For Want of a Brother, Part Three

by J. Rosemary Moss

Genre: Fan-Fiction (Bonanza)
Rating: Mature Content

LINK TO PART ONE: http://jrosemary.blogspot.com/2008/02/for-want-of-brother-part-one.html

~

“How’d you get a name like Reuben?”

Adam’s voice cut through my thoughts, calling my attention back to him. We’d fallen silent for the last while. He was busy at the fire again, preparing some beans to serve as dinner. Me, I was quietly working on the ropes that held my hands behind my back. I hadn’t made much progress yet--in fact, I reckon all I’d done was to scrape my wrists raw--but I was optimistic.

“What was that?” I asked.

“How’d you get a name like Reuben?” he repeated. “The way you described your Pa, I’d have thought he would have named you William or Hamlet or Horatio or some such.”

I grinned at that. “Oh, my father tried. He wanted a good Shakespearean name for me, but my mother insisted on a Bible name. I was their first born, so she decided that Reuben was fitting.”

Adam grinned back as he stirred the beans. “And your father gave in?”

“He could never hold out against her,” I explained. “But he got his way with my sisters. He named them Rosalind and Celia. I never figured out how he convinced her--I was too young at the time to appreciate his arguments.”

I paused for a moment. It wouldn’t do to say too much about my sisters.

“What about your name?” I asked, trying to turn the subject a bit. “Are you named after the biblical Adam--or are you named for a relation?”

“After the biblical Adam--indirectly,” he answered. “My Pa used to read Paradise Lost to my mother. She named me before she died.”

“How’d she die?” I asked. “Was it childbed?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She bled to death shortly after she gave birth to me.” Then he turned back to the beans.

“My Ma died in childbed too,” I told him. “A lot of women die that way. And it’s not anyone’s fault--it just happens. You have to be brave to give birth, I think.”

“From the little I’ve seen of it, it’s a harder death than most men face,” he said.

“I reckon so,” I said softly, thinking back. “With my Ma, the baby was still-born,” I told him. “That would have been my third sister.”

Adam peered over his shoulder at me. “Do you have any brothers?”

I shook my head. “Just as well--I never wanted any younger brothers. I wish I had an older brother, though,” I added, grinning again. “It’s too much damn responsibility being the oldest.”

He smiled at that, but he didn’t say anything in response. He checked on the beans instead and went back to stirring them, so I went back to work on the ropes. I could feel my wrists getting slick--I was starting to bleed. Well, so be it. The slickness would help, like as not.

I kept at the ropes until Adam came over to feed me and water me. He didn’t notice anything amiss--there were still two wool blankets on top of me. He just sat by my side and made sure that I got enough to eat.

We didn’t talk much as he fed me. At first I didn’t mind--the silence between us was comfortable enough. But at length I got bored and decided to break it.

“Why’d you come out this way?” I asked.

He held another forkful up to my mouth. I took it and started chewing as he answered.

“I was looking for you,” he told me. “I figured you might come up here--it’s not handy if you’re trying to escape the Ponderosa, but you know this part of the ranch well enough to hide awhile. And you knew what supplies were available in this shack.”

“That was my thinking,” I owned after swallowing down the beans. “But if you knew I was here, why’d you come alone?”

He sighed. “I didn’t want to give the posse an exact idea of your location. I wasn’t sure they’d bring you in for a trial.”

I nodded slowly at that. “Clayton was a powerful man--I reckon his fellow mine owners would find a way to reward the posse handsomely for bringing me in dead.”

Adam nodded in agreement. “Yeah, that was their thinking.”

I gave him a level look. “What’s it to you, what the posse does?”

He tousled my hair, just as I’d seen him do to Little Joe more times than I can count. “You’re one of my hands,” he said.

He said it as if it explained everything. And I suppose it did. Adam was the sort who felt a keen responsibility for his workers.

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But is it worth all this trouble just to bring me in? You can still look the other way, Adam. You know what sort of man Clayton was--I heard you say yourself once that he was responsible for the deaths of at least twenty miners. All because he was too cheap to pay for the safety of his men.”

Adam narrowed those cat eyes of his at me. “I know what Clayton was,” he admitted. “His men weren’t real to him--they were just figures on a ledger. He wasn’t purposefully cruel and he didn’t want them to die. They just didn’t enter into his thinking when he looked at the costs and profits of his mine.”

I thought about that. “I suppose that’s accurate enough. Too many people weren’t real to him--that was the problem. But that don’t change things, Adam. He deserved death. He deserved a worse death than I gave him.”

“And you think you deserved to be his judge and executioner?”

I shrugged. “Why not? The law wasn’t going to do anything to him. The law can't even fine him for all those deaths."

Adam sighed again. “Reuben, I know you didn’t kill Clayton over those miners. You’re not on a crusade against the evil captains of industry.”

I had to smile a little at the sarcasm in his voice. “That’s true,” I owned. “It was more personal than that.”

“Tell me what happened,” he ordered. And it was an order--there was no mistaking that.

I stared at him for a long time before I answered. But in the end, I decided to give in. I’m not sure why, though. Maybe I was used to taking orders from him. I’d been working under him for a year now, after all. Or maybe I just liked the idea of having an older-brother type to boss me around.

I smiled again as I started talking--a wistful smile this time. “It’s about my sister Rosalind,” I began.

LINK TO PART FOUR: http://jrosemary.blogspot.com/2008/02/for-want-of-brother-part-four.html