Chapter 7: The First Battle

Once again, his strength and agility amazed her. Jesse stood up on the wagon seat, crawled up the side of the stacked bales and held on with one hand while he jerked two hay bales down onto the bed of the wagon. Snow flew from the bales when they landed. He pulled himself over and grabbed one bale and dropped it in the wagon. Then she saw what he had done. He had begun to create a series of steps up the side of the hay in order to get to the top with the least amount of effort.

It amazed her all over again how he seemed to have planned each movement so he was where he ought to be to begin the next step of his task at hand. He dropped down onto the wagon and stacked the first bales tight against the front of the wagon bed. He dragged and stacked hay until at last he told her, "This is about all the horses can pull." As he hopped back down onto the seat he shook the reins and urged the horses forward.

A mile away from the stack they came to a gate. The gate consisted of three horizontal strands of barbed wire that tied two vertical cedar posts together. Wire loops held the posts in place. Jesse jumped down and opened the gate. He called "Geedup" to the horses. They obediently leaned into the traces and pulled the wagon on through. He closed the gate, climbed quickly into the seat and called "Geedup" to them once more. Again the two horses leaned into their load and slowly plodded onward.

After a while they came to a place protected from the wind, Jesse stopped the wagon and again climbed up on the hay. He broke the bales apart over his knee and kicked the loose hay over the side. In a loud voice he called, "Hey Cows. Hey Cows." In minutes a sea of dark coated white-faced hungry cattle surrounded them.

They rode on and repeated the process three more times. Then they were out of hay. Jesse grinned and told her, "Let's go visit your gold mine."

She resented Jesse's condescending attitude toward her. Then she thought of his resentment toward her as she tried to educate him in the ways of the business world. She decided they both needed to unbend a little. She smiled up at him and said, "Thank you, I always wanted to look at a mountain of gold."

He cocked an eye toward her, shook his head at the completely alien ways of women, especially the ones from New York City. He called to the team and turned them toward a high hill. An hour later, the hill had turned into a steep cliff nearly fifty feet high. About eight feet up from the ground was a ledge, hidden from the casual observer by the natural contours of the cliff face. As soon as the wagon stopped, Jesse stood and grabbed up a small coil of rope. He tossed the rope up onto the ledge, stepped up onto the wagon seat, placed one foot on the seat back and jumped straight up. He caught the ledge and vaulted himself up onto it all in one continuous motion.

He stood, uncoiled the rope and told her, "Marie, I'll pull you up while you walk up the side of the cliff."

Jesse nodded his approval as Marie grabbed onto the loop and he pulled. Her eyes glistened with excitement as he bowed her toward a small crevice in the rock. As soon as she stepped through, she gasped. The crevice turned into a deepcave with a low ceiling that went back almost twenty feet. There it ended in a pile of rubble. A pipe cap stuck up a couple of inches out of the debris at the back of the cave.

"Thank you. Let's go back." She turned around and jumped down into the wagon bed. She sprawled, sat up unharmed and crawled over the back into the wagon seat.

Jesse silently coiled the rope, tied it secure with one end and tossed it down into the wagon bed. He followed the rope and instant later. He turned the wagon around and headed for the house. They rode in silence for an hour. Finally he could not stand the vacuum he felt after she looked and said, "Thank you. Let's go back.

Finally he exploded, "Let's go back? That is all you have to say, let's go back?" His lungs expanded as he gasped in great gulps of air. He looked straight ahead and said to himself, "That's all she said, 'let's go back.' I can't believe I heard that."

"No, actually I said two more words," she told him smugly. "If you remember correctly, I also said 'Thank you.' When you quote someone, you should never paraphrase that person, it's not polite."

"How did you know that was the wrong place," he asked her.

"I am very certain it is the correct place. When we get back to the house I intend to read a little bit more to refresh my memory. I am almost certain that is our cave." They rode along in silence for a few minutes before she told him, "I believe you are correct about that map, it is a very clever forgery. I want to find the original."

They had barely passed through the last gate before arriving back at the house when Jesse called in a low voice, "Whoa." He reached under the seat and pulled out the heavy rifle. He scanned the countryside around them, in all directions. In a terse voice he told her, "Get down off the seat right now."

"Why?" she asked, not moving.

He grabbed her and threw her bodily off the wagon seat. In the same motion, he followed her. "Because I said so and don't have time for twenty questions," he told her in a low voice. Someone is out in the barn."

"How do you know?" she asked. "Are you psychic?"

"Nope, just observant." He pointed to their own recent back trail made as they returned from the cave. "See how clear our tracks are in the snow?"

"Well, yes." She answered, mystified. "What of it?"

"Now look at our tracks, the ones we made when we headed out this morning. See how they are less well defined? The same goes for the wagon's skid tracks in the yard between the barns and the house. In some places they have been completely been blown over by the light snow. Now look at that track from the road into the yard, the one that veers toward the house and then toward the cow barn. That track was made by a small ski mobile. Someone is in the barn."

"Oh," she gasped. The anger she felt at being thrown from the wagon seat forgotten. "What do we do now?"

"Geedup," he said to the horses. They needed no urging to head toward the barn. "Keep low and follow close behind the wagon. As soon as we are near the house, you make a run for the back door, and stay inside. There's a handgun in my nightstand. Get it out and take it off safety. If anybody comes inside the house but me, shoot the son of a bitch. Okay?"

'I'll try," she whispered as the wagon slowly started forward.

He urged her forward, "Don't try, do."

They followed behind the wagon on foot until they came to the house. "Go!" he told her in a low, sharp voice. Marie veered to the left and ran hard toward the house. She opened the back door and threw herself inside.

Jesse jumped to one side as the wagon reached the corner of the barn. The horses stopped. He stood quietly, waiting for whatever came next. After a couple of minutes the side door by the big barn entrance slowly opened and a man stepped out. He called back inside, "It's just the horses. Nobody with them."

Jesse slipped around to the back of the barn and quiet as he could, opened the back door of the milk room. He closed the door behind him and ghosted his way across the floor in the gloom to the other door into the horse barn. He slipped through into the infirmary and on into the cow barn. His quarry was ten feet in front of him. He had just started out the door to join his friend.

The man was a stranger. He held a heavy revolver in his hand at the ready, barrel pointed up toward the sky, police style. His back was toward Jesse as her peered outside toward his partner. "You can drop your gun or die," Jesse told the man.

"What th..." the man exclaimed and spun around, gun barrel dropped to find a target. Jesse shot once. The man jerked backward, and fell, a quickly expanding red stain showed where his belly button used to be.

Jesse charged outside in time to hear a shot come from the house. He ran to the front porch, opened the front door and jumped inside, doing a neat tuck and roll with his rifle carried across his belly. From a prone position on the floor he wildly looked around. He saw nothing. Then he heard a faint sob from the bedroom.

"Marie?" he called, "Are you all right?"

"No, I just shot a man," came her muffled voice from the bedroom.

Slowly, Jesse entered the bedroom. Marie stood to one side of the room by the bed. A body lay sprawled on the floor. Jesse rolled the body over onto its back. It was the man who first came out of the barn to investigate the arrival of the horses. Jesse checked for a pulse and found none.

"Come on out into the front room. I'll call Troy to get his ass out here. This gets mighty old mighty fast." He grabbed up the cordless off the end table by the couch and pinched in 911.

"Sheriff's office, how may I direct your call?"

"This is Jesse Morgan," he told the operator, "Let me talk to Troy."

"Oh, hi Jesse, this is Verna here. Troy is just out past you a ways on a fender bender. You want me to call him?"

"Please, right now. I have another shooting at my place, two of them."

"I'll get him out there right now." She disconnected.

"Let's have some coffee and wait," Jesse told Marie. "The wind is coming up and another storm might be on its way.

They removed their heavy outer garments and sat at the table drinking coffee while they waited for Troy to arrive. Marie felt numb inside. She had never before fired a weapon in her life. She kept looking toward the bedroom as if she expected the man she killed to come out. Jesse sat and thought. They both waited...

To both it seemed an eternity from the time Jesse called until they heard the faint wail of a siren. Two minutes later Troy knocked on the front door. Marie hurried to answer it. "You again," Troy exclaimed as he recognized her as Jesse's visitor from the previous time out to the ranch. As he came through the door, he told Jesse, "Man, I warned you not to have any house guests until we get this thing straightened out. Jesse, it's dangerous to have a girlfriend come visiting." He seemed more upset Jesse put someone in danger than he was about the shooting.

"The body is in the bedroom and she shot him in self defense. The piece she used in on the couch in the front room." There is a body in the horse barn. I'll show you. I have to unhitch the horses and turn them out. Come on. It's almost time to do the milking."

While Troy checked the body in the bedroom, Jesse suited back up, took his rifle and headed for the door.

Troy caught up with him as he began to unhitch the horses from the wagon. He opened half of the big barn door and let the two animals inside for their treat of sorghum and cracked oats. He felt guilty the way he had neglected the two beasts and he gave them extra large rations.