7

Some time later, when Joe made another effort to open his eyes, he found Martin sitting on the ground beside him. The boy was using a stick to draw circles in the sand.

“Hey, Martin,” Joe greeted. “How long have you been there?”

“I dunno.”

Stilling his hand, Martin looked up at Joe. His gaze intense, he seemed on the verge of voicing some important question. But apparently he couldn’t figure out how to ask it, because he said nothing further. Instead, he returned his attention to his drawing.

Joe held silent, letting the boy have a few moments to sift through his thoughts using that stick in the sand.

Finally, still focused on the circles, Martin said, “Mr. Cartwright?”

“How about you start calling me Mr. Joe?” He looked toward the remnants of the stage where Adam was talking with Ed Burke. “Like you do with my brother?”

Martin stopped drawing again. His eyes glanced toward Joe and then back to the circles. And then, “Mr. Joe?” he said in a quiet voice.

“What’s on your mind?”

“They say another stage is coming to get us and Mr. Gainsby.”

The name sent a stab of pain across Joe’s shoulders. “That’s right,” he answered softly.

“Mr. Adam says you can’t come with us.”

“I’m afraid that’s right, too, Martin. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t like Mr. Gainsby.”

“No one could blame you for that.”

“I don’t want to go with him.”

Joe didn’t want that either. But the decision was not his to make. How could he say that to Martin? What words could he possibly offer that might ease the mind of a child being sent so far from his mother, his home?

“I’m sorry.” Joe’s voice was soft, his tone, sincere.

“Mr. Adam said he came here because you were hurt, and he’s your brother.”

Joe smiled. “He takes care of me, just like you take care of James.”

Martin seemed to think about that for a moment. “That’s what Mr. Adam said. But I say it’s more than that. It’s not just because you’re brothers.”

“It—it’s not?”

“It’s because you’re family. Like my uncle in San Francisco is family, and Momma said he’d take care of us, because he’s family.”

Joe’s smile felt more genuine as he considered Martin’s words. “That’s what families do. They take care of each other.”

“What you said before,” Martin went on, “about wanting me to pretend you’re family, when you said I should call you Uncle Joe—did you mean it?”

“Of course I meant it.”

“Then if we start calling you Uncle Joe, will you take care of us, too?”

“I’ll take care of you any way I can, Martin. You should know that by now. Even if you don’t call me Uncle Joe.”

“You’d take care of us, just like my uncle in San Francisco would?”

The question concerned Joe. “Martin, I imagine your real uncle would take care of you just like he would his own children. I can’t do all the same things he could, but I will do whatever I can.”

“As long as we still have our momma, then we don’t really need for my real uncle to take care of us like his own children.”

“I imagine your mother just needs a little help for a while,” Joe offered.

“Maybe you and Mr. Adam could help her. Then maybe we wouldn’t need to go to San Francisco at all. Maybe we could go back home instead. To Virginia City. With you.”

“Martin, that ….” Joe glanced over at Adam, silently willing him to come closer, to help Joe explain why they couldn’t impulsively send the children home. “We can’t just …. Your mother has to make a decision like that.”

“Maybe she will. Maybe she already has.”

“Martin, you can’t—”

“Mr. Adam sent a telegraph!” Martin insisted. “He told Momma James was homesick. When she hears that, I just know she’ll tell us to come home. I just know it. All we have to do is go back to that station and wait to hear what she says.” The boy’s gaze was somehow both defiant and pleading.

Again, Joe felt lost. While he struggled for words, he started to push himself upright, instinctively wanting to draw closer to the boy without giving any thought to why he’d been laying still for so long. By the time he realized what he was doing, he also realized his head was no longer spinning as badly as it had been. He was able to sit without the whole world tilting around him. Yet something else disturbed him. The ground felt strange. He lifted his hand, pressing his fingers against his palm and then rubbing his fingertips over the grains of sand clinging to his skin. He saw the grit. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel it at all.

“Mr. Joe?” Martin called to him, sounding concerned.

“It’s okay,” Joe answered absently, giving no thought to what he meant. He was growing numb from all this lying around; that’s all it was. He needed more than ever to get up and move.

“Hey, Martin? Will you do me a favor? Would you ask Adam to come over here?”

Without answering, the boy turned and ran toward Adam and Mr. Burke. The circles he’d drawn were obliterated with his first two steps.

XxXxX

After some coaxing from Joe, Adam agreed to help him stand once more. The only problem was Joe couldn’t. His feet felt too light, or his legs too heavy. And, like with his fingers, he realized there was an odd numbness in his toes, a sense almost as though they weren’t there.

Now it was Adam’s turn to do some coaxing. He and Burke had fashioned a travois to carry Joe back to Peter’s Station. As much as Joe wanted to argue against it, he couldn’t. He couldn’t walk, and while riding might be possible, mounting up represented only one challenge. Staying mounted, holding the reins with numb fingers and guiding the horse with uncooperative leg muscles would make the ride all but impossible. It would require too much of Adam’s help and attention, both of which would need to be focused instead on the four children with them. Burke had to stay with the valuables, and Gainsby had opted to stay with him to wait for the new stage.

Joe had no choice but to endure the journey on his back, dragged along the well-groomed yet still bumpy road. At first every one of those bumps sent stabs of pain across his shoulders and into his neck, rekindling the throbbing in his head. Yet as time passed it bothered him less and less. He was even able to drift off to sleep.

“Joe?” Adam’s voice stirred him out of oblivion. “Come on, Joe. Show me you can hear me.”

He raised his eyebrows. His eyelids required more effort. Someone blew out a rush of air, exhaling loudly.

“That’s it, little brother. The doc’s here. He wants to see your back.”

Joe felt a slight pressure against his arm. He sensed himself turning—or the world was turning around him. Only then did he realize the world around him had changed. The travois was no longer beneath him. Instead, he was on a small cot.

Finally opening his eyes, Joe found himself lying on his side and facing the grizzled features of Slim Morgan, the old man who ran Peter’s Station.

“Well, howdy, Little Joe!” Slim’s wide smile was lost in his thick, white mustache but evident in the deep creases around his eyes. “I wasn’t thinking you was ever gonna wake up! How you could’a slept through all that ruckus with those young un’s and two stages comin’ through….” Slim laughed and shook his head.

“Concussion,” another voice said from behind Joe. “That much is certain. What I can’t say yet is whether there are any fractures in your neck or spine.”

Nothing’s broken, Joe remembered someone else saying. Jeb Ralston. And Adam. Adam had said that, too. But if this doctor figured he had to consider the possibility, Joe wasn’t going to argue with him. Instead he focused on the man’s strange voice. It sounded about as thick as Slim’s mustache, full of whiskey and cigars. Joe was thinking he’d have to share that comparison with Adam when something sharp stung him between the shoulders. He couldn’t help but cry out.

“Sorry, young fella! These are some pretty spectacular bruises you have here.”

“Spectacular?” Adam’s calm yet clearly irritated tone buoyed Joe through the wave.

“Well,” the doctor went on, “call it what you like. There’s too much swelling to make a positive diagnosis. From the look of these splinters and scrapes, your brother here must’ve taken about as much of a beating as that stage did.”

The thick-voiced doctor laughed softly. Maybe he was trying to be kind, to help both Joe and Adam relax. If so, he was not being successful as far as Joe was concerned. It sounded like the doctor was drunk.

Still gasping from the shock of whatever the doctor had touched, Joe felt himself being rolled once more to his back. He tried to fight it, to avoid adding to the pain, but the hands pulling at him were too insistent—or he was too weak.

“Easy now,” The doctor cautioned as Joe’s gaze shifted to the ceiling and then to the two men standing beside him: Adam and a stranger with pewter hair and a ruddy nose.

He is drunk, Joe realized. He looked to Adam, wondering why his brother seemed so unconcerned about letting a drunk doctor treat him. Adam responded with a shrug and the smallest hint of a smile, as though to say “sorry, Joe; he’s all we’ve got.”

“I know that must hurt some,” the doctor said then with an unexpected tenderness that sounded more like honey than whiskey and was somehow reflected in his gray-blue eyes.

Despite the ruddy nose and the thick voice, something in those eyes filled Joe with an odd sense of trust. Had Adam seen that, too? Was it enough?

“You’ll be better lying on your stomach when we finish up here,” the doctor went on. “But if you can bear with me for a short while, I’d like to do a few tests. Your brother here told me you were experiencing some numbness,” the doctor said as he pulled a blanket off of Joe’s feet.

“That’s right,” Joe answered softly, his mind still struggling to understand how he had come to be here, on this cot. How had they managed to take off his boots and undress him without Joe being the slightest bit aware?

The doctor pressed something against Joe’s right foot. “Tell me what you feel now.”

“A little pressure, I guess,” Joe answered absently.

The doctor moved to Joe’s left foot. “And now?”

Joe waited.

“Joe?” Adam asked.

“What?”

“The doctor asked you what you feel.”

“I will as soon as he does something.” Joe watched Adam’s gaze move toward the doctor’s. “What’s wrong?”

“No need to be alarmed,” the doctor answered, patting Joe’s leg lightly. “Could be just the swelling. All we did just now is confirm your feet are too numb to sense the point of a needle. Now let’s test the muscles, shall we? Can you lift your right knee toward my hand?”

Joe did as he was told.

“Very good. Now the left?”

Once again, Joe obliged, although it took more effort than it should. His leg didn’t feel heavy, exactly. It just felt…numb.

“Fine, fine,” the doctor said. “That’s just fine. Now let’s see what we can do about getting rid of those splinters.”

As the doctor and Adam repositioned Joe to lie on his stomach, he found himself focusing on the words he hadn’t wanted to consider a moment ago. What I can’t say yet is whether there are any fractures in your neck or spine.

It’s just the swelling, he told himself.

When the doctor began digging for splinters, Joe’s entire back started to burn. “H—Hey, Adam,” he called out, trying to force his thoughts elsewhere. “S—Slim said two stages came through?”

“That’s right. The one from Carson City with the doc, here, and—”

“You didn’t…you didn’t let the children go, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“How could you? Not with that—” Joe started to push himself upward. The movement went counter to the doc’s efforts, causing something sharp to jab into his back. He felt another hand on his shoulder, the calming touch of his brother as Adam gently pushed him down.

“Easy, Joe. It’s alright. They’re on their way to Virginia City. They’re going home.”

XxXxX

When Hoss went with Mrs. Hansen to meet the stage, he was expecting four confused children, not six rambunctious ones. They bounded out making enough ruckus to remind Hoss of a Fourth of July sack race, and their eyes were all lit up like Christmas morning. The sight made Hoss feel good inside in ways he could never have expected.

“You’re Hoss?” the youngest boy asked.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Joe said you were big, but I never thought you’d be that big!”

“Mr. Joe?” Hoss asked.

“I mean Uncle Joe. That’s what he wants us to call him.”

“He does, does he? Well, I reckon your uncle Joe took real good care of you, if he wanted you to call him that.”

The boy nodded. “Mr. Adam … I mean Uncle Adam did, too.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Should we call you Uncle Hoss?”

Hoss made a show of pondering the boy’s question. “I reckon you might be obliged to do just that.”

“Obliged?”

“That means it’s something you just have to do.”

“Why?”

“Well, if you call both my brothers uncle, that pretty much guarantees I’d have to be your uncle, too.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re brothers, that’s why.”

“Like Martin and Matthew are my brothers?”

“Just like that.”

“But you’re not the same kind of uncle as Uncle Gunnar.”

“Uncle Gunnar?” Hoss tensed at the memory stirred by the boy’s mention of the name. Hoss’s own Uncle Gunnar had spent many years on the wrong side of the law, and had died after saving Little Joe’s life—after first putting it in danger—at the hands of his own band of commancheros.

The boy nodded. “That’s him, right there.” Young James pointed to the man who had exited the stagecoach behind him.

Hoss hadn’t noticed Mrs. Hansen’s reaction to the stranger before. Now he realized she was clinging to the man, and seemed to be crying on his shoulder.

“Mr. Cartwright?” a woman’s voice pulled Hoss’s attention away from the curious meeting.

“Ma’am?” He glanced beside him to a brown-haired woman in a green dress.

“How do you do?” The woman extended her hand. “I’m Mrs. Andersen. Gunnar’s wife.”

“Uncle Gunnar?” he repeated.

“That’s right. He’s Kari’s brother. Kari Hansen?”

“Mrs. Hansen. Of course. He must be the brother in San Francisco.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Adam told me the children were in good hands, but he didn’t say anything about any Uncle Gunnar.”

“There’s not a lot of room for details on a telegram.”

“No, ma’am. I reckon there ain’t.”

“Gunnar and I went down to Sacramento to meet our nephews and niece. It’s such a long trip for them to take, and all alone like that. We wanted to get to them as soon as we could. Our own children—that’s them over there, Agnes and Paul—why they were thrilled to have such an adventure. Of course, when we received word about the accident, well, we just couldn’t sit there and wait. We had to go find them, those poor dears.”

“They don’t seem too rattled.”

“Fortunately, no. I am sorry about your brother. That was such a gallant thing for him to do, watching over those little ones the way he did.”

“How was he when you met him, ma’am? It’s hard to tell from what comes over that wire.”

“I…I’m afraid we didn’t meet him.”

“Ma’am?”

“He wasn’t …. Well, he wasn’t conscious when we arrived, I’m sorry to say. Your other brother, Adam said Joe had a concussion. The trip from where the accident occurred back to the way station…I suppose it was hard on him. The doctor had only just arrived as we were leaving, so I really can’t provide any more details.”

Hoss took a deep breath and gazed up the road, as though he could see all the way to Peter’s Station. “Least the doc’s there now.”

“You’re very close, aren’t you?”

Confused, Hoss returned his attention to Mrs. Andersen. “We’re family, ma’am.”

“Yes, of course. But….” Mrs. Anderson looked toward her husband and sister-in-law. “Not all families share what you and your brothers seem to have.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Gunnar and Mrs. Hansen look to be pretty close.”

“They haven’t seen each other in years, Mr. Cartwright. Many, many years. Gunnar was stunned to receive Kari’s telegram, and even more surprised to learn she was sending her children to us. We knew something had to be terribly wrong. Yes, what you are witnessing now is a long overdue reunion.”

Hoss tried to imagine what it would be like to be so far removed from his own brothers’ lives. He didn’t like how it made him feel.

XxXxX

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