man said with a smile.

Clay smiled too, and began brushing the horse’s opposite side.  After a moment, he said, “You know, we haven’t had much chance to talk since, well…”

“Since that trip you and Little Joe took into Virginia City?”

Clay winced.  “You know, I really didn’t intend to—”

“Aw, don’t worry about it,” Hoss said.  “Little Joe has been getting himself into scrapes since the time he started walking.  I don’t suppose anybody could keep him out of all of ‘em.  Adam and I try, and so far he hasn’t got himself killed, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got into some bad spots along the way.”

Clay watched his brush move over the horse’s shining black hair.  Hoss had more than twenty years of history with Joe.  Twenty years of stories.  It made the last few weeks seem very short.  He tried to shake the thought away, because he was here about one of those stories, and getting sidetracked wasn’t going to help.  “Can I ask you about something?

“Sure.  What’s on your mind?”

“Would you tell me about Liza?”  Clay hadn’t brought Liza up again to Joe.  He didn’t think he’d get more out of him than the influence of a sentimental song and too much pulque was going to do.  He wasn’t totally sure Joe even remembered talking about her, with how much they’d been drinking, and so the subject had been entirely dropped.  But Clay could see it, now and then, see an expression cross Joe’s face; he could guess what and who he was thinking of, and he wanted to know more.

Hoss’ brush paused, held still for a moment, then resumed.  “Where’d you hear that name?”

“Joe mentioned it the other night when we were…camping.”

“Then you already know about her.”

“I was just wondering what you thought about it all.”  He could have tackled Adam on the subject but somehow—he’d seen Joe with both of his brothers, and while there was no denying how close all the Cartwrights were with each other, even a less observant man than Clay could have worked out that, if Joe had a confidant in the family, it would be his middle brother.

Besides, Adam was a lot less approachable.

Hoss sighed.  “Guess it was about two, three months ago.  I liked Liza.  And it was a shame it didn’t turn out better.”

“Joe seems to think she was pretty special,” Clay prodded.

“Yeah.  Little Joe thinks that about a lot of girls,” Hoss said with a grin.  “It never seems to work out in the end, one way or another, and usually he flings himself right into a new romance.  There’s been stretches where I can’t hardly keep up with the names, there’s been so many so quickly.  But this one—Liza really seemed like she might be something.  There’s been some others that were pretty serious too, but—I dunno, Joe just seemed—really happy with Liza.  Smiling a lot.  Laughed a lot.”

Hadn’t it been a line in the song about laughter that had undone Joe, back in the saloon?  Clay stayed quiet, waiting to see if Hoss would say more.

Hoss heaved a big sigh.  “Little Joe and Liza both seemed real happy right up until he proposed, and then – well, Little Joe didn’t exactly give it to me word for word who said what.  But sounds like it was too soon; maybe she got scared about making such a big decision.  And all those gals in Joe’s past kinda got in the way, ‘cause she didn’t find it easy to believe he was really serious after just a couple weeks.  So she left.  And we all thought Little Joe would move on quick, like he usually does, but he kept on moping around the place.  Still hasn’t set his sights on another girl.”

“It’s only been a few months,” Clay pointed out.  “That’s not that long.”

Hoss cast him an expressive look.  “It is for Little Joe.  So he’s been all brooding and moody.  He finally bucked up some when you rode in.  Having a new face around, I suppose.”

That put an interesting perspective on some things.  There was a piece of all this that didn’t make sense to Clay, though.  “I don’t follow though – if she wasn’t ready to get married but she did like Joe, why doesn’t someone go see what she’s thinking now, a couple months later?  Maybe she’s had enough time to rethink.”

Hoss was already shaking his head.  “Nah, Little Joe ain’t going to go chase a woman who turned him down.  She was real nice about it, which maybe only made things worse, but he still ain’t going to do it.  And he’d never forgive Adam or me if we tried interfering either.”  The big man looked over the back of the horse, met Clay’s gaze squarely.  “So don’t get any fool notions in your head about trying to find Elizabeth Montgomery in San Francisco.  You hear me?”

Hoss was a lot smarter than people thought.  Clay had had enough time on the Ponderosa to realize that.  “Very clearly.”

Hoss set down the brush he was using and gave the big horse’s nose a pat.  “I think we’re about done here.  Let’s go see about that supper.”

Clay set his own brush down slowly.  Just one more question…  “So – you think Liza was good for Joe?”

A pause, then Hoss said in a low rumble, “Liza maybe could have been the best thing that ever happened to Little Joe.  But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“Yeah.  Thanks, Hoss,” Clay said, and strolled after him towards the chow wagon, turning thoughts over in his mind.  He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do with all this new information yet.  But it was interesting.

 

7.

Days slid past, and in what seemed like a long time and no time at all, Clay had been on the Ponderosa for more than two weeks.  Not long enough for everything to feel comfortable, but long enough for new information to feel disruptive of whatever fragile stability they’d found.  At least, that was how it felt to Hoss, when Pa had that new information.  He’d sent a telegram as soon as Clay’s story came out about his connection to Marie, and the answer that had finally come back was – mixed.

Hoss was relieved to find out Clay wasn’t flat-out lying.  He really was Marie’s son.  It would have hit Little Joe mighty hard to find out otherwise now.  But the news that Clay had shot a man in a saloon before – in a fair fight, after Clay was accused of cheating at cards and the other man drew, just exactly like it had happened here in Virginia City – well, that wasn’t going to hit well either.

Ben told Hoss and Adam first, then wanted to talk to Joe alone about it.  And Hoss didn’t argue, but he didn’t like it either, all this dividing them up.  They were all brothers, and he didn’t like making them different.

So he waited out on the front porch again, although this time he sat down at the table to stop himself from pacing, until Little Joe came out from talking to Pa.  Hoss studied the set of Joe’s shoulders and the frown on his face and judged that little brother was in a broody state, not a shouting and hitting state, so he was relatively safe to approach.  Though Hoss would’ve done it anyway, of course.

“Pa talk to you about Clay?” Hoss asked, because he might as well take the direct route here.

Little Joe, who’d been aimed at the barn, shifted his path towards Hoss.  “Yeah,” he said in a low voice, and dropped onto the bench across the table.  “He already told you about the telegram?”

“Yeah, me and Adam earlier.”  Hoss squinted at Joe, wondered if that information was going to make things worse.  “I would’ve done it all three of us, you know, but I guess Pa thought—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said, waving one hand, then lifted that hand to run it over his hair.  “I have to talk to Clay about it.”

“I’m sure Pa would—”

“No, I need to do it,” Joe said flatly.  “Pa would just—Clay will take it better, coming from me.”  He sighed.  “Not going to be easy to figure out what to say though.  I want him to know we accept him, and asking about his past feels like—it’s not going to be easy to make it not sound like some kind of accusation.”

“How about you and me talk to Clay together?” Hoss suggested.  “Clay and me’ve been getting on pretty well, these past few days.”  Something had relaxed between them a little, and whether that was because Adam had helped him find some perspective or because he liked it that Clay wanted to know more about Joe, and seemed really concerned about him—well, either way it had been going better.

But Joe shook his head.  “No, it’s better if I talk to Clay by myself.  You know, between brothers.”

“Sure,” Hoss said slowly.  “Yeah.  Sure, little—Joe,” he managed at the last minute, because something didn’t feel right about saying little brother just then.  Joe was his little brother, he always would be, but—his other older brother wasn’t Hoss’ brother and he wanted to have a conversation between brothers and—and Adam’s metaphor hadn’t taken into account what happened if Little Joe decided he liked his new horse better than Cochise after all.

 

Joe meant to talk to Clay about his past, and all the rest.  He really did.  And he knew that he had to be the one to do it.

Pa would get it wrong somehow.  Adam and Hoss would definitely get it wrong.  He knew Hoss meant well, offering, and that Pa had too, but none of them understood.  Clay wasn’t their brother.

He rode out to join the round-up again, after talking to Hoss, and for the rest of the day he kept looking for opportunities to talk to Clay.  Somehow, he couldn’t seem to find any.

The entire next day he made opportunities, and then kept telling himself that this one or that one wasn’t right, that he should find a better moment.

By the time they were mounting up to ride out the day after that, him and Clay alone out in the front yard with their horses, he’d finally admitted to himself that he wasn’t really going to talk to him.  Not about this.

He watched Clay adjusting his saddlebags, and knew there were some questions that were too dangerous to ask.  Questions that made people he cared about run, disappear from his life, leave only an empty space behind.

He’d asked Liza the wrong question – or maybe it had been the wrong time, or he’d asked it the wrong way, or – it didn’t matter, he had asked her to marry him and she had gone.

And now he had all these questions he was supposed to ask Clay.

What’s in your past you’re not telling us?

Did you cheat at cards before?

Did you low-card in the Silver Dollar, risk everything and cost a man his life, by cheating at cards here?  After you met us, after you must have known you could have a future here, after you had people who could care about you.  After you met me.

And worst of all, most dangerous questions of all…

Do you even want to stay here?  Is this even a life you want?

So he walked around Cochise to stand by Clay, and asked a safe question instead.  He asked if they could go to Mexico, after the round-up was done.

He didn’t expect Clay to be sensible about it, to point out how dangerous it was down in Mexico right now, with Juarez’s war still going on.  But it wasn’t really important because Clay was willing to go somewhere with him, if maybe not Mexico, and that was the important thing.

Facing danger together, toasting their pasts and each other, that was when they had felt the most like brothers.  So whether it was a trip to Mexico or somewhere else, it would be good for them.  That would be what they needed.  Not a lot of dangerous questions.

 

Clay thought he recognized the look in Joe’s eyes when he suggested riding off together.  The thrill, the excitement, the desire to go see what else there was to see.  He could understand all of that.  He felt all of that.  There was some other uneasiness in Joe too, though, and he didn’t understand that until later in the day, when he was watching the milling cattle out at the round-up and Ben Cartwright walked up to have a little talk.  About Clay and Joe and the future.  About what Ben was expecting from him.

Clay had learned very young how to smile and stay polite when someone was telling you that everything about you was wrong.  It had been one of his most valuable skills, growing up with his grandparents.

He leaned on the corral railing after Ben walked away again and wondered how life had got so stacked against him that he still needed that skill, even now.  Even here.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think Ben Cartwright had meant well, talking to him about being part of the vaunted Cartwright clan, and then strolled off apparently satisfied that he’d said all the right things.  The man radiated meaning well all over the place.  But he also didn’t seem to see the cutting edge in his words, the twisting knife beneath the warm smiles.  You’re part of our family now – if you live like us, believe like us, follow our rules.

The sensible voice said that, after all, old Ben Cartwright and his sons seemed to have done pretty well by their rules.

The reckless voice wanted to ride straight into town, get drunk, and start a shoot-out with whatever miners were around, just to prove that he could.

Except – except Joe would follow him into town again, follow him into the saloon, follow him all the way into a hail of bullets.

That was the one part of that fatherly speech Ben had made that Clay couldn’t just shake off.  About influencing Joe the right way.  About the power he had, as Joe’s older brother, and about using it the right way.

Something that sounded a lot like the reckless voice said that this just proved Ben’s real motivations, that he only had the conversation at all because he was worrying about his son, about his real family.

Clay’s eyes narrowed as he watched the cattle mill in the corral, the tangible, living wealth of the Cartwrights with their beef and their land and their trees.  It wasn’t like he had come here looking for a family anyway.  So why did it hurt to feel that he didn’t belong, wasn’t their type, didn’t fit in this life?

“Hey, don’t you have any work to do?” Joe’s voice called, and Clay looked up to see him riding up on his pinto, grin on his face.

“Just keeping an eye on your cows,” Clay said.

Joe swung down from his horse, clapped Clay on the shoulder.  “Gotta get the last of them rounded up so you and I can get on the road.  We’d better decide where we want to go.”

In a different mood, maybe Clay would have put it more diplomatically.  Right now, he just looked back at the herd and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea after all.”

Joe squinted at him, face confused.  “What?  No, it’s a great idea!  It doesn’t have to be Mexico, I said that, we can go somewhere else—”

“You belong here, Joe,” Clay said flatly.  “Ponderosa through and through, remember?”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t take a trip!  Look, I don’t get it – you liked the idea this morning.  What happened?”

Clay frowned at the cattle and said, “I don’t think your father likes the idea,” and out of the corner of his eye he could see Joe go very still.

“Pa talked to you?” Joe asked, and his voice had gone tense too.

“Yeah,” Clay said without looking at him.  “About the way of life and values of the Cartwrights and about my past and what he expects in the future.”

Joe let out a loud breath.  “I told him it didn’t matter – whatever happened in Chico Wells, it’s just not important.”

“Chico Wells?” Clay echoed, suddenly understanding the other reason Ben Cartwright had felt driven to give his little lecture today.  He had thought it was sort of general purpose – but they’d found out about what happened in Chico Wells – about the card game, where he was accused of cheating, where he’d shot a man in self-defense.  It had been in self-defense.

And he’d only cheated a little.

“Yeah, but it’s not important,” Joe repeated.  “It’s in the past, and you’re here with us now, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” Clay said quietly.  Because he was realizing that Joe didn’t understand either.  Joe thought he was a Cartwright now, and even if Joe wanted to ride off together, he thought he was riding off with someone who was like him.  He thought it would be like taking a trip with Hoss or Adam.  Clay didn’t know exactly what that would look like – but somehow, he thought it was very different from what happened when he went riding through the world.

“Hey, which way did my pa go?” Joe asked.  “I want to talk to him.”

“I think he was heading back towards the house.”

“Good – and you think about that trip,” Joe said, clapping him on the shoulder again before turning back to his horse.  “I’ll talk to Pa about it.”

 

Joe rode too fast on his way to the house, and while usually a good ride cooled him down, steadied him, this time he only got more heated up.  He slammed in through the front door, flung his hat on the sideboard, stalked over to where his father was sitting behind his big desk.

Pa’s eyebrows lifted as he approached, expression just concerned enough to show that he could see Joe was upset – but it sure didn’t seem to be bothering him much.  “Something wrong?”

“You talked to Clay,” Joe said tightly.

Ben nodded, a slow nod.  “We had a conversation a little while ago, yes.”

“You told me I could talk to him!” Joe thundered, palms pressed against his father’s desk.  “We agreed, I was going to do it.”

Pa was aggravatingly, infuriatingly unmoved, leaning back in his chair behind the desk.  “Yes, but you didn’t talk to him.”

“I was waiting for the right time!”

Pa cocked an eyebrow at him.  “When?  On the way to Mexico?”

“Maybe,” Joe said hotly.  “And what’s wrong with that?  Maybe it would be easier to talk away from here.  You know, there’s a whole big world out there, Pa.  This isn’t the only piece of it that matters.”

“Oh yes, I know.  But do you really think Mexico is a smart place to go right now?  The situation is very unstable there—”

“So you told Clay I wasn’t allowed to go.”

Pa’s eyebrows drew together, the first sign of irritation.  “I merely told him I thought it was a bad idea, and asked him to try to be responsible in the directions he was leading you—”

“I’m not a child, I can make my own decisions!”

“Yes, you can,” Pa agreed, “and you can start by deciding who you’re going to let influence you.  I like Clay too, but if you’re not more careful—”

“You’ve been prejudiced against him from the beginning!  Just because he’s lived a different life – he didn’t have us.  Who’s to say what any of us would be like, if we didn’t have each other?”  How could Joe know that he wouldn’t be just like Clay, under the right circumstances?

Ben pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Joe, we’ve been over all of this already—”

“Then why can’t we just agree to give him a chance?”

“We’re giving him a chance, Joseph!”

When Joseph came out, Joe always knew he was in trouble.  At least when it was said in that tone.  He fell silent, because he couldn’t find the words to explain what he was feeling, what was wrong.  Yes, they were giving Clay a chance, had given him the spare bedroom, had all said that he was part of the family and was welcome to stay.  So why did none of it feel right?  Why did nothing feel—balanced?

They had all known where they fit, when it was the four Cartwrights.  Sure, sometimes Joe kicked and objected to his own particular role, but he knew what it was.  Part of him knew now that it wasn’t anyone’s fault that it wasn’t easy to suddenly add a new person to a family, that they hadn’t quite been able to work out yet how and where Clay fit in.  But he still didn’t like that.

Pa evidently saw the pause as an opportunity to take a breath and find a calmer tone.  “We keep ending up shouting at each other, these past few weeks.”

“Not that often,” Joe muttered, although yes, it did keep coming up.  Well, he kept shouting, and he wasn’t sure if he appreciated or resented that his father was willing to present it as though they were both losing their tempers.

“But I don’t see that we’re accomplishing anything this way,” Ben continued.  “And we have work to do.  Adam and Hoss need you back at the round-up, and I need to go into town for the payroll money.  Let’s get the work done, and we’ll talk about this later.”

Suddenly, impulsively, Joe found himself saying, “Let me go for the payroll money, Pa.”  Because he just needed to go—somewhere, anywhere, even if it was only Virginia City.  Nothing fit around here right now, nothing felt right, and maybe if he could take a good long ride on Cochise, maybe this time that would help.

And it would make him feel more like a man, doing a man’s work, and not like a child who had been scolded and sent back to the custody of his older brothers.

Pa frowned, his worried frown instead of his angry frown, and in the mood he was in right now, that seemed worse to Joe.  “Maybe you ought to take Hoss with you, just in case there’s any trouble.”

Because obviously he couldn’t do anything without his responsible older brother along to look after him.  “Maybe I ought to take Clay with me,” he said deliberately.  “We can handle ourselves pretty well.”

That at least got the flash of anger back into Pa’s eyes.  “You know that would be extremely foolish.”

“Yeah, I know, I wasn’t serious,” Joe snapped.  He took a breath, tried to manage his tone.  “I don’t need Hoss to come.  I can take care of myself.  The miners don’t—”  His voice faltered but he caught it, kept going, and his father didn’t seem to notice the tiny slip.  “—have any reason to connect me to Clay.  They think he’s just one of our ranch hands.  I’ll be fine.”

He could hear his own voice echoing in his ears, when he’d told the whole mob of miners that Clay was his brother.  But his father couldn’t hear the echo, and didn’t know he’d said it to begin with.

“All right,” Pa said after a moment.  “Just watch your back out there.”

Don’t turn your back on people when they’re hostile.

This time it was Liza’s voice that echoed, and it didn’t help his temper any to hear her right now either.

“Sure,” he said gruffly, turning to the door to pick up his hat.  He supposed it was safe enough turning his back on his father, at least.

“Little Joe—son.”  Footsteps, and he knew Pa had come out from behind his desk.  “Try to remember I’m not your enemy here.”

His father’s hand closed on his shoulder, trying to draw him back in, and Joe just knew that if he let him do it, he was going to unravel completely.  It was just—it was all too much lately.

“Don’t, Pa,” he said, wrenching his shoulder away.  Maybe he shouldn’t have turned his back after all.  “I’m not five years old anymore.  You can’t fix everything with a hug.”

He pulled his hat low over his forehead and walked out the front door without looking back, just catching the sound of his father’s sigh before the door swung shut behind him.

Joe was already up on Cochise, already on his way out of the front yard, when it occurred to him that five might not have been a random age he pulled out of the air.

He’d been five when his mother died, the first really big thing that a hug hadn’t been able to fix.

The first really important person he’d lost.

He shook his head, pushed the memories away.  It was fine.  It would all be fine.  Clay was here, he was staying here.  He wasn’t going to lose another family member.  He wasn’t going to lose the only other person who shared his mother’s blood.

He’d ride into Virginia City, he’d pick up the payroll money and ride home again.  Nothing was going to go wrong, and everything would be fine.

 

8.

Clay knew it was all over when he saw Joe sprawled on the front porch, after he’d rushed out of the house with the Cartwrights in response to the disturbance outside.  Ben got there first, Adam and Hoss just after him, and Clay—he was a step behind the rest.  And didn’t that just about fit?

Maybe it was because he’d hesitated inside, when they heard the dinner bell clanging in discordant alarm.  Maybe he’d been a little surer than the rest about what they were going to find outside, and the picture they found only fit his expectations.  Joe must have grabbed the cord of the bell as he fell, as he stumbled into the tumbled rocking chair to collapse on the porch.  Clay had had a terrible idea that something like this was going to happen as soon as he learned that Joe had gone into town that afternoon.

He had thought of riding after him.  Joe had ridden after him, after all, when he was the one who’d gone into Virginia City.  But it was him the miners wanted most of all, and he couldn’t be sure that going wouldn’t make things even worse, provoking a confrontation Joe alone might avoid.  So he’d stewed and worried and waited, out at the round-up and then once they were back at the house, and all the worst things had happened anyway.

Well, Joe wasn’t dead.  But the worst thing save that.

It was only as they were all carrying Joe into the house together that it finally occurred to Clay that he could have asked Hoss or Adam to go into town after Joe.  He could have told them that he was worried about the miners, that they knew Joe was his brother, that this could all go badly.  Joe’s other older brothers would have gone.  They could have helped.

He wasn’t used to having people around who could help.  He had no practice at asking for help.

They all carried Joe up to his bedroom, and then Clay fled back downstairs, slipping out of the room while everyone else was focused on their youngest family member.  He left the Cartwrights to it, knowing he didn’t belong here.  Not around Joe’s bed.

Not in this family.

Whatever this experiment was, it was over.  It had to be over.

He tried to explain that to Ben, when the man came downstairs again a while later.  It took him by surprise when Ben told him to stay, insisted that he was still part of the family.  That didn’t change anything that mattered, though, except for making this even harder.

Ben didn’t understand, with all his talk about facing things together.  That’s what Clay was trying to avoid.  Because sure, running away wouldn’t stop trouble from following him.

But it would stop it from following Joe.

As soon as Ben went back upstairs, Clay grabbed his things – he never carried much, and he had never unpacked anyway – and slipped out the front door.

He thought he’d made a clear escape, felt sure enough about that to stop and camp a few hours on, after night fell.  Or maybe it was too hard to pass the particular campsite, the same scrubby patch of earth where he and Joe had drunk too much pulque and toasted everything they could think of.  He hadn’t, couldn’t, say good-bye to Joe, so maybe this was the next best thing.

He had coffee brewing by the time he heard the hoofbeats.  His first instinct was to grab his gun, just in case, but his second guess—well, who else would come to look for him here of all places?

He watched the black and white horse approach, the man in green swaying on its back, and cursed Ben Cartwright for not even managing to keep his injured youngest son at home.  What had he done, told Joe that Clay was gone?  It was probably a Cartwright value to tell the truth all the time.

He had known Joe might follow him, but he had hoped he was wrong.

And now he knew for sure.  Joe was going to follow him all the way to Hell if that’s where he led.  Because that’s what family meant to Joe.  That’s what it meant to him to be brothers.

And Clay knew already how this had to end.  How he had to end it.  He could ride back with Joe, try again, but it would only be delaying the inevitable, delaying the same ultimate result.

This was the moment.  This was where he had to end it, because he was the older brother and his sensible voice told him that meant he had to do the right thing.

The fact that his sensible voice sounded a little like Ben Cartwright tonight didn’t make things any easier, but it still didn’t change the conclusion.

His grandparents had taken him, Clay, away from his mother.  Away, ultimately, from this family, Ben Cartwright and his sons.

He wasn’t going to take Joe away from them.  Not down to Mexico, not into a pointless brawl somewhere, not in front of a stray bullet.

So the only way he could find to be a good brother was to be a very, very bad one.

Maybe the Cartwrights told the truth all the time.  But he was his grandparents’ child, a DeMarigny in the blood.  His grandparents had changed the entire course of his life, of his mother’s life, with lies.  He knew how to lie.

He was just enough Cartwright to have to turn his back on Joe while he did it.  But he could still lie.

 

9.

Hoss hated it when he didn’t know whether he should worry about Little Joe or be angry with him.  This came up a lot, and it was in full force tonight.  Joe shouldn’t be out riding, the state he was in, and Hoss was that mad at him for going.  And he couldn’t see why their father thought they shouldn’t go after him, even if it would be hard to find a trail by moonlight.  Whatever Pa said, Hoss wasn’t going to bed; he was just going to wait a little while longer until he was sure Pa was asleep in the armchair downstairs, and then he was going to slip out to the barn and get his horse.  He could at least try to track Joe, to find him and haul him back home again.

That was the plan, right up until he heard the front door open, and heard the low murmur of Pa’s voice.  He eased out of his bedroom, walked to the top of the stairs where he could see the room below and the space by the front door – and could see Little Joe hanging onto Pa for dear life, shoulders shaking.

Hoss got one foot on the top step before Adam’s hand closed on his arm.  He glanced back, noted that Adam was still fully-dressed too, and said in a low voice, “Joe’s home.”

“Let them be,” Adam said, pulling him back into the upstairs hallway.  “They’ll call if they need us.”

“But Little Joe’s upset and—”

“I know.  Let him get it out with Pa.”

Hoss hesitated, because his first instinct was to plunge in and find out what had happened and if he needed to tear someone – Clay, probably Clay – apart for hurting his little brother.  But Adam was right that sometimes, the worst times, it was easier to talk to just Pa alone.

He nodded finally, and they each headed back to their own rooms.  Hoss paused in his doorway, gave a nod to Adam’s clothes.  “You were going after him too, weren’t you?”

Adam gave a wry smile.  “Older brothers.”

“Yeah.”

Hoss closed his door and waited, sitting twitchy on the edge of the bed because his big feet would be too loud if he paced, until he heard the scrape of two sets of boots coming up the stairs and crossing the hall to Joe’s room.  More low voices, and a while later Joe’s door clicked shut.

He was in his own doorway at once, to throw a questioning look at Pa as he stood outside Joe’s door, shoulders slumped as though under a heavy weight.  Ben looked at him, then glanced over and there was Adam in his doorway too.  Pa pointed to the stairs, and they all descended together.  Pa got out the good liquor, once they were down there, and poured himself a glass.

“Little Joe asleep?” Adam asked, sitting down on the settee.

“Or will be soon,” Pa said, sitting down again in the blue armchair.

Hoss sank onto the seat next to Adam.  “Do we need to get Doc Martin?  Those ribs—”

“No, I think he’s all right,” Pa said, sipping his drink.  “At least, as far as anything the doctor is going to treat.”

“What happened out there?” Adam asked.

Ben sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “Clay’s gone, like we thought.  And Little Joe rode out to try to find him, like we thought.  He tried to convince Clay to come back, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“And that’s what has Joe so torn up?” Adam said quietly.

“Partly,” Pa said, staring into the amber liquid of his drink.  “And because Little Joe offered to go with him, and Clay told him he didn’t want him.”

“He did what?” Hoss said in a low voice, maybe too low because Pa didn’t repeat it.  But Hoss didn’t really want to hear it again anyway.

“The way he had his heart set on Clay,” Adam said, “that must have gone down badly.”

Hoss shoved up from the sofa and set to pacing, heedless of the noise now.

“It was hard for Joe to talk about,” Pa said, “and I don’t think—”

“What was he thinking?” Hoss demanded, just barely managing to keep his voice down.

“Clay was worried about trouble following him, so—”

“Not Clay,” Hoss growled.  “Joe.  What was he going to do—just ride off in the middle of the night without a word to any of us?  That was his plan?”

It wasn’t often Hoss got a real good mad on.  He’d had to learn young, as big and as strong as he was, not to lose control of himself.  And while Joe might aggravate the life out of him, he wasn’t ever going to really let himself go with his little brother.  But this—oh, this burned him up something fierce.

“I don’t think he had a plan, son,” his father started, but that didn’t make anything better.

“He tried to leave with him!  What was he gonna do, follow him to Mexico?  Get himself shot in Juarez’s war?  Get killed jumping between Clay and a bullet in some saloon?  Was Clay gonna send us a polite telegram, letting us know where we could look for Little Joe’s grave?”

“Hoss, that’s enough,” Pa said, in the tone that normally brooked no arguments.

“No, it ain’t half enough!  Joe hasn’t given a single thought to the rest of us since that dad-blasted new brother of his showed up, and this is just about the last straw.  Don’t he care about any of us?”

“Hoss, remember the new horse,” Adam said quietly.

“I ain’t a horse!  And you ain’t, and Pa ain’t neither!”

Pa’s eyebrows rose.  “I don’t see—”

“And apparently Joe don’t give two shakes if the whole roof falls in!”

“It’s a metaphor,” Adam contributed.

“You’re going to knock the roof off, yelling like that, big brother.”

All heads turned to see Little Joe standing at the top of the stairs, one hand pressed against the wall as though to brace himself.  And Hoss felt something twist up inside, at the bruise darkening his cheek and the way he was standing like his ribs hurt and like—like something else hurt that wasn’t about bruises at all.

“Joseph, you should be in bed,” Pa said sharply.

Little Joe summoned up a smile from somewhere, but it was so far away from his usual devil-may-care grins that Hoss wished he hadn’t.  “Who can sleep with him yelling about horses?  Why’re you yelling about horses?  And I don’t want the roof to fall in.”

Apparently Joe hadn’t heard most of what he’d been saying and—Hoss didn’t know if that was good or not, because this was plainly no time to scrap with him, but that didn’t change anything, Joe had still tried to ride off into the night without a word to anyone and looking at him now it was only more obvious why he shouldn’t have been going out at all and why didn’t he ever think—

Hoss shook his head.  “Never mind.  Just—never mind.”  But he wasn’t sure he could keep quiet if he stayed here, so he stomped off towards the front door.

He might’ve expected Pa to demand explanations, but it was Joe’s voice that followed him, asking, “Where’re you going?”

“To the barn.  Just—gonna go check on the horses.”

It made as much sense as anything tonight.  Nobody spoke as he wrenched open the door and let it swing shut again behind him.

Outside on the porch, Hoss took in a deep breath of the pine-scented air and tried to get a hold of himself.  He walked across the yard to the barn, went in through the big door because, sure, he might as well really check on the horses.

The horses were all asleep, proving they had better sense than the people tonight.  Hoss took a quick look at Cochise, confirming that even in the depths of a crisis, Joe had managed to take care of his horse.  Apparently he had some sense of responsibility to his family, even if it was just to his horse.  Hoss stopped in front of Chub’s stall, leaned on the railing to look at the sleeping animal, one foot up on the bale of hay sitting alongside.

It was like he’d told Adam, he liked Chub.  He wouldn’t want another horse.  He glanced again at Chub’s next-stall neighbor, at Cochise’s black and white patches.  Far as he could tell, Little Joe had always been real happy with Cochise.  Hoss couldn’t see why he’d want another horse either.

And yeah, he knew it was a metaphor, but even in his own head it was easier to think about horses than about what was really clawing at him.

Hoss sighed, and slumped down to sit on the ground with his back against Chub’s stall door.

He was still sitting there when Pa slipped in the half-open barn door, relief spreading across his face.  “Good, you’re in here.”

“Said this was where I was going.”

“Yes, well.”  Pa eased himself down to sit on the nearby bale of hay.  “I thought you might have decided to ride after Clay.”

“Oh.  Nah.  Not much point in that.”  He couldn’t swear he wouldn’t take a swing at the man if he was in front of him, but he wasn’t going to go hunt him down.  He supposed he was mad at Clay, but it was a much less—personal feeling than his tumult about Joe.

“Good.  That’s good.”

Hoss hesitated, then asked, “Little Joe all right?”

“I’m sure he will be, given some time.  You know your brother has a way of bouncing back from things.”

Yeah, but he hadn’t seemed quite so bouncy lately.  Like maybe things were finally catching up to him.  Hoss didn’t say that out loud, just stared into the shadows in the far corners of the barn.

After a moment, Pa said gently, “Are you going to be all right, son?”

He knew he ought to say yes.  Their father had enough to handle with Joe, and he was the older one; he shouldn’t put more weight on their father’s shoulders.  But sitting here like this, Pa sitting on the hay bale above him – it made him feel like he was a kid again, like that long ago time when Pa was bigger and taller and had all the answers.

“You think Little Joe was really going to leave with him, Pa?” he asked finally, and even his voice felt smaller too.

“I don’t know, son.  I don’t think Joe knew.  I think he was trying to hold onto something, and didn’t think about what else he’d be giving up.  But I do believe, if he had left at all, he wouldn’t have stayed away for long.”

Maybe that made things a little better?  Hoss wasn’t sure.  “Yeah.  I s’pose.”

Pa sighed.  “And at least we can be grateful to Clay for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Hoss asked doubtfully, because he might not want to hunt the man down but he wasn’t feeling too charitable towards him neither.

“At least he sent Little Joe back home to us.”

 

10.

Clay didn’t know where he was going.  Just away.  He just pointed his horse’s head away from the Ponderosa, and Joe, and the Cartwrights, and the mess he’d made of everything, and rode away.  Like he always did, when things got too hot in a place.

His mother’s photo, Joe’s photo of their mother, was heavy in his pocket.

You bring it back someday, Joe had said, pressing it into his hand before riding away.

But how could he possibly do as Joe asked?  Joe’s family – and when it finally came down to it, they were Joe’s family, not his, whatever Ben Cartwright might say about standing together – would probably shoot him on sight for all the trouble he’d got Joe into.  Or for the way he’d broken Joe’s heart.

He’d had to do it.  Maybe, if he’d had more experience at being an older brother, he could have found a better way.  But all he could think of to do to make sure Joe didn’t keep following after him was to make sure he’d be so hurt and betrayed that he’d go back to the people he knew loved him.

And leave the one who as good as said he didn’t.

Clay wiped a hand over his face and kicked the horse into a faster trot.  Reckless, probably, to ride this fast in the dark, but what did it matter now?  What would it matter if the reckless voice won every time?

Nobody was waiting for him to come home, not even Joe, not really.  And if he ever did, it would just start everything up again, run through the whole damn cycle and end up in the same place again.

He rode for one day, two, three, stopping to camp as late as he dared each night and then starting on the way again at dawn.  Not going to anywhere, just away.

Until finally, whether it was enough time or enough miles, his head started to clear a little bit.  He could start to think again.  He could start to hear the sensible voice again, and unexpectedly, against the odds, the sensible voice had an idea.

It was an improbable, unlikely enough idea that maybe the reckless voice had a little say in it too, but he turned it over from one angle and then another and he couldn’t see that the idea was going to end up with anybody shot or killed, it wasn’t anything illegal, and even if it went badly – well, then the Cartwrights wouldn’t even know about it, so that wouldn’t matter much.

And so Clay turned his horse’s head towards San Francisco.

 

Joe knew Hoss was mad at him, probably for going out when he was injured.  But there had been nothing else he could do, so big brother was just going to have to get over it.  Maybe he should confront him about it, but he couldn’t bring himself to face another older brother who thought he wasn’t measuring up.

The days ticked slowly by as his ribs healed and his bruises faded.  Hoss didn’t talk about the night Clay had left.  No one did.  Everyone seemed determined that everything was going to be fine, that everything was going to go along as it used to be, as though there had never been a Clay Stafford.

And as if there had never been a Liza Montgomery either, and without Clay around it was harder not to dwell on that absence.  Or maybe it was the effect of two people he cared about leaving, so close together.  It was hard to be around the table with his family, too aware of who wasn’t there.

The trouble in town blew over, once Clay was gone, and Joe escaped into Virginia City as often as he reasonably could – or maybe even more often.  He didn’t want to sit around the ranch, thinking.

It wasn’t a lot better sitting around the saloon thinking, but at least there was beer and people – and no older brothers casting worried glances at him.

As much as everyone wanted to act like everything was just fine, Adam and Hoss were worrying about him.  Pa too, but he accepted it a little more easily from Pa.  He could see it, the way they looked at him.  They all seemed to think he might break apart at any moment, until he was about ready to punch Hoss or Adam and invite them to hit back and see if he broke.

It was enough to make a body feel he’d be better off with no older brothers at all.

So he sat in the saloon a little too often, nursing a beer and watching the card games, until one day there was a stranger at one of the card tables who got his attention.  He couldn’t say what it was exactly.  The way the man played poker, or a sort of recklessness to his grin.  But there was something there, and Joe walked over to the table and took a seat.

“Deal me in,” he said.

“You got the stake?” another man at the table asked.

“Hey, now,” the stranger said, grinning, “don’t you know this is Little Joe Cartwright?  His daddy owns the biggest spread in Nevada.”

“How’d you know my name?” Joe asked, leaning back in his chair.  “I don’t know you.”

“It’s Donovan,” the stranger answered.  “Dave Donovan, and I ain’t somebody anybody’s likely to know.  But everyone knows about the Cartwrights.”

The words gave Joe a sudden stab, because Liza had said the same thing.  He reached for his beer and drank down a long swallow, set the empty mug down with a thud and gestured to the saloon girl to bring another.  “Well then, you ought to know this.  It’s just Joe, and I bet my own money, not my daddy’s.”  He reached for his wallet, and threw it on the table.  “Deal me in.”

“Sure, friend,” Donovan said, grinning again.  “Sure.”

Joe picked up his cards, with the sense that his older brothers would probably say he was being reckless and irresponsible.  And right now, that seemed just about perfect.

End

 

For those interested in knowing episode references…the story about Ben being shanghaied was in “San Francisco.”  The songs “Sourwood Mountain” and “Careless Love” both appear on the Ponderosa Party Time album.  Dave Donovan goes on to be a major character in “The Quest,” which immediately follows “The First Born” and therefore this story.  And Adam’s metaphor about a new horse is inspired by “The Stallion” (and my own sense that Joe is basically cheating on Cochise in that episode!)  Since that’s a Season 14 episode still ten years away, in-universe the metaphor is based only on Adam’s understanding of Little Joe and no actual events.