Rebellion in the Valley Page 12

  “Look here, Duffy! I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve just about had my boot full of hearing you run Tobias into the ground, and I ain’t gonna stand for it no more! Now, that man has stood still and never once has he ever taken a cheap shot at you, even though none of us would have come to your defense if’n he had of,” he stormed.

  The other ranch hand chimed in at that point with, “Yeah! Seems to me like you oughtta be more concerned with whether or not we’re ever gonna see Bruce alive again, rather than who gets to go inside the main house when he wants to. What is your problem, anyhow?”

  No need to say any more, the three men exchanged looks of disgust and spent the next hour or so in silence.

  As the day moved along, the men tugged their coats up a notch or two higher around their necks to divert the chilly winds. Their horses began to act skittish, as if they had long since become bored or would rather be anywhere else than where they were at the moment.

  In a sudden gesture of what he mistook as a rebellious spirit in his horse, one of the ranch hands yanked back on his reins to prevent it from walking crooked. His horse had suddenly taken the notion to begin backing up and kicking its hooves somewhat; at first thought, the ranch hands began to scout the ground for a snake. But then when they realized it was far too cold for snakes to be out, it was too late to think much more. The horse had reared up just ever so much, and when the ranch hand’s eyes lifted, he spied a long golden tail swishing back and forth in the not-far-enough distance.

  There sat the cat. On top of a large boulder, centered in the depths of a crag no more than fifty yards away!

  Even Duffy found himself taken aback in surprise, stunned for a moment before allowing his eyes to register what they were actually viewing right there in plain sight.

  All three men froze in the middle of the pathway and dared not even look at one another, dared not make one more movement until at last, Duffy leaned back and instructed someone to take a shot.

  He reached into his own bootleg for a meat saw that he’d kept back in case of an emergency.

  “Hey, Duffy. You told us you lost your meat saws a couple of days ago. You got stuff hid on us?”

  “I don’t hafta answer to you or nobody else,” he scolded. “You just keep your aim on that dang cat, will ya?”

  The men kicked their horses in a gentle move, just enough to get them moving along in a slow walk. With eyes on the cat, they knew very well the cat was doing the same to them.

  P

  The muffled plea for help coming from his friend’s horse is what drew Tobias’ attention toward the patch of wet grass and broken branches near the creek.

  He dropped Epoenah’s reins and stood there in the brush, ankle-deep in wet leaves and broken twigs.

  “Bruce?”

  No answer.

  “Oh, no! Bruce,” his hoarse voice coughed out a couple of curses as he made wide steps to his friend’s side; a limb off a scrub oak had gone clean through his left leg on the way down the incline – his friend had been bleeding a great deal by the large stain covering his dungarees.

  Tobias studied the leg wound cautiously. Having never seen anything like it before, he had no idea how to move the man without causing more harm than good, but thought he remembered hearing somewhere in the back of his head not to remove an object if it had gotten stuck as far as this limb had. He crouched down just enough to hold the back of his dirty hand up to Bruce’s forehead and frowned. He placed an open palm against his neck and hung his head.

  “Well, Boss,” he glanced toward his friend’s horse, “this sure is a situation, don’t ya think?” He turned his head upward to look once more at how far the owner of the Red Bone Ranch had tumbled down the canyon wall; when his gaze fell back on Bruce, he winced at the large bruise covering the side of his head, already showing a stomach-turning shade of brownish-blue.

  He stood again, his eyes scanning the terrain for saddle, bedroll, or any of Bruce’s other belongings, knowing full well what the future held out for the whinnying horse laying only feet away. A fella’s horse became his companion over time, and this one had served Bruce and the Red Bone faithfully since they bought her a couple of years earlier; the thought of putting her to rest gnawed at him to the point of feeling ill.

  Trying to fight the most unmanly act of shedding tears, Tobias hit his knees and leaned down over Bruce’s still body as a rifle shot rang out in the distance overhead.

  Chapter 17

  Duffy rubbed his chin and squinted his eyes in an attempt to focus through the haze and get a better gander at the situation.

  Where was it?

  Following the rifle blast, gray smoke dissipated into the fog; the scent seemed to linger in the air because of the hail and rain, and for a moment, the heavy sulfur odor almost covered up all the fresh pine. The men waited to regain their clear visual on the cat, motionless in the echoing clatter of wet pine needles clicking overhead.

  The ranch hand reached down to the barrel of the rifle, tugging it back upward to welcome the warmth of the barrel against his cold fingers. He ran his hands up and down the barrel with an absent-minded gesture for the warm comfort his fingers gained temporarily, eyes never leaving his prize just ahead.

  With the air cleared, the men focused on the crag and found through disbelieving eyes - the cat had vanished.

  Duffy slapped one of his hands across his pants leg and spit out, “Well, ain’t that just a fine howdy-do! We get a clean shot and there he goes; who knows if we’ll get another chance?” He grimaced a bit too much so the others would catch his disgust.

  The other two men remained still, letting their eyes do the moving instead of their mouths.

  The one in the back poked his friend in the shoulder and pointed upward just a bit. They were grinning even as Duffy’s mouth continued; they brushed past him, the reins to their horses held tight in their hands.

  “Now what in the heck,” he began to protest when he realized they weren‘t paying him any mind at all.

  When he saw the intent look on the faces of the other two men, Duffy turned his head to the same area and squinted his eyes again in order to get a better look.

  “Well, I’ll be dag-nabbed!”

  Duffy was already reaching for his rifle, but both ranch hands shook their heads and gave him a stern look.

  Recognizing the somberness in their faces, he chose to keep his tongue this time.

  “Not yet, man! Wait til she gets closer; she’s creeping little by little. Act like you don’t see her anymore and she’s bound to make her move on us. That’s when we gotta be ready.”

  The other man paused for a few seconds in consideration of the situation at hand and inquired, “What are we doing here? We don’t even know what’s going on with Tobias and Bruce. Don’t we need some kind of plan before we just go and -”

  Duffy interrupted him, scowling his disgust, something that man was getting better and better at doing.

  “I say we let Tobias take care of his own business. I mean, you two keep carrying on about how capable and how wonderful he is, I say we let him get on with his life and we get on with ours,” he grunted. “We came after a cat, so let’s bring her home. Bruce is gonna show up with Tobias in a bit anyhow, and I know we can have his cat half way skinned before he even gets home,” he stated. “That dang cat is the only reason we’re even out here. How do you think he’d feel knowing we let that cat go so she could creep on back into his ranch and help herself to even more of the meat you and I depend on to get us through the winter? Yeah, if you leave it up to me, I say we bring her home while we got the chance.”

  There wasn’t much in the world they could agree on when it came to Duffy, but this time both men nodded their heads; it didn’t make much sense to leave the thing now that they’d found her. Her gaze had set on them and they knew she would pounce even if they had decided to walk away and leave her alone.

  “Okay,” they agreed in low tones. “Let’s get this done,”

&
nbsp; The hatless man chuckled to himself. “My bet is, Tobias already has Bruce propped up against one of them boulders down there. They’re probably even hoping that last shot bagged the cat,” he thought out loud.

  Duffy grinned to himself. This was going even better than he thought it would …

  P

  Knowing somewhere in the back of his head the gunshot he’d just heard was a sure sign Duffy had things pretty well taken care of, Tobias assumed the men must be on top of the cat and he paused for a moment to wonder how large she’d turned out to be.

  He took one more look at Bruce before wiping the debris away from his kneecaps. Standing to stretch the kinks out from his lower back, Tobias leaned his neck back and rolled it around til he heard it pop, then yanked his jaw to a sharp left-hand pull to finish getting the knots out.

  It only took about fifteen minutes, but Tobias found his saddle sideways in a tree.

  Eyebrows furrowed, he stuffed the toe of his boot in between a split in a boulder and hoisted himself up far enough to yank on the cinch strap and stirrup hanging from a mass of pine branches. Steadying himself with one palm securely against the first branch he came to, he finally lifted himself high enough and curled his fingers around the familiar leather strap. He snagged it downward.

  On the last tug, the saddle crashed through with a heavy thud, causing the man’s boot to slip; the mishap sent him in a swift plunge off the boulder and down into the wet earth. The saddle joined him in the grass a few feet away from the horse blanket.

  Flicking the debris and rainwater from the heavy blanket, he couldn’t help but notice it smelled of wet horse and pine; Tobias scrunched his nose up and turned his head a bit, catching sight of Epoenah nibbling on grass near the creek.

  Tobias trudged around in the damp terrain in search for either a decent cedar or spruce branch he could devise into parts of the cot he planned to lay Bruce onto. He required three sturdy branches to accomplish his mission.

  After locating the second branch and deciding it met his approval, he allowed a slight grin to emerge when he spied Bruce’s bedroll, still intact, lodged in between a tree and a boulder.

  “Well, there you are,” he mumbled.

  Dropping the branch in his hand back down on the ground, Tobias made his way through the various stones and twigs scattered in his way. In spite of the tumble it took, the bedding remained in the same manner Bruce left it only hours before. Tied into a tight bundle, Tobias planned to use the contents for his friend’s transportation back home. He set it down near the poles and got to the task at hand of stripping the seven and a half foot branches.

  Unsure of whether his words reached listening ears or not, Tobias lifted his voice to a rather off key rendition of Old Dan Tucker as he stripped his outer flannel shirt off and pulled out a pocketknife, which he used to cut the sleeves free from his shirt at the shoulders. Rings fell off the sleeve every four inches, first one sleeve and then the other. Gathering the rings into his hands, Tobias gave one last tug through the whole bunch of them, producing several strips of fabric.

  Spreading the bedroll out, the man laid one of the long poles on the side of the woolen blanket and rolled the pole into the blanket it twice, cutting a slot clean through the blanket every few inches down the length of the poles. As he thread one of the flannel strips through each slot and tied it tightly to the pole, Tobias kept an eye on the sky overhead.

  Once both sides met with his close scrutiny, the third pole found itself chopped in two with his hand ax and fixed into the makeshift cot; by the completion of the project, Tobias no longer tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach, reached for his last two apples and seated himself near the man lying in the center of the newly constructed bed that would carry him back home.

  To have something else to focus on for a few minutes before he loaded the cot to the Epoenah’s saddle, Tobias pulled the malfunctioned saddle in front of himself.

  “This is my own saddle,” he shook his head. “It didn’t give me a lick of trouble yesterday; why would the straps suddenly go haywire this morning?”

  Something about the day didn’t smell right to Tobias. He ran a hand under the cinch straps, glanced back over toward where Bruce lay on the cot. Turning the saddle over, something caught the feel of his fingertips, so he craned his neck closer to the thing for a better look.

  “Well, I will be dag-nabbed,” His fingers ran back over the spot on the cinch strap where his eyes had focused and refused to let go. With his head shaking, Tobias began thinking of how this could have happened, knowing in the back of his mind full well how this happened.

  “I’d like to say I can’t believe it, but I should have seen something like this coming,” he scolded himself. “This ain’t gonna sit well at all,” he trailed off; a sick knot formed in the pit of his stomach as one single question pounded at his brain.

  What was he going to say to Hailee?

  One more look at the underside of the cinch strap confirmed any initial suspicions Tobias may have begun to entertain.

  Shaking his head once more, he stood and began to unlatch his belt in order to secure Bruce to the cot, making certain the man fit snug enough in the apparatus.

  Next came the task of single-handedly lifting Bruce-cot and all-and attaching the man to the rear of Epoenah without tipping him over.

  “I don’t guess the next few hours are gonna be much fun for any of us,” Tobias grunted from under the weight and awkwardness of the situation.

  Visions ran through his head of the cot either dragging or scraping on the damp ground and getting caught up on branches or stones along the way; Tobias wanted to leave nothing to chance.

  Looping a length of heavy leather strapping around both the cot and Bruce’s body, Tobias checked a second time to make certain he hadn’t left the strapping too loose at the corners of the cot.

  Shoving both uneaten apples back into his pocket, Tobias tried not to think of his belly, which was alerting him to the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything since early that morning.

  “Well, Bruce,” he mumbled to the unresponsive man, “We got us a long way back to the old homestead.”

  Chapter 18

  Doc Amerley stood at his iron cook stove, pouring a second cup of coffee into a stained cup, attempting to fully understand what the young ranch hand was explaining to him.

  Shoving one hand down into the front pocket of his dirty dungarees, the eye-witness to the events began to repeat the part where Tobias parted ways with the remaining men.

  “I never saw nothin’ like it, Doc. One minute we were all goin’ along all good-like and the next minute the whole day went to heck! Can’t nobody blame Tobias if’n he don’t find Bruce in good shape, neither. He was the first one down the side of the canyon wall, til he figured out the rope wouldn’t hold,” the younger man slowed to a stop in his speech, shaking his head and looking down into his cup of black coffee. “And it was Tobias who volunteered to backtrack down into the canyon to fetch Bruce, too; fact is, he kept his head together and made sure the rest of us had clear direction what to do next. He was down that road no more ‘n twenty minutes after the boss fell.”

  The doctor nodded his head because he knew that not only was Tobias a good man, but also because in his mind, Tobias would have been the one to keep the situation together.

  “Just soon as the sheriff gets here, we’ll be tearing outta here real quick,” the doctor assured the nervous young man with a firm pat on his shoulder. “I’ve got a feeling everything–and everyone–will be just fine.”

  Doctor Amerley offered a positive smile but the young ranch hand read what was behind the man’s eyes. He didn’t like what he picked up and hung his head.

  In an absent-minded effort to just be doing something to bide a few minutes, the doctor reached down with rag in hand, twisting the handle of the heavy iron door to the wood stove. Satisfied it contained a sufficient amount of banked pine, he swung the door shut; the sudden draft of air swept inside the stove ca
used the flames to kick. They turned a deeper shade of red-orange as the doctor clanged the door and turned the latch.

  The look on the doctor’s face demonstrated the serious situation at hand; he knew the canyon well and knew the danger Bruce faced. The possibility that his friend had sustained any number of injuries, from the way the young man described what he’d seen, was all too possible.

  Doc Amerley’s eyes scrunched up in concentration, tuning out the nervous yammering of the young man who’d brought him the news; more than likely, he would come face-to-face with a head injury, bruised ribs, if not broken bones or even worse. That thought was far too heavy to carry, so he shook the images from his mind and stuffed bandages, ointments and some iodine into a small waterproof medicine pouch before allowing his eyes to wander around the room for anything else. He spied a bottle of morphine he was certain would come in useful and leaned over far enough to grab it with the tips of his fingers.

  The doctor was just about to open up a cedar chest in the corner when the sheriff and other ranch hands came in through the squeaky old wooden door. Turning his attention back to the chest, three heavy blankets were removed for the occasion.

  Without looking at anyone in particular, he asked, “Is everyone ready? There’s coffee if anyone wants it and there’s apples and biscuits over there,” he instructed, pointing to a small round barrel table. “Take what ya want, let’s eat on the road.”

  The doctor had seen his fair share of accidents and births. He’d spent the better part of forty-three years and counting in medicine, stitching folks up on that mountain home of his. And he had known Bruce Johnson and his family for longer than that; this was personal.

  In his mind, the intention was to bring his friend back home and see to it that he stayed comfortably in bed for a few weeks while he mended.

  But in his heart, Doc Amerley feared the worst as he gave a gentle kick into his horse’s side and gave a stern nod to the sheriff.