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Ken trembled and closed his eyes. He didn't have to imagine the memory of Ben's fire ravaged face where he lay on the bridge of explosion seared navy ship. The horror of knowing that death was approaching had numbed him then. But the sunny, warm scent of Joey's hair comforted him now and gave the badly wounded pilot his courage to face that moment again. "He said, 'If you remember what we were, how we lived, you will find life again. Now, I'll live in you. And in all whom you will encounter when you'll tell them of us, my darling.' " Baxter let go as the phantom memory of Joey's father's voice left him and he felt himself starting to black out. But he didn't fall. He was caught by two tiny hands that supported his head as he was lowered swiftly, but carefully, back to the ground. Joey looked up into the sky, and smiled. "Thank you, Dad. I love you." ************************************************** Subject: Mule Tidings -- Part One Finale... From: patti k (pattik1@hotmail.com) Sent: Thu 5/28/09 3:15 PM Hank Stanley kept his grip on the cherry flare he held away from his body as he walked slowly through the woods, calling for the pilot and the boy. He could see the bright red blooms of other flares from ones that Chet, Marco, Mike and Roy were holding as they moved in a line down valley, spread out over a quarter of a mile. Their voices rang out, but no replies returned. ::Eight miles round is a big area to cover. :: he thought. Cap readjusted the rescue pack on his back and kept going. Falling shadows of late afternoon made it difficult to see anything out of the ordinary. Twenty minutes earlier, a false alarm had been raised over a half foot piece of metal and rivets found but the park rangers confirmed that the find had actually been from a plane crash that had occurred ten years ago on the ridge above them. Heavy rust on the bottom side of the shard had proved a very aged condition. Deheartened, the Station 51 crew just nodded and got back to searching and scanning the tree tops for damage or smoke. Cap walked alongside Terri Blake's horse briefly to ask her a few questions. "How good of a pilot is your friend? Maybe that'll have a bearing on where he might have chosen to go down. If he knew the area well, he may have aimed for an open spot." he suggested to the Ranger R.N. Terri looked down from the saddle, her face set in lines of worry. "Paul Carnes says he's one of the best. An ace pilot from Nam. These woods are his playground. He could tell you his coordinates just by the pattern of trees and hills he saw below him from the cockpit. Sir, if Ken Baxter had any place to land, he would have found it. Dwayne Thibideaux and Trap Applegate have already checked all the clearings they know about. Bluebird Five's not in any of them." "She's down in heavy cover then." Hank sighed. Blake just studied her hands as she rein guided her horse over logs and fallen leaf drifts and didn't answer. Morgan's voice piped down through Terri's handy talkie. ##You know, guys. I've been thinking.## she radioed from 240 Robert Air. ##Ditching over land's far different than ditching over water. If Ken had wind problems, there would be only one thing he could have done to save that chopper.## Blake thumbed her toggle switch. "And what would that be?" ##What else do you do when you're being flung around in a fast current? You find an anchor.## Wainwright suggested. Cap's eyes lit up eagerly. "A high tree, sticking up out of the forest. A kind with broad branches.." he said, thinking. |
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Terri got excited. "White pines, Morgan! Eagles nest in them all the time for their accessibility. They stick up out of the trees sometimes up to twenty feet higher than the rest of the forest." ##Islands in the sky. ## Morgan agreed. "He must have done that. I know he did! He's teased me enough about landing on top of one enough times when I'm flying with him." Terri said. She turned up the gain on her radio. "Blake to all search parties. Concentrate on searching out all the lone sentinel white pines in your grid. Bluebird Five may have used one of them to get out of the air if she was in rotor distress." ##Roger.## ##Will do.## ##I'm heading west to the ridge tops.## came the many replies on her communications band. ##I know where the nearest one is to me.## said Paramedic Deputy Thib, adding more. ##It's huge, like a tower, stuck in a creek valley. I'm heading there on foot, leaving the jeep on the road to mark my position. My GPS is on. I'm about a mile away from it. ## Terri's eyes reflected hope, glistening with tears. "10-4." Chet angled up to Terri, on foot, flanking her horse on the opposite side of Cap. "Uh, not to sound dumb. But what does a white pine look like?" "Like that." Terri said, pointing a casual finger over her shoulder behind her at a tall majestically sweeping pine tree on the highest ridge top that was crowned with the silhouette of a pair of thermal hovering bald eagles as they hunted for prey above the aerie they had built in it. "Eagles are always over every one of them." she replied. "Those pine trees are their take off platforms. And dang it all, Ken probably borrowed his joke stunt idea from them just to scare the life out of me back then. He's sure doing a pretty good job of it scaring me now." "We'll find them." Cap told her. "Now that our searching is narrowed down to specific points. We'll find them for sure." "I hope we do, before darkness sets in." said Sarah, on the mule. "Tonight's forecasted to be below freezing again before dawn." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joey heard a groan behind where he was fanning out smoke with a broken pine bough from their signal fire, up into the growing darkness. "...ohhh." "Mr. Baxter?!" shouted Joey. He hastily dropped the stick he was using to stir up more hot embers and scrambled quickly into the ring of the fire's light where the injured pilot lay rolled onto his side under a thick layer of blankets and a wool sleeping bag. "How are you feeling?" Ken didn't say anything for several breaths. When he opened his eyes, they were swollen and blood red. Joey saw that he couldn't focus on his face at all, so he took Ken's damp hand into his own and squeezed it. Baxter slowly raised his eyebrows. "I'm not gonna lie to you, kid. But I think I'm on the "d" side of "bad."" |
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Collins was distraught. "What did I miss?" he asked urgently. "I stopped your leg's bleeding. Covered you up. I- I got treated water boiling for chicken broth for us. I even added sugar!" he minced nervously. "Joey.." "I treated your shock as best I could, Mr. Baxter." "Joey.." "So why aren't you getting better!" the boy panicked. "You're still so cold." Ken sighed for the boy's benefit and squeezed the child's tiny hand right back. "I'd be an easy fix if I were just a singed steak. But this leg of mine's trying its best to be ground beef. Hamburger's hard to heal right away." he joked, trying to ease Joey's worry. "So if I don't cook right, it's not your fault. I'll always be grateful.. that you d-did the best you could." the pilot whispered. "Don't say that." Joey cringed, not wanting to think of the pilot actually dying. "Have to. Because it's true." Ken said simply, pursing his cracked lips. "You're saving my ever living sorry *ss butt." Joey looked down at where his hands clutched Ken's nearest bigger one. "Not very well." he sniffed, new tears beginning to fall. Ken sensed the boy's mood changing over to despair. "It's okay to be afraid, kid. Let's face it. I'm pretty scary looking cold cuts here. But you did your job just fine, I'm wrapped up all nice and snug for delivery. Now all we gotta do is wait for our flying people chefs to arrive to turn me into their one of a kind daily special." The Collins boy smiled bravely, but he couldn't laugh. He tried to help Ken some more, answering a deeper instinct. "Are you getting hungry? I think our soup's just about ready." "I think I'll pass. My stomach probably couldn't handle it." Ken said, thinking about how much his current nausea might grow in the future. "How long was I out?" "Almost fifteen minutes. Did you get those black eyes from hitting your head?" "No. I-I might have gotten them because something squeezed me around my waist too tight for a few seconds. Might have been my seatbelt riding up after we crashed. I got ... something... burning deep inside my abdomen where it slipped." "How far did the belt go?" "Up to my armpits." Ken felt his neck and found that it had been bound loosely in gauze wrap. "I remember hanging by them until I released the belt harness's chest catch. But I think this neck scraping was from a branch. Is it bad?" "No, looks like road rash." Joey replied. "It's already dried up. How's your leg?" "Numb. What color is it?" "I can't tell. It's too dark down here in this gorge." Joey said, peeling away the blankets from around it. "It's okay, I can feel the chill on my toes. See? They're probably steaming." he said, wiggling them. "Hardly." Joey re-buried the foot and leg. "I was joking." "Well, I'm not in the joking mood." Joey told him, no nonsense. "I'm feeling helpless being trapped like this." "Why? They know just about where we went down. So we're not lost. You got a fire going for heat and light. With food." he emphasized. "It's not raining so we really don't need any shelter yet. We're doing really great according to my book." "Well great's not good enough. We can't signal to them anymore. The sun's gone down and these trees are too thick to let any firelight or smoke through to the sky." "So light a bigger fire." Ken suggested, closing his black and blue eyes tiredly. "What? That's crazy! There are too many dead leaves lying around. I don't want to start a wildfire in all this wind." Joey told him. "No way, am I going to burn any Bambis." said the boy in no uncertain terms. "All right. That's okay. I can see that. " Ken blinked, blurrily. "Well, no I can't, but you're the man in charge of camp and who am I to argue with the voice of reason? I'm just the patient here. Well, guess we have just one option left available to us then." "And what's that?" Joey snapped, feeling irritable. "We wait." Ken said simply. "Seems your first plan's really the best one after all." he concluded, winking a bruised, fat eye. He pulled up the blankets around his shoulders more snugly to sleep. Joey's mouth flopped open in sheer amazement at how he had been maneuvered into feeling okay again about their current situation. He was struck mute. But not the pilot. "Oh, and keep any bugs from landing on my face, would ya? I hate em." |
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dwayne Thibideaux was getting frustrated. He radioed back yet again over the search party channel. "Nothing here at this one either. I'm adding these GPS coordinates in red as already searched. My next target tree is up the ridge over Diamond Valley Gorge." he radioed, exasperated. "I wonder why we don't have a map and a count of how many nest pines are actually in the park? Kind of important, don't you think, with the bald eagle being our national bird?" he said to the others on their channel. ##Lack of funding.## said Paul Carnes from Park Headquarters through the base station. ##Much easier counting campers. They generate the direct revenue for us. Our eagles are just window dressing in our legislators' eyes.## "Yeah, well having that information now might help save two lives." Thib fidgetted as he hiked. Ranger Carnes mused a bit, then he transmitted an idea. ##I'll call the local birding club. They might know every stick in those hypothetical nests better than they know the backs of their own hands.## ##It's worth a shot.## Roy DeSoto replied into the band from where he, Stoker and Trap Applegate were hiking along a nearby ridge adjacent to Thib's. ##Cutting a few corners may speed up the ground we can cover before full darkness hits.## ##That'll definitely help me.## replied Morgan from 240 Robert Air. ##I can search all marked coordinates that they could possibly have squirrelled away, in minutes. Eight miles round is not a very big area from a helicopter pilot's perspective. ## Paul Carnes got right on it, reaching for the phone. |
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Johnny Gage was watching the news from his hospital bed. He had long since put two and two together that the missing helicopter in the park being reported was actually Bluebird Five. He was getting antsy for the search teams as he heard more and more details about the weather forecast for the evening. ::No snow, but more winds? And cold? Not good.:: he thought. He jumped when there came a knock on his door. "Ah, geez. Come in.. I'm decent.." said Gage, throwing a sheet over his legs that were still sticking out of the hospital gown. He put a scowl onto his face in case it was Marilyn the nurse coming to take his vital signs again. A head peeked through the cracked door. It was Joanne Almstedt. Instantly Johnny brightened. "Oh, hiya Miss Doc, Uh, I mean Joanne. How's our patient doing?" Joanne rolled her eyes around the room and shrugged. "Fine? I.V.'s DC'd. Your core temp's back to normal. So's your B.P." she ticked off on her fingers, surprised that a seasoned paramedic would be asking her that kind of question about himself. "I meant the second kayaker.." Gage said, fluttering a few fingers to clarify. "Oh, he's still in surgery. Prognosis is, uh..." she hesitated, thinking about confidentiality. Gage rescued her. "...still out to lunch.. I can just imagine." Johnny sighed, growing serious. "He was pretty out of it out there." "Yeah.." Joanne said, equally crestfallen. "Let's hope my meatball surgery made a difference for him." "It did." Gage told her seriously. "He'd be dead by now if you hadn't've released all that intracranial pressure. He was posturing." Joanne came the rest of the way into the room and leaned up against a chair set along a wall, smiling ruefully as she crossed her arms. "It's so weird talking medicine with a patient and getting a dose of it right back at me." "You're welcome." Gage grinned. "And I really mean that. I know how hard it is making crack decisions in the field about treatment. Back at home, we don't always have a perfect communications link with our hospital at times." Joanne nodded. "All those arroyos and canyons." "Yep. It sucks whenever you're in a low spot on a call." "What about your physician's standing orders?" "We don't have any. Well, not yet anyway. Maybe soon though. Brackett's talked about cutting us loose one of these days." he chuckled. "Speaking of which, am I free to go?" "You mean, free as in released from the hospital?" "No, I mean free to go out on a date with you sometime before the end of the weekend. Because then, we have to truck out to the airport to learn a new kind of firefighting." |
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"Platonically? Then it's a yes, Mr. Gage. I think we both have some bad air to clear up." "Ahh.." Johnny sighed. Gage mimed being shot to the heart. "There's that word again." "What? Platonically? Or is it actually hearing a 'yes' answer that's making you feel faint?" Joanne winked from around her clipboard. "You figure it out." Johnny said, challengingly. "Get dressed. You've been sprung. I have...." she said, looking at her wrist watch, "..exactly forty five minutes before my night shift begins. And the park cafeteria is open now twenty four hours for all the search parties and state agencies moving in." "I'm gone.." Gage said, leaping out of bed and making a dash for where Marilyn the nurse had hung his camping clothes in the bathroom. Joanne politely shielded her eyes from the open flaps of Gage's gown fluttering as he ran by her. "Don't you ever tie anything?" "Ropes. Really well. But not gowns. They leave irritating crease marks." Johnny said, slamming the door behind himself. The door opened and he peeked out at his doctor. "Be right back in thirty seconds. Nobody dresses faster than a firefighter." he smiled lopsidedly, excited. He slammed the bathroom door shut again and soon, Joanne heard muffled changing noises and bangs as he hurried. Under her breath, Joanne muttered. "Bet it's not faster than what a certain lady helicopter pilot can't undo." she chuckled under her breath. "Morgan, he's a good one. I'm jealous. Too bad I'm already taken." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joey was snoozing fitfully on a bed roll under a blanket when he heard a disturbance. "Ken?" Ken Baxter shot bolt upright when the muscles around his broken leg leaped again in another series of uncontrollable spasms. He screamed as sickening sensation returned in blinding, white hot pain that shot through his entire body like a lightning bolt from his groin to his teeth. Unthinking, Ken grabbed at his pants leg over the deep, cratered wound under the bandages in panic, and bumped an elbow against a sharp bone end by accident. His screaming cut off instantly as a new wave of choking agony gripped him cruelly. Ken fell back down to the ground onto his back in a contorted knot of limbs, twitching in unbelievable torment. "Mr. Baxter? What's wrong?" Joey yelled. "Lie still!" |
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"Cramps! In my leg! AHHHHhhh!" The weakened pilot felt something critical tear deep inside. An answering fountain of blood, hot and coppery, began to spurt out of a newly opened gash in the thigh around a clearly snapped femur shaft. Trembling, the pilot tried to suppress the overwhelming flood with both hands, trying to sit up. "W-What did I do?" he panted. "Ken! Don't move!" Joey shouted. "A big vessel's been cut!" the boy shouted. Joey scrambled over to Baxter as fast as he could with a bundle of rags he had found. He pressed them against the cratered gouge in a ring around the stained bone that was jutting up from newly pale, colorless skin with all of his strength, but blood still shot out and into the air around his pressing pile of cloth. The pilot noticed the jet of red escaping from between Joey's hands. ""Oh, no.. G*d, no. Please. Not like this.. I don't want to die like this.." Ken wheezed as the cramps fled from a sudden lack of circulation. "Joey, you gotta help me more. This is real bad." he gagged. "Killing bad.." "I know." Yelling in fear, the boy twisted around and spied a football sized boulder next to him. He grunted, hefting it up into two hands with effort, against his chest. "I'll stop it, Ken. Hold still. I found something real heavy." Ken's head nodded, but then Joey saw him sag onto the ground as shock began to take the pilot's consciousness again as his blood pressure bottomed out from the effects of the stabbed artery. The boy saw a large pool of red rapidly spreading out from the sleeping bag and running into the dirt surrounding their fire. With fast desperation, Joey moved the bulk of the stone over the groove between Ken's upper leg and lower abdomen. Then he let it drop. The rock immediately nestled onto a pressure point neatly, shutting off the flow of blood to the rest of the leg farther down. The hideous spray of gore from the thigh, ceased instantly. His hands wet, dripping, and sticky, Joey gaped in surprise. "I got it Mr. Baxter. You're not bleeding from your leg any more!" Collins said, carefully studying the large stifling stone sitting on Ken's body. Then he slid his hands down lower and lifted up the soaked rags over the spasm shifted fractured bone to double check. But the new large wound was quiet of any flow. "Now I'm sure I've got it stopped again. How does it feel to you?" But the pilot didn't answer from where he lay sprawled on his back. The boy looked up at Ken's face. It was lax and turning dark. Ken's sudden stillness began to terrify Joey. "Mr. Baxter? Can you hear me?!" He crawled over to the pilot's head and bent an ear down over his nose and mouth, laying a hand on his chest. It wasn't moving. Nor did he hear the sound of air passing in and out of Ken's lips. "Ken?!" the boy shouted. Remembering more scouts training that he and his dad had long practiced, Joey took a hold of Baxter's face and tipped his chin up to clear the tongue from the back of Ken's throat. Then once more, the boy listened. The pilot wasn't breathing. "..oh, no.." the boy sobbed softly. He blocked off Baxter's mouth with the flat of his palm and then he blew the largest breath of air he could in through Ken's nose. The man's chest rose only a little, but it was enough. A few breaths later, Ken's features pinked up as the pilot's thready heart began to faintly circulate the oxygen that Joey offered. "Ken!" the boy cried. "Wake up! You gotta breathe on your own. I can't keep doing this. I'm gonna get tired. You're almost too big for me to help." he gasped in between his attempts to keep Baxter's lungs filling. "Ken? Breathe!" But the pilot remained still and limp as death itself. |
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Joey kept offering deep, panicky breaths as they both slipped into eerie limbo. The two desperately bound figures were swallowed up by the darkness of full night as the camp fire began to drop lower and lower inside its ring of stones. Slowly, its lifegiving wood was consumed into just glowing ash as the lonely sigh of the autumn wind drowned out the sounds of a little boy's crying and the frantic efforts of his work, trying to breathe for two. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Terri Baxter kept her horse along side Jodi the mule, so she could talk with Sarah Collins. "We're gonna find your grandson, Sarah. It's only a matter of time." "I know that well enough. It's what condition we'll find him in that worries me." she answered acidly. "Dang it all, why can't your mule stay on the trail? She keeps dipping her head down grabbing onto things. My arms are getting tired redirecting her back to business each time." Sarah complained, feeling fatigue in every joint. "She's what?" Terri gaped. "Wait a minute. Let her do that again. I want to see what she's doing." "Why? She's just fidgetting. Doesn't want to work." Sarah shrugged. "Not my mule. Jodi's different. She's a hunter. Hates cougars with a passion but she also loves to find anything else out of the ordinary, too." Sarah eyed Terri on her horse with skepticism. "Are you telling me this mule's a natural born tracker?" Terri squared her jaw, embarrassed. "Well..." She tried a different explanation. "I know we've never lost a cougar yet we've gone after." Baxter grinned, tipping her head to one side. "Handy, since there isn't a park ranger on the staff who knows how to track them." "Joey's not a cougar." Sarah scoffed, frustrated. "No, but a chopper he was in that crashed is certainly going to be an odd ball in these woods. And Jodi would notice a change like that long before any of us would. Weird as it sounds." Blake reasoned. Collins harrumphed loud in her throat and loosened the reins on Jodi's neck. "I'm willing to try anything at this point and I think the others would agree with you, me... errr...us." she sighed, correcting herself, with strained emotions. Jodi, the bay mule, suddenly freed, immediately canted to the right, nuzzling about in a low bush. Her head disappeared up to the shoulders into its dried branches and leaves. Terri studied her curiously, focused. The older woman noticed and brushed her windblown blond gray hair out of her eyes. Sarah rolled her eyes ruefully. "So she's hungry. Big hairy deal, Miss Blake." she joked dryly. "Just a second, ma'am." Blake held up a hand, watching Jodi's antics carefully. "She's actually full. Ate her weight in oats after we bagged that cougar yesterday. She just lipped her hay for me this afternoon as a courtesy and didn't eat a single mouthful." The two women paused again, sitting quietly in their saddles. Then Jodi took a step backward and when she reappeared, something blue was in between her teeth. Terri dismounted and snatched it free after liberal caresses and praise. "That's a good girl. Good hunting. Now gimme it. Let me see." Jodi brayed, opened her mouth and let the object fell into Terri's gloves. The mule's find was made of cloth, full of mud and dust. And when Blake turned it over to look at its cleaner side, Sarah just about fell off the mule. "That's Joey's! It's his baseball cap!" she gasped. "I'd know it anywhere!" |
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Terri wiped away a smear of mud to expose an embroidery stitched ship bearing the name of the U.S.S. Intrepid. Part of the lettering was splashed in blood. Feeling stunned, and rescuer impatient, Blake passed it over to her guest to free her hands up while she scrambled to get at the radio on her belt. "He'd never part with it if he was still alive." Sarah sobbed, hugging the battered navy cap to herself in despair. All her earlier obstinance had evaporated into anxiety. She suddenly looked ten years older. Terri gripped her arm to offer strength. "Now we don't know anything concrete yet, Mrs. Collins. Let's just treat this find like the clue it is." Blake lifted her radio and reported their confirmed helicopter debris and then she gave her coordinates to the exact decimal quickly. Minutes later, the rest of the search party converged to begin a new search using the hat's bush as the center mark. Wainwright landed 240 Robert Air on the ridge above the group and jogged down to join them. Terri pointed to Sarah and what she held. "This hat is the boy's. His name's Joey. And he was definitely wearing it today." The searchers got excited. Especially the gang of 51's. Then Terri showed them the damage to the cap and to the bush that had hidden it from view. "This does look like recent wind scour." said Trap, studying more shrubs and trees in the area. "There's no dew condensing on them yet." "Yeah, and dust devil debris paths are always dry. See the marks where flying sticks and rocks have pierced the dead leaves on those trees? Bluebird Five must have been caught in a windshear or something similiar and lost control." Morgan stated. "Then she'll be close by." said Cap. "Within a half mile. Dust devils don't get that big. And they don't last for very long once they get going." The female pilot agreed. "Let's spread out!" Terri shouted to everybody. "Look for a white pine/eagle tree in the immediate area." She updated Paul Carnes at Appalachia Central on everything. "...and our location's is on the west rim of Black Rock Creek Gorge just above Tag 119." she concluded. ##Good job. I'm glad you talked me into keeping that mule on the payroll in our stable's string. She's earned her weight in sweet feed today. Keep me posted.## "Will do, Paul." Terri told him. Morgan Wainwright ran for her chopper. "I'll get my spot light running hot." she promised. "How big is it down there?" Roy asked, trying to peer into the pitch black gorge through the setting sunlight. "Maybe a mile long by a quarter wide. It's tiny. With a creek at the bottom." Terri replied. "Okay, guys, have your ropes ready. They might be needed." Hank suggested to his men. "And bring all the flashlights you have." "Right, Cap." said Marco and Chet. |
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"I've boosted those up to twelve a minute, light." Ted Cassidy shared. "Breath sounds are clear." he said, pulling a stethoscope out of his ears. Roy nodded. "Okay, let's intubate him. Then let's get him secured on a backboard with a c-collar." DeSoto decided. Once they were through securing Ken's airway, Roy brought Joey to one side while the others continued to treat and ventilate Ken. "Sit next to me. Did Mr. Baxter tell you about anything else that was hurting him before he blacked out, Joey?" "Yeah, he said his belly was bothering him." the boy said from deep within the blanket his grandmother had nestled around him. DeSoto made eye contact with Thib who checked Ken's abdomen out again. "It's soft. No masses. Pelvis's stable." he shared with Roy. Then he bundled Ken up again in thick blankets around the fitted longboard and inflated mast suit. "What happened?" DeSoto asked, turning his attention back to the boy. "We had to jump down to get away from the chopper. Ken thought she was going to blow up." Collins told him, watching Ted bag support Ken slowly through the taped EOA tube. "How far did you two fall?" Roy asked, checking out Joey's pupils and feeling his head and neck for problems. "About eight feet." "Are you still feeling dizzy?" "Not anymore." Joey said vehemently. "That went away once I was done working for two." Marco, Chet and Stoker laughed. Roy winked up at them for Joey's benefit. "Well, you've earned yourself a rest. We'll let you lie down in a bit. Now how about these ribs here?" he said, noticing the darkening bruises when he had lifted Joey's shirt away for an examination. "They're fine. I just ache a little bit in my muscles." Joey told him, shivering. "Where exactly?" "My back from bending over, my stomach, from blowing hard for so long. And that's all." he insisted. "Ken needs your help more than I do so why don't you go back to him?" "I will. I just want to sure that you're doing okay, too. Are you feeling thirsty?" DeSoto asked, smiling. "A little." the boy answered suspiciously. Roy just chuckled. "No, I'm not looking to start an I.V. on you. You're doing fine." "I'll get you some water." said Terri, grinning. "Make it warm to hot." Roy told her. "With sugar. He's a little chilled." "And hungry. The soup I made got cold waiting for me to get back to it." the boy complained. Very near them, Jodi the mule brayed, understanding that sentiment perfectly. She began to eat vigorously around her bit, crunching the grass around Joey's shoes with her large teeth in loud, burpy pulls. Collins laughed and reached up to pet her neck. |
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