“Maybe you’re right,” said Merry.
The next morning she left with the two horses and the rifle.
She did not take the trailer, planning to use Sally as a packhorse instead. The weather was still good, if crisp, and the sky was clear. Jeebee worried about her, in spite of himself. Still, she had said she would stay close to the foothills.
Left alone at the cave, he began work on the forge. It was a matter of building up a round, well-like affair out of stones he had gathered. They were all about six inches in diameter, and as close to roundness as he could find. He built a small, circular wall with them, packing the spaces between with mortar. The sides went up around a log that he had laid in at an angle when the walls were about six inches off the ground so that its upper end would project into the firepit at the top.
The space left by the log when he took it out would be the channel for the draft of forced air he would provide with the foot bellows he planned to build later.
In the next few days, while Merry gathered meat, he built the wall up until it was about three feet off the ground. Then filled it with the remaining rocks to the level at which the angled log came out and the firepit had its bottom.
He pulled the log out, finally, and coated the firepit and the inside of the air passage with a smooth coat of clay.
By the third day, the forge itself was done and the clay of it drying. Meanwhile he was hard at work building his bellows. These he made simply of two large triangular pieces of plank, joined together along the sides with leather that widened from some three inches at the wooden nozzle that fitted into the air channel, to a good twelve inches around the broad end of the back, where he had attached two solid handles ten inches long, each to one plank side.
Pulled apart by the handles, the bellows sucked air in through the leather valve on the underside of a hole in the top wooden side of the bellows, then forced the air up the channel in the forge when the two sides were pushed together again with the handles.
He had planned to fasten one handle and side by staking it into the earth floor, and pump the bellows by stepping on the top handle to force the two wooden sides together, once the bellows had inflated. For that, however, he needed some mechanism that would pull the upper side away from the lower to inflate it.
He solved that by attaching to its top side a rope that ran up and through a pulley screwed tight to one of the two-by-four rafters of his slim roof. The far end of the cord through the pulley was counterweighted.
Now he could push the top handle down to the floor with his foot, collapsing the bellows, and the counterweight would pull it up again, inflating them, when he took his foot off the handle. He could now pump air into the fire, once he had one going in the forge, while still having both his hands free for work.
All this took a little better than the three days. Every evening, after Merry had gotten home, they ate; and after, as they sat with the fire, Merry spoke a little more freely about her long trip to find him. It was as if she could not leave the trip alone, but at the same time he had the feeling that she was dodging around a part of it, something to do with it that she found hard to tell.
Jeebee began to feel uneasy about what might be bothering her. But he had now grown so unused to asking questions that he could not push her to tell him.
The day after he finished the forge itself, he rigged a hood over it with a length of leftover stovepipe to carry the vapors from the fire out the front wall. He could not remember, and his one course in undergraduate chemistry was not good enough for him to figure out, what kind of dangerous vapors his homemade charcoal might put out.
But with a draft from the bottom and the stovepipe open to the outside above the forge fire, most of its gases ought to be carried out, and the unchinked walls around him should let plenty of air in. At last, he built a small fire with wood in the forge, and when it was going well enough, added the charcoal.
He was both excited and pleased at the way the charcoal caught from the small wood fire. He had brought up the anvil from the ashes of the ranch’s smithy some days before. He had kept it ready by the forge; and now simply as an experiment, he tried heating and bending a piece of angle iron, using the six-pound hammer from the ranch once the iron had turned a bright cherry red.
The angle iron bent. Not elegantly but more easily than it ever would have cold, it responded to the hammer blows.
He was full of triumph. Merry was not home yet, or he would have gone to get her immediately to show her that his smithy was now a working device.
He stopped pumping the bellows, and left the charcoal to die down by itself.
Theoretically, it should go out before it had burned itself completely to ash. He must remember to check, later. He had been making charcoal regularly by the old-fashioned method of getting a fire stoked with well-dried wood well started, then covering it with earth so that it burned slowly, away from the oxygen of the open air. The wood should have been from hardwoods like oak. Unfortunately, all he had to work with was pine, but dead wood, if it was firm and dry, seemed to make at least a usable charcoal.
Working this way, he had accumulated a fairly good pile of fuel for the forge. But, going out to look at the pile of it he had built up against the outside of the smithy wall, he realized that he would have to continue making it all winter long if he intended to use the forge at all regularly. With the bellows pumping air into it, the forge ate fuel.
He went back to work in the interior room of the cave. His plan since he had found Merry again, had been to dig back further into the sandy wall so that later on he would be able to build a somewhat larger inside room. Merry had not yet put down the layer of worn-out throw rugs she had planned, simply because he had told her that he intended to do this digging. There was no point in laying rugs and then strewing sand on top of them.
He worked as neatly as he could, but dust quickly accumulated in the air and fogged everything in sight under his dim illumination from the car-interior lights. He was tempted to use the yard floodlight he had found at the ranch. The solar blanket did an excellent job of charging up the rechargeable battery of that device. Some daylight was coming in through the front window of the cold room and the door of the inner room which he had left open, but it was not enough to help much. He needed to see exactly where and what he was digging.
He gave up at last to give the air of the inner room a chance to clear before Merry got home, and went out to his unending job of accumulating and chopping firewood for the fireplace.
They could not have too much of this and he was piling it ready against the outside wall of the cave, where it would act as an extra windbreak, if not extra insulation against the cold, later on. Merry came home eventually, with a good load of meat, as well as some light things from the ranch, to top out a fairly good-sized packload on Sally.
“I was lucky,” she told Jeebee as they were unloading and unsaddling the horses together. “I found a calf by itself, almost the minute I hit the flat down there. So I spent the rest of the time at the ranch. How’s the forge coming?”
“It’s done,” said Jeebee. “There’s no time tonight to rig lights in there, so if you can wait awhile in the morning before you go out, I’ll show you how it works.”
That afternoon and evening after she got home Merry did not talk about her journey to find Jeebee. She talked about everything else, about her hunting, about the ranch, about several dozen things. Her tone was excited and cheerful. She bustled about the interior of the cave. Finally, almost regretfully, she agreed that they should probably turn in for the night, since they were always up by dawn.
Jeebee fell asleep almost immediately, as had become a habit with him. He was roused to find Merry holding herself tightly against him and crying into his chest.
“What is it?” he said, putting his arms around her.
“Just hold me,” Merry choked.
He tightened his arms around her. She was crying very hard indeed. It was the kind of weeping that tears
apart the one who weeps.
Once, Jeebee thought, his mind would have been flooded with a number of questions and guesses as to what was troubling her. But the past months had changed him in this, too. Her explanation would come eventually. There was no need to try to hurry it. She was being attacked by something, something her mind remembered; and all he could do was be a fortress about her and wait. So, he would wait.
He laid his cheek down tenderly upon the top of her soft hair and tried to encompass her as much as he could with his presence. For no reason at all, he thought of how Wolf had come to him in the river bottoms, and also when he had turned his ankle. Often Wolf had come when he was asleep, or when he was so caught between wakefulness and sleep that he was hardly conscious of the other appearing. Invariably, Wolf sniffed him all over and then nose-prodded at his arm or body. “Nose-lift,” he told himself, would be a better term, since essentially what Wolf did was slide the top of his nose under an arm or a leg and push upward, to see if Jeebee made any reaction.
The moment Jeebee did come full awake or respond, Wolf either greeted him or—more often—simply seemed to lose all interest, turned about, trotted off, and disappeared.
If it had not been for the wolf books, Jeebee would not have recognized what the other was doing. But with the help of the books, he now understood. Wolf was simply making sure that he was still alive. At first, his sudden switches to total indifference had been shocking to Jeebee. Yet this was the same animal who had brought him food the only way he could—in his own stomach.
Wolves dealt with things as they were, and, Jeebee told himself, he now had come to do pretty much the same thing.
He waited. Merry cried for some time. Eventually the emotion went out of her, her body relaxed, and the tears gave way to dry sobs, the sobs to silence. She lay still for what seemed a long while, simply holding to him. Then, almost abruptly, she took her arms away and sat up, wiping her eyes.
“Let’s get up and build up the fire,” she said.
She got out of the bed without waiting for his answer, wrapped a blanket around her, and went over to hunch down before the fire and feed its still-glowing coals. Jeebee rose, pulled on his pants and jacket, and went to join her.
The fire blazed up and they sat down together on the two chairs he had brought back from the ranch, just before the fireplace. Merry took the coffeepot off its hook and weighed it in her hand. Evidently satisfied that there was still tea water in it, she put it back on the hook and swung the rod about so that it was over the flames.
She continued to say nothing, so Jeebee did not speak, either. They sat together. After a while, when the water was hot, she filled his cup, then hers, and sat back in her chair, not sipping from the cup, but holding it in both hands as if to warm herself. The fire was now throwing enough heat so that extra warmth should not be necessary, but still she cradled the cup in her grasp.
“I haven’t cried,” she said to the fire. “I wasn’t able to, until now.”
“Do you want to tell me?” Jeebee asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I wanted to from the first moment I found you. But I couldn’t.” She paused.
“You remember the horses?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, understanding which particular horses to which she referred.
“You know the ones I mean?” she persisted.
“The ones always saddled and ready, tied to the end of the wagon as you went,” Jeebee answered.
As he said the words the memory of them came back to him. The three horses—four, after he had joined the wagon’s crew—all saddled, the full pack behind the saddle, a loaded rifle scabbarded at each saddle and the ends of their reins tied to holding bars at the back of the wagon. He remembered that whatever horse Merry would be riding also always had a rifle at its saddle. Just as she at all times had a handgun in the holster of the gun-belt around her waist and a filled pack behind her saddle. These packs, he had learned, on his third day with the wagon, carried the essentials for survival, insofar as Paul could supply them. They carried some of Paul’s hidden store of antibiotics, ammunition and extra handguns, which were always valuable trade goods, bedrolls, clothing, and other needs. The horses that bore these things were for escape.
Merry had looked at him for a second as she asked the last question, but now her eyes were back on the fire.
“They were waiting for us,” she said in a steady voice. “We were on a pretty good highway—not a two-lane freeway, but a good local highway, with the ground clear back fifty to a hundred feet on each side and trees beyond—”
She laughed, unhappily.
“If it hadn’t been like that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They would have got me, too—”
Her voice died. He waited. Finally he spoke.
“The people in the area didn’t warn you that there was danger?” he asked.
What she wanted to tell him was not even now coming easily. It was up to him, plainly, to draw her out gently, to make it possible with questions for her to tell him.
“Nobody local had told us anything,” Merry answered dully. “I don’t think they knew themselves there were raiders around.”
“Someone local must have known, if they were waiting and ready for you.”
“Yes,” she answered, “they were waiting. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe they’d been camped nearby, in a patch of woods somewhere, or perhaps in some place that’d already been raided. Just—there was no warning. No warning at all. Just all of a sudden they were there, coming out of the trees on both sides of the road.”
“Then it was planned,” Jeebee said.
“Yes,” Merry said indifferently. Her words were still addressed to the fire. It was as if all that mattered could be seen there, among the alternately fading and bright-glowing embers, where the greatest heat of the fire was, under the flames.
“It was an ambush.” She shook her head, very slightly. “There were way too many of them for us, but they wanted it easy.”
She went silent, again. Jeebee waited. But this time it was as if she had run out of words to go on with. He prodded her with another question as Wolf had nosed up one of his arms when he was bedridden and unmoving.
“How did they think it’d go?”
“I don’t know,” Merry said in the same dead voice to the flames. “Easy, I suppose. There had to have been more than a hundred of them. They let the wagon get right into the middle of where they were waiting, before they came out of the trees. It was just luck I was back, further than usual, heading in Missy”—she glanced for only a second at Jeebee—“you don’t know her. We traded for her after you left us. She wasn’t full-trained to staying with the wagon and so she’d stray—”
Merry paused.
“If I hadn’t gone back after her… but I did, and when they swarmed the wagon, they were all up ahead of me. I heard the alarm siren when Dad pulled it; and I looked back, to see them riding in on it from both sides. Then the siren quit; and I knew Dad must already be inside with Nick. Almost at the same time, I heard our machine guns, both of them…”
She ran down. Jeebee waited. “You know what he always said,” she went on dully. “‘Ride, fast as you can. Don’t look back.’”
She stopped speaking. The firelight glanced off her hair. She was sitting with her elbows on her knees, apparently all her attention concentrated on the fire. The moments stretched out.
“I rode,” she said at last, in a monotone. “I think some of them even chased me a little ways—I’m not sure of that. But I rode; and after a while I was too far away to hear the firing…”
She broke off. Again, a silence. Only the fire crackled and snapped.
“They couldn’t have known how well Dad and Nick were prepared to fight them off,” she went on finally. “They must have been surprised… ”
She lifted her head slowly and looked steadily at Jeebee.
“You know what else he said.” She waited.
Jeebee nodded and she went o
n.
“‘Don’t try to come back’—that’s what he always told us. ‘Never come back.’”
Her eyes were still on Jeebee. He wanted to reach out and touch her, comfortingly, but he was afraid that even that might be wrong at this moment.
“You went back,” Jeebee said. She dropped her eyes and nodded. He waited.
“I went deep into some woods and waited there—oh, a couple of hours perhaps,” she said to the embers. “Finally, I went back… slowly. I had the binoculars. I found a good spot I could see, from maybe a hundred yards or more away. I could have been even closer. They weren’t paying attention to anything but the wagon. They’d tried to burn it. The front seat was gone, the wooden facings over the front and back ends were gone, the canvas with our sign on it was burned away and so were the tires. All that was left was the steel underneath. They were up by the steel box of the wagon itself, and they must’ve realized by that time that it wasn’t the ordinary sort of thing they went after. The machine guns would have let them know that. It wasn’t going to be that easy for them to get at Dad and Nick.”
Her eyes clung to Jeebee’s now, as if she was holding on to him with her gaze alone.
“They’d spread out in two fans front and back so that they were out of traverse range of the slots the machine guns could fire through,” she said. “And the fire they’d started at first had gone out. But just as I started watching they got a new fire going, between the wheels and under the bed of the wagon. They were going to heat the metal shell of the wagon, until it drove Dad and Nick out, or cooked them alive.
“I could see them there. They were as thick as crowds used to be at circuses when I was a little girl,” she said. “They were waiting for the fire under the wagon to do their work for them. There was nothing I could do; and I didn’t know what Dad and Nick could do anymore. But he had something to do. He’d just never told me, Dad hadn’t.”
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