Payback at Morning Peak Read Free

slowly eased to his side, as if preparing for a nap.
    Several rounds splintered the root cellar’s plank door, a long thin piece of wood catching Jubal in the side of the head, opening a wound. For an instant he couldn’t see. He wrapped his bandanna around his forehead to stop the bleeding and fired several more shots into the distant hay wagon.
    The intense pain from his gashed head gave him some welcome courage. His family had suffered, and this pain seemed to make him one with them. He thought of Pru, her bloody dress, and pa, Jubal Thaddeus Young, Sr., a man striving to make a life for his kinfolk, killed now byhis own son’s hand. Jubal had a moment when he thought maybe his father would forgive him his death and be proud of him.
    Be the man…, he would have said. Jubal prayed that it be so.
    Jubal rose and heard what he thought was a hornet, then a high whistling sound and a shocking pain in his left hip. An arrow protruded from his body. It had not penetrated the skin of his back but stopped somewhere inside his lower waist. Jubal dropped back down on the native grasses to crawl below a small rise in the earth beyond view.
    Scuttling along on his right side, he was careful so the arrow did not catch in the heavy foliage. With all the weapons in play, rifle and pistol rounds eating up the earth around him, Jubal thought it odd he would be hit by, of all things, an arrow.
    His mission was too dangerous, and from the looks of the house it would be a miracle if anything survived the fire. He would have to go back empty-handed up the steep trail leading to Morning Peak and Sultan’s Castle. But Jubal didn’t know what else he could do for his sis.
    If these men could track, and he knew at least the man with the bow could, then they would trail after him, but he knew the rocky path so well he was confident they couldn’t get around him. He glanced at the farmhouse, it continued to burn.
    They would follow.
    He wanted them to follow.
    Hours had passed since Jubal had first come upon the attack. He deemed himself safe for now, having barely madeit out of the bloody grounds of the homestead, inching along on his good hip. Grasping the embedded arrow with his left hand, he clawed and elbowed with his right. The ghostlike image of a tall gray-haired man kept him going. Jubal knew him. He felt as if he were missing something, a reason. It eluded him. The figures darting about his family’s property were mere phantoms without motive. His lack of memory, the why of this kept him strangely alert.
    Jubal limped across an open meadow. Looking down at the protruding arrow, he thought it must have glanced off his hipbone. The length of it jutted out from his bleeding upper leg like an errant tree branch.
    A stand of ponderosa pine lay ahead. He pushed on, glancing back often to see if he was followed. Not yet.
    At a cliff overlooking what his sister referred to as “Young’s Valley,” once again he found his sister’s retreat, the small opening where two large rocks formed an inverted V.
    The light started to fade as Jubal eased himself into the cave, where he was greeted by the sound of his sister’s soft, forced breathing. A strand of light from a gap at the top of the boulders illuminated her pale face.
    He felt remorse. His search for the medicine had not only been worthless, but he had also been rewarded with a deep wound.
    He watched his sister, wondering what to do next. How to deal with his own fierce pain of the arrow was beyond him.
    Prudence stirred. “What would pa say?” she asked. It was almost as if she had read his mind. “Pa once said tome, ‘Prudence, when all else fails, simply smile.’ It’s a little harder done than said. Wouldn’t you say, Jube?”
    “Pa was full of sayings.”
    “Was?” she asked.
    Jubal was happy to hear his sister once again speaking clearly, but she’d caught him off guard. He tried to cover his mistake. “Oh, I just mean he’s always saying these… platitudes. I think