The River
by
tallsunshine12
Chapter 1
He'd been sent out for wood for the fire, but as clouds moved over the half-moon, he stood watching, transfixed by the storm about to whip up. As rain started to fall, and the pines blew and blew, he never once moved to the log pile.
To Hoss, who had been sent out to see where Joe was, it looked like the two, Joe and the storm, were one. He moved over to the log pile. "Get a move on, Joe. It's about to unload on us," he said.
Joe, turning and seeing Hoss bend to pick up a few logs, laughed. "A job done by two is always cut in half."
Hoss straightened, his arms practically full. He got that look in his eye that portended trouble for Joe if he kept it up. Eight years older, and about a hundred pounds heavier, he could menace most folks with a look like that, but Joe had learned a long time ago that, even with his eyes staring like that, Hoss was no tougher than cottonwood down. That's why he enjoyed poking him.
"You better stop listenin' to Hop Sing," said Hoss. "Oriental wisdom don't cut it out here."
"Pshaw!" cried Joe. "I heard that in the saloon the other day."
"Jus' what were you doin' in there?"
"Havin' a sarsaparilla."
"Yeah, I bet. Clem will serve to anyone, even a boy whose pa told him he'd tan 'im he caught him in that place again."
Laughing and almost too sure of himself, Joe walked over to the log pile to pick up a couple of sticks. He began to whistle as he walked past Hoss into the big log house, his arms half-full.
Hoss heaved a big sigh, chuckling to himself. Joe was always trying to get out of work.
The next day, the Cartwright brothers took a load of planks, a keg of nails, and some tools up to a line shack in the north pasture. This was the best time to repair it, summer, before the fall round-up.
As they unloaded the wagon, bickering, as usual, Joe doing less than half of his share of the work, tall pines moaned and swayed in the wind. Dark clouds tumbled about in the western sky.
"More rain's comin'," the sixteen-year-old Joe said, wiping an eye laden with sweat on his tan shirt sleeve as he took one end of a small anvil out of the wagon.
"We ain't goin' stop work on 'count of it," said Hoss, walking backward with his end.
"Just thought it looked like more rain."
But could any rain be left after last night's wild blow?
"Set it up on the porch," said Hoss. "Right here. Get the stones for a fire. I've got to check this wall." During a gale sometime that past winter, the shack's stove wall had tumbled in.
Soon, next to the shack, Joe had a fire going in a circle of brown river stones, in which he was heating old crooked nails.
"Hoss, there's a whole keg of nails in the wagon. Why don't we use those?"
"And waste all of these old nails?" Hoss hollered from the shack. "They're as good as new ones any day."
"You'll make some girl a thrifty husband someday, Hoss," said Joe.
"What's that, Joe?"
"Never mind, it's nothin'." He took up a pair of tongs and lifted another bent nail out of the low flames, laid it on the anvil, and began to hammer it.
He straightened a few more, just to keep Hoss happy, then gazed upon the fast river running thirty feet below the shack. In a sudden feeling of doom, he shivered. It felt like a ghost had just walked across his grave. It was going to be a spooky night, wind, more rain, a crashing stream.
"We ought to use the new nails, Hoss," he began again.
"We will, little brother, if there's any big need." Screwing his eyes shut, Hoss grunted as he lifted yet another stone to mortar it into the collapsed wall. Some of these stones were huge. They'd been hauled up from the river by what must have been—then—a race of giants, instead of only his pa and what few hands Ben Cartwright had at the time he started the ranch.
Joe sighed. Straightening bent nails when they had a whole keg of them made no sense. He grabbed his canteen and told Hoss he was going down to the stream to fill it.
"Just be sure you come back," Hoss called to him, slapping another layer of mortar on the stones.
"Yeah, don't wait up!" Joe climbed down the bluff to the river. Standing on a rock overlooking it, he could feel the pounding of its strong, whistling waters. His ever-changeful eyes looked down the steam a-ways, as far as he could see past the trees at the edge. He shivered again.
He started to climb up the bluff again. With all that recent rain, he ought to have been more careful. At least that's what Hoss thought when a portion of the bluff cleaved away under Joe's feet. He rushed out of the shack at Joe's outcry, in time to see him roll over and over, striking rocks, into the rushing stream.
Not thinking he might be hurt, Hoss yelled, "You'd use any excuse, little brother, to get out o' work!"
But the rapid waters carried off Joe's body like a spiraling log. He couldn't swim, had never been able to, though, as any young'un would, he liked splashing around in the lake near the ranch.
Stripping off his gun belt and holster, not having time to kick off his boots, Hoss ran down the jagged bluff towards the water. Sliding over rocks, squelching through dangerous mud, he looked up every two or three seconds to see Joe's body hurling along.
At the river's edge, he cupped his mouth and yelled, "Joe! Little Joe!" But it was to no avail. The fast stream had carried him out earshot. In the split second before he himself jumped in, a flash memory struck.
Joe was just a tadpole, trying to keep up with Hoss as he climbed a knoll of pines. He was going after a deer, and Joe just had to tag along.
"Hoss, wait for me to catch up!" the younger boy called. "You're like a runaway horse and I'm tied to the back of it!"
He'd lose the deer he'd been hunting all morning, but he paused and let Joe catch up. It was like that between them. More than a brother, Joe was his friend.
He'd looked after him that day. Today was no different.
Hoss ran out as far out into the fast water as he could, and then dove in and started swimming. The dark current raced on, even faster than he had first thought, drawing him deeper and deeper into it.
With strong strokes, he swam out to the middle, but finishing the distance to where Joe was proved too much even for his strength, and he had to jerk himself out. He fell upon the rocky shore and breathed like a bellows, then struggled up.
Above the beat and rush of the river, he called out again, "Joe!" Joe was even further away from him then and couldn't possibly hear him.
Like a blind man, he lumbered through the entangling brush and trees along the shore, climbing up over the boulders and down again, always trying to keep his eyes on Joe's slim, brown, somersaulting form.
The white-capped waves were not easy to see through, but he caught a glimpse of Joe as his head bobbed hard against a rock lodged deep in the stream, his tan shirt billowing out in the water as he paused, face-down, before moving on again in the swift waters.
After pinpointing where he was, Hoss dove in again, swimming as hard as he could muster towards the rock which had momentarily halted Joe's progress down the river. He reached it, but Joe was already gone.
Clinging to the same rock himself, Hoss gathered breath and spotted Joe again. He had fetched up in the shallows on the other side of the stream. Hoss's heart almost stopped at a sight which more than amazed him.
Five or six tall, strapping men had a hold on Joe and were lifting his limp, unresponsive body up out of the water. Hoss, seeing them before they saw him, crouched down behind the rock and peeked around it. He didn't know their buckskin outfits, not Paiute, at any rate.
When the men showed signs that they were going to make off with Joe into the woods, and with a frenzy born of terror, Hoss shouted and waved, his hold tenuous on the wet rock. His bellowing drew the bead of their cold, hard eyes down on him.
Choking on the fast water, his heart hammering in his chest, and finally too spent to yell, he just watched, mystified, at what happened next.
Taking Joe with them, the hunters disappeared into the woods at the edge of the stream. His eyes bored holes in the trees like an awl through wood, but not even a faint outline of their buckskins could be seen. They'd vanished.
Diving into the waters again, he fought to swim across, fifty or sixty yards remaining, but about midway, he again had to admit defeat. He could not swim to Joe's side of the stream. Running high, the river was like a freight train derailing and plunging down a cliff.
Struggling back to the Ponderosa side of the river, he pulled himself out and lay spent, staring at the spot he had last seen Joe and the Indians who took him. He couldn't forget how his mother had died. Indians had killed her.
Inger Borgstrom, Swedish by birth, had been like Hoss tall and fair. She'd been so gentle with Ben's first boy, Adam, who was not even her own son. Though his pa had memories of Inger which were very kind, Hoss, being only a few weeks old when she died, had no memories of her at all.
In the hot summer air, he loped back to the shack, fetching his gun belt, with its holster and .44 six-shooter. He untied Sue, one of the two wagon horses, from her picket and let her roam, while he climbed aboard Bob to ride back to the ranch for more men. She'd have plenty of grass and water to drink.
He didn't spare either himself or the saddle-less horse. The hunters who had taken Joe traveled swiftly in the forest, and what a tiny trail they were likely to leave! In a day, it'd be too old to follow.
He had miles and miles to go, but he crushed that distance in no time and stirred up a lot of dust in the yard when he beat it back to the ranch house.
"Chet, see he's rubbed down and give 'im plenty of oats. Water him good, too. Thanks, bud!" he said as he threw the reins to one of the older men who helped out in the barn.
"Right you are, Mr. Hoss!" said the old stableman, already pulling the tired, lathered wagon horse towards the barn.
Hoss rushed into the house in such a lather himself that his pa looked up from a book he was reading, White-Jacket, by Herman Melville, published just the year before in 1850, with a definite scowl.
Ben was on his feet as Hoss filled him on the details of what had happened that morning. "How many were there, Hoss?" he asked.
Ben Cartwright loved all his sons, three boys of different mothers. But the half-wild, headstrong Joe tugged on his heartstrings the most. He saved his fondest paternal feelings for him. What he, and sometimes Hoss, couldn't get up to had not yet been invented.
"About six, pa."
Not a man to fall apart at bad news—he'd had so much of it in his life—even this bad, Ben reaction to Joe's mishap and disappearance was stoic and grim. Rounding up what men he could find on short notice, he left Chet behind to tend the barn. He also sent a rider to a few of the cowhands, instructing them to follow as soon as they could get away.
As the spur of the moment posse galloped out of the yard, Hop Sing, Ben's Chinese cook, waved goodbye. He'd pulled off a miracle to get the grub ready that fast, but sometimes he wished he could ride as well as the Cartwrights and their men. This was one of those times. He'd create a big meal to greet everyone when they returned with Little Joe.
With bedrolls, grub for a week, a clean shirt for each man, and extra cartridge boxes, Ben and his men rode up the Virginia City road, then turned off onto a long, ascending track that led to the north pasture and the old line shack, up near the Truckee River—the same river which had taken Joe.
Ben rode a buckskin with a deep brown mane and tail, the first in a line of similar horses, all named Buck. Hoss had under him a chestnut gelding sturdy enough to carry his weight of over two hundred pounds.
The draft horse he had ridden home, Bob, unbroken to a rider until then, was now in the barn, worn out. Chet, the whiskery old-timer, gave him a good rubdown and an extra measure of oats. He admired him for his hard work and grit, but he grieved that Sue was still up at the line shack.
As he rode, he could see Marie, Joe's mother, slim, beautiful, of French blood from New Orleans. Hands of a delicate, soft brown, eyes—secretive, tragic—set back from high cheekbones, and hair, golden, shimmery in the sun.
She had been as ready for a brisk ride as for a quiet walk in the pines. She loved setting table, putting out lots of things Ben could not fathom the use of. On tables everywhere in the house she kept vases of wildflowers, her favorite being yellow buttercups. She liked to collect them herself.
A miniature of her hung on the wall beside Joe's bed. It was all he had of his mother, besides a few trinkets and a couple of fan-style combs Ben had brought for her on a Missouri steamboat. Though he'd given her dresses away, Ben couldn't part with those.
Marie had been the last love of Ben's fading youth. He no longer had time to keep marrying, so he planned that she'd be around for a while. However, when Joe was quite young, a fall from a horse ended that soft-eyed and soft-spoken Gallic beauty.
Conjuring up the face of the son who so resembled her, Ben pressed his horse and his men as hard as he could. Ben was single-minded. One thing was clear above all else, nothing must happen to him.