Within the Circle    
a 2003 Tale from
The Tahoe Ladies    
 

This story deals with a simple premise: bring the Cartwrights into today's world. Give them all the modern day advantages, equipment and, most of all, today's problems. But to solve those modern problems, go back in history to solve them.

    Adam hung up the phone then leaned back in his leather chair, his fingers steepled before him. What his brother had just told him sounded so far-fetched that at first he had not believed him. Only after Joe had repeated himself twice, did Adam come to the realization that his brother wasn't pulling his leg….

 "I'm telling you! The north-south wall, the big one, collapsed!" Joe's voice had insisted over the phone, heavy static making Adam listen even closer. "But not all of it! There's places where it looks like someone put a huge fist through it then other places where it went clear down to the footing."

"I did those calculations myself! Are you sure the mason was using the right mortar mix? Did you check the batch tickets?" Adam shouted into phone.

"Of course I did!" Joe ripped back, the connection now strangely free and clear of static. "Each and every one of them I checked. If you don't believe me, get your butt in that fancy set of wheels of yours and come see for yourself!"

"Simmer down, will you?" Adam hissed. In his mind's eye he could see Joe, cell phone to one ear as he paced around the jobsite, the unoccupied hand and arm waving, gesticulating wildly. Adam wondered again if it had been a smart move to allow Joe to run the project. Sure, he had handled smaller ones for the family construction business before but this one, the Pyramid Lake Casino for the Northern Nevada Paiute Council, was bigger than all of the others combined. Added to the fact was that it had a short delivery date. The construction schedule had been bumped up twice already and they were running 12-hour days as it was. To hear that a major wall had failed was almost more than Adam wanted to hear. At least it had happened when no one was on site. OSHA would have no reason to come snooping but from what Joe had said, some of the men, laborers as well as craftsmen, were talking about quitting.

"I can't come today. I have a meeting with a client about a new hotel on Tahoe in an hour. Clean up as best you can but don't replace anything. I want to look at it myself. I'll meet you there tomorrow morning about eight. How's that?" Adam explained but the only answer he got was a rude one before Joe hung up on him….

From the computer on his desk, Adam brought up the file drawings, and notes concerning the Pyramid Lake project. He went over the wall footings and the foundation plans again. Across the sunlit office on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, he strode and pulled out the actual building set of blueprints. The sheets he needed were close to the front and he found them quickly then laid them out on the wide slanted drawing table beside the racks of plans. The figures and their accompanying drawings had been stamped and signed by the County Engineers as acceptable. Adam Cartwright ran a hand back through his short black hair as he looked for a reason why the wall, the longest and most important one of all, had failed. There didn't seem to be an answer on the plans and he doubted if any substitution had been made without his knowledge. Joe might be young to be the superintendent on a project, but he had worked in the business since he had been tall enough to reach the pedals on a backhoe. No, Joe wouldn't have made any changes. Not on something as simple and elemental as this, he wouldn't have.

The intercom softly buzzed on his desk. "Sir?" his secretary's soft voice called and without thinking he gave a heated, sharp "what?" in reply.

"Your father is on line one. Do you want me to tell him you're busy?" The voice, though it remained soft, held a trace of a tremor as she spoke.

"No," Adam sighed. "I'll talk to him. Thanks Rosalie, and I apologize for ripping your head off." Whatever else she was, Rosalie was the best secretary Adam'd had over the last ten years. He went out of his way at times like this to make sure she knew how much he appreciated her. Besides, one lesson he and his brothers had learned early in their lives was to be polite…especially to women. Their father had seen to that.

Leaving the drawings on the table he crossed to his desk. As he dropped into the soft leather chair, he picked up the phone and hit the blinking red light.

"Afternoon. Don't tell me. We had a lunch date and I forgot it!" Adam said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"No, not quite." His father's deep resonant voice seemed to fill all the space between the receiver and Adam's ear. Adam closed his eyes and leaned further back in the chair, letting it envelop his long lean frame. There was always something about talking with his father that made him half-frightened and half-secure. If nothing else, Ben Cartwright, the family patriarch, could often make a listener bend to his will just by the tone of his voice. Or at least that was how it had always seemed to Adam. And it didn't matter in the least if the listener was a wayward son or a voter. Ben Cartwright, while he headed the family cattle raising business also was a builder in the political sense as well as the contractor sense. For the past 20 years, he had held a place in Nevada Legislature, voted in again and again overwhelmingly by ardent supporters. For the last two terms, he had stood as Speaker of the House, a position of power and authority.

"I had an interesting phone call a little bit ago. From Bill Running Wolf Campbell. He said that there'd been a problem out at the casino project. I tried calling Joe but kept getting dropped into his voice mail. I figured he was talking to you. Or he should have been. What's going on?"

Adam's shoulders sagged and he found himself pushing his body deeper into the chair as he thought of a reply. Smirking and feeling a headache begin right behind his eyes, he finally answered his father. "Yeah, I was talking to Joe. I've looked over the calculations, checked the plans, everything. Joe and I are gonna meet out there first thing tomorrow morning and I'll know more then."

"I thought this was a hurry-up project. Why are you waiting until tomorrow? Why not run up there this afternoon?"

"Because I have an appointment with Grissom and Associates about the new hotel over on Tahoe. And if I don't leave in the next few minutes, I'll be late. Joe is cleaning up the casino site today. Sounds like it'll take all day. Think we should have the sheriff come take a look at the damage?" As much as he tried, Adam found it hard to keep his voice from sounding strained and angry.

"Thought that myself. You going to be home tonight?" Ben's tone softened.

"It's Friday, Pa. I am having a quiet dinner with a lovely lady. I don't expect to be home before you go to bed." No, he thought, I'll make sure I am not home until very late.

"All right then. Go enjoy yourself, I guess. I'm having dinner with some environmentalist group's lobbyist. I'd rather have dinner with a lovely lady but, we do what we must." Adam heard his father chuckle then he finished by asking, "Do you want me to go with you boys up to the casino tomorrow morning?"

"No, the more I think about it, it must have been vandals. Joe and I can handle it. Enjoy your dinner," Adam taunted wearily then said good-bye and hung up the receiver.

"Boys," he muttered to himself. "No matter how old I get, I'll always be a boy to him!" He stood, and snagging his suit jacket from the coat tree by the door, shrugged into it.

For the rest of the afternoon, his thoughts and concentration were all on a new project. The consortium of big money from Texas and the Gulf Coast were slowly but surely making themselves felt in the Lake Tahoe area. Last year, they had bought one of the small skiing concerns and had spent millions upgrading the slopes, the lifts and the ski lodge. Adam had bid on the project but lost out to their only rival, Custom Builders Inc. Grissom and Associates, led by a loud-mouth Texan by the name of Mel Grissom, had made it plain that they didn't care for the workmanship of Custom Builders Inc. That was why Adam was so determined that this project, a luxury hotel to be built on the North Shore around by the Crystal Bay, would fall to Cartwright and Sons. After all, only they could offer the complete package: designing it and building it. He liked to tell people that he could take their ideas and turn them into reality and listening to Grissom that afternoon, Adam was sure the project was his.

In the all-too-modernistic office at the ski lodge, with bright summer light streaming through the windows, Adam listened to Grissom and one of his partners, a Crayton Mellencamp. Adam listened, took notes in his own cryptic shorthand and asked a few leading questions. Once the other men had talked themselves out, Adam turned to a blank sheet of paper and made a quick sketch. It showed the front of a building, towering A-shaped walls of glass that seemed to leap from the surrounding trees. Off to either side swept more glass.

"That, gentlemen," Adam said and laid his pad on the coffee table before him so they could see. "That is the front of your hotel."

"Don't look like much," exclaimed Grissom.

Adam smiled. "It doesn't need to because the piece of land you're talking about building on has one of the best views of Lake Tahoe. Don't wall your guests in. Let them see that lake, morning, noon and night. Winter, summer, it doesn't matter."

Grissom twisted his lips to one side while Mellencamp, a long thin man with graying hair, studied the sketch. He handed it back to Adam.

"He's right, Mel. What people come up here for is the lake. Let's give it to them."

"Does that mean you intend to hire Cartwright and Sons, Mister Mellencamp?" Adam let the words go slowly, almost afraid to breathe, let alone think, that the project could be so easily won.

Mellencamp and Grissom studied each other for a few silent moments. Then Grissom slowly inclined his head. "Tell you what, Cartwright. Grissom and Associates want you to design the building. We want full plans and specifications for the hotel. Name your price. Then we'll put it out to bid to a very selected group of contractors. But we want the plans in ninety days. Understood?"

Adam stood and swallowed hard. Ninety days wasn't enough time, he knew. "Make it a hundred and eighty days and I'll give you a good price as well as a fine set of plans."

Shaking his head, Grissom hung onto the ninety days. "Then we'll open bids in a hundred and twenty with construction to begin very early next year."

Now it was Adam's turn to grimace and he did. He slipped his hands under his black jacket and let them ride his hips as he walked around the small office. Over and over he let it run through his thoughts that this would be the opening of the door with these people. Could he do it? Even though he had several other capable architects in that small portion of the firm, most of the work would fall on him. Could he produce a full set of plans and the guide for materials, the specifications, for building the hotel in that short of time? And with the casino project having trouble…no, he pushed away from those thoughts.

"Okay, ninety days it is. I'll want to see the surveyor's reports asap. Have you had a geologist inspect…" he saw their heads shaking and changed his tack. "I'll get someone on it right away."

Once hands were shaken all around, Grissom promised to have the contract drawn up and over for Adam's review by the middle of the week. For some reason, Adam wanted to run out of the building, jump into his vintage Jaguar XKE, throw its convertible top down, and shout out loud while pumping invisible iron. That, he silently chastised himself, would really make those guys think they'd made a wise move, now wouldn't it? But maybe tomorrow morning, on the way out to meet with Joe….

Joe Cartwright wiped the trickle of sweat off his jaw and hefted another piece of the broken wall into the bucket of the front-end loader. He waved and the big machine backed up and lumbered for the large dumpster parked on the far side on the construction site. He tugged at the gloves he wore and stood for a moment looking over the debris field.

What the hell happened? he wondered if not for the fiftieth, the fifty-first time. When he had pulled up early that morning, it looked as though the wall had been used as target practice for some military group. The cinderblocks that had made up the wall lay, sometimes in groups of up to seven or eight, still bound together with the mortar used. Other times, the carnage was a pile of single blocks blasted into dust of partial pieces. Of course, the first thing he had done was check all of the large equipment for signs of vandalism, figuring they had been used. But no machinery was out of place from where it had been left the night before. In fact, most of them were covered by the fine dust that puffed up at Joe's feet even now.

"Hey, Boss!" a man's voice called behind him and Joe turned. Hank Miller, one of their best masons was lumbering towards him; in his hands he carried what Joe took to be leftover mortar that had been dumped aside the night before. "Thought you might want to see this."

Wiping away another dribble of sweat, Joe looked at what the other held out. Yes, it was a dried lump of mortar, roughly two foot square and a good six inches deep. He couldn't figure out what was important though. "I thought your men knew you had to put that sort of thing in the dumpster at the end of every day. We can't go leavin' the tailin's out."

"I know, Boss. I'll get on Jerry about it but look at this." Again Hank gestured towards the mortar. Then Joe saw it as well. It looked like a giant thumb had been pressed into the mortar while it was still in the drying stage.

"I'll be damned," Joe muttered and took the piece from Hank. "Now all we have to do is convince the law to arrest the Jolly Green Giant for trespass and malicious vandalism!" He couldn't help but vent his vexation. However, just as quickly, he apologized to Hank. Hank smiled wide, showing teeth that hadn't always been cared for, and slapped Joe playfully on the shoulder. As he walked away, Joe heard him wondering who he meant by the Jolly Green Giant.

Joe yanked off his glove and ran his hand back through his unruly hair. He was hot and miserable and knew the crews were too. Like him, they were also disheartened. Someone had not cared enough and had decided to tear down what was being built. This far out of the way, Joe figured it was more than just some kids out skylarking. Not only that, there was far too much damage for it to have been kids. He turned towards the gray construction trailer that held his office as a pretty blonde lady hopped out of a red Jeep Wrangler at the door.

"Payday!" she called cheerily and waved a stack of envelopes back and forth in her raised hand. It was something she did every Friday. She didn't have to since every man on the job had been watching for the bright red Jeep to come barreling up the deserted stretch of highway. But that was the way Mandy did it and had ever since she had come to work for the Cartwrights six years ago. Then she had been Joe's steady girlfriend but slowly, they had outgrown one another but managed to stay friends all the same.

"Wondered when you were gonna show up!" Joe shouted back and trotted to meet her. "Am I gonna win the check pool this week? I almost had it last week with a full house." It had become common practice to play poker with the check numbers, every man giving the secretary a dollar to hold until Friday. Then, once the checks were passed out, heads were bent over them, making the best poker hand one could out of the numbers. Every week there was one winner. In case of a tie, the pool was held over until the following week. While Joe knew that his father frowned on the men gambling this way, he also knew his father turned a deaf ear and blind eye to it, especially when it included his youngest son. He rarely won, preferring that one of the working men take the pot. He frowned at the thought of being different from them. He certainly didn't feel different since he worked alongside of the crews. Where the line was drawn was at the trailer door and Joe had been working to change his own perception of himself once inside those walls. His father and Adam had repeatedly told him to act like the boss and he would be the boss but he had never been able to stand aside doing nothing while another man worked.

Mandy slapped at his shoulder with the wad of checks and bounced ahead of him into the office. He smiled, watching her derrière, tightly encased in Levi's.

"Hi, Jenny!" Mandy called to the lady behind the desk. Giving the young woman a cold stare, Jenny, a matron of at least fifty with steel gray eyes and equally imposing manner, handed Joe several slips of paper with calls noted on them. If Mandy had an opposite, it was Jenny. And neither cared one wit about the other.

Thumbing through the call-slips, one name kept reappearing to Joe: Bill Running Wolf Campbell. He never left a message but Joe didn't have to guess what he wanted. It was the same thing everyone else wanted: an answer as to why a major component of the structure had failed. And failed so drastically. Joe wondered about returning the call. He had nothing to tell Campbell.

"You'd best call your father, Joe. Seein's how you left your cell phone in here on my desk at lunchtime, I been noticing the number of times he called." Jenny's voice gave clear evidence that she didn't think it was by accident that her young boss had forgotten his phone.

Jenny had worked on nearly every Cartwright and Sons construction project since Ben had founded the company close to thirty years before. She never took vacation during a project, waiting instead for that lag time between projects. No one could remember when she had taken a sick day or even shown up late to work. A standing joke among all of the project managers was that they only feared one person ever taking their jobs: Jenny. They also would joke that she could probably run a project as well, or better, than some of them. It didn't stop there since there wasn't a hired man in the company that didn't give Jenny her due when she asked for it. Most times, she didn't even need to ask. Joe knew why he had drawn Jenny on the casino project. That had to have been Adam's doing, he decided. He was giving Joe the most experienced help available whether Joe wanted it or not. Secretly, Joe liked Jenny but he couldn't and wouldn't let on to that fact.

"I'll call him later. Do me a favor, Jenny. Call Thompson's Auto in Carson and see if they can service my Jeep tomorrow," Joe asked, scooting into his air-conditioned office before the woman could have another crack at him.

Taking the checks from Mandy, he signed the clipboard she offered, his scrawl taking up two lines. He thumbed quickly through the checks and pulled out his own, stuffing it into his back pocket. He handed the rest back to Mandy and asked her to give them to Jenny on her way out. Mandy smiled, winked saucily and whisked out the door.

He puffed out his cheeks and dropped heavily into his chair. He let the air conditioner blow through his wild hair, swishing it around as it cooled his head and neck. Again he flicked through the phone messages. The one he wanted to see wasn't there.

"Won't stop me!" he chirped and snatched up the phone receiver and began punching numbers. Then he listened as the connection was made and it rang. Once, twice, three times, it rang then a soft and sultry woman's voice came on. It was the answering machine and for a moment Joe cursed his luck but once her voice stopped, he spoke up. "Afternoon, darlin'. Thought you'd be back from your little trip by now. Call me when you get this message and I'll run right over and massage your feet. Maybe bring a cool six pack and a hot pizza too. Call me." He had made his own voice as equally seductive and he was smiling broadly as he hung up the phone.

"Ahem!" Jenny stood at the doorway, one hand on the knob still. She certainly didn't look as though she thought he was behaving and Joe almost blushed. She thrust his ringing cell phone at him that he managed to get a hold of just before it would have hit the floor. He glimpsed at the caller id screen and flinched. It was his father calling.

"Hi!" Joe smoothly answered, trying to sound upbeat and pleasant.

"Hello, yourself! Do you know how many times I've tried to get you today? I even called out to the site but Jenny said you weren't in the office. Where have you been and why haven't you had your phone with you? There is a reason we bought the thing and a reason why we pay the bills on it every month! And you will note that I have said nothing about the charges that obviously aren't business related….like a certain 775 number that gets called  after work hours. Well, what have you got to say?"

"Busted."

Fifteen minutes later and neither caller had any more information to give the other than when the call started. The only new news was that his father wasn't going to be home for supper so Joe figured he was foot loose that evening. Now if that 775 number would ever call me back, it would be a great way to spend the evening.

She never called back. Joe lost the check number poker pool and Thompson's Auto couldn't get his Jeep in to service it until some time next week.

With the last paycheck handed out, and the last person but him having left the jobsite, Joe took one more look at the destroyed wall. He had about decided that the week couldn't have gone any worse for him. Just in case, as he got into his own fiery red Jeep to leave, he checked his phone. The battery was dead and he couldn't find the car-plug adapter.

Saturday morning found Joe struggling to get out of bed. With both feet finally on the floor, he leaned over and let his head sag into his hands. Last night, he had arrived home with a pizza and a six pack of beer, figuring Hoss would help him polish off both since Friday night was also Hop Sing's night off and the Cartwrights would have to forage for their own dinners. Hoss had grinned broadly and told Joe that he was going to the Volunteer Firemen's barbecue and dance over in Dayton with Greta Swenson. Then he heard Hoss' pickup roar out of the yard, dusting the front of the house liberally. Morose, Joe had eaten half the pizza by himself and over the course of the evening, while musing on the fact that he was the youngest single male in the household and was home dateless on a Friday night, he had also drunk all of the beer. Now, with the bright summer morning's light fingering his toes on the floor, he regretted all of last night.

"Oh hell," he muttered. "forgot  tha' I gotta to meet Adam at the site." He slammed his palm onto his brow, instantly regretting the motion. "Maybe I can beat him!" Reaching over, he pulled aside the damask curtain and checked the garage. He could clearly see the back of his father's old dusty black Volvo, Hoss' pickup and his own Jeep. But the spot next to his father's car was empty. "Damn," he swore softly and dropped the curtain. He struggled to his feet and pulled a pair of jeans from his dresser drawer and shirt from the closet. "The Grape ain't there. Maybe he didn't…no, I heard him. Can't miss the sound that thing makes."

He dressed quickly and was headed out the door when Hoss caught him.

"Better hurry if you were gonna meet Adam," the big man advised.

"What time did the Grape scoot out?" Joe asked, pulling on his jacket. Even though it was summer, the ride in the open Jeep was often cool.

Hoss smiled, knowing if Adam had heard Joe refer to his vintage 1965 Jaguar XKE as "the Grape" he might do a little pounding on a little brother. Adam kept the nearly forty year old sports car in great condition mechanically as well as being careful about road-nicks and parking lot dings. What he hadn't been able to do anything about was the paint. Back when the car was new it had been a rich deep cranberry color with plush black leather seats. But all those years of running under a Nevada sun had bleached the color out until it was now almost purple. Of course, it hadn't helped that when Adam had first driven it home nearly twenty years ago, he had called it a plum. Joe was a small child then and had misunderstood the differences in fruit and language and had promptly told the reverend at church the next Sunday that Adam was driving a grape. Even though he had been corrected numerous times, to Joe the classic sports car would always remain "the Grape".

"He left about an hour ago." Hoss found himself talking to his brother's back as Joe sprinted out the door, saying something about still having time.

Adam snapped the lid down on his cell phone and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

"Still can't reach him?" asked the other man there with him on the construction site.

"Can't get a clear signal, apparently. But he'll be along. I don't think he has any more idea about what happened than we do, Bill." Adam was running out of ways to placate Bill Running Wolf Campbell, the head of the Indian Council. I knew I should have dragged his sorry ass out of bed when I heard him still sawing logs this morning!

"Is that him now?" the older man asked, pointing out over the flat plains. Standing on the small rise with the construction site behind them, Adam followed the Indian's pointed finger. There wasn't any missing the red Jeep barreling down the flat and empty highway in the morning sun. Adam huffed. Typical Joe, he thought, make up for oversleeping by driving way too fast. Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, Adam saw the Jeep suddenly lose control. Over and over it flipped, gouging up the desert floor, throwing plumes of dust into the still air. It rolled to a final stop but Adam was already tearing towards his own car.

It seemed only to take a matter of heartbeats until Adam was beside the overturned Jeep. Laying belly down on the sand at the driver's side, he could see that Joe'd had his seatbelt fastened and that, for the most part, the rollbar and air bag had done their jobs. But Joe was unconscious, his body twisted over towards the floor-mounted gearshift and the passenger side.

"I smell gas," Bill said. Adam didn't seem surprised that the man was there. He actually just took it for granted. "We gotta get him out of here. I can reach the buckle but you'll have to pull him out on that side. This side is crushed."

Even as he spoke, Bill did as he said he would. Adam, his mouth suddenly dry, was barely able to maneuver his brother's inert body around the mangled steering wheel and crumpled half-door. The old Indian came to help him and together they were able to free Joe, his legs gouging out a long bloody trail in the sand.

Quickly Adam had shifted around so that he was at his brother's side. With one shaking hand he was reaching for his phone while the other sought for a sign of life. Behind him, he thought at first he heard a growl, like an animal, then the gas tank on the wrecked Jeep exploded and the force of it pushed Adam across his brother's body.

"9-1-1. Do you have an emergency?" the disembodied voice came from the phone half-buried in the sand.

To Adam, it seemed like hours before the paramedics appeared. Bill had helped as much as he could, using the first aid kit from Adam's car to staunch the flow of blood from the gash on Joe's leg. He also had bandaged Adam's head where a piece of the flying debris had knocked him senseless for a few minutes and opened a nice gash in the back of his head.

"Mister Cartwright," one of the paramedics was talking to him, forcing him to pay attention to something other than where six of them were hovering over his brother.

Finally Adam looked up, a moment's worth of dizziness striking him. "What?"

"We're gonna take Joe by LifeFlight to Carson-Tahoe Hospital. We want you to go in the ambulance, okay?"

"No," Adam barked and shoved the man aside. He could see the helicopter whizzing over the high desert now and knew he had no time to argue the point. "I'm going with Joe. That chopper can handle two."

"But," the medic started to say something else but chose not to when Adam glared at him.

With a swirl of fine sand, the helicopter landed on the deserted tarmac and Adam was on one end of the stretcher that held his brother. Once seated in the aircraft at Joe's head, he again asserted his right to be there to the paramedics. They graciously conceded but kept up the hubbub of technical and medical talk that Adam could only barely follow. There was one young woman with them when the chopper lifted off and she was busy speaking into a helmet microphone. Adam listened carefully, hearing words that made no sense to him: weak, thready, shallow. Joe was none of those things. At least not to his oldest brother.

One leg of Joe's jeans had been cut open, exposing a gash just above his knee that still bled heavily. The woman was pressing more gauze packs onto it while trying to place an oxygen mask over Joe's mouth. Adam took the oxygen mask from her and held it firmly to his brother's mouth and nose. It struck him how cold Joe's flesh was and so he turned his eyes from the bloody, still body.

Below the rising helicopter, Adam could see the wrecked Jeep still smoking and the silent, broken wall of the casino-to-be.

He waited until he reached the emergency room of the hospital before making the call to his father. Adam stood just outside the entranceway and numbly pushed the keypad. It rang three times then Adam heard his father's deep voice saying that he was not available to take the call--Adam cursed voice mail--so he left a brief and succinct message. With his head pounding voraciously, he dialed Hoss' number. He answered on the second ring.

"Hoss," Adam almost shouted. "There's been a bad accident. Do you know where Pa is?"

"He was going into his office to do some work for a while this morning. You all right?"

Adam touched the back of his head and his hand came away slightly bloody despite the bandage there. A piece of the Jeep, he thought oddly detached then he began to shake. "I'm okay but Joe…Joe…" Adam found his voice was shaking as he tried to speak. "Joe may be bad. Carson-Tahoe Hospital, Hoss. Get here, please?" He didn't wait for a reply. He closed the little phone and slipped it back into his pocket.

"Come on with me. I just got the call. What's with you boys now?" Doctor Paul Martin took Adam's arm and, with a gentle tug, drew him into the emergency room. He waved aside a nurse and led Adam, now physically shaking as adrenaline ran its course through his body, into one of the curtain-enclosed rooms and made him lie down on the bed there. "I'll be back but you stay there."

Just beyond the drawn curtain, there seemed to be lots of people, but for the most part, Adam couldn't make out what they were saying or doing. The voices were full authority and orders that were being given were obviously being followed. As he watched the shadows on the curtain, he saw a pair of blue jeans, now cut into bloody pieces fall to the floor. A familiar green jacket, dirty and also soaked in blood and cut up, followed it. Then finally a tan shirt and one tennis shoe, the laces cut and the top split so it could be removed.

There was a commotion in the hallway and above the other sounds, he heard his father's voice demanding to see his sons.

"Ben, settle down. Right now, Joe is in critical condition. We are working to get him stabilized. I haven't seen to Adam. As soon as I know something, you will. Please, don't make a scene here." The curtain at Adam's feet rattled and a shaft of light poured through along with his father.

His father's warm hand closed over his and held it gently then, "Adam? Son? Are you all right?"

For just a split second, Adam wanted to laugh. Here he was in a cubicle in an emergency room and he had just heard that his brother was in critical condition and his father was asking if he were all right? At that particular moment, he didn't have a reference for 'all right'.

"I got hit in the head with something when the Jeep exploded," he explained. Ben's only response was to shake his head sadly.

Before either man could speak again, Paul Martin slipped into the cubicle with them. He handed Ben a clipboard, telling him to sign the papers there then proceeded to begin his examination of Adam.

"It's gonna take a few stitches to close this gash in your head, Adam. But right now, I'm gonna have them ice it down real good. I'm ordering an x-ray as well. May have to keep you overnight for observation. Do you remember what happened?"

"All too clearly," Adam muttered and when he closed his eyes, he saw it again. The Jeep suddenly rolling over and over, hitting the desert floor, small things falling from the vehicle. Again, he and Bill were pulling Joe from the wreckage and Adam could see his brother's blood trail in the sand. Behind him, once more he heard the warning, then felt the impact as something hit him as the Jeep exploded.

He didn't realize that he had spoken aloud, explaining what had happened, until he opened his eyes and saw his father's shocked white face. Paul Martin was nodding. He said he would have a nurse in to Adam in just a few moments. Paul reached across Adam and pulled on Ben's arm, taking him out into the aisle.

"Hi Adam. Remember me? We went to school together way back when," the pretty pert red-haired nurse said as she came through the curtain.

For a moment, Adam was too fogged over to remember but from somewhere in his addled brain came her name: Peggy Atwater. But her nametag referred to her "M. Yates". Then it came back clearly to Adam. She had married Donnie Yates right out of high school. When he had been killed in a hunting accident, she must have turned to nursing.

"It's been a long time, Peggy," he slowly said, realizing that his headache was growing by the minute. "My brother. How is he?"

Peggy slipped the blood pressure cuff onto his arm and secured it then puffed it up and with her stethoscope, listened for the beat. She shook her head when it had deflated all the way. "Your pressure's a little high. One fifty over eighty." She used a strange sort of thermometer that she held into one of his ears then grunted again. "Temperature one hundred point oh- two. Respiration is a little rapid." She made notes on the pad she was carrying.

This time when he asked, Adam reached out a grabbed the woman's arm to get her attention. "Joe. How is he?"

Peggy pulled her arm gently from Adam's grip and stepped further away. "I don't know for sure, Adam. I wasn't on his trauma team." Adam followed her eyes as they went to the shared curtain where strangely enough, there was no sound or motion in the cubicle. "But I do know they took him down to surgery right away. Didn't wait for the x-rays to come back. I'm sorry, Adam. That's all I know. Doctor Martin has given us orders for you and one of them is to not upset you. Please don't make me go against doctor's orders."

Adam tried to smile as he thanked her.  Once she was gone, he stared at the blank ceiling above him. He had done everything he knew to do.

He opened his eyes and found himself in a darkened room. Beside him, the array of medical monitors chirped and beeped, a half-dozen or so with different colors making jagged lines and a steady readout of numbers, some changing as he watched, some staying steady.

"Well," he whispered to himself, "I'm alive."

The deep chuckle came right beside him and a huge hand held him steady. "Yep," Hoss told him, his normally robust voice toned down to a gentle croon. "Doc said that he'd let you go home tomorrow morning if you were doin' as good then as you are now."

"Joe?"

Even in the shadows, Adam could see Hoss' expression change. "He's in Intensive Care. Pa's with him. Got himself a bad concussion. Cut his leg really bad. Broke his right arm in two places. Then you go addin' in all the places where he's bruised up real good and our little brother is a mess. But like you, he'll live. How fast was he going?"

"That's just it Hoss. I don't think he was doing more than, say, sixty to sixty-five. He must have blown a tire or hit a pothole. That's all I can think that could have rolled him like that."

"Roy and some of his boys were out there lookin' things over real good. Tryin' to decide what happened. Until Joe comes to and tells us, it's all just thinkin' on our parts." Hoss leaned down on the side railings of the bed.

"There wasn't much left of the Jeep, was there? Pa mad?" queried Adam. It came to him that once again they were all liable to hear their father's speech about what the Press could do with information. Their father had pounded into them time after time that they needed to be circumspect, and not just in public. Adam'd had little problem obeying his father's wishes and Hoss had none at all. Both men had been exemplary young men, even though Hoss struggled with his schoolwork. Adam, the family scholar, had spent more of his time on studying than looking for ways to misbehave. When he had crossed the line into the sort of behavior that the Press would likely have reported on, thankfully, there were no cameras, no inquisitive reporters. But then again, Adam had been fourteen when his father first entered politics.

"Ain't seen much of him to be able to tell. Remember last time, though? When that little newspaper gal got a hold of that police report, man, the hash she didn't make out of it! I was never so glad to drive a pokey ol' truck in all my days!" Hoss chuckled at the half-memory.

"And thankfully, most of what she had written was wrong so the paper had to print not only their retraction but an apology as well. I think that was the only thing that kept Joe from being locked in his room until he was old and gray!" Adam also recalled that his little brother went on to date the reporter for what he considered an abnormally long time for Joe- six months. As far as he knew, they parted amiably and she was now working in Sacramento.

Yes, all of their father's admonitions concerning behavior seemed to have fallen on deaf ears with Joe. He had been the one called into the principal's office for fighting more often than Adam liked to remember. Forget about the fact that the majority of the times, the fight hadn't started with Joe but he couldn't not finish one. Once he hit the roads with a driving permit, speeding tickets seemed to pour in. He claimed once that if his father would let him buy the type of car he wanted, then the cops wouldn't catch him so easily. Adam still could recall the bright red of his father's face following that piece of 'Joe logic.' Minor fender-bender accidents seemed to dog Joe and their father began to consider making him get his own car insurance since he was sending the family premium into outer space. He had gone to traffic school so many times the instructors knew his face.

But all of that was in the past. Or so Adam thought. "He hasn't had a ticket for a long while, has he? Two? Three years?"

Hoss thought for a moment. "Last one he got was for driving erratic the night he turned twenty one so that's almost four years ago, Adam. I don't think Pa's gonna holler too loud." He didn't want to comment on the old charge, but Roy Coffee had whispered to him that Joe needed to wait until he got the girl home before he started making out with her.

Still, Adam knew that there would be inquiries by the Press. A man who was the Speaker of the House of the Nevada Legislature was a man to be watched and followed. When tossed into the mix were three adult sons, all of them as good looking and eligible as their father …well, news-hounds occasionally even had the guts to come to the house, looking for a juicy tidbit. That continual almost lack of privacy had driven the three sons into a decision three years ago. They had formed their own loose corporation: Three Brothers Inc. That corporation had bought five acres on the west side of Lake Tahoe, behind Squaw Valley. Then, using their own knowledge, plans, tools, materials and sweat, they had built a cabin. It was one bedroom with a small eat-in kitchen, and a living room centered about a free-standing circular fireplace. Outside, a redwood deck looked out over acres of trees for the property backed onto the National Park. They jokingly referred to it as "The Hideout". Because of its size, one brother at a time had the rights to it and when needed, a quick call would verify its vacancy. Neither ever asked the others what they did there but it was always neat and clean with no dirty dishes in the sink or linens to be changed. Each kept a change of clothes there but that was all. In the eighteen months that it had been inhabitable, there had never been a problem. And each one had sworn an oath to keep it secret, no matter what. It was their sanctuary, their refuge, their hideout.

"Holler about what?" the deep voice asked. Even in the dim light, Ben Cartwright's hair shone a brilliant white as he eased into the room. "How are you feeling, son?"

"My head hurts but that's about it. How's Joe?" Adam was quick to alter the course of the conversation.

"He's doing what you should be doing: sleeping. How about it? Tomorrow will be soon enough to get this all straightened out."

"Oh, Roy wanted me to tell you that one of his deputies drove your car home, Adam." Hoss watched as his brother flinched at the mere thought of someone beside himself behind the steering wheel of the Jag. "We headed home now, Pa?"

Ben smiled and touched Adam's arm gently as though apologizing but for what Adam had no idea. "Yes, at least I'm headed home. You comin'?"

Hoss grinned and Adam smiled. "Go on, Hoss. Get a good night's sleep and be back here early in the morning to spring me from here, okay?"

Hoss left his father beside his car and walked down the length of the parking lot towards his truck. The street lamp overhead shed a soft yellow glow over the grass and bed of flowers in front of the parked vehicle. As he pulled his keys from his pocket he looked back up at the hospital, admiring the late night vision of soft clouds that seemed to be hugging the building. For him, it appeared that the clouds were holding all the injured loved ones there while their friends and family couldn't be present. Hold my brothers, will ya? he silently begged of the clouds before he climbed into his truck and started the engine.

There was no traffic on the highway towards home and nothing to keep Hoss' thoughts from going backwards. The call had come just as he had finished looking over a new-born colt. He didn't even remember if he had turned the little fellow back to his mother in the pasture but he hoped he had. He wasn't even sure if he had locked the pasture gate.

He was a simple man who took his pleasures just as simple. There was nothing he enjoyed more that a beautiful sunrise or a startling sunset. He had taken over the family's ranch when it had become clear to everyone that his father's time was better spent in politics. Many of the issues his father dealt with, Hoss didn't understand well. That didn't truly bother him for as long as he could work outside with animals and living, growing things, he was content. When something in his world, like the recent uproar over cutting old-growth forests had touched on his father's work as well, he involved himself and tried to understand all the various viewpoints. Otherwise, he let the rest of the world go by.

But now, that world had reached out and snagged at him. His father had talked with him while they waited for Joe to get out of surgery. Ben had talked about the apparent trouble at the casino building site. The Paiute Council was pushing for an early completion, his father had said. Now, with this happening to Joe, they would have to find someone capable of running the project and have to do it quick. For just a moment, when he had said something to the effect that Joe didn't realize the full impact on what his poor behavior had done, Hoss heard the heat in his father's voice. But just as quickly as it had come, Hoss heard it leave, replaced by worry.

In the morning, once he had gotten Adam out of the hospital, he decided he would take a ride up to the job site. He didn't know if he would check out the crash site. That would most likely give him the creeps, he thought. Just thinking about how close he had come to possibly losing both his brothers made Hoss shiver and he rolled up his window.

To turn his thoughts, he punched on his radio and, for the rest of the ride home, sang along with every song played. He only fell silent when he pulled into the yard and eased his truck into its overly wide space in the garage. On the other end, his father's big black sedan was still faintly clicking so he knew his father had just gotten home. Instead of going inside, Hoss killed his engine but left the radio on. He leaned back and closed his eyes, humming with the music. A glance at the dashboard clock showed him that it was just after one in the morning.

"That dadblamed little brother. Couldn't get up in time to meet Adam when he said he would. Told him a mess of times that drivin' like a wild man would end gettin' himself into more trouble. But Adam said he weren't goin' that fast," Hoss spoke his thoughts aloud, giving the words to the darkness surrounding him. "I've seen Joe take that Pyramid Lake road at better that a hundred. The telephone poles just disappearin' he'd be running so fast. Yet he loses control at sixty-five? That don't make sense. Something else must have happened. Maybe Adam and I'll go look things over tomorrow."

With a deep sigh, Hoss turned the key off and got out of the truck. The night had been a long one.

Ben slowly turned down the blankets and slipped into bed, bunching the extra feather pillow into a wad beside him as he lay on his side. He tried just closing his eyes, willing himself to sleep but when he did, the day came back hard. He and Hoss had paced the floor of the surgery waiting room for what had seemed like most of the afternoon. Finally Paul had slipped in and told him the good news.

"From what they are telling me, there is no spinal damage. No broken ribs. There is a little internal bruising on the right side but it hasn't affected the kidney. He did break his right arm but Doctor Raines, the orthopedic surgeon, was able to operate and set it. That gash on his right thigh took some doing but they managed to get the bleeding stopped and they've sewn it up. Right now, Joe's biggest problem is that he has a concussion, a bad one. Don't get upset, now, but there is a little bleeding into his brain. And he has lost a fair amount of blood."

Ben had tried to take it all in stride; to listen closely to what Paul was telling him and to think on the bright side. "What happens now?"

Paul had rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Now? We pump fluids into him. Another pint of blood should bring him back to full in that department. And we monitor him closely. First thing tomorrow, we'll get another CAT scan of his head and see if that bleeding is any worse."

"Can we see him?" Hoss had asked.

"He'll be in Intensive Care all night and probably tomorrow as well, Hoss. He's still unconscious," Paul had explained but Ben guessed that something in their faces had told the physician just how they felt. "Can't hurt I guess but remember that he's not going to know that you're there."

Both Ben and Hoss had gone into Joe's room and for a while, had numbly sat there beside the bed. Then Hoss had told his father that someone ought to go check on Adam and that he would. Once Hoss was gone, Ben had moved his chair closer to the bed. Slowly and gently, Ben had rubbed the arm on that side, carefully avoiding the IV there in the crook of Joe's tanned elbow. The nurses came and went, never openly intruding, their voices hushed. They checked then disappeared. Joe never moved a muscle, nor made a sound.

Finally, Ben found himself dozing. He knew that he would be back tomorrow and then Joe would possibly be awake and need his father. He rose stiffly and, bending over the side railing, kissed his sleeping son's forehead and left, battling a lump in his throat. The nurse at the desk told him what room Adam was in and he mentally chastised himself for not having spent more time with his eldest. Hopefully Adam would understand.

Now, as he tossed and turned in bed, he wondered what tomorrow would bring. Once Roy Coffee had the cause of the accident figured out, Ben was sure that charges of  speeding and reckless driving would be thrown at Joe. Once those charges were logged down at the County Sheriff's office, there would be media questions. He would talk with John Tanner, his political party's consultant on such things. John would probably tell him to just say that the family was more concerned with Joseph's health and well-being at the moment. Maybe he would have John write him a short speech.

Something caught his thoughts: The Paiute Casino up to Pyramid Lake and the damage done to the one wall. It kept looking more and more like Cartwright and Sons Construction wasn't going to be able to finish the project in the scheduled amount of time and his adversaries, both political and business-wise, would make hay out the situation. He couldn't recall right off the bat what the penalties were for a late finish on the casino. Then he nearly smacked his own knuckles. He had no idea about the contract since Adam handled all of that part of the business, right down to signing his name on contracts worth millions. And Hoss now ran the ranch, and again, it was with no certainty on Ben's part how and what was going on with his beloved Ponderosa. While his sons had grown into responsible men, he had been busy making Nevada law. While his sons had gone about increasing the family's fortunes and standing in the community, Ben had fought for Nevada citizens, their rights as businessmen, landowners, voters. Now he felt unattached to both his sons and the empire that had once been his.

"Tomorrow," he muttered to himself and pulled the sheet higher. "Tomorrow I go back to knowing what is happening in my business and my ranch. And with my sons."

Joe awoke slowly. The walls, the sounds, the smells even, made no sense to him. He lifted his head and found the space around him swirling. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back to the hard pillow behind him. He tried lifting his hand to hold his head steady but found it was too heavy to manage. His mouth was cottony dry, his lips cracking. He took a deep breath and found a track of pain that went up and down his side. Wondering how far his boundaries went, he wiggled his toes and found pain but only on the right side.

"Evening," a tentative voice spoke in his ear. "Come on, open your eyes."

He opened his eyes to muted light and a woman dressed in some pastel color that in the shadows looked washed out and vague. Joe struggled to keep his eyes open but the lids were just too heavy and with a deep sigh, he smiled for the woman then closed his eyes.

When he managed to open them again, it was to the sound of a different woman's voice. And she was squeezing his arm something fierce. He was about to say something when the tightness disappeared and she smiled down into his face.

"Blood pressure is good. Respiration? A little fast.  See this number?" she asked and he tried to make the blue number on the monitor stay still. "That tells us how much carbon dioxide is in your blood. It needs to be a bigger number, Joe. We need to get you back on oxygen, okay? I'm gonna slip this, " and something touched his face then it felt as though the wind was blowing up his nostrils and he tried to move from it. She touched him gently, holding him in place and then the flow dropped. "We need to keep this right here, okay? Your temperature is a little high but guess we can expect that." She smiled and patted his arm again. Oddly enough, when she did that, he couldn't feel it.

"What?" he managed to whisper.

She could see he was confused. "You're in Carson-Tahoe Hospital. You had a car accident. Do you remember that?" When he groaned, she continued. "You've been in surgery to fix your arm. You broke it pretty bad. And you have a really nasty cut on your leg that they fixed. Do you remember that they brought you in the LifeFlight helicopter?"

Joe wanted to tell her that he couldn't understand half of what she was saying. He hesitated long enough and she went babbling on. She told him that memory loss was common with concussions as bad as his so there was nothing to be concerned about. She adjusted a few things and he dropped back over the edge into the waiting, blissful, silent darkness.

The next time he opened his eyes, there was no one in the room with him and he took the opportunity to look around himself. There were monitors attached to him, their jagged lines and numerical readouts telling the professionals something. He had no idea how to interpret them except that he was still breathing and had a heart that was beating.  Funny, look at that! Every time my leg hurts, the little wiggly line that's my heartbeat jumps too! Like it's a pain monitor! Cool!  Also hanging there was a bag that held something dark inside it, but there wasn't much in it. It was connected to the line running down into the crook of his left arm. He lifted his heavy right hand Damn! No wonder it's heavy. A cast from fingers to elbow - and moved the bag. Ah, nothing like a good dose of B positive to make a man feel like he should! Good old red-blooded American blood! He almost giggled. He lifted the sheet covering him cautiously. Eww! That doesn't look good. He swallowed the uncomfortable knot in his throat while he studied the bloodied bandage covering his right thigh. He shivered, remembering how the gearshift had broken when the Jeep had overturned.

"Yes, you made a mess of yourself, old boy. Gonna take a while to get all the pieces back to working right," he joked to himself. "Wonder where the button is to call the nurse. The burrito and coffee I had for breakfast have cleared the system. Oh, here it is."

When the nurse appeared, Joe smiled at her as best as he was able. What else is a fella to do when he has to ask a woman to do "that"?  At least she not someone I've dated!

He pressed his shoulders into the hard mattress when he was finished and let the kind nurse adjust the sheet over him and turn the light down low. She murmured "Good night" but he was already drifting off to sleep before she got it all out.

There was thin daylight peeking through the drawn curtains when he awoke the next time. Next to him, the short chubby nurse was hanging a bulging bag up where the first bag of blood had hung. She had to stretch to reach it and as she did, the unwashed scent of her wafted over Joe and he shifted his head away from her. She smiled at him then went about changing the lines from one bag to the other. He didn't know if it was because he was bored or because she seemed to be fumbling with the items but Joe watched her hands. Then he looked up at the bag suspended there beside him.

Where did the knowledge come from, he wasn't sure. The blood last night had been his type, B positive. The bag she was hanging was clearly marked A positive. Unsure but still afraid, he looked again at the woman. Her graying hair was pulled back into a straggly bun but it was her hands once again that drew his attention. There was dirt on her hands, the nails broken and raggedly chewed on with a skim of dark showing at the cuticle.

Panic rose in him. As much of his high school biology as he could recall, he was sure that the two blood types were not compatible but yet this nurse…

With his right arm, he blocked her and pushed her back as hard as he could. He grabbed the new line and pulled it from his arm. As he jerked on it, the needle in his arm came ripping out as well. Blood splattered both the nurse and Joe, but he rose onto his side, grabbing hold of the side of the bed and began to shout for help. The woman backed away from him, her hand going to cover the "o" her mouth made.

Suddenly the room was full and the lights were brightly on. One of the nurses that Joe recognized from earlier was the first one in the door. She gasped when she saw all the blood on the bed and on the floor. Hurrying around to the other side of the bed, she pulled Joe back.

"Get her! Stop her! She tried to kill me!" Joe shouted over and over, trying to rise up enough in the bed to point a finger at the other woman's quickly retreating back. The other nurse pulled him back and leaned against him to hold him down.

Doctor Paul Martin was in the hospital early. He had several patients he wanted to spend some Sunday morning time with. One of them was Joe Cartwright. When he entered the room, it was just as several orderlies were working on cleaning up a huge amount of blood. He raised his brows and looked across an orderly's back at Joe.

"Morning," he greeted cautiously. Long ago he had learned the expression on the young man's face he now saw meant that he wanted out, away, gone from the doctor and anything else close at hand.

"I tell, you, Doc, it wasn't a simple mistake. That woman was no nurse! And the bag of blood she was hanging was meant to kill me! "

"Settle down, Joe. Nobody here wants to kill you." He took Joe's wrist and felt for a heart rate, ignoring what the monitors told him. There were times when all the whizzes and gizmos were useless and he thought this was one of them. Yes, even as he held the young man's wrist in his hand, the pulse began to slow. When a full minute had passed, he was able to gently force Joe to open his left arm so he could assess the damage there. He pushed the call button for a nurse and when the disembodied voice asked what could they do, he asked for gauze, alcohol and tape. While he waited, Paul did everything he could to stay calm and collected, checking the monitors, checking Joe's pulse again. He'd heard about the "attack" and had decided that if he could remain calm, he could push Joe into the same state of mind without the use of drugs.

"That woman did, Doc. I swear it. Look at that bag. It's marked A positive blood. I'm B positive. What would have happened if I had let her hook it up?"

"You'd have been one sick individual, that's for sure. Shock, certainly." A slim willowy nurse delivered the supplies to the doctor and he gestured for her to stay and assist him. She was, Paul thought, just what he needed: a distraction for his patient. "Leah, meet my good friend Joe Cartwright. Known this young man all his life. He was one of the first babies I delivered so I guess you could say I was there in the beginning. Now, Leah, Joe here had a bad accident yesterday. Got himself knocked around real good. He's probably hurting somethin' awful right about now but he isn’t going to say anything about it." Doc smiled as he wiped away the oozing blood and applied a square of gauze folded over a few times as a pressure bandage. "So I want it noted on his chart that he is to get a big ol' needle full of Demerol every four hours. He can get up if he wants to, but I don't want him trying to walk on that leg just yet." She couldn't help herself. The way Doctor Martin was giving orders was funny and she giggled. The patient smiled at the sound. "We're not going to hook back up his IV, seeings how he ripped this one out. Actually, I had thought at first we'd put it in the back of his hand but he's mighty particular about them hands of his. Here, Leah, hold on to this one while I check his leg." Even as he spoke, he gave her Joe's hand then pulled aside the sheet. Joe couldn't get himself to look at his bandage that the doctor was now cutting away. Besides, Leah had pretty blue eyes. "Leah, when we're done here, I want this incision cleaned and rebandaged. Leah? Leah, you can turn loose of his hand now." The lithe brunette smiled and, dipping her head, pulled her hand free.

There was a tap at the door and a gruff voice asked if he were awake. Recognizing the sound of Storey County's Sheriff Roy Coffee, Joe smiled for the nurse, winking at her as he said he was awake.

Sidling up beside the good doctor, Roy Coffee was a vision in gray. Unlike other county sheriffs, Roy didn't wear a uniform. That is unless you wanted to consider the fact that he rarely was seen wearing something other than a dark gray suit. This morning was no exception.

"How's the patient this mornin', Doc?" Roy stood just shy of the bed, his hands crossed in front of him. "You feelin' up to answerin' a few questions?"

"I got one for you. What are you doing investigating an accident that happened on the Paiute Reservation? I was over the line, I know I was." Joe figured the best defense was an offense.

"I told the chiefs and the Council Members that I would look into for them since I have access to better law enforcement equipment and more manpower to do it with. I been out to the site and looked around real good. 'Fraid there ain't much left of your Jeep. What the accident didn't mess with, the fire did. You're a mighty lucky young man to still be breathin'!" As he spoke, Roy moved closer to the side of the bed until he was able to lean on the side railing while he bantered with the young man there. "You recall much of the accident?"

Joe swallowed and shook his head while he looked at his hands in his lap. How could he tell him and have it believable when he didn't believe it himself? "I remember that I was only doing about fifty or so. My cell phone rang but then-" then he shook his head vaguely and prayed Roy would leave it at that.

"Didn't have no trouble steering or anything? How about your tires?" Roy pressed.

"Roy, that Jeep has less than thirty thousand miles on it. The tires were the ones that came on it and if I'm not mistaken, there was plenty of tread left." Joe fought a losing battle to keep from taking an argumentative stand with the lawman. He'd done so in the past and wound up always on the short end of the stick.

Oddly enough, Roy just nodded his head as though he agreed with him.

"You catch that woman who tried to kill me?" hotly, Joe asked, only to see Roy's brows raise up as he looked across at Paul Martin.

Leaving out the histrionics Joe would have certainly added, Paul relayed the story but said that the hospital was looking into it. As far as he was concerned, he said, it was a mistake that the nurse had made and Joe's attitude about it didn't make it a capital case, in his opinion.

"Does sound peculiar," admitted the sheriff. "If it'll let you rest better, Joe, I'll look into it even though it really is Doug Rogers' territory over here. But I don't think he'd mind. So tell me, Doc, how long before this one here is up on his feet and chasing these nurses down the hall?"

He had a miserable breakfast. The only bright spot in his morning had been the brunette nurse, Leah. She had obviously decided that she was going to be his special nurse that day since every time he pushed the call button, she appeared. She brought him more coffee when he asked for it and even the Sunday comics and the sports section from the local Sunday paper. Joe dozed frequently but only asked for one shot of pain medication. That was the only thing not delivered by Leah. Instead he got a nurse that he swore was really a man dressed like a woman since she jabbed the needle into his backside with a fair amount of force.

"Leah, that is a pretty color nurse's uniform you've got on," he flirted as Leah worked at re-bandaging his thigh. "Makes your eyes bluer yet, you know it?"

She smiled up at him then resumed her work. "Well it actually isn't mine. I borrowed it because I forgot mine when I came to work." Joe made the appropriate perplexed male noise. "Oh, most of us don't wear our nurses' outfits in public. We have a changing area just down the hall. Most of the time, we'll hang a couple days' worth of uniforms in our lockers and change when we come in."

"Some how I didn't take you for the uniform-wearing sort of gal. More like blue jeans, I'd guess." Leah smiled and nodded, still working on rebandaging his leg. It didn't stop him from flirting, but with a purpose. "I'm right, aren't I? And not those fashion-type jeans. Nope, Levi's."

Leah tilted her head back and laughed softly. "Most guys I know from around here are a little less direct, Mister Cartwright. Next thing you know and you'll be asking me out on a date."

"Would I be successful?"

She shook her head. "I'd say you're going to be here in the hospital come next Friday night. And that would be the first night I have off this week." Leah gathered her things and with a smile over her shoulder and a wiggle of a few fingers, she was out the door and gone.

Grumbling, he laid back in the bed. Who was he kidding? Yes, he wanted out of there. It just didn't feel like some place he wanted to stay. He thought about calling Hoss and getting him to come and spring him but Hoss was about as likely to do that as Ben was. Joe shelved that idea. He'd figured gamely that if he had some clothes, he could walk out. But first he had to get rid of all the lines attached to him. He studied the machines beside him. It appeared that there was only one still hooked to him and that was the one giving out the bumps and blurts of his heart rate. A quick check showed him that they were simply taped to him. They would pull off easily. He came back around to the lack of clothes. Someone walking down the streets of the state capital with an open-down the back hospital gown was sure to attract attention. I can always call a cab…but then I have to pay the cabbie. Wait a minute, I had some money on me. Where did it go? Call the nurse. Tell her you're upset and think you lost something that was in your pockets.

Leah brought him a manila envelope that had his name printed on the outside. As she stood there, he ripped it open and counted out the cash he had. Twenty-eight dollars and change. That wouldn't be enough to get him to the Ponderosa but he wasn't sure he wanted to be there. No, he thought to himself while he went about smiling at Leah and stuffing the money into the side table, if he went home his father would make sure it was a worthless effort and return him, with haste, to the hospital.

"Leah, you were here earlier. Do you know the nurse who tried to give me that wrong type of blood?"

"Never seen her before in my life. And I've worked here almost two years. Done rotations in nearly all the wards. I didn't want to say anything but I think you were right."

"Good, then I need you to help me. What's to stop her from coming back and trying again? And maybe this time succeeding? I have an idea but I need your help." Under the sheet, he crossed his fingers as far as he could. When she looked at him and blinked her big blue eyes, he went on. "I have some place I can go and be safe but I have to get there first. To do that, I need some clothes."

Ten minutes worth of flirting and promising everything conceivable under the sun and Joe was pulling up her jeans over his bandaged leg.  I've always talked about getting into a girl's jeans but --Damn! If this isn't the first time I've actually done it literally. Thank God she's close enough in size…okay, a little shorter than me but as long as they don't fall down…Got to go easy on the leg...Hell, I ain't got any shoes!  Goes with the shirtless look.

He didn't wait for her to come back. He slipped from the room and down the hallway to the elevator. Since it was a quiet Sunday morning, he rode the car empty down to the first floor then out the front door of the hospital. A cab sitting right there had a driver in it, filling out paperwork.

"I need a ride. How about it?" Joe leaned in the window and asked.

"Sure! Where to?" The cabbie put the car in motion even as Joe got in. For a moment, Joe was torn then he gave an address behind Squaw Valley. "Don't know that area, mister."

"Don't worry. I do. And I'll tell you right now, I got twenty eight dollars. You get me as close as you can to that address, okay?" Joe sank into the backseat of the cab and let the morning air wash over him. As the cab rolled up the side of the Sierras, Joe pushed aside small talk from the cabbie. He wanted to feel the wind on his face; he wanted to hear the whine of the tires on the pavement and see the sunlight on the trees.

The meter kicked over to twenty-eight dollars while still on the hard surfaced road. Joe figured that he had maybe a mile all totaled to hike. He dug the money out of the tight jeans pocket and flattened it out to hand it to the cab driver.

"How much further you got to go? I mean, mister, you got no shoes on and this morning is a little too chilly to be hiking around without a jacket."

"I told you that was all I had. Thanks, but I don't want you getting into trouble. I mean I've already gotten a real nice nurse in trouble, I'm sure, for the use of her jeans. I don't want to add you to my conscience."

The driver shoved the car into gear after he flicked the meter off. "Let's say if a nurse can help somebody, so can I? Now gimmee directions, will you?"

            "Like I said, next time around, big tip!" Joe handed the man all of his cash then stood and watched the man turn around in the driveway and pull away, one arm out the window waving. "Nice guy," Joe muttered then, finding the concrete driveway hot under his bare feet, he limped to the door. A shower sounded like a good idea to him and, once he'd retrieved the hidden key and gotten into the house, he would get one.

"He what?" Paul Martin held the phone away from his ear but still heard Ben Cartwright clearly. "How in the devil could he just walk out? Why did he walk out?"

"Ben, you keep shouting like that and you'll work yourself right into a heart attack. Like I said, there was a problem here this morning. Joe thought a nurse was trying to kill him by giving him the wrong blood. I pretty much brushed it off but it turns out that he may have been right. The nurse, who several of the regular gals saw and didn't recognize, may not have been a nurse at all. And the blood she had, well, it wasn't even human blood." Paul explained, doing his best to stay calm. It was a shame Ben wasn't.

"Have you caught her? Who is she? Why would she want to kill my son? Isn't there some sort of security there at the hospital?" Ben's questions peppered Paul like buckshot.

"No; we don't know; we don't know that either and yes there is security here at the hospital. One of the guards saw Joe getting into a cab. He is probably on his way home, Ben. When he gets there, get him in bed, would you? The concussion he has shouldn't be played with. Then call me!" He hung up the phone and growled once more. "At least Adam waited for me to release him. Shame, but if Joe had waited a few more minutes, he could have saved himself cab fare home."

Ben slammed the phone down, nearly breaking the mechanism. With a huff, he jammed his hands into his pockets and strolled into the center of the great room. Over in the dining area, he could see Hop Sing clearing away the remains of the breakfast he and Hoss had shared before Hoss went to get his brother Adam from the hospital. Over and over again, Ben mulled over what he would do with his youngest when he caught up to him. On one hand, he wanted to blister the young man's hide for doing something so foolhardy. On the other, he would listen to his excuse. Then he would probably tan his hide anyway!

Outside, he heard Hoss' pickup pull into the yard and, clearing the black cloud from his face, Ben went out the door to help his oldest son. At least that one had the sense God gave a mule!

Adam was smiling as his father came across the porch to greet him. He'd awoken a little stiff and the ride home in Hoss' truck had helped loosen him up quite a bit. That and just being out of the confines of the hospital. But the real reason he was smiling was that he had gotten the same phone call Ben had just had. Paul Martin was in search of a wayward and missing Cartwright. Like the rest of them, he assumed that Joe was headed home and all they had to do was wait.

"He's not here yet? Must be taking the long way home! Cabdrivers usually do. Don't worry, Pa. If he can walk out of the hospital under his own steam, he can't be hurting too much!" Adam explained as he and his father decided to sit on the porch and have some coffee. Hoss, on the other hand, claimed he had some cattle he needed to see about and crawled back into his truck and pulled away.

"He's probably going looking for Joe, isn't he?" Ben mused then buried his nose in a cup of Hop Sing's coffee.

"Wouldn't doubt it." Adam, as well, inhaled the fragrance of the black brew in his cup. There was just something about the way Hop Sing brewed his coffee that made it the best a man could drink. And having had it since he was a teenager, Adam felt he was a connoisseur of coffees. "Like I said, Pa, Joe will be fine."

"I don't know that for sure. You heard what happened, didn't you?" When Adam replied that he hadn't, Ben filled him in. At that, Adam decided that perhaps Joe'd had the best idea: Come home where it is safer.

"But why would someone want to kill Joe? Except maybe a half dozen irate boyfriends whose girls Joe's winked at!" Adam joked but in the back of his mind, he saw the Jeep tumbling across the high desert sand and wondered about the accident again.

Adam and his father sat on the porch much like they had in days gone by. They talked about the upcoming hotel project for Grissom and Associates, the problems at the casino and the best way to handle them since it was plain that Joe would not be returning to run the job for some time. Adam said that he'd gotten a call from Webb Stewart offering his services. He watched as his father's brows had flattened then lifted when he recalled the man.

"But I thought there were problems when he worked for us before," Ben said.

"There were, but that was a few years ago. And with this being the high season for construction, there aren't too many men out there with his credentials we can call on short notice. I think though that he is offering to do this as a way of apologizing for what happened before."

"He stole from the company!" Ben pounded the table between them with a stiffened finger.

"Less than a thousand dollars all totaled, Pa. Besides, aren't you the one who said that every man deserves a second chance?"

 As the afternoon rolled on, both men on the porch became more concerned. Adam even made a few calls to people he knew were acquainted with his brother but no one had seen him. Little by little, it dawned on Adam where Joe had gone: some place remote, and most of all, quiet. Joe had gone to the Hideout. Telling his father that he was headed into his office to do some Sunday work on the Grissom hotel, Adam backed his sports car out of the garage and headed west, not east.

He stepped out of the car where he had pulled into the garage and knew his brother was there. The water pump was running. The inside door to the Hideout, while closed, wasn't locked. Adam smiled. Joe never locked himself in anywhere, always preferring the quick getaway, he claimed. As he stepped into the cabin's hall, he could hear the shower running from the direction of the bathroom just off to one side of the bedroom. He slipped quietly on into the bedroom.

On the bed was a pair of jeans, casually tossed there as though the wearer had just shed them and left them. Through the bathroom door, steam came slowly eddying out and Adam stepped over and looked through the open door. He could tell by just glimpsing at the frosted and steamed-covered glass that the figure standing under the hot pounding water was Joe. He was turned slightly and Adam thought that he was hanging onto the window ledge, letting the water stream down over his slim body.

"You okay?" Adam called, doing his best to sound non-threatening.

Joe raised his shaggy head and looked through the vapors towards Adam as he stood in the doorway. The sound had at first frightened him but just seeing his brother standing there let his heart resume its normal beat. If nothing else, it was comforting to know that his brother was there with him. He even tried to sound normal when he bantered back, "I will be when I can get the smell of the hospital off me."

"What about your cast? You're gonna ruin it getting it wet aren't you?"

With a short bark of laughter, Joe replied, "Nope. It's fiberglass. It'll dry in no time. You come to take me back?"

Now it was Adam's turn to laugh and he did, leaning against the doorjamb with his arms crossed over his chest. "No, don't think I could get you back to that hospital without a fight on my hands. You want to tell me what's going on?"

Joe turned off the shower and opened the sliding glass door just enough to grab a towel to wrap around his waist. Gingerly, he stepped closer to the shower door and slid it back all the way, leaning on the framing. Joe's grunt made Adam turn his attention to his brother when modesty would have bid him look the other way. He saw that Joe was still too weak to be up but that wouldn't stop him from trying. Adam sighed as though exasperated and stepped forward, offering his arm. It surprised him that Joe took it. His fingers, still damp from the shower, clutched like talons into Adam's arm as he maneuvered out of the shower, the badly cut leg seeming to drag. The elder brother fought the urge to simply pick up the younger one. Instead, they worked their way slowly into the bedroom where Joe simply collapsed, chest heaving, on the bed.

Adam grabbed a towel from the bathroom and tossed it to Joe. "Least you can do is dry your hair."

His brother snorted and struggled to sit back upright but he couldn't do it without help. This time, though, he pushed the helping hand aside and remained flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

"Okay, now you want to tell me why you left the hospital? And better yet, why did you come here? I could understand going home where there are people to help you. But here? Come on, Joe, what's with you?" Adam could see his own reflection in the mirror, his dark clothing matching his mood.

With his eyes still closed, Joe used the towel to dry his arms and chest then rolled to one side and managed to sit upright. "You wouldn't understand," he muttered, not even looking at his brother.

"If you don't tell me, that'd be right. Come on, Joe, out with it or I'll haul your ass back to Carson-Tahoe in about a dozen heartbeats."

Still Joe refused to even look in Adam's direction, but Adam could feel something unsettling coming in waves off of him. "Tell me and maybe I can help," he soothed and sat down on the bed beside him.

"You know about the mix up last night, don't you?" Adam nodded. "That nurse, the one who made the mistake, I don't think they'll find her 'cause I don't think she was a nurse, Adam. She had dirty fingernails. You ever see a nurse with dirty nails?"

His lips twisting as he held back a laugh, Adam agreed with him. "But there's something else. What is it?"

Joe's shaggy damp head shook once. Deciding that he had to pry the information out of him, Adam used the same technique his father would have. He took the towel from Joe and dried the remaining droplets from his brother's back. When he was finished, he let his hand stay lightly pressed against Joe's black and blue shoulder.

"You wouldn't understand because I don't understand."

"Just tell me and, maybe between the two of us, we can figure it out," was Adam's offer.

Slowly, thoughtfully, Joe licked his lips and Adam could almost see him shoving things around in his head. "I told Roy that I didn't remember anything about the accident. I lied. I remember everything. Just like if I'd had a video camera, it's so clear. You said you saw me coming down the road then suddenly the Jeep was flipping over. You didn't see what I saw."

Adam remained quiet but something about the way Joe was talking made him unsure if he wanted to know.

"Just before the accident, I got a phone call. Clear as day, and you know how lousy reception can be out there. Anyway, clear as you and I talking right now, the voice, a man's, said 'Paybacks are hell. And it starts now.' The caller id was blocked so I don't know who made the call but when I looked up again, there was this huge hand. It looked like it was made out of silvery-gray clouds 'cause I could see through it but at the same time I could see the fingers, hell, even the lines on the palm. The hand, Adam, it was held up like someone would tell you to stop so I put my foot on the brake. Just as I did that, the fingers bent and just flicked the Jeep off the road like you would a fly from the table. The Jeep went sailing. I felt like a pair of jeans in the dryer, I tell you. When it finally stopped rolling, I could hear that same man's voice still on the phone. He was laughing, Adam. Now, you want to explain that to me?"

Adam remained silent, withdrawing his hand only when Joe moved away from him a little.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you? You think I imagined it. I didn't, Adam. I saw it, I heard it, I felt it. The only way I can think of proving it is that there is gonna be busted glass on the highway. The highway, Adam, not out in the dirt, the highway, because that hand broke the window on my side when he hit me."

The elder brother stood and walked away from the bed and the turmoil he could feel washing off his brother. Yes, when he and Hoss had gone out there for a few moments that morning, he had seen the tiny dark-tinted glass squares still on the tarmac. It made sense with what Joe'd said but, at the same time, it sounded far-fetched.

"I can't say I don't believe you, Joe, I just wonder if maybe part of this isn't something your subconscious made up while you were -"

"NO!" Joe shouted then gasped when he realized he had tightened muscles that were sore. "I know it happened, Adam, God knows, I've got ample proof all over my body."

"And it happened just like you said it did?" When Joe only nodded, Adam continued, coming back to sit on the bed beside him. "Okay then. That's what happened. But right now, I'd feel a whole lot better if you were resting, rather than trying to figure things out."

"That's just it, Adam. The voice said paybacks -plural- and I can't figure out who it is or what it is I am supposedly paying back. I figure whoever it was, they found out that I survived the accident so they manufactured that incident in the hospital. Where's the next one coming from? How can I protect myself against another attack when I don't know who or where or why?"

Without another thought, Adam rested his hand on his brother's shoulder again. "Maybe that's why you came up here. So no one can find you." and we can watch over you a little better. "Come on. How about a nap? You look pretty done in."

Joe quit arguing, exhausted, and stretched out on the bed, asleep almost before his head hit the pillows. It was left to Adam to pull the sheet over him and he made sure the casted arm was out where the air could dry it. Once his brother was asleep, Adam stepped out onto the sunset-drenched deck and called another brother.

"I found him. He's up here at the Hideout," Adam said with no preamble when Hoss answered on the second ring.

"Good. I'll do what I can to call off the search parties."

"When you get done, how about coming up here. You and I need to talk about something."

He could almost see Hoss' face squirm into a question mark. "What sort of thing?"

"I'll tell you when you get here. Better bring something to eat. I think the only here is a jar of peanut butter and stale soda crackers." He massaged the bridge of his nose, wondering where the headache had come from but he knew. Too much stress with too little sleep.

It had just grown completely dark with the moon rising over Lake Tahoe when Adam, sitting on the deck, heard the whine of Hoss' truck coming up the steep lane. He stood and stretched then stepped back and looked into the bedroom. Yes, Joe was still sleeping, not having moved so much as an eyelash. Adam heard the solid thunk of the pickup door closing and before he could step around the corner, brother Hoss was there. In one arm he carried a bag and in the other hand, a six pack of beer.

"You get subs or something we have to cook?" Adam gestured towards the bag.

"Couple of subs. Two for me and one apiece for you and Joe. But I suppose I shouldn't have bought the beer. With you and Joe both taking them prescriptions, you shouldn't be drinkin' anything but water." There was a delightful tease in Hoss' tone as he brushed by his brother and went into the small kitchen. He dropped both packages onto the table then went into the darkened bedroom. Once he had convinced himself that his baby brother, stretched out in a shaft of moonlight on the bed, was all right and sleeping soundly, did he return.

Unwrapping the subs and opening two beers, the older Cartwright brothers sat at the small table and ate in silence. In the length of time it took Adam to down his one sub and beer, Hoss had cruised through two subs and three beers and was looking longingly at the other sub and the remaining beers.

"You said we were gonna talk about somethin'. What is it? Somethin' to do with Joe?"

Quickly and simply, Adam told him what Joe had told him. As he spoke, he watched the expression in the blue eyes across the table from him. When he'd finished, Hoss pursed his lips and nodded his head.

"While we were at the jobsite, and you went in the offices to make a call, I wandered around some. I poked here and prodded there and as I did, I swear Adam, it felt like someone was watching me. I'd look out the corner of my eye but couldn't seem to catch whoever it was. It was creepy, Adam."

If someone else had said what Hoss just had, Adam would have been tempted to just blow it off, but sometimes his brother seemed to have a sixth sense about things. When they had been kids, Hoss seemed to have picked up vibrations from people and had warned Adam several times about girls he was dating being "trouble".  Hoss had also foretold when he'd had car trouble in bad weather and had gone out looking for him, finding him just a few minutes after it had happened. Since then, Adam had trusted Hoss' feelings concerning some things that would otherwise defy explanation.

"I think something is goin' on out there at that job, Adam. Besides the wall, has there been any other trouble out there?" Hoss opened the next to the last beer.

"Not that I've heard but then our little brother is notorious about keeping problems under his hat until they get so big, he can't get his hat on any more. Maybe we ought to call Jenny tomorrow morning out there. She'd tell us."

"Webb Stewart is headin' out there to run the job until Joe gets his feet back under him is what I heard. Is that right?" Hoss took a long pull on his beer but never took his eye off his brother.

Adam made a face, grimacing at how fast news got around. "Yeah, he called me this morning. Said he was sorry about what had happened to Joe and to show it, he'd like to come back and take over 'til Joe's back. I told him I wouldn't tolerate any shenanigans. I suspect he'll toe the line, at least until he thinks I'm not looking."

Hoss shook his head slowly. Webb Stewart was one of the few men in northwest Nevada that Hoss Cartwright didn't like. The man had worked for Cartwright Construction for a few years, working himself up to superintendent. Then he had started changing time cards in favor of the employees, himself included. He was also supposedly pushing drugs at the sites but no one could ever prove it. In the end, Adam had simply laid him off, replacing him with Hoss for the short time left on the contract. Webb had made big noises but hadn't done anything. Now he was coming back to work.

"I don't want Webb Stewart at my job."

Both brothers at the table turned at the sound. In the joining doorway, Joe stood dressed only in a pair of jeans, his hands pressed against the doorjambs. Even under his tan, he was pale and there was a slight sheen of sweat over his chest.

"Hey Shortshanks, you sure know how to get people riled up! If Adam hadn't called when he had, I think Paul Martin and Pa were about to go to the governor and ask for the State Militia to look for you. And you don't want to know what Roy was up to! Heard he was getting up a posse," Hoss chuckled but both he and Adam knew that it hadn't been far from the truth.

"Ha, ha! You got anything left for me?" Joe gestured at the sub wrappings and empty beers on the table.

Hoss got out of his chair and took the few steps he needed to be at Joe's side to help him into the small kitchen, now suddenly full. Joe took the chair while Hoss went out on the deck for one of the chairs there.

Picking the peppers and olives off his cold cut sub, Joe said nothing. He reached for the last beer but Adam moved it further away.

"Narcotics and alcohol don't mix," warned Adam but Joe scowled at him.

"The last narcotics, as you call 'em, that I had was back before noon. Gimmee the beer," Joe insisted, his outstretched hand wiggling his plea. His brother wouldn't give. Just as it looked as though a full-scale argument would explode, Adam's phone rang. Instinctively, he reached for it and flipped it open, noticing the caller's number too late.

"Hi, Pa!" Looking at both of his brothers, he grimaced theatrically.

Hoss and Joe looked at one another and smiled. Poor old Adam was most likely about to get an earful.

"Yes, that's right. He's right here with me and we're having some dinner together."

Joe made a half-hearted lunge for the beer but Hoss got his hands on it first, opened it and tilting his head back, nearly emptied it in one long gulp.

"Yes, Pa. Hoss is here too." The brother so named made a face so comical that Adam nearly started laughing. "Everything is fine. Yes, I'll get him back to Paul but I think we might need to get a --what was that you said? Oh, sure, wait a minute." He handed his phone to Joe. "Our father wants to talk to you." Now it was Adam's turn to gloat and grin.

"Pa!" Joe exclaimed then began making a grating noise in his throat. Both of his brothers looked at one another, realizing that at some point in the past, while talking to him on their cell phones, the static they had heard was Cartwright-generated. "What was that, Pa? I can't hear you. The connection-" and Joe made more static-noise then snapped the phone closed. Immediately he reopened it and turned it off. With a flick of his wrist he handed it back to a bemused Adam.

"Won't do any good," Adam pointed out. "He'll just call Hoss."

"And not get me. Left it in the truck." Hoss finished the beer.

"Wonder where mine is?" Joe lamented, then shrugged and went about wrapping his mouth around one end of the sub.