Chapter 3

Jesse Hawkes woke early every morning and this morning was no exception. He was up before the dawn and even in this mid spring morning, one still needed to stoke the fireplaces to take the chill off the cabin for a few hours before the sun took care of things for the rest of the day. He made his way into the kitchen and stoked the wood stove to get things heated up so he could make his morning coffee. He knew that as soon as the smell of coffee wafted up through the rafters, he'd hear Cody stir and get up.

Ten minutes later, the soft footsteps of Cody moving around upstairs could be heard as he made his bed and got dressed. Such was their morning routine. Jesse pulled out a skillet and went to the ice chest to begin pulling out eggs and a chunk of bacon along with a small jar of salsa and canned peppers from last year's supplies. They were running low and Jesse was glad they'd be planting their garden soon. He honestly couldn't wait until he could have some fresh vegetables instead of canned.

As he worked to make them breakfast, Jesse's mind wandered back to the radio call he'd gotten the previous morning from Matt. He'd called up with news about Jake Rodger's great niece. Apparently she'd returned eight years after his death to claim what he'd left to her in his will, fifteen years after her last visit. That didn't seem too out of the ordinary but it was the way Matt said things, basically giving him their own little code that something was off about the whole situation that made Jesse consider going and looking in on her today or tomorrow. Something about it all had made Matt uneasy and if Matt was uneasy, then it might be something Jesse should check into.

Cody stepped into the doorway with a strange look on his face. "Dad? We only own five horses…right?" he asked casually.

Jesse raised an eyebrow at this. "Last time I checked. Why?"

"Because either we don't know how to count or someone lost a horse," he said, jerking a thumb towards the direction of the corral.

This had Jesse's full attention and he took the skillet off of the stove so not to burn their breakfast. "You sure?" he asked as he headed towards the door, reaching to grab his jacket off the peg, watching Cody do the same.

Cody nodded, "Has a halter on and it's just standing outside the corral, helping itself to the hay."

Jesse pulled open the front door and stepped out, feeling the crisp morning air and looked around for any signs of trouble. Seeing none at first glance, he made his way around the side of the house and headed at a slow, calm pace towards the corral where two of their horses were, Cooper and his leopard Appaloosa. Sure enough, helping himself to the hay in the manger from the other side of the corral fence was a worn out looking bay gelding.

Walking with calm even footsteps up to it, Jesse reached out and took a hold of its halter. It showed signs of recent flight, sweat stains having dried on its flanks and it seemed tired, perhaps too tired to give up much of a fuss about being caught by a human, especially when food was right in front of its face.

Jesse continued to let it eat, "Cody, go make sure the middle stall is cleaned out for our guest and then lets saddle up and track him back to see where he came from."

Cody had stopped at the front porch to watch his dad, not wanting to spook the horse with the presence of too many humans coming at him and let his dad do the 'catching'. With a nod at his dad's orders, he went off towards the barn and made sure there was fresh straw on the floor and water in the middle stall as his dad brought their 'guest' inside.

As Cody gave him a measure of grain and put hay in the manger, Jesse began to assess the horse. Finally he left the stall and went to help Cody gather their horses up to saddle. Jesse had to admit to himself, this was a first…waking to find a rider-less horse outside their cabin. Most likely it had run off in the night after being spooked and whoever it had run away from was left stranded.

"I'll go in and finish fixing our breakfast to go Cody. Go catch one of our mares in case whoever lost their horse is stranded." With that Jesse headed into the house and finished what he'd started, wrapping the eggs and bacon in some of the flour tortillas they had made up a few days before. Packing a few other supplies in the saddle bags, he brought them out and within moments, they were on their way, headed off to track the gelding that had graced them with his presence that morning.

Clara had stood there as she watched her pack horse run off while she held the lead rope. A stray thought flitted through her brain at that moment…she had a small pistol in her packs. It would be so easy just to end it all right here. Just go get it, stick it under her chin and pull the trigger. Bang…then nothing. No frustration, no anger, no fear…no …nothing.

Then the thought was gone and anger filled its place. She had left the road in hopes of angling over to the cabin instead of switching back and forth on the road. She was hoping to save time but instead had become lost on top of everything else that had happened. Typical! Just typical! It was growing dark and she had finally given up trying to find the cabin. It had turned into the utter and absolute worst day of her life. With a sigh, she figured she'd just have to try again in the morning. Finding a relatively flat spot, she deciding to pitch camp, fix something to eat since she'd missed lunch then spend the night in the tent before saddling up the horses up in the morning and finding the cabin.

She'd tied the horses off to trees and unloaded their packs. She did her best to rub them down and even took a length of rope to make a picket line so they could graze a little. She had hooked up the horse she'd ridden today to it and gone to get her pack horse to put on the line. She'd unhooked the pack horse from lead rope that was tied around the tree, had a hold of him by his halter as she took him over to the picket line. As she had reached for the lead rope on the line to hook him up there, he'd spooked at something. With one swift jerk of his head, he'd pulled his halter out of her hand and was off like a shot.

Dropping the lead rope to the ground, she staggered back to the stack of goods and found the tent. After a few minutes she had the dome tent up and had pulled everything inside with her. She found a can of peas and opened it. Pulling a spoon out of the pack, she ate them cold, not even wanting to chance a fire at this point for fear she'd burn the forest down at the rate her luck was going.

She drank some of her water and finally crawled into her sleeping bag. She slept hard that night, too numb to do anything else. Morning came too early and the sound of her horse making noises outside woke her. Fearing that she might lose him too, she got up and went outside. The shock of the cold air made her gasp and she huddled down farther into her jean jacket, something she hadn't taken off the night before.

Looking over at her horse, she saw he was simply moving up and down the line, digging at the ground to try and get to more grass just out of his reach. She went back into the tent and got a measure of grain from the one bag she had brought and put it on the ground in front of him. He stopped his pawing and began to eat, calming down.

She had to make a decision now. She had to figure out what she could take with her and what she had to leave behind. What if she stayed lost another night, maybe more? What would she need? She took a few minutes to pull out the map again. Seeing the direction the sun was coming up, she looked for land marks and studied the map. Figuring out which direction she should go, she began to pack things up.

After saddling her horse, putting as much as she dared on him, she took the rest and tried to put it up into a tree. She thought she remembered something about bears and trees but what the hell did she know. She was a city girl mostly. But doing the best she could, she wrapped the other saddle up in a blanket and put it up in the tree with the other things. If she was lucky, she would be able to come back in a few days if she found the cabin and retrieve it all.

Trying to memorize the place and landmarks, she took a piece of yellow nylon roping and tied it around a branch of a tree to mark it and make it visible…she hoped. After that, she climbed carefully into the saddle of her remaining horse and pointed him in the direction of where she thought the cabin was.

By late morning, Jesse and Cody sat beneath a large pine tree and looked at the assortment of supplies tied up in the branches. Cody smirked, "Why do I get a feeling that a flatlander is responsible for this?"

Jesse looked over at his teenage son and sighed, "Well, you have to admit, it's better than just leaving it on the ground for who knows what to get into it or the weather to damage it. Granted, a determined bear will get into it if they are hungry enough." They had searched the area for the single horse but had found that two horses had entered the area, then their 'morning guest' had left, leaving them the trail they followed back here this morning. Another single horse had headed off at a different angle and that track was still relatively fresh.

Looking around at the ground, Jesse spoke up. "No sign of fire so they must have spent a cold night but at least they had the shelter of a tent."

Cody looked down, reading the marks as clearly as his dad did. "Looks like they put up a picket line for the horses. I'll bet that's how their horse got away."

Frowning, Jesse looked off in the direction the single horse that morning had gone. They were headed in the direction of Jake Rodger's place. "Cody, I want you to bring down those supplies and saddle up our spare horse with their gear. Pack up the supplies and follow after me." That little nagging feeling had awakened when he had seen the direction the fresh trail had gone off in.

"What's up dad?" asked Cody.

Jesse looked at Cody, "Nothing yet but I get a feeling this is someone who doesn't know a thing about being up in these mountains and the sooner I can find them, the better," was all he said as he nudged his horse into a walk to follow after the lone rider.

Cody looked after his dad with a slight frown to his face then he looked upward and groaned. He hated climbing trees. At least he was bringing stuff down out of it, not hauling it up into one.

Her heart began to race a little when Clara saw the chimney over the tree line as she crested the rise. She knew those stones and had spent her summers admiring their formation. She was finally within reach of her goal. She urged her horse on a little, trying to reach the end of her journey…to get to the one place where she'd always felt welcome, always had felt free, had felt loved.

She knew her Uncle wouldn't be there to receive her but if she could just 'go back' and be surrounded by the memories of her childhood after all these years…. Her horse picked its way down the ridgeline, causing the chimney to disappear behind the growth of pine trees. Just a few more minutes and she'd be there…at the end!

There was the tree where she and Matt had carved their initials as best friends when they were seven, the old trunk having healed itself over, the cuts barely visible now but she knew they were there. Her eyes shied away from it. Those were memories for another day, memories she wasn't sure she ever wanted to revisit now that she'd seen Matt as an adult.

An edge of the barn came into view and her heart skipped a beat. It looked as though nothing had changed it in all these years. And then there it was…the cabin of her memories. The windows had shutters over them and years of pine needles had built up on the porch but could be easily cleared away. She quickly slid out of the saddle and pulled the horse over to the hitching post, tying the reigns around it.

Her hand absently reached up for the saddle bag that had been in front of her that held her small pistol and a few other things. She didn't want to go in and find a bear or something living in there or a wild cat or something. She chuckled nervously at herself. A bear living inside of there…how stupid could she get! Wouldn't it be obvious if a bear was living inside?

She fumbled inside the saddle bag for the key on a leather thong that would unlock the padlock on the front door. Her hands trembled as she stepped up onto the porch, hearing the old wood creak under her. Reaching for the rusted padlock, she had to make several tries at it to get the key into the hole and then put a little effort into getting the key to turn, popping the mechanism open.

Pulling the lock apart, she unhooked it and tossed it aside, putting the key absently back in the saddle bag and pulling out her small pistol. Unhooking the latch, she pushed the door of the cabin inward. It groaned on its hinges, like one would hear at a haunted house.

Having expected it to be dark inside from the shuttered windows, she stood in shock at the sunlight pouring in, illuminating the rubble in the center of the empty room. Taking a hesitant step into the cabin, hands trembling as the saddle bag fell from numb fingers, Clara looked upward.

Rays of noonday sun streamed down from the open roof. The support beams for the roof were still there but the shingles and ceiling had caved in. Several sparrows flitted about on the inside of the cabin, causing shadows to dart here and there through the sunlight. Her eyes fell to the floor again and the evidence of at least one winters worth of snow melt having damaged the interior of the walls and floor.

She couldn't move another step. There were only two words that echoed through her mind over and over again. 'Now what?'

Her vision blurred and she closed her eyes for a moment, hoping that if she opened them again, everything would be just the way she remembered it so long ago. But as she opened them, two huge tears rolled down her cheeks and nothing had changed from the image that had just been burned into her retinas. Destruction of her last hope for escape lay in a jumbled up pile on the floor in front of her.

Without really thinking of it, the hand holding the gun brought it up to her chin and she felt the cold barrel pressed there. This thought had flitted through her mind last night. She knew it was the coward's way out of everything that had happened to her, but she knew that four hundred bucks wasn't going to fix this. She'd been foolish to think that she could run away from everything and just disappear. The cage that had been built around her really hadn't let her go. It was still there…this had all been an illusion of freedom.

Four hundred bucks…wouldn't fix a roof, wouldn't be enough to put food on her table for god knew how long. She didn't know how to grow anything. What was she going to do? Live off the land? Wait tables? She didn't even have a truck to get back and forth out of town now. She had one horse to her name. How long was that poor old thing going to last traveling back and forth so she could make money to buy food? How was she going to heat this cabin, even if she could afford to fix the roof? She had no clue of how to chop wood or even what was good wood or not.

She was a fool! A stupid, naive, useless fool…. Tears streamed down her cheeks as her finger worked to tighten on the trigger. She could only pray the end would be quick and painless.

Jesse had followed the trail but it was evident that they were headed right for Jake Rodgers place. He knew instinctually then that it was Clara he'd been following. He wondered how she'd take the sight of seeing the collapsed roof of the cabin. He'd seen it last year when he'd come through after the earthquake.

It wouldn't take much to repair but something told him that with what Matt had hinted at in his radio call yesterday about Clara and with finding her extra horse at their place, tracking it back to find half the gear inexpertly hung in the tree and no sign of fire from the night before, he got the sense that she might be at her wits end. If this was Clara, perhaps having someone there to soften the blow of the hole in the roof or to help her out some would maybe make things not seem so bad.

As he came around the corner of the cabin, he saw the horse he'd been following tied to the hitching post and saw the front door standing open. The silence from inside worried him and his gut told him something wasn't right. He would have expected to hear someone moving around inside, shuffling through the debris, checking out the rest of the place, something.

Dropping the reigns of his horse and giving the hand signal to stay, Jesse moved towards the door. He could see a shadow of someone standing just inside, the noon sun casting it out past the door and onto the porch. The stance of the shadow and the position of their arm up to their head made him move as silently as he could, his instincts telling him he didn't want to scare her.

As he came to the door frame and looked inside, he took in the sight of the woman before him, how she seemed to stare at the floor, then up at the opening in the roof. Her whole body trembled with tension as the glint of sun off of metal made Jesse's heart stop as he saw what she held to her chin. Her hands were shaking as tears ran down her face. This was not someone to mess with as she seemed only seconds away from making the decision to pull the trigger.

He swallowed and in two fluid steps he swept her gun hand away from her chin so that if her finger squeezed on the trigger, it would fire off into the wall or ceiling. In that same sweeping arch of motion, he reached to grab for her hand so she couldn't come back at him with the gun. His other arm and body moved around behind her to hold her in a grip to keep her from escaping and trying to do herself or him any harm in her panic.

He heard a shot go off and felt her body tense and then go limp as he worked to hold her up, his back screaming with the added weight as he worked to lower her to the floor, praying that the shot had actually gone wild and that he hadn't been too late…