{"id":7203,"date":"2014-05-01T18:14:56","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T22:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/?p=7203"},"modified":"2026-07-22T08:55:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T12:55:03","slug":"aftermaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/?p=7203","title":{"rendered":"Aftermaths (by sklamb)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary: \u00a0<\/span>It’s November 1865, and a winter storm and a stagecoach accident are interfering with many people’s plans…. Not so much a WHN as a What Happened Later for “The Crucible.”<\/p>\n

Rated:<\/span>\u00a0T (15,840 words)
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Aftermaths Series:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aftermaths<\/a>
\nExit Lilah Rose<\/a><\/p>\n

Aftermaths<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
“I don’t have nightmares,”<\/strong> Adam Cartwright said firmly.<\/div>\n

Well, that was an improvement. Not very long ago he’d been mumbling something about gold and games, and struggling with the blanket, which wasn’t doing his shoulder any good. It had taken me a long time to get the bleeding stopped where a jagged bit of wood from the stagecoach door had speared into him. I didn’t think it had hit something important, but I really wasn’t sure where the big blood vessels run, and anyone who’s seen a little gunplay knows how fast a man can bleed to death if one of them gets torn wide open.<\/p>\n

Wanting to keep him back in his right mind for as long as I could, I asked, “How do you know?” and made sure to put some vinegar in it. Adam always liked a woman who wasn’t afraid to talk back to him.<\/p>\n

“My youngest brother does. I know the difference.”<\/p>\n

All right, he hadn’t recognized me on the stagecoach. Not a chance he’d have shared that little tidbit with a saloon girl from Virginia City, or any one else who might have known the family, for that matter. He used to tease ‘youngest brother’ every chance he got, but something like this the Cartwrights were always going to keep private. Besides, Little Joe wasn’t so little any more, even if he was still the short one in the family. Lately he’d been just as likely as Adam to be sent off to negotiate some contract, and instead of teasing him the older boys joshed with him, just as they did with their pa sometimes.<\/p>\n

The grip on my hand slackened off; I’d been quiet too long. Dammit, he’d be thrashing again in a moment. “So why don’t you want the laudanum?” I said in a louder voice.<\/p>\n

“Didn’t say I don’t have…bad…dreams.” Not so firm now, but he was still with me. “Laudanum makes them…worse. Isn’t the dreams, anyway. If I get too hot, or too cold, or too thirsty…well, my brain obliges with appropriate memories. Laudanum makes that worse, too.”<\/p>\n

You had to admire a man who could talk like that in a fever. Didn’t take much thought to know what the ‘appropriate memories’ might be, either. I’d been in the Silver Dollar that day the telegraph man came in, white as a sheet and shouting for a hand from the Ponderosa. Of course none of the current hands were in the saloon. It was well into a working day, and the Ponderosa won’t keep slackers on their payroll, but plenty of people there owed the Cartwrights one favor or another. “I’ll get there fastest,” one of them said, and the others let him go. They fastened on the telegraph man instead, trying to find out what the news was, and ended by dragging him down to the sheriff’s office. Our sheriff sent some messages of his own, and word spread quickly that Adam Cartwright had gone missing in the desert out near Salt Flats, and the sheriff\u00a0there<\/i>\u00a0thought he was probably dead. The family brought him back about three weeks later, when we’d started to wonder if any of the Cartwrights would still be at the Ponderosa come winter–they were just the sort of people who’d go down together rather than give up on one of their own. Adam must have been ‘too hot and too thirsty’ for more of that time than was pleasant to think about.<\/p>\n

Not that I worked through all that just then. “So what am I to do with you instead?” I tried to get a tease into my voice, and overdid it as usual; I never am much good at flirting with the johns. Damn sure he didn’t want pity, though, and I wasn’t up to deciding what a proper nurse might say.<\/p>\n

But glory be, he was flirting back at me. “Just see I don’t get too hot…” and somehow he had my hand at his lips, and was kissing it. “Or…too cold…” and he kissed it again. “Or too thirsty.” A third kiss.<\/p>\n

Made you wonder why on earth the man was still single. “Well, I’ll do what I can,” I promised, and wiped his forehead again.<\/p>\n

There’d been a china basin in the abandoned shack by the road, and I’d heaped it full of snow while Adam was trying to start a fire one-handed. I didn’t know about the hole in him until I came back inside to find him keeled over by the hearth clutching at his shoulder, with a match still between the fingers of his good hand. The match had gone out, thank goodness; it was wet, like almost everything else we had with us. Being dumped into a snowdrift will do that to things. Up until then I’d thought his worst problem was the hand that had still been outside the coach when it went over. He’d been leaning through the window to yell up at the driver, and I’d been hanging onto one of the inside straps, braced against the other side of the coach. He got enough of himself back inside so the coach didn’t crush his chest, or his head, as it slammed down on the road, and of course I tumbled right on top of him. The coach went on rolling–like the dice in a craps game, I remember thinking–just long enough I felt sure it was headed all the way down the side of the mountain into the river. Fortunately, the snowbank stopped it, and our luck hadn’t run out at that, either. The smashed-up side with the broken window frame was facing up, which gave us an easy way out, and it didn’t take long to determine that we still had two legs each, and two arms, or an arm and a half in Adam’s case. Something about the way he said that did suggest he was in some pain. The horses were gone; the coach had broken free from their harness some time during the accident. No sign of the driver at all. We were knee-deep in snow, there was a cold strong wind, it was starting to sleet, and the daylight wouldn’t last much longer, but we could both walk. It might have been worse.<\/p>\n

Our luggage was still strapped on the roof of the stagecoach. I pulled my carpetbag free, since it wasn’t heavy and I suspected we’d need what was in it. He’d brought a small trunk and several boxes I guessed to be presents for the family. The trunk had taken the weight of the stagecoach when it rolled, which had stove in one side; Adam pulled out a handful of papers and a few clean shirts. Once I’d squeezed them into the carpetbag, he made to pick it up, but I shook my head. “I’m the one with two arms,” I reminded him, and he gave a little chuckle instead of arguing. Right then I should have known he was bad hurt, but I wanted to find shelter while we could see more than a foot in front of us, and so, of course, did he.<\/p>\n

At a guess, we were about halfway between stations, so it was another piece of luck that we came across the shack a few minutes after we got back to the road. Not exactly elegant lodgings, with its broken-down bedframe and trash heaped in one corner, but the roof was intact and the chimney didn’t seem blocked. I investigated the trash pile to find a blanket that reeked of mildew but was heavy enough to be warm, the basin, and enough broken bits of wood to make a fire. “If the horses get to the station they’ll come looking for the coach,” Adam commented as he scraped the wood towards the hearth. Only a Cartwright would expect people to start the search for a missing stagecoach in the middle of the night with snow flying. I wasn’t even sure the horses would reach the station, but it seemed unhelpful to say that. Since at best we were stranded until morning or longer, I went out with the basin for snow, so we’d have some water later. I was still snickering at the not unpleasant vision of a posse of Cartwrights scouring the mountain for their stray when I came back in and saw him on the floor.<\/p>\n

I didn’t drop the basin–more good luck–and Adam managed to help himself onto the bed before he collapsed for good. The next several minutes were messy. He’d kept his coat pressed over the hole as much as possible, but once he was down flat it opened up like a fountain, or at least a pretty good spring. By then it was almost dark, so although I probably should have cleaned the wound out properly, I stuck to getting the bleeding stopped. The battered hand could wait until morning, I decided. After that I spread the blanket over him and piled every spare piece of clothing I could find on top of it. Since I was now well on the way to a chill myself, I found the box of wet matches and went back to struggle with the fire. It took even longer to get that going than anything else I’d done. I had almost decided to use Adam’s papers for kindling, and to hell with the thousands of dollars they presumably represented, when the first piece of wood showed signs of being properly alight.<\/p>\n

Back at the bed, Adam had gone from shivers to fever. I mopped down his face, untangled his good arm from under the covers so I could check his pulse, and made sure his shoulder wasn’t bleeding again. Finally I went back to my carpetbag to get out the last of my mother’s laudanum. Back in Sacramento I’d wrapped the bottle up in my spare petticoat and put it in the center of my bag, since mother didn’t need it any more and I reckoned to find a use or at least a buyer for it when I got home to Virginia City. To my surprise, Adam wouldn’t touch the stuff, even after I reminded him it was safe for teething babies and people with nervous complaints. When I suggested, not entirely in jest, that after a day like the one he’d just had laudanum could at least insure a good night’s sleep instead of a string of nightmares, he came back with the declaration I’ve already mentioned.<\/p>\n

Apparently our almost-an-argument settled his nerves. He let go my hand, gave me a sardonic grin that almost turned my knees to jelly, and closed his eyes again. So there I was, snug in a snowbound cabin with a crackling fire, only one bed, and the second most eligible bachelor in Virginia City all to myself.<\/p>\n

Well, at least I had plenty of ice and cold water.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

If this was only a bad dream or an unpleasant memory, I was very glad Adam didn’t have nightmares.<\/p>\n

He started shivering again a little while after the laudanum dispute, so I tucked the blanket more tightly around him and weighted it with some stones I’d warmed up by the fire. I was still wiping his face down with the melted snow, ridiculous as it seemed when the rest of him felt so cold. At some point I also remembered to pull off his boots and put one of the larger hot stones down near his feet. His other clothes weren’t much drier than the boots, but at least they were a warmer damp now, sort of like a good bath without the bathtub. The vision of a tubful of warm water, and a soft bed to follow, distracted me for a moment–oh, yes, and that bed in my vision was empty. When you’re as tired as I was by then, a man in bed with you starts to look too much like work. Even an Adam Cartwright.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Adam Cartwright was filling up the only bed for miles around, and I honestly didn’t begrudge it to him. Really, I repeated to myself. Well, not much, anyway….<\/p>\n

That was when he started to mumble again. “No gold…no guns…no games…,” over and over, getting louder each time, until he was almost shouting. His head jerked from side to side as I tried to reach it with my dripping cloth. For a moment he seemed to focus on me, which only made him worse–he gave a massive shudder, as if trying to pull himself free of everything that held him down. Nothing came loose, and he collapsed like a rag doll, all the struggle beaten out of him. “Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?” he gasped.<\/p>\n

“I’m trying to help you!” I shouted back, angry enough that a fleck of my spit landed on his face.<\/p>\n

He opened his eyes again and frowned up at me in silence a moment before, very deliberately, wiping his cheek against his sound shoulder. “Miss McNair,” he said evenly. Calmly. Sanely. Thank God. And in the midst of my anxiety I was still pleased he remembered my name from our brief introductions in Sacramento. “Is there anything here to drink?”<\/p>\n

I felt about two inches tall. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything with the melted snow but bathe his forehead. The thought of swallowing something that cold myself made me shiver, but he’d said not to leave him thirsty, and I’d flat ignored that. “Just a minute,” I muttered, and fumbled through my carpetbag for the spoon.<\/p>\n

“I said no laudanum,” he protested when he saw it.<\/p>\n

“It’s not laudanum, and there isn’t anything else here to drink from.” I tipped the water slowly into his mouth. He didn’t swallow at once, but waited for the second spoonful, and a third. At least giving it to him in driblets meant it would be a little warmer when it hit his stomach. When he finally shook his head to signal he’d had enough, I mopped his mouth and chin with my sleeve, then felt for the pulse in his throat. It was still too fast and too shallow, but stronger than before.<\/p>\n

The rest of the night went more quietly, although he had several more restless spells. Each left him limp and panting for breath, staring up at me in broken misery–and then, each time, he found the strength to take charge of himself again. It was like watching a bronc rider who was determined to master his horse, however often it threw him. I did what I could to help him, but he was the one who had to keep getting back on.<\/p>\n

Most of the time he slept, which gave me a chance to mull over what I knew about that time he’d been lost in the desert. There’d been plenty of gossip in town about it. I knew they brought him home in a wagon because he was too weak to sit a horse, and even when he was out and about again he held himself carefully, like he thought he was made out of glass. For months afterwards, when he came into the saloon with his brothers, if you tossed him a joke he’d give you a blank stare back. That upset us girls the most. Adam wasn’t one of those people who carried a party everywhere he went, but when he laughed he could make you feel good about yourself, like you were clever and pretty and not something tracked in from the street. He wasn’t laughing any more, and his brothers were almost as bad, at least when he was around. Mostly they spent their time making sure he didn’t get in a fight. They weren’t protecting him, it turned out. The one time someone threw a punch at him Adam went for the man’s throat with both hands, and it took Hoss and Little Joe together to pry him off. I’d been much nearer that scuffle than I liked, given the snarl on his face when he charged. Now that I thought it over again, what frightened me more was the emptiness I’d seen in his eyes.<\/p>\n

There was one more thing I knew, and it made a little more sense to me now. Besides my work in the saloon I’d a regular john who was a foreman at the Gould and Curry. The Cartwrights were big stockholders in that mine, and its management treated Adam almost like one of their own consultants. He’d studied engineering when he went back east to college, and liked to keep in touch with all the newest ideas. Everyone knew his father relied heavily on his opinion when deciding which ventures to back on the Comstock, and the Gould and Curry intended to keep its fair share of the Cartwright fortune. A session with Adam usually put my man in a good mood, but the first one they had after Adam came back from the desert left him puzzled and annoyed instead. “Shied off like that spooky horse of his–wouldn’t go near the workings. He went right back down after the big cave-in at the Ophir, but it sure seems he’s lost his nerve now. You hate to see a man like that turn coward.”<\/p>\n

A month or two more passed and seemed to smooth everything down. Adam started to smile at us in the saloon again, he took a long tour of the Gould and Curry’s working stopes, and his brothers stopped hovering half a pace behind him all the time. Hearing Adam called a coward stuck in my mind, though, just like seeing the sky turn bright green would have. Something in that desert, I was sure, had knocked Adam down so many times he’d finally stayed there. After hearing his mutterings about gold, I was almost as sure that whatever it was had something to do with a mine.<\/p>\n

Not my business, I reminded myself. Nothing to do with me at all.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

“I already know you think I bled too much yesterday,” Adam said patiently. “Trust me, the night’s rest and the water will keep me going long enough.”<\/p>\n

“Enough for what?” I snapped. He had dragged himself out of bed at an hour I considered indecently early, though there was light enough outside I suspected he’d have called it late. After an extended struggle with his boots he propped himself against the wall to argue about what we should do next. My suggestion that he lie down again had met with a firm refusal.<\/p>\n

“I need to go back to the stagecoach to have another look around.”<\/p>\n

It seemed to me he needed other things more. Every time his right hand brushed against anything I saw his lips tighten, and the skin around his mouth was strangely pale. Mentioning either concern would get me nowhere with him, I felt sure, so I tried a more practical approach. “Your clothes are barely dry, and the fire’s burned down so far I don’t know what I’ll do if you come back wet again.”<\/p>\n

“Collect some more wood while I’m gone, then.” He lifted his injured hand towards his face, winced, and lowered it again. “You might look around and see what else is in here besides what you found last night. If this were our land, there’d be a box of supplies somewhere. Something to eat, for people caught out like we are now. Try under the bed, maybe.”<\/p>\n

“Why don’t you look for yourself?” I snapped. “Do something useful instead of making bad worse by ignoring my advice.”<\/p>\n

“Miss McNair, you are not a trained nurse.”<\/p>\n

“Now, Mr. Cartwright–”<\/p>\n

“You’ve done very well, and I’m grateful to you, but a trained nurse would have had my clothes off me last night.”<\/p>\n

I blushed, though not for the reason he probably assumed. Undressed men were something I was used to. Undressing that man–let’s just say I’d entertained the ambition. If anyone in town had actually done so I hadn’t heard about it, though of course a man with his money could afford a side order of discretion with his pleasure. Still, to me, taking a man’s clothes off him was part of being on the game, and last night I’d tried not to think of this man as a john. I’d been trying to behave as if he were my mother, coughing her life out in a boarding house in Sacramento, too grateful for her daughter’s presence to ask how I’d survived all the years I’d been away.<\/p>\n

Adam was still talking. I was sure he’d seen my blush, and was trying to appease my injured modesty. “I’ve been working with cattle or timber most of my life, Miss McNair. I think I’ve seen more exposure cases than you have, and more injuries like this shoulder. I know how far I can push myself safely. Forgive my bluntness, but you don’t.”<\/p>\n

I know I don’t trust you to stop pushing yourself after it isn’t safe, I thought to myself. I also knew that, injured or not, he would do just what he wanted, sooner or later. He was only talking now to try and keep my cooperation…and I wasn’t going to deny him that. “Very well,” I sighed.<\/p>\n

“Thank you,” he said dryly. “If I’m not back by….” Neither of us had a watch. He glanced down at a patch of weak sunlight on the cabin floor, then up at the tiny window through which the light came. “By when that moves over here–” he scrubbed his bootheel over the floorboards to make a mark–“and you haven’t heard a disturbance, come looking for me if you like. If there’s gunfire, promise you’ll stay here and wait for help. They really do send out search parties for overdue stagecoaches, you know. Missing passengers aren’t good for profits.” A tilted smile warmed up his face; he wanted me to share his joke and relax.<\/p>\n

“You’re expecting gunfire?” I asked instead.<\/p>\n

“Not really. Just laying down the rules in advance,” he said as the smile grew broader. “When you have brothers like mine, Miss McNair, you make a habit of that–though I’m not sure how much good it’s done me.”<\/p>\n

If I’d really been an innocent lady from Sacramento who first met him when she got on the stagecoach, I was sure I’d have accepted his explanation quite trustingly. As it was, I didn’t think he talked to his brothers that way now, and doubted he ever had. I couldn’t see why he thought someone with a gun might be out there, or why, in that case, he still wanted to go back to the stagecoach–but he had made it plain it wasn’t my place to argue with him. “All right, older brother. I’ll be good.”<\/p>\n

He shot me a quick look; I’d used his brothers’ favorite title for him without thinking. I watched him weigh the difference in our ages and decide it was only a coincidence, but he was definitely more wary than he wanted me to think. As far as I knew, his notions of chivalry didn’t extend to hiding unpleasant news from a woman, so I doubted he was just trying not to distress me. Sometimes, I’d been told, sick people took the notion their nurses meant them harm. I hoped Adam wasn’t becoming that kind of sick. I wondered what I could do if he were.<\/p>\n

At least he let me button his coat for him, and help make a sling for his arm. He left his gunbelt on the floor where he had dropped it the previous night. There are people who can shoot well with either hand, but looking at the abandoned weapon I guessed that Adam wasn’t one of them. It had never occurred to me before that there might be something the eldest Cartwright brother couldn’t do.<\/p>\n

Once he was gone, I took stock of our assets, the way he’d asked. There was a surprisingly large pile of wood out the back, so I carried an armful inside and replenished the fire. After that I checked under the bed, and found a metal chest like the stagecoach’s cash box, only without a lock. Maybe once it had been packed full of useful supplies for a stranded traveller, but there was nothing left now but a half-empty bag of dried beans, a whiskey bottle– entirely empty–and two battered tin cups. The beans were food, at least, and it was good to have something to drink from besides that absurd spoon. I rinsed out the bottle and the cups, tipped as much of the remaining meltwater as I could into the bottle, and mounded fresh snow in the basin before going on with my inventory.<\/p>\n

It didn’t take long to finish; the only other thing to find was a dented old pot with a hole in the side half-way up, pushed even farther under the bed than the stores box had been. Better than nothing to cook the beans in, though not much. A decent pot would have been scavanged long before–probably had been, or more likely swapped out for this worn-out excuse. When it was as clean as I could get it, I dumped in a handful of beans and as much water as it would hold, and propped it on the top of the fire.<\/p>\n

The patch of sun was still well away from Adam’s heelmark, and the bed was looking…flat, if not actually comfortable. Softer than the floor, as well. Surely it couldn’t hurt to lie down for a few minutes….<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

“Miss McNair?” Adam was shaking my shoulder gently. I came awake and sat up so quickly I almost cracked heads with him.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t slept long; sunlight was just brushing at the mark on the floor. He hadn’t just walked in the door, either. The various things I’d left strewn across the floor had been gathered and sorted into two piles, one beside my deflated carpet bag and the other–including Adam’s last clean shirt and my best petticoat–by the bed, next to the basin of snowmelt and a small, half-open pigskin case I didn’t remember from last night. Over by the fire I could see a canteen and a bulging sack that also hadn’t been here before.<\/p>\n

Adam settled himself beside me on the bed. “Brought my shaving kit and some supplies back from the stagecoach. Not the first to get there…two-three men came from the west, broke open the luggage, and went back the way they came.” He braced himself with his good arm while he caught his breath.<\/p>\n

“Thieves?”<\/p>\n

He nudged one foot against the pigskin case. Along with razor, strop and shaving brush it held a second, smaller case for his cufflinks and studs. A man’s jewelry might not look as spectacular as a full parure, but I knew his must be worth far more than my few gaudy trinkets. There were those in Virginia City who liked to use massive gold nuggets to adorn their shirtfronts. The men of the Ponderosa preferred colored stones in theirs; turquoise and lapis for day wear and square-cut emeralds for more formal events. Green for the pines and grass of their ranch, blue for the water that kept that rich land green. I bent over and opened the small case. Both sets glittered up at me. “Not thieves,” I admitted, and closed the case again. “So what were they looking for?”<\/p>\n

“Nothing that was there, as far as I could tell. And I don’t think it was my shirts, or your laudanum.” Adam closed his eyes and brought the long fingers of his left hand up to knead the bridge of his nose. He looked desperately tired. I must have made some kind of anxious noise, because he drew himself up with an effort and went on, “Just one more thing, Miss McNair, and then you can do with me as you wish. The wind last night blew this stretch of road almost clear. I’d like you to find out how far in the other direction it is before the way is blocked again. And if you could see whether the telegraph lines are still up, that would also be good to know….”<\/p>\n

I looked down at my high-buttoned boots, meant for walking only on well-shoveled city boardwalks. He could have gone on and looked for himself, but he\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0tired; perhaps just reaching the shack had been all he could manage. Or perhaps he wanted me outside for some other reason. I wasn’t really afraid–protecting the womenfolk was first, second, and third nature to a Cartwright–but I didn’t like the idea that Adam was using me for reasons he chose not to explain. If you want to stay safe in my line of work, you have to know exactly what you’re agreeing to do, every time. I never would have thought I’d come to distrust Adam Cartwright, but I was getting pretty close.<\/p>\n

Not quite there yet, though. I pulled my wrap tight around me and made my way out of the shack.<\/p>\n

Weak as the sunlight was, it dazzled my eyes. Anything that wasn’t snow looked black, whether the rocky skin of the mountains or the tall pine trees in the valley below. The breeze that rustled my skirts as it came east from California was only a soft echo of what had blown all the night before, but still strong enough to be sending tiny particles of ice and snow sliding and bouncing along the road ahead of me. That giant invisible broom had swept this section of the stagecoach road more diligently than anyone had ever cleared Virginia City’s boardwalks. As I walked down towards the next station, my boots barely dented the film of snow that remained.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the wind, like a lazy housemaid, had left its job unfinished, pushing the snow it was moving in a straight line down the mountainside and leaving a high white wall to block the road where it curled south, clinging to the mountain. I thought how deep the bank that had caught our rolling stagecoach had been and realized it would be fatally easy to mistake fluffy drifted snow for solid ground and drive off the edge of the road here. A man on foot, keeping to the upslope side of the grade, could make his way more confidently, but only until the next switchback. I remembered from when I took the stage to Sacramento late last summer how the steep cliffs had been first on one side of the coach, then on the other. Only someone who knew this road well and could guess how the winds would drive the snow was going to be able to clear a safe way through.<\/p>\n

The telegraph line might take even longer to restore. Instead of looping back and forth down the slopes, as the road did, the telegraph poles marched straight from the top of the pass–or they had, before the storm. Now they were skewed and tilted like a line of drunks instead of smartly disciplined soldiers, and there were gaps in their regular spacing as well. No messages would be carried on that wire for some time. I shivered, wondering if the next station along even knew there was a stagecoach missing; it would be so easy for them to assume we had stopped at the last station to take shelter as the storm built up, and now there was no way they could learn we had not.<\/p>\n

The horses, I reminded myself. They knew the road, and they had been running for home before the last heavy snowfall, before the winds that had shifted all that snow into the puzzle of clear and blocked stretchs that faced me now. A team of horses with no coach behind would surely be all the message a stationmaster would need. Assuming, of course, that the weight of the stagecoach hadn’t pulled them off the road before it broke the central pole, that none of the trailing fragments had somehow tangled with the panicking team’s legs, that they had made it safely through…. But we had shelter, water, and food to last us a week or longer. There was no real reason to be anxious, except that Adam Cartwright, I thought, was.<\/p>\n

I caught sight of him restacking the woodpile as I made my way back up the road, and also saw a brief flash of something white. Perhaps he’d been rinsing out some of the bandages, I thought. He glanced up at me, waved, and went back inside. When I reached the shack he was on his knees by his gunbelt, turning his pistol over and over in his left hand. I noticed that although he handled it with less than his usual grace, he certainly didn’t seem clumsy, but only confused, as if he wasn’t sure why it was still on the floor. “Getting careless,” he muttered after a few moments, and moved gun and gunbelt both next to my carpetbag, knocking a pile of the bloodiest rags over on top of them. He hadn’t tried to clean anything–why had I thought a man might think of doing laundry? I asked myself–and he hadn’t brought in any more wood, although certainly there was a good supply already inside. But then, as he stood up, he swayed and almost lost his balance, and I stopped wondering what he had been up to in my absence so I could concentrate on what needed to be done now I was back with him.<\/p>\n

He kept his word and didn’t argue when I guided him over to the bed. That didn’t mean he was quiet; he maintained a steady commentary as I tried to make him comfortable and tended to his varied hurts. In the end I just let him tell me what to do, since his ideas were much more definite than mine. By the time I was finished with the poultice, the splint, the bandages, and the beans he finally seemed to have talked all the words out of himself. Seeing we had his kit with us, and I knew how much better he’d feel without a faceful of stubble, I suggested that he let me shave him. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized what an unladylike offer it was, but Adam only smiled and thanked me. I hoped he thought I had practiced on an invalid father.<\/p>\n

Once the shaving was finished, I couldn’t find much else that needed to be done. Between us we had eaten all the cooked beans, so I put more on. The pot couldn’t hold enough for us both to have a full meal, but if we ate what it did hold as fast as the beans would cook, we weren’t going to get very hungry. Small portions were probably better for Adam anyway. He was asleep, not quite snoring, and I was getting drowsy myself. When I had the beans simmering at about the right heat, I propped myself against the wall at a safe distance from the fire and let my own eyes close.<\/p>\n

I never learned how much later it was when I woke up again. Whatever disturbed me had already roused Adam, who was perched on the edge of the bed looking, if anything, more tired than ever. A horse neighed outside the shack and for a brief moment I thought we’d been found by someone from the stagecoach line. Adam’s expression told me that couldn’t be true. I glanced where he was looking and scrambled hastily to my feet.<\/p>\n

Five men, their guns drawn and levelled, were making their way through the door. “Who’s she?” one of them asked, pointing his pistol at me. I took a shaky breath and held still, staring at Adam in the hopes he’d somehow let me know what he wanted me to do.<\/p>\n

“Someone else off the stage, I reckon,” the biggest man grunted. “So long as she don’t make trouble…you get over there, ma’am.”<\/p>\n

The man who had spoken first took my arm and pushed me, not ungently, into the far corner. That seemed to suit Adam; the narrow creases above his nose smoothed away. With slow, exaggerated motions, he pulled his billfold from inside his jacket and tossed it on the floor. “If it’s money you’re after, that’s all I have. It should be enough to satisfy you without bothering the lady.”<\/p>\n

The leader kicked the billfold behind him without looking away from Adam. “That’s not what we want, Cartwright,” he said placidly. “Where’s the papers?”<\/p>\n

“Papers?” Adam repeated, raising his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you any papers, friend.”<\/p>\n

If he meant to irritate the thugs into making some mistake, it didn’t seem to work. At the jerk of their leader’s head two of them holstered their guns and pulled Adam to his feet, swinging him sideways to stand, back against the wall, between them. Both were big men, and they held him in place without effort. “You sure?” the leader asked, sounding almost bored as he put his own revolver away. “Well, then….”<\/p>\n

In all my life, I never saw a man set about hurting someone else so methodically. Adam tried to twist away at first, but a blow to his jaw left him dazed and defenceless. After that it was like watching a punching exhibition. The quiet made it worse. At bar brawls and boxing matches there’s always enough noise from the onlookers to drown out the actual fighting, but this time I could hear every impact of the pounding fists, every small gasp of reaction. From time to time the bruiser paused to glance at me as if to be sure I was making no trouble. I wasn’t. I had one hand pushed into my mouth because it seemed important to try and be as stoic as Adam, and I could feel my tears like slime on the back of that hand. My nose was streaming almost as badly as my eyes. I knew I was being a coward, and I despised myself, but I didn’t dare move or speak.<\/p>\n

The punches worked their way from face down to groin and up again, ending with a blow to the injured shoulder that finally made Adam cry out loud. His head snapped back against the wall behind him, then slumped limply onto his chest. The men holding him had to brace themselves to support his sagging body. Their leader took a step back, looking first at me, then more carefully around the room. When he caught sight of the bottle and cups he smiled and went over to pick them up. He poured out a full cup of water and handed it to the man on Adam’s right before knocking the bottom out of the whiskey bottle like someone who’d done that many times before. He gave me another, longer, look and turned back to Adam. “Wake him up.”<\/p>\n

I lunged forward against the arm that held me, forgetting the man had a gun. “No!” I begged. “Please, no…he put something in the wood pile. Please, don’t do any more to him.”<\/p>\n

At the leader’s signal, the man nearest the door went out. None of the rest of us moved until he came back in, brandishing the stack of papers in their pale blue wrapper. The leader glanced over them quickly and nodded. “Put him down on the bed,” he ordered the pair holding Adam. Without waiting to see them obey, he turned back towards my corner, said, “Let her go,” as unemotionally as ever, then completed my humiliation by pulling a neatly folded bandana from inside his hat and tossing it to me. I blew my nose and struggled to stop crying.<\/p>\n

The man who’d been holding me at gunpoint urged me over to the bed before walking out after the others.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

“At least they left my hand alone,” Adam said after a long silence. “It’s just bruises, a couple of cuts. Hurts like…well, much more than I’d like, but nothing’s broken. Professionals. Cost someone a pretty penny.” He mopped at his split lip with the back of his splinted hand, leaving spots of bright blood on the bandage. “I didn’t expect you to hold out for that long,” he added more quietly.<\/p>\n

My fault, was this? The surge of anger brought me to my feet. “You never said you wanted me to tell them anything! If you had…if I’d thought….” My knees buckled and I was back on the bed, twisting my hands in my lap, trying not to burst into tears again.<\/p>\n

“I know. I’m sorry.” He laid his left hand over both of mine and held it there until I became a little calmer. “I had to be sure they’d believe you. You aren’t a very good actress, Miss McNair. I couldn’t risk them suspecting you were part of my schemes.”<\/p>\n

Nothing was making sense, least of all Adam’s undertone of satisfaction.<\/p>\n

“If you bring me your carpetbag, I can try to explain.” When I’d dragged the bag across the room to the bed, he reached in and pulled out a small roll of paper, wrapped rather untidily with pink ribbon. I’d have taken it for a love-letter if I hadn’t known no one ever wrote me one. “They wanted this.”<\/p>\n

I took the little packet from him and folded it more neatly. The ribbon had been pulled from my camisole. I wrapped it around the papers as if they were a present and tied a neat bow. “What were those other papers?”<\/p>\n

“Important-looking, weren’t they? Timber contracts–with the man who most likely hired that crew, as it happens.” His mouth wouldn’t make a smile, but I could hear it in his voice. “No great loss. Our lawyers in San Francisco have a complete set; they can send me copies.”<\/p>\n

“So what do your schemes call for now?”<\/p>\n

“When the road’s clear, I’ll take that on to Virginia City.” He took the packet from me and, with a grimace of effort, pushed himself up from the bed to collect his billfold. Tucking the ribbon-wrapped papers inside, he restored the billfold to his jacket. “Until then….”<\/p>\n

He managed to twist away from me fast enough that my dress wasn’t splattered, which was about the only grace he was given–that and the fact he went to his knees before his right shoulder hit the floor. I had to drag him to the bed, and this time when I had him there I took off more than his boots. I hadn’t been able to keep him clear of the mess he’d sicked up, and he’d gone through enough not to have to stay in clothes soiled with\u00a0that<\/i>. The blanket wasn’t exactly clean, but mildew smelt pleasant by contrast.<\/p>\n

If he’d had the strength, he would have fought me over the jacket, especially when I took the papers back out of the billfold and returned them to my carpetbag. Instead he glared at me in silent fury, and I glared back, just as angry. There were pieces of glass all over that side of the room from the broken whiskey bottle. I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t guessed Adam put those contracts in the woodpile. Would Adam had talked before his face was slashed to ribbons? Before he lost an eye? I wasn’t going to inquire; I was afraid of hearing his answer.<\/p>\n

My hand brushed against my bottle of laudanum and I pulled it out of the carpetbag. “Have you changed your mind about this?” I asked him instead.<\/p>\n

“No,” he said without hestitation. “I don’t want any, no.” I could see his body tense up, and watched his eyes change expression. He was afraid I’d force it on him…afraid of me. Suddenly I couldn’t have given it to him, even to save his life, as long as he still refused.<\/p>\n

“Some water, then?” I offered.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know if I can keep it down,” he said honestly. To my relief, he began to relax again.<\/p>\n

“Better to have it than not, either way. The dry heaves hurt the most,” I pointed out.<\/p>\n

“Very true, Miss McNair.” Suddenly he was meek as a choirboy, except for the wicked glint in his eye. “And you’re the one will have to clean it up, too. Yes, I’ll have some water, please.”<\/p>\n

At least he could sip from a cup instead of having the water spooned into his mouth. I supported him while he drank, laid him back down to examine the shoulder–which was looking much better than I’d expected–and folded my petticoat over the top edge of the blanket to protect him from its scratchy wool and moldy stink. It was all the comfort I could find to give him. There didn’t even seem to be something for a pillow.<\/p>\n

I used the blood-stained rags, which were almost dry again by now, to mop up the mess on the floor. Smudges of blood were an improvement over half-digested beans. After that I took the rags, used bandages, and his suit outside and scrubbed them with snow until at least the worst stains were a little less noticeable. That took quite some time, long enough that I finally calmed down and could think the situation through with a cooler head. I only wished the cooler head could come up with more pleasant conclusions.<\/p>\n

My old john the mine foreman only gave me the one piece of advice, on the day I watched a man we both knew well ruin a pretty good poker hand with discards even I could see were foolish. After I told him the story, more as a joke than anything else, he had shaken his head sadly and commented, “When a careful man gets careless all of a sudden, his friends better look after him real particular, or else get a long ways gone. It generally means he’s wanting something to solve his problems for him–in a final sort of way. You remember that, girl; it’s handy to know if you spend much time around high-stakes poker games.” Sure enough, not many days later that same imprudent poker player made a mistake setting up a blasting pattern in the mine, and died in the explosion. Unfortunately for my john, that was the time he’d gone down to watch, in hopes of coming up with a safer procedure. It lost me a nice steady income and my best chance of getting out of the saloon before I got too old for the work. He wasn’t the man of any girl’s dreams, but he’d have made a decent husband. Instead, what I had left of him was his handy advice, which wasn’t at all a bad legacy. Two or three times since then I’d been able to head off bad trouble in the saloon by keeping it in mind.<\/p>\n

But this was Adam Cartwright making stupid mistakes and taking unnecessary risks. If he survived this mess, there’d be another one along, probably fairly soon. He was a cattleman, he worked with timber; occupations almost as dangerous as mining, even for men who gave all their attention to what they were doing. More dangerous than mining, perhaps, for a man who’d stopped taking precautions. Thinking about that knotted my stomach up.<\/p>\n

I knew the real problem might have very little to do with the papers in my carpetbag. That Gould and Curry miner hadn’t been losing money he didn’t have at poker, hadn’t been unhappy with his job; he’d found out his wife was cheating on him, we learned after the accident. On the other hand, if I wanted a way into the oystershell armor Adam had clamped around himself, that stupid package was the only oyster knife around.<\/p>\n

As I’d expected, Adam asked for his papers back as soon as I went inside the shack. I ignored him as long as I could by fiddling with the fire and the pot with its current batch of beans and jerky. Finally I turned around, pot in one hand and spoon in the other. “I almost burned all your papers up to get this fire going last night. What would you have done today if I had?”<\/p>\n

“Talked my way out of it. They’d have believed us after a while–being professionals.”<\/p>\n

“Then can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t burn what’s left of them now?”<\/p>\n

“I assume asking you not to wouldn’t be good enough.” He wanted to sound angry, but could only manage a rather weak sarcasm. When I shook my head, he thought for a few moments before trying again. “Why\u00a0should<\/i>\u00a0you burn them now everything’s over?”<\/p>\n

I put the pot down on the floor with a thump. “What if those men find out they weren’t hired to recover timber contracts? Or if they’re not the only ones looking for you?”<\/p>\n

He really hadn’t thought past one encounter; I saw the flinch as he recognized I might be right. He came back to the argument, though, as I’d so often seen him come off the floor in a fight. “You said the telegraph line was down. How would they learn they had the wrong papers? How would anyone else know where we are?”<\/p>\n

“We don’t know about the other side of the mountain. The line could be up from San Francisco all the way to the pass.”<\/p>\n

“Not likely. That side of the mountains usually gets the worst of the storms.”<\/p>\n

“Our visitors came from that direction,” I pointed out. Before he could think up a retort, I put a temporary stop to the discussion by inquiring, “Can you face a little food yet? There’s some meat in this besides the beans; it should taste better than the last batch.”<\/p>\n

I got a few spoonfuls of the stuff into him and finished it off myself–and it did taste a little better, though not much. Strangely enough, that gave me some courage to go on.<\/p>\n

“You haven’t thought this through very carefully, you know. In your condition, you really shouldn’t keep those papers with you. If you don’t have them, you’re right; someone would believe they’d been destroyed–after they searched you. So as I see it, you’ve only two choices. Either I burn the lot now, or I take them on to Virginia City for you.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I lifted a finger and kept on talking. “Right now, I’m inclined to keep things simple and burn them.”<\/p>\n

“Why?” He’d be back to his protest all too soon, I was sure, but curiosity won out for the moment.<\/p>\n

“Because I don’t know how much more danger you’ve created with your carelessness,” I said bluntly.<\/p>\n

I expected my frankness would draw a strong reaction from Adam. I didn’t expect him to bite down on his lip and consider my words in silence. I certainly didn’t expect him to break that silence by agreeing with me. “Carelessness,” he repeated, like an admission of sin. “I knew a foreman at the Gould and Curry who used to say, ‘There’s carelessness, and there’s trying to get yourself killed.’ Sometimes he’d add, ‘Ain’t right to go down the mine if you’re not set on coming back.'” His voice turned from sour to bitter. “Didn’t keep him from getting killed, of course. Neither did being a foreman. I wonder if miners first came up with the idea of predestination….” He stared past me at the wall, apparently thinking hard again. I racked my brains, trying to remember if he knew I’d been that foreman’s regular squeeze. “That was one thing Pa couldn’t give me advice about, of course. A Cartwright doesn’t admit people ever think like that. We certainly don’t get that way ourselves.”<\/p>\n

The self-directed sneer in his voice was impossible to miss. He was going to hate me the rest of his life for this, I thought sadly. “So you understand my concerns, Mr. Cartwright. You don’t blame me for hesitating to carry those papers for you.”<\/p>\n

“No, but I can blame you for being foolish enough to consider such a thing, when you don’t even know what’s in that packet.” Now he was trying to smile again, to convince me that nothing was really as important as I was making it out to be. In a moment he’d agree to let me burn the papers, and I’d have lost my only chance to get at what really mattered. I said goodbye to ten years of silly fantasies, jabbed my oyster knife into his shell as hard as I could, and twisted the blade.<\/p>\n

“It isn’t what you’re carrying that worries me, Mr. Cartwright. It’s why you want it carried.”<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

I had seen so many things in Adam’s eyes over the past day. Now it seemed even the memory of all his playfulness, his mischief, even the darker flickers of pain and anger and fear, drained from his expression like water into dry sand. “I can’t tell you that, Miss McNair.” His voice was as flat as his eyes, as cold as the stone to which he seemingly had turned.<\/p>\n

“Please, Mr. Cartwright, let’s not be hasty. Let me tell you a story first and then…maybe we can come to some arrangement.”<\/p>\n

Adam’s face didn’t soften as he nodded. “By all means tell your story, Miss McNair. It would certainly be a more pleasant way of passing the time than we’ve managed so far.”<\/p>\n

I folded my hands in my lap and took a few deep breaths before I started. “Back in ’57 I was at Placerville. It was a pretty wild place then, as I’m sure you remember.” Wild enough it had nearly gotten Adam and his father hanged, though that wasn’t the story I had in mind. Adam pressed his lips together at the reference but waited for me to continue.<\/p>\n

“There were always miners coming in from their claims to get supplies, get drunk, get a woman–” I saw his brief surprise at my crudeness and hurried on before I lost my courage. “One day one of them rented a room over the saloon for a night and me to go with it. There was a bad place on his hip that oozed and stank. It really needed a doctor, but he insisted he’d take care of it himself–only I was the one had to do it, since he couldn’t see the place clearly. So up we went with a knife and a bottle of whiskey, and he made me tie him down and get to work….” It was not an easy memory, even all these years later. “I stuck the knife in where he told me, and this…this filth gushed out….”<\/p>\n

“I know what that sort of infection can be like,” Adam said quietly. “Please don’t distress yourself trying to describe it.”<\/p>\n

I breathed in slowly and got my stomach back under control. “Well, then. He made me squeeze his…leg…until everything seemed to have come out, and then I had to wash it all clean with the whiskey, and tie it up in a fresh cloth. And as soon as I was finished he was ready for some of what he’d come to town for, though he’d limped in looking half-way to death. He had him a wild good time until he died about a week later of severe lead poisoning–you know, the kind that comes out of a gun. I can’t say I was sorry.” He’d been my first. I’d had plenty worse since then, but not many more upsetting. “Anyway, when we laid him out for burying, that place on his hip was clean and pink and almost healed.” I took another deep breath and looked him full in the face. “Now tell me again, Mr. Cartwright, why you want your packet to get to Virginia City.”<\/p>\n

Adam’s lips had twitched at the ‘lead poisoning’ comment, but he was serious again by the time I finished, and I was sure from his silence he had taken my point. He spent a long time deciding what to do before he finally cleared his throat. “It’s a long story,” he said apologetically, “but two years ago I was robbed in the desert after a cattle drive into Eastgate. They took my horse and my water as well as the money.”<\/p>\n

That much everyone knew. I lifted an eyebrow, copying one of his favorite expressions, and waited for more.<\/p>\n

“About dusk that same day I came across a prospector, a man named Peter Kane, who shared his supplies with me. If he hadn’t…well, he did, and I agreed to stay with him a few days to help in his mine. He said he was almost at the big strike he’d been after for twenty years; we would find the main vein and come out of the desert together. He’d been there a long time alone, just him and his mule. He called it Epicene–that means…well, never mind. It was a clever name.\u00a0He<\/i>\u00a0was clever, educated. The delay was going to worry my family, but I couldn’t refuse him, and I thought…I really thought I’d enjoy his company.”<\/p>\n

It was clear from the catch in his voice that he hadn’t. I remembered the man who’d come home and almost wished I’d kept my mouth shut.<\/p>\n

“He never intended to let me leave. What he wanted–and I still can’t say why–was to make me kill him. Maybe I did. I was willing enough at the end…. By the time he admitted there was nothing in his mine we were both not…thinking clearly. They found me trying to walk out of the desert, pulling him on a travois, but he was dead. I don’t know when he died, or why. I can’t remember the last part very well. God only knows what I finally did to him.”<\/p>\n

It wasn’t cursing, the way he said it, just a statement of fact. This from a man who had–more than once–pulled a gun on a posse of his friends to make sure a murderer was brought back for trial instead of being lynched. A man famous for always thinking twice before he acted, however deeply he’d been insulted, however angry he was.<\/p>\n

“The first three days he had me working hard–at least, it seemed hard at the time. The third night we had an argument. I wanted to leave, but he shot the mule. That’s when the real nightmare started. After that he worked me at gunpoint…. Kept me in the sun any time I was out of the mine. Made me eat with my fingers. I was filthy by then; I couldn’t even get my hands clean first. Took back his spare bedroll and threw me a worn-out saddle blanket to sleep under. Do you know how cold it gets in the high desert at night? Then the night I tried to escape, that was just another part of the game…. He was waiting for me, and after he forced me back into camp he sat me on a stool by his tentpole and hobbled me with the ropes he’d used on the mule. He’d put out an unloaded gun for me to steal, and a canteen full of sand. Our water was gone, he told me.\u00a0My<\/i>\u00a0water was gone, right enough. He was still shaving each morning, but I didn’t learn what he’d hidden for another four days….”<\/p>\n

Even I know you can’t last four full days without water. “But…how?”<\/p>\n

“There was a seep at the very back of the mine. Just a trickle of mud, but it was wet. And I chipped a pisspot for myself in the adit floor, so…. An animal really will do anything to survive.” He sounded more disgusted with himself than I felt, once he’d told me. Prospectors bandied around tall tales like this often enough in saloons. It just didn’t go with the man who’d been travelling with me in his tailored suit, crisp white shirt and silky black string tie. Still didn’t, however filthy and torn those good clothes had become.<\/p>\n

“Cartwrights do what they must,” I quoted. It was a cliche in Virginia City, more admiring than some of the ones muttered behind their backs.<\/p>\n

“I haven’t finished,” Adam said through gritted teeth. Now he had begun talking about the desert, it seemed he couldn’t stop. His face was darkening again with fever flush, and sweat had begun to gather on his forehead. Every breath he took was carefully measured, so I also guessed his ribs were sore. I wondered if he would have managed better for himself without my attempts to assist him.<\/p>\n

“They were looking for me–my father, my brothers. Almost found me, two days later. The camp was tucked down at the base of some cliffs, and they were at the top, signalling and calling. I heard their gunshot. I heard Pa calling me, and I tried to climb up to him, but the rocks were so steep…. Kane pulled me back, threw me down at his feet. And I folded. Pa’s voice echoing all around me, and all I could do was lie there and gasp like a dying fish. Didn’t try to call back. Didn’t try to get up again. Just lay there….”<\/p>\n

“Sometimes folding is all you can do,” I ventured.<\/p>\n

“You don’t fold if you’re not playing poker,” Adam said as if quoting one of the Ten Commandments. “He got me to fold. It didn’t even take him very long. Six days from shooting the mule was all.”<\/p>\n

Six days of hunger and thirst and humiliation sounded very long to me.<\/p>\n

“I just did what he told me, after that. I stopped thinking for myself, I went along with his nasty game. I folded.”<\/p>\n

“Are you sure the two of you were playng for the same pot, that hand?”<\/p>\n

He’d been over this rutted road so often in his mind a new question made no sense to him. His brows came together as he frowned.<\/p>\n

“Didn’t you say he had a gun on you whenever you were out of the mine?” I prompted him.<\/p>\n

Adam turned away from me, as if suspecting I was about to offer him an excuse. “He put it down to grab me off the rocks. Didn’t need to pick it up again.”<\/p>\n

“He would have if you’d gone on resisting. Suppose he’d aimed up? Suppose he shot your pa and your brothers like he shot his own mule?”<\/p>\n

He pursed up his lips, thinking through not just what I’d said, but its implications. “I didn’t consider that.”<\/p>\n

“Is it always considering with you? Can’t you just have done the best thing you could do without having to think?”<\/p>\n

The mouth relaxed into a smile, though a tired one, still with reservations. “You’ve shuffled up your Cartwrights, Lilah Rose. Brother Joe’s the one knows what to do without thinking.”<\/p>\n

He might have slapped me, the shock was so great–but at the same time I was glad just to see that weak smile. “Little Joe thinks, often enough. Is it so impossible sometimes you might just react?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t know,” he said simply. “I don’t know that I ever have.”<\/p>\n

I knew he had; I’d seen him in bar fights often enough. But if he thought he didn’t, nothing I said was going to change his mind. I went back to the poker game instead. Men playing poker, at least, were something I understood.<\/p>\n

“You dealt yourself a bad hand at Eastgate, and you didn’t get one single helpful card the rest of the way, did you?”<\/p>\n

He took the deepest breath he dared and let it out slowly. “No,” he admitted.<\/p>\n

“And the stakes couldn’t have been much higher. Your life. Your family’s lives.”<\/p>\n

A nod.<\/p>\n

“Only other man I ever saw in a spot that tight didn’t make it. He tried dealing from the bottom of the deck and got shot.”<\/p>\n

This smile was twisted, bitter. “Maybe the only difference is that I wasn’t caught.”<\/p>\n

“You can’t cheat and fold at the same time,” I reminded him. “And I don’t see you did either of them. Seems to me this Kane was dealing off the bottom from the start, and you were the one playing honest.”<\/p>\n

“I didn’t want to play!” It was almost a shout, and echoed in the small room. “He planned the games, he set the rules…all I wanted was a way out. A way back home. I didn’t want to kill him, and I didn’t want to die. And what I wanted made no difference!”<\/p>\n

“You didn’t kill him,” I said with all the confidence I could muster. “And you didn’t die.”<\/p>\n

It wasn’t enough to convince him. “I didn’t have my hands on him when he died, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t kill him. I told you God only knows what happened, and God isn’t telling me. I couldn’t save myself, either. They<\/i> found me and rescued me. They<\/i> brought me home.” There was no gratitude in Adam’s voice, and the twist of his mouth was no longer any sort of smile.<\/p>\n

“Have you told them what happened?”<\/p>\n

“A little. The outlines. That there was a man; that I had to work for him.” He swallowed hard. “That I may have…caused his death. Not the rest. Not what I told you.”<\/p>\n

“Don’t you think you ought to tell them more?”<\/p>\n

There was a brief pause. “I don’t think I could stand knowing that they knew….”<\/p>\n

Well, that’s why saloon girls learn so many secrets. We aren’t real people. Nobody cares what we know.<\/p>\n

“…except Hoss…and I couldn’t tell him either. It would hurt him too much. He isn’t as tough as he looks, you know.”<\/p>\n

And I wasn’t? I thought, but I did know what he meant. Adam’s middle brother, though built on the lines of an elephant, hated seeing anything suffer. Listening to what Adam had gone through would be harder for Hoss than undergoing it himself. As for Little Joe, and their awe-inspiring father Ben–those were the two people in all the world Adam most needed to believe him unbreakable. Even sharing ‘the outlines’ with them must have felt like one more victory for Kane.<\/p>\n

Maybe it was just as well, for his sake, that saloon girls aren’t real people.<\/p>\n

“There’s more to it than that, of course,” Adam said a little while later. “I mean, if you want to understand about the papers.”<\/p>\n

It was clear from the tone of his voice that the most difficult part of the story was over. Seeing it through to the end might not be necessary, but if this was a kind of medicine, I thought he’d better take the full dose. “Go on,” I encouraged him.<\/p>\n

“I knew it was going to be hard the first time I had to go back in a mine,” he said slowly. “But it wasn’t at all like what I expected. It wasn’t the mine itself that bothered me…it was the miners. It was seeing all those men getting ready to go down somewhere they might never come back from, because someone else had ordered them to…. Don’t misunderstand me, Miss McNair. Kane’s place was a rathole mine in solid rock, about as safe as a mine can get. The Comstock mines aren’t like that. Square-set timbering’s a wonderful protection, but there’s plenty else to go wrong, and sooner or later it always does. That didn’t bother me when it was my choice to go down in one, but after Kane…well, I wondered how much choice those men thought they had. And that was when I found I couldn’t breathe. I never got past the changing-room…I turned and bolted like a rabbit.”<\/p>\n

He was calm, almost cheerful sounding now. This was something he’d forgiven himself for, I realized.<\/p>\n

“The foreman who’d been planning to tour the stopes with me went off in a huff and I stood there trying to calm down enough to mount my horse without panicking him. There were miners coming off shift, men who’d seen me run out, and one of them came over and said to me, ‘It’s all right, Mr. Cartwright. Can’t see why a man who don’t have to’d ever want to go down a mine.’ And I realized I knew him. He had lost two brothers a year before when a hoist rope broke and a bucket fell where it shouldn’t have, and\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0was trying to comfort\u00a0me<\/i>. Nothing like a good dose of shame to put a man back on his feet.” He laughed at that, and I ventured a smile in return. “So I thanked him politely and offered him a drink, and a little while later he was telling me how he needed to make a speech in a few days, and couldn’t think how he’d find the courage. Turned out he was one of the founders of the Miners’ Protective Association.”<\/p>\n

I nodded, feeling rather confused. What I’d heard of the M.P.A. made it out to be a muddled sort of thing that had collapsed under the weight of its own overconfidence. The mine foremen and supervisors had joked about it, and so had a good many miners. Adam Cartwright didn’t sound like he had found it comical. “So you helped him?”<\/p>\n

“Every way I could,” Adam said, and it was impossible to miss the satisfaction in his voice.<\/p>\n

“But why?”<\/p>\n

“Because he was doing the right thing. Only the miners look out for the miners, Miss McNair. Believe me, the shareholders don’t. Get the ore out as fast and as cheaply as you can–but you mustn’t cut corners maintaining the machines, you know. So where does that leave the workmen? And if there’s one thing Kane taught me, it’s what the man in charge can do to the men underneath him.” His voice was starting to rise again, and he broke off a moment to take a deep breath. More quietly, he went on, “The Ponderosa can’t afford to sell out of our mining investments. Without them we’d be only one drought or one fire away from ruin. So I do what I can for the men who make us the money we can’t afford to do without. And when I start remembering the desert, I can remind myself that good men have got a tangible benefit from what I went through there. Maybe it’s why my bad dreams don’t turn into nightmares. It’s worth a beating to me, anyway.”<\/p>\n

Finally the whole tangled story began to make sense. “So that’s what these papers are all about.”<\/p>\n

“They’re about to start a new union in Gold Hill. My friend wanted to know how people in San Francisco might react–whether the mine owners would be willing to listen to what a union said. That’s the record of what I learned. It would be worth a lot of money to someone who wanted to speculate on share prices, but of course no one would ever do anything like that….”<\/p>\n

There might be people in Virginia City who wouldn’t, but only because they couldn’t afford to buy shares to speculate with. I couldn’t help grinning back at him. “All right. I’ll carry your packet to Virginia City.”<\/p>\n

“Thank you,” he said, all seriousness again, and then, as if he’d finished an exhausting day’s work, he let out a long sigh, closed his eyes and fell asleep.<\/p>\n

If he had any dreams that night, good or bad, they were quiet ones.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Next morning Adam was still weak enough, or possibly strong enough, that he finally accepted some laudanum. He didn’t even argue with me over the dose; this time I was the one who had used it before, and he respected my experience as much as he did his own–maybe even more than I trusted it myself.<\/p>\n

The sun was a lot brighter and the air a little warmer than it had been, but there was still no sign of anyone from the stagecoach line. A band of ragged-looking men did gather a little way from the shack, commenting on the smoke from its chimney. I met them in the doorway, Adam’s pistol in my hand, and told them we had no papers or anything else they might want, but I’d kill anyone looking for trouble. Whether because they believed we weren’t worth bothering with, they believed I really would shoot if they argued, or they hadn’t been planning to rob us at all, they backed away with their hands in the air and then ran. Adam slept through it all. When he did wake up, some hours later, I gave him a cup of water, some beans and another dose of laudanum to put him asleep again. Like the bunch of miners, he didn’t argue with me.<\/p>\n

By midafternoon, however, Adam was awake again and no longer in a mood for going back to sleep. He blinked up at me, eyes surprisingly bright in his bruised and swollen face, and said, “Confess it. I look well rested and ready for action.”<\/p>\n

“You look like a man who slid down a mountain face first,” I said, trying to match his tone of voice. “How do you feel?”<\/p>\n

“About what you’d expect for a man who fell down a mountain,” he admitted. With his left hand he was exploring the sore spots of his head and face. “Thank you for shaving me yesterday morning. It’ll be a while before I can do that again.”<\/p>\n

A saloon girl would have made a joke; a proper lady would have blushed. I was too tired to decide which I wanted to be, so I poked at the fire and offered him some more beans. He came up behind me and looked into the pot over my shoulder. “Is that all you know how to cook, Lilah Rose?”<\/p>\n

“I’m afraid you left the oysters in the other sack,” I said, and forced a smile. His breath was warm on my cheek as he chuckled in response. With his sound arm he reached around me to take the spoon away. I edged sideways and left him with the pot, hoping his good manners would keep him from following. They did, of course. He ate his few mouthfuls of beans without turning around, and moved well away from the fire before he suggested I take my share.<\/p>\n

As I ate, I heard the rustle of paper behind me. By the time I had the next batch of beans simmering, Adam was back beside the bed, spreading the blanket smooth. When I checked inside my carpetbag, I was surprised to find not only the packet still where I’d tucked it but also a small stack of bank notes. “Mr. Cartwright, I can’t take this money,” I stammered. “I’ve done nothing to be paid for.”<\/p>\n

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “But you’ve ruined all the clothing you had with you and spent several days worrying over me. It seems the least a gentleman could do in the circumstances would be to provide you with a room at the International House so you could recover from your ordeal–and replenish your wardrobe.”<\/p>\n

I wasn’t sure what to make of the hotel room. Perhaps he saw that in my face; he leaned against the wall and looked towards the fire, away from me again. “I’ll probably need a day or two at the way station before I’ll be ready to travel. When I get to Virginia City I hope you won’t mind receiving me at the hotel so I can be sure you finished your journey safely.”<\/p>\n

“Of course,” I murmured. By now it felt like we were reciting lines from a play about two people very unlike us.<\/p>\n

“Now, the packet. My brother Hoss was supposed to meet me at the stagecoach. If he’s there, just give it to him and tell him I sent it. He’ll know what to do. If he isn’t, give it to Roy Coffee instead, and ask him to pass it on to Hoss from me. You won’t have any trouble recognizing either of them, will you?”<\/p>\n

“Oh, no.”<\/p>\n

“Good. Now why don’t you let me worry about the beans while you get a little rest yourself?”<\/p>\n

I tried to come up with a polite refusal and couldn’t find the words. It was so much easier just to stumble over to the bed, stretch out, and close my eyes.<\/p>\n

The search party from the stagecoach line arrived midmorning the next day, in one of the sleighs they ran for winter travel. While I tidied up the shack and got Adam as comfortably packed onto the sleigh as I could, one of the men diligently restocked the woodpile. Others brought down what they could find of Adam’s luggage. It was a good thing he’d recovered his shaving kit that first day, because the miners I’d chased off had apparently picked the wreck over pretty well since then, but he admitted with a lazy smile that he was looking forward to fresh clothing almost as much as a meal not composed primarily of beans. Fortunately I was able to deflect the man who was about to slap him on the shoulder as they laughed.<\/p>\n

Sleighs were far more comfortable for the passengers than stagecoaches, I discovered. If I ever went back to California–even only as far as Placerville–I would do it in midwinter, and keep a basket of decent food with me throughout. It might have been the sheer relief of being away from the shack, warmed by the sun and surrounded by armed and protective men, that made the short journey to the next station seem so pleasant, or it might have been the fact that Adam Cartwright was next to me, large as life and half as handsome, but apparently in spirits as cheerful as mine. Leaving Adam behind at the station didn’t dampen my mood much. The sleigh’s driver was one of those rare men who could speak his mind plainly about the most indelicate subjects yet do so with such simple innocence that even the most propriety-ridden matron would find it hard to take offence. He settled it with himself almost at once that I’d been a lucky woman to have a Cartwright blocking that broken stagecoach door with his body to protect me during the accident. On the other hand, he reckoned it was an equally lucky thing there’d been someone along to care for the young man afterwards. It didn’t take long to die in the mountains if you were cold, injured, and alone, he pointed out with detached cheerfulness. I decided to stay east of the Sierras for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

The road had been passably well cleared and the sleigh made surprisingly good time, pausing only to change horses and once to wire ahead with news of the accident after we reached a station where the telegraph was still working. We swept into Virginia City well after dark, about the time the mines changed shifts to judge by the crowds in the streets. Hoss Cartwright and Sheriff Coffee were both waiting at the depot, along with an excited knot of idlers eager to hear more about the accident. Sheriff Coffee gave me a shrewd glance but stepped back to allow Hoss to help me down. Not to my surprise, Hoss immediately asked after his brother.<\/p>\n

“He’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Badly bruised and his right hand and shoulder were injured, but I think he’s planning to be on the next coach…sleigh…vehicle. He asked me to bring you this.” I held out the handful of papers, still in their pink ribbon binding.<\/p>\n

Hoss palmed the packet without looking down from my face. “You’re sure we don’t need to go to him, ma’am?” he persisted.<\/p>\n

“I think he’d rather not have anyone see him until he can shave again,” I said. “Certainly not his father.” A momentary vision of the other three Cartwrights crowding around Adam’s bed at the way station swept into my mind and nearly smothered me; I knew as clearly as if Adam were screaming in my ear that I had to keep them away from him for the moment.<\/p>\n

The big man beside me smiled and nodded, but I saw the momentary wrinkle in his brow and knew Hoss understood what I hadn’t said. “Yeah, Adam can be like that,” he agreed. “Thank you for taking care of him, ma’am. Reckon he was right lucky if he’s only lost his good looks for a time.”<\/p>\n

I wondered if he had been worried about hired professionals from San Francisco. “He’ll be fine,” I repeated earnestly, and hoped I was telling the truth.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Hoss escorted me to the International House, carrying my carpetbag, and even helped me register. I was received there as if I were an old friend of the Cartwright family, someone due all the best the hotel had to offer. No mention was made of my bedraggled and stained skirts or the fact I was still wrapped in a buffalo robe a man from the stagecoach line had lent me. The manager himself escorted me up to my room–I’d had to work quite hard not to be given the most expensive suite available–and wished me a pleasant night’s sleep. I had no doubts I’d manage\u00a0that<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The next day I took Adam’s advice and replenished my wardrobe. I’d never been given such attentive service in a shop; everyone knew I was the lady who’d cared for the eldest Cartwright son after our accident in the mountains, and no one, apparently, knew anything else about me. I spent a little more than was absolutely necessary on the one dress I chose to join my pile of petticoats and stockings–well, I’d get a long time’s use out of it, since it was only meant for Sundays. My working clothing was safely packed up at a friend’s lodgings, if she hadn’t worn it into rags herself while I was away. When I went back to the International House for dinner I discovered I was a celebrity now, as sought after a dinner companion as any of the divas who sang at the Opera House. I ordered oysters, in personal celebration, which sadly proved to be less tasty than I’d expected. The men who shared my table drank my health in champagne, and didn’t seem disappointed when I offered them nothing but a bright smile in return.<\/p>\n

At ten in the morning the next day–the stagecoach line was even back on schedule again!–another sleigh came into town, and Adam Cartwright presented himself at the International House not long afterwards. The management suggested we meet in one of the small alcoves off the main dining room, where late in the evening men would settle to play cards for even higher stakes than I was used to in the Silver Dollar. It was a way to allow us some privacy without compromising the good reputation I didn’t actually possess. I was reminded, once again, that no one yet connected the heroine of the hour with an aging saloon girl who’d left the Silver Dollar six months earlier. Guests at the International House often did regular business in Virginia City, but they weren’t residents, and they seldom went to even the best saloons, since the public rooms at the hotel were justly famous. I’d picked the dress shop precisely because I’d never dared go in it before, and doubted I’d ever have money enough to afford its goods again. I wouldn’t be able to escape my ill-fame much longer, I knew. I’d come to Virginia City earlier than most of its good citizens, though no one ever honored my kind of ‘first settler.’ It was only a matter of time before one of my old clients recognized me.<\/p>\n

Adam had, of course, and it hadn’t affected his behavior much. But then, he was a Cartwright, and they held themselves above such petty social niceties–one of the reasons so many of Virginia City’s finest citizens resented them at times.<\/p>\n

I was wearing my new Sunday dress–new clothes all the way to the skin, which braced my spirit as much as my figure–and Adam took a moment just to admire me. “You look greatly refreshed, Lilah Rose. Did everything go well?”<\/p>\n

“Yes, I gave the papers to Hoss right away.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, I knew that.” He smiled at me when I blushed. “I just wanted to be sure there weren’t any complications. Was your journey pleasant?”<\/p>\n

“Why, of course. Everyone’s been very kind.”<\/p>\n

“No more than you deserve,” he said, and lifted my hand to his lips. For a brief moment, I let everything I thought I’d thrown away at the shack wash back over me, and then I pushed it to the back of my mind, where I’d always kept my dreams.<\/p>\n

I’d known there was no chance of those dreams coming true even when I was just starting out in Placerville, and my experience since then only made it clearer why. Lots of men married girls out of saloons, and often it turned out well for the men and the girls. If my john the foreman had asked me, I’d have said yes without hesitating. No one much cared where a man like that found his woman, or how long he’d had her before she put on his wedding ring. Any gossip we inspired wouldn’t have bothered him any–or me very much. Such talk wouldn’t have gone on for long, either; the people he worked with had too many other problems in their lives.<\/p>\n

A Cartwright, though, wouldn’t get off so lightly. Virginia City’s elite wouldn’t see anything desireable about one of their most eligible men throwing himself at a piece of trash out of a saloon. They’d have fancier words to use instead of ‘trash,’ and they’d make sure to use them as often as possible, and as unpleasantly. What’s more, it would never die away. People would whisper behind my back as long as I lived–no, longer. After all, rumors about Marie Cartwright still circulated, and she’d been dead for almost twenty years. There wouldn’t just be rumors about me. Half the mine owners in town had bought me drinks–or paid for something else–at one time or another. Adam was too proud a man to simply ignore gossip about his wife, and I’d already seen how poison, once set, could fester in him. One day he’d catch himself believing some piece of spite or other, and then it would just be a matter of time before his guilt or his shame ate up any happiness we might have. No, thank you.<\/p>\n

Making him understand that, without implying that he cared what other people said, would be quite difficult. I didn’t even try. Instead I resorted to every woman’s best defense against a gentleman; I resolutely ignored every attempt he made to indicate his interest in me. His final effort was uncharacteristicly awkward and direct. “Aren’t you even curious that I knew your name was Lilah Rose?”<\/p>\n

If he really wanted to tell me that, I supposed I should listen. “How did you know?”<\/p>\n

“Back when they used Julia’s Palace as a hospital during the epidemic, you were one of the girls that did the nursing, weren’t you?”<\/p>\n

I nodded.<\/p>\n

“Hoss and I teased Little Joe a lot that all the pretty girls helping out then were after him, and one day he said no, Lilah Rose thought I hung the moon and the stars. I thought he was just teasing me back. I’m glad I found out that he wasn’t.”<\/p>\n

“That was a long time ago,” I said quietly.<\/p>\n

After a pause he replied, “If that’s how you want it, all right.” He picked up his hat and coat and started for the door, then turned back to add softly, “You really are a very poor actress, Lilah Rose.”<\/p>\n

“Lilah Rose is my working name,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “I was christened Marianne.”<\/p>\n

He gave me a long grave look. “I see. Well, thank you again…and good bye, Miss McNair. I hope things work out for you.”<\/p>\n

Miss McNair, indeed. No one else who knew me in Virginia City had ever called me\u00a0that<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I spent all the cash I could spare being Miss McNair at the International House for one more night before I packed up my pride and went down to the Silver Dollar to beg for my old job back. The first two girls I saw there were freshfaced strangers, so I guessed I wasn’t needed any more. To my surprise, the bartender greeted me with a wide grin and sent someone out for the owner instead of giving me the brushoff. I was back on the payroll fast enough to turn my head, if not actually make it spin, and they even took time to make it clear to the new girls that I was their senior and had prior claim to any man who came in.<\/p>\n

Well,\u00a0there<\/i>\u00a0was a tangible benefit to my stagecoach ride with Adam Cartwright, I decided.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

After the harsh early start to that winter, the weather didn’t let up much for months. None of the Cartwrights came into the Silver Dollar between Christmas and Easter, to no one’s particular surprise. They usually stayed pretty close to their ranch in wintertime and there had been enough recent strikes on the Comstock that business at every Virginia City saloon was jumping. There wasn’t much time to think about what was past and done with, so I didn’t, but all the same when Adam Cartwright came in one fine spring day I noticed him as soon as he cleared the door. He collected a glass of whiskey and settled at an empty table from which he systematically scanned the room until he found me supervising the noisy poker game in the corner. After that he stared at me until I looked directly back at him, then raised his eyebrows.<\/p>\n

I smiled my brassiest saloon-girl smile and gave him a very small shake of my head.<\/p>\n

He smiled back–a little wistfully, perhaps?–dipped his head in an equally tiny nod, finished his drink and stood up. In the doorway he paused again to put on his hat, glanced back at me one more time, and tapped two fingers against his hat brim before pushing his way onto the street. There was a moment’s pause as the crowded saloon considered what had just happened, but the buzz was soon back to its normal level, and the poker game I was trying to keep a friendly spiraled along its inevitable way to a fist fight. At least no one pulled any iron.<\/p>\n

Pinkie grabbed my arm as we came off shift together, flushed with vicarious excitement as well as with rouge and alcohol. “How on earth did you get Adam Cartwright\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0interested in you?”<\/p>\n

I didn’t much like Pinkie, who almost deserved such a vulgar name, but she was one of the few girls still working who remembered the early days at the Palace, so I always tried to be nice to her. Instead of brushing her off I said, with as pleasant a smile as I could manage, “Oh, he’s not interested in me, really. Just being polite, is all.”<\/p>\n

She gave me a knowing smirk. “Now I saw him…only a little encouragement and you’d have been in his lap for the evening. Or as long as you liked. Fancy passing up a chance like that, at our age! I wouldn’t have.”<\/p>\n

My smile was getting stiff, but I managed to keep it in place. “At our age there’s no sense in going starry-eyed over a man’s lap. You know as well as I do how these things go. Even if he were serious–and I’m not saying he is–there’s no chance anything would come of it.”<\/p>\n

“C’mon, a Cartwright? Wouldn’t even be like work. Any one of ’em knows how to please a girl. And I tell you,\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0one’s never looked at a girl that way before.”<\/p>\n

Not one in a saloon, anyway, I thought.<\/p>\n

Pinkie prattled on. “You make your play for him instead of wasting your time at those poker tables, you’ll have a ring on your finger and be set for life in no time.”<\/p>\n

“It wouldn’t last,” I said as calmly as I could manage, and started to walk faster.<\/p>\n

“The money would, and the memories–that’s good enough for me.” She must have seen in my expression how much I disagreed with her, because she dropped her eyes a moment and sounded almost contrite when she went on, “Or get him off to live in San Francisco. I’ve seen you be the high-and-mighty lady, Rose. You’d make him a fine wife somewheres no one knew you’d been one of us.”<\/p>\n

Maybe it was her calling me Rose, and not Lilah, that pinched out the lit fuse on my anger, or maybe it was just that I wished I agreed with her. “I’m sure you mean well,” I said sincerely, “so let’s stop teasing ourselves. He’d never leave the Ponderosa. You know the Cartwrights; they can’t breathe apart from each other.”<\/p>\n

But I was wrong there. When Adam touched his hat to me that last time, he already had tickets in his pocket; tickets to go east to St. Joseph, and Chicago, and finally Boston, on a journey that unwound all the journeys in his past to leave him almost where he once began. I was working in the saloon the day he left and only found out he was gone when the others came in for a quick drink before they started home again. You might have thought they’d sent him off in a coffin instead of a stagecoach, they looked so miserable. He still writes home, every week if he can, and all Virginia City knows when one of his letters arrives.<\/p>\n

They say he’s happy, now. I wonder. I’m not sure he ever can be, caring as much as he does for so many different things.<\/p>\n

He’ll be back, though. Sooner or later, for richer or poorer, in sickness or health, he’ll be back. His family holds his heart, and he can’t live away from it forever.<\/p>\n

Maybe, once he’s home, he’ll come into the Silver Dollar for a drink and smile at me again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Next Story in the Aftermaths Series:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exit Lilah Rose<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Disclaimer:<\/span>\u00a0All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: \u00a0It’s November 1865, and a winter storm and a stagecoach accident are interfering with many people’s plans…. Not so much a WHN as a What Happened Later for “The Crucible.” \u00a0<\/p>\n

Rated:\u00a0T (15,840 words)<\/p>\n

Aftermaths Series, links to all the stories within the series included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":5779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-full-width-post.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[1005,23,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adam-cartwright","category-drama","category-whn","wpcat-1005-id","wpcat-23-id","wpcat-13-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Adam-Stories.jpg?fit=637%2C480&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}