Rebellion in the Valley (16 page)

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

D
uffy 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,”

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

D
oc
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 caused 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.