Rating: PG (for some language and violence)

Many thanks to my excellent beta readers, Randy and Carla. All prior dedications/disclaimers/warnings/advisories apply. Please read part one before this one. Thanks.

Canon Characters: Jamie, Adam, Candy, Griff.

Further notes to Pt2: Douglass (spelled that way) was named after an old friend of mine for whom Bonanza was one of the last comforts at the end of his life, thus the spelling was retained for Part 1 of the story. Though Douglass does not appear in this section, I wanted to make the point to those who've emailed me their input regards this. Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. I may well write more in this universe.

Input welcome:

Part Three:

"This is madness, Josiah," the oldest Cartwright son said, "plain madness."

"Adam, I don’t know what to tell you," said Josiah Carpenter, land office commissioner, with telegraphy ink like blood all over his hands. "It came in this morning. I rang up the state office on that damn wall contraption, but they have no explanation beyond what it says right here."

Lemuel Coffee, now the Cartwright attorney, was poring over the chaos fresh in his hands.

Adam was now looking to Coffee for answers. "What's it say, Lem?"

Coffee shook his head, a sour twist to his mouth. "They claim grounds to believe you willfully withheld information that led to an undervaluation of your Pa’s land. They want a good faith bond to forestall a land sale at auction. Since the next scheduled one won't be for another year, they want it moved to today."

"This is an obvious attempt to blackmail my family. I won’t have it."

"Adam, it's unfair as Hell and them some, but it's legal," Coffee said. "This has happened before. Its what's been happening to family after family around here. Just took them longer to get at yours. But if you can come up with the good faith bond amount, you can still put off the tax deed sale unless somebody else can bid over. Not many have that kind of money."

"What is it they want?"

Josiah read off the number, as if he hadn’t read it twenty times before. "390,000."

Adam punched a wall. "You know how long it takes to get up that kind of money?"

"You could offer up collateral."

"Like what? All we have is the land and I can't speak for all of it. I have my land, but it’s half the world away. I’ve got some assets here, but not nearly enough."

"I think I can help," a voice broke up the discussion. It had come from outside. Adam, and Candy who stood with him, looked around.

"Griff, that’s good of you," Adam said. "But that little store of yours isn’t – "

"Not the store." Griff steeled himself visibly for his new role of greenhorn financier. " I have other… capital…assets."

"Griff," Candy said kindly, "you can’t even spell those words."

He shifted Candy a sour glare, and dragged a jumble of papers from his shop apron. "I have here some legal papers from my lawyer. It gives me power of attorney over these…things I have. Financial instruments."

"May I see them?" Josiah said.

Griff handed them over. "I’m sure you’ll find everything’s in order."

"Everything indeed." Josiah squinted at the fine print, then nodded. "This might be enough." He looked up at him. "Where’d this come from, Griff?"

"Isn’t that my business?"

"Why, yes, I expect that it is, so long as it's not ill-gotten gains, and we have no reason to think it is. Just asking the question."

"I prefer not to say, if it’s all the same to you."

Candy was staring at him, a vision of dubiousness. "You come to me on paycheck Friday and borrowed five dollars for some lampblack for the store’s warm stove. And now you’re near to a millionaire?"

"I got a few things socked away. Not liquid, but kinda… thickened up, so to speak."

Adam cleared his throat, to redirect the pertinent small talk back to the topic at hand. "Everything in order, Josiah?"

The commissioner nodded. "Seems to be. Pretty healthy holdings here, Griff. Remind me to talk to have my boy talk to you about investing."

"Griff," Adam said, "I wouldn’t ask you to do this in any other situation. I guarantee you that, if this works, you’ll get everything back and more."

"I know I will," Griff said.

"Then maybe you got the five dollars you owe me for the lampblack," Candy said, staring into him knowingly.

"See me on Sunday."

"Oh, I’ll surely do that."

The sound of the next room’s door opening and closing, opening and closing, signaled the beginning of the arrival of the men from Farmers Inn. The anterior room had been converted to a meeting hall, with lengthwise tables laid end to end, and tracks of chairs nestled by them.

Swarming footsteps up the boardwalk moved in trotting unison, steps laid clean by expensive shoe-leather stopping outside the door. The short man with the tall ego stubbed out his expensive cigar against the building, then slipped it into his pocket.

He walked inside, gauging his movements to the stance of Adam Cartwright, half the office away. Adam immediately closed their distance.

Callendar performed empathy on cue. "I assume you have heard about the unfortunate tax situation."

"Only just. How did you manage this one, Callendar?"

"You endow me with far too much influence, Mr. Cartwright. I’m just a humble paperman."

"You're a lot of things, Callendar. Humble is definitely not one of them. And you had the nerve to accuse me of influence peddling. The only problem is we’ve managed to thwart your scheme."

"You have?"

"Yes, we’ve come up with enough collateral to forestall the sale."

"Is that so?"

"That’s so."

"May I see the bid over target please?" Callendar said to Josiah, holding out his hand.

Josiah quickly noted down the pertinent data, tore the page free from the pad and handed it over.

Callendar considered it a moment, hiking an eyebrow. "Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me a moment," he said, walking out the front door.

"What’s he up to now?" Adam said, to the other two men.

"Nothing good, that's for sure," Candy replied.

The man who stood just outside the doorway, beyond the view of the men inside, watched Callendar cross the main street. Callendar spoke to a second man, who relinquished some papers. Callendar read through that sheathe, moving aside so the other man might step down from his carriage.

The other man was Standard Huckaby.

No surprise to the man watching them. Water did seek its own level. Two edges of his life, falling together with the ease of petty curiosity fed by blind greed. Callendar's reaction would tell Jamie everything – everything and nothing.

The man he knew and the man he knew only be reputation exchanged words. Callendar nodded. And grinned.

Jamie's heart caved in.

Plan A, carried by Griff, had just been bested. The backup plan was all there was left standing between the Ponderosa and Callendar's papermills.

Jamie nodded to the messenger boy across the street.

The messenger made his way up the walk, around the people, amid the throng, all watching the beginning of the end of the Cartwright legacy. It was standing room only, now that the word had gotten out. Of all the titans to stumble in the war, this was the proudest one of all.

"It's not leaving us yet, Pa," Jamie whispered. "Whatever it takes, it's staying with us."

Jamie watched as the outside viewers pressed against backs before them, to push even closer within, as if fire in the pit had ignited.

"My associate, Mr. Huckaby of Wyoming, and I call to order," said Callendar, waving the intended instrument of Cartwright destruction before the crowd, "a writ in the amount of 520,000 US dollars. More than enough to bid over the Cartwright good faith bond as a fair offer to the Commissioner of Land. I fear Mr.…King's sudden inheritance is less than that amount. So we would be pleased to accept deed to the Ponderosa at the recording office's earliest convenience."

"Damn," Adam groaned, turning about as if struck directly by a head-on blow. He turned to the wall, as if seeking something…as if unable to face what lay ahead. "That's it. It's over. That's the end."

"Maybe not," Griff said.

"You gonna pull a gold nugget outta your ear?" Candy snapped over at him, shaking his head in despair.

"No," Griff said, pointing backward, "but he is."

A tall man, dressed in east coast bib and tucker, stepped out of the distant wall's line of many watchers. He was smiling pleasantly to the others, but addressed himself to the Commissioner, currently examining the dark details of the Huckaby-Callendar compromise.

"Mr. Land Commissioner, I represent the firm of Whitaker, Thackery, Maybury and Porter. We are legal designee to the estate of the late Mister Ferris Callahan. We have been engaged by the sole heir of the Callahan estate to best any best offer made by Misters Huckaby and Callendar toward the purchase of the Ponderosa from its present owners. I may write a bank cheque in total to that amount. Let the record stand at one million US dollars for the bid."

Josiah's color went gray. "Well, these numbers are becoming royal. Mr. Callendar, the bid stands at a firm one million. What is your last, best and final offer?"

Callendar's face reflected nothing short of wrath. "I'm afraid you have it. However, I must protest this bidder. I have presented to the Land Office a cash value offer. This…attorney individual…has merely brought forward a bank scrip. We have no idea if it's good. Granted, I'm not a long-time resident with local officials in my pocket, as is Mr. Cartwright, but my name is known, and my money is greenback and good."

The Commissioner sighed, knowing himself to be cornered with county ordinance. "Mr. Whitaker, is it? Does your client have some manner of identification or a known local person to speak for him?"

The lawyer Whitaker's fingers nibbled for a nervous moment at the brim of his doffed hat. "Will you give me a moment please?"

The Commissioner nodded. "Be my guest."

The attorney moved along the path of people, who turned to watch his progress up the aisle. Whitaker stood in the still-open door. He signaled to someone still unseen, with a broad sweep of his hat.

The man on the opposite end of the signal realized his longtime self-exile was at an end. There was no turning back now. Only one thing to be done.

Jamie entered, plucking the bank script from his attorney's hand. He advanced to the podium without looking anywhere but at Josiah's big, surprised grin. He claimed the podium pen, set his signature to the document, and handed over to the Land Office Commissioner.

"You remember me, Josiah? Will you speak for me?"

"Indeed I will, Jamie."

"Ferris Callahan was my blood grandfather. I'm sole heir to the Callahan estate," Jamie said. "That's my bank scrip. Whatever Mr. Callendar and Mr. Huckaby have given you as their final offer, please better it to the order of the Land Office, and take the Ponderosa off your tax sale rolls."

The Commissioner landed the gavel with relish. "This called deed sale is ended. Deed to be made to -- ."

"The Cartwrights." Jamie turned to glare for a moment into the pensive face of Standard Huckaby. "That's what the C stands for."

Huckaby's sneer was meaner than ever. "You won this battle, Jim. The war isn't over."

"With people like you, it never is. Now why don't you go back to the Hell you came from and blow it up."

Callendar, sizing up the room and the moment, seized Huckaby's collar to drag him into retreat. Jamie's eyes locked on Standard's until the land office door shut between them.

"Thank you," rose a voice… a long-feared voice… from behind him.

Jamie exhaled the last air in him, knowing flight to be useless. The moment he'd so long avoided was now at hand..

He turned around, considering the other man with a hurt uncertainty. "Thank you isn't necessary. You ought to know that better than most."

Adam frowned, shaking his head. "Isn't there anything I can say to you to put us right?"

"I expect you said enough," Jamie said, not meeting the other man's dark, constant gaze. "All you'd say is guilt words. You told me a long time ago what you really felt."

"So what I really felt was all the bad stuff? All the angry stuff?"

"I expect," he said, looking aside.

Half the gathering had not departed; they lingered instead like Boston fishwives, gawking as this new Cartwright drama unfolded.

"Maybe we oughta charge admission," Jamie said to the crowd. He lowered his voice to the others, "Can we take this somewhere less public?"

"I know just the place," Adam said. "If you wouldn't mind going there, one more time."

Jamie nodded. "My only reason for not going there was to avoid you. Thanks to Huckaby and Callendar, that's no longer a reason. No place else I'd rather see most days, especially today."

Jamie rode in on his own, the afternoon grown cold in the treelined twilight. Winter coming. Everything grew keen and close. The gray sky brighter, the round white moon glistening with higher meaning and light. And death, life's constant companion, never closer than the brightest winter night.

He missed them so much…so much, in fact, he half-believed he'd fled Nevada just to be able to live with the pain.

He pulled from his pocket the small picture clocket, the only picture he had of the five of them. It had been taken Adam's last visit home before Hoss died. Jamie had, as was his nature, fallen to the background, but Joe had towed him from the corner, pushing him up to the front, to the left of Pa, with Adam to their father's right. Jamie's one clear memory of the portrait-taking was Joe laughing in his ear, cracking some joke about his red hair blinding him. Jamie had jokingly elbowed him back. Joe grabbed him in a headlock. Hoss had split them apart, lodging himself between.

He couldn't open it. It would just be too much. The sad, old moon itself was rising, big enough, over his shoulder.

He looked to the west to gauge his bearings, only to find Adam had stopped the family buckboard up the ridge, watching him aways.

I don't trust you and you don't trust me, Jamie thought to himself. We both knew them as well as anyone, but we barely know each other.

There was a time to roughhouse, a time to be little brother, and at last, as Hoss had pointed out to them, a time to be grown men and stand up for the family, to take the family portrait and make it last. Because now they were living for more than themselves…more than the lives they lived here and now. They were bookmarks in time – symbols for posterity. A testament to everyone they loved and who loved them.

Whether Adam liked it or not, Jamie was part of this family. The younger man knew, in his soul, it had always been the truth. And nothing that was said or done by anyone would change that.

Or so he wanted to believe – more than anything.

Jamie whistled the soft, high sound, the one Pa always used when the boys had ridden out away from camp and it was time to move in toward home. Jamie's eyes met Adam's. Adam smiled. It was clear they two alone among living men knew what that sound represented.

At the grinding jangle of buckboard and horses, the Ponderosa's front door flew open.

Adam Cartwright the younger walked decorously down each step, as if trying to counteract his more passionate assault on the front door. He ambled out to watch an approaching rider slow his horse to a canter. A rider of unknown but half-suspected identity. The rider gazing only at the house.

A.C. met his father's buckboard.

"Is that – "

Adam nodded, climbing down. "Yes, that's him. Did Josiah get word to you?"

"Yes, thank God. Sarah, Benj and Eric have gone into town. They're planning a joint celebration. They asked for Candy and me to come help once he reached home."

Candy moved into the buckboard pilot seat after Adam. "Hop in, A.C., we got our marching orders. I best pick up Griff, too, while we're up there, make sure his recent windfall hasn't gone to his head."

Before signaling the team, Candy reached out to bag the arm of the dismounted rider, who was walking slowly toward the house, taking it in. Candy turned the red-haired man around. "Hey, you, stranger."

Jamie looked toward him, like he'd caught his sleeve on a talking fencepost. He grinned into the face of an old friend. "No stranger than you are."

Candy rolled his eyes toward Adam, then back to Jamie. "That's right funny. I sure missed Jamie's dumb jokes. But you listen to me. You get that chip off your shoulder and hear Adam out. He's a good man. You got a second chance. He deserves one, too."

Jamie stared back at him, a little sadly. "You takin' sides now too, Candy?"

"Only side I'm on is ours. I couldn't love you more if you were my own little brother, but if you don't hear him out, I'll hog-tie you to a chair to make sure you do. You hear me?"

The younger man rolled his gaze around, looking once again like an awkward young boy. "I expect I'm standin' right in front of you, and I ain't deaf."

Candy snorted a laugh, clapping him across the shoulder. "You stay put awhile. That's an order."

The team had spirit, as the ranch team always did, surging south at the trick of Candy's call. The buckboard once again moved back along the road away from home.

Adam gestured to the house. "I expect you know the way as well as I do."

There was so much around him to count as memories. He knew it was best he touch them one by one. Hoss telling some long, tall tale by the fire. Joe – and the world's most infectious laugh – highlighting the memory. Their first evening together as a family after the adoption. The first Christmas. The first of so many once prosaic, now precious minutes, hours and days.

At last, he stepped to Ben Cartwright's chair, placing his hands a moment on its shoulders. So many years. So long and so brief a time.

He walked across to one of the leather wing chairs, wherein Jamie had sat many nights to read to his father, as Ben's years grew long and his eyesight failed him. In those later years, Jamie had been his eyes and ears. This moment, Jamie lowered himself into the chair, as if to find that place in time again within himself. He had only to look to find it. As always, it made him so happy, and so sad.

"I used to read to Pa, sitting here." He touched the arm of the wingchair. "Edwin Markham, his favorite poet. And from the Bible. The Book of Job usually. He said it reminded him of me. The patience, I expect, not the Job part."

Adam smiled, seating himself in the opposite wing chair. "All of us, Jamie. All of us. Of course, that's the lot of all fathers. I know that now. I hear that you do, too."

Jamie nodded. "I got two boys. David, I got him the day I married my wife. And Eja, I got him the day I lost her."

"I'm sorry." He reached again for small talk, simple things to say. "Eja…is that short for Elijah?"

Jamie compromised with a small grin. "I expect you'll hear about this soon enough. We couldn't name him Benjamin, coz we already had the one. My wife couldn't abide the idea of calling him Hoss. And Eric had been her father's name and she didn't have much use for him. And her family already had a Joseph. So we come up with Eja. For Eric Joseph Adam."

Adam leaned into his chair, taken aback. "I'm honored." He sighed, wishing he could say all the things he intended, and say them in a way that conveyed what he really felt. He needed his father's wisdom, and his words.

"Jamie, it's your choice whether you claim me as kin. We both loved this family. We both grew up in this house. We have all the things in common that make two men brothers, but none of that means anything if it's not in your heart. But if you could manage to consider me a friend, I'd be obliged."

Jamie nodded, looking around. Staring deep into the shadows of this house.

"Adam, do you know what this family… means to me?"

"I know what it means to me," Adam answered. "I can only see my own shadow. I can't walk in yours."

Jamie's face turned entirely serious, almost grave. "I'm not asking for anyone's pity. And I don't mean to make excuses. I only mean to give you reasons. Why I reacted like I did to what you said."

Adam nodded. "I'd like to hear them."

The younger man gazed again with love upon the house around them. "I'd never had a home before this one. My blood family was nearly all dead. I had no way to survive but from an old friend's pity. And I was barely older than Eja. Dusty never tried to make me feel like a burden to him, but I was one. And I didn't trust anything or anyone. I don't think I even believed that such a thing as love existed. And then one day… I guess you heard the story before…"

"Never heard it from you," Adam said.

Jamie nodded. "Pa come around the corner of my life. He could have taken in a hundred other boys, but he chose me. And he never looked back, though Lord knows I gave him plenty of cause to try. I wasn't just blame good at heart, like Hoss. I wasn't intelligent, like you were. And I was never quick to know the right thing, like Joe. But Pa never made me feel less. Sometimes, I'd even forget for awhile. And Hoss and Joe, well, they had every right to resent me. I wouldn't have blamed 'em. But they never did. They never treated me a whit different than they treated each other."

"Then enters Adam," Adam said, shaking his head at himself, and not for the first or last time.

Jamie stared up at the ceiling, fighting to reserve his tears to himself and the old familiar wood pilings above. "It's just that, I felt like, when you said what you said, that the only things making me a Cartwright were all dead. Like I was back in the woods. Like everything I thought was real was a lie."

"My God, you didn't really feel that way…"

Jamie nodded. "I did. I don't mean to make you feel poorly, but from my heart, I did feel like that. In ways, I still do. See, it's easier for you. As you get older, you see Pa in the mirror. You hear bits of their voices in yours. You see them in A.C. too. I don't have that. And I need that connection, now more than ever."

Adam looked at him, dismayed. "Jamie, all you have to do is look at your life. You built that business of yours out of nothing. You did the same thing Pa did, only you built it out of rock. And you had the resources to save us, when the chips were down and out."

"You have them, too."

"That's kinda my point. Jamie, you have to believe me, if I could shorten my life so that I might take back those words, I would."

Jamie shook his head. "I wouldn't let you. I wouldn't do it. If I hadn't left, I wouldn't have met Alice. I wouldn't have my boys. And nothing helped me know that Pa did love me, than what I feel for David. Plus, I wouldn't have had the resources to do…well, what we were just talking about." He shrugged. "Maybe it's like Pa said, everything happens for a reason."

"So. Where does that leave us?"

"A couple o' older guys sittin' in these even older chairs, I guess."

Adam chuckled, reaching for the top drawer to their father's desk. From it, he removed a small cloth parcel. Out of it, he withdrew a corded bundle of mail, one letter apart from the stack and tied to the top. It was that one he tenderly removed to lay by itself before him.

"This is the letter Pa wrote to me, when you joined the family. I doubt I lost a thing he ever gave me, especially something like this. I'd like you to have it."

Jamie accepted the fragile piece of trust, set as it was by the Cartwright seal in wax, long before peeled opened. He closed his eyes, as if feeling the presence of the hands that once held it. Gentle as light, he opened the page. As his gaze hit the handwriting, his eyes misted over.

"I," he said, his voice fraying at the edges. "I don't think I can read this directly."

"I think you should. I think it might give you some comfort. If there's anything that can make up for what I once said to you, it's Pa's own words. He writes about how happy they all were, when you came to the family. And how he knew you, when they met you, that you were the son who Ma saw in her dream…"

Jamie's brow furrowed in confusion. "Ma? Your Ma?"

"Yeah, my ma. Joe's by birth. Marie. Guess she'd have been your ma, too, if she'd lived. I know they must have told you about her dream…"

Recognition lit his eyes: a fact nested in memory. "I was told about her, of course. I don't think I was told about a dream."

"You must have been."

Jamie's face wrinkled in deep and distant thought. "No. Not that I recall."

"You'd remember this," he said.

After a silent moment to reflect, Adam rose out of the chair, sinking back against the edge of the desk, somewhat astonished. From the vantage of age, it did make sense. What a burden to place on the boy, the dream of a long-dead woman. A mother he would never know. Surely, Jamie's burdens had been heavy enough to carry, without that in tow.

But what once might have been a burden to carry for the younger man's soul, might well now be its deliverance.

"Good world in glory, Jamie, I never for a second thought you hadn't been told -- "

"Been told what?" Jamie's eyes were open, unrelenting, puzzled. "What was it about?"

Adam cleared his throat, nodding toward the folded pages in the other man's hands. "I think you best just read that now."

He stepped away for the moment to give the man a measure of solitude. Adam stood there, diffident in his continued presence, turning up the hissing lamp a bit to expand the light further across that most important of letters.

Jamie stood from his chair, crossing to the inset window, for a greater measure of light…and, Adam imagined, more privacy The younger man grasped the edge of the letter as if a tenuous hold on life itself, the grip of his hand tightening moment to moment. With a barely perceptible tremor, his hand tenderly pressed the letter over his heart. The other hand reached for wall, then crumpled over his eyes.

Tears shook through him -- silent, unseen.

Adam Cartwright doubted he'd ever seen a man cry harder. These weren't tears of pain or sadness, but a profound and joyful leap beyond them. They were the tears of love at last given meaning…of a stray returned to his tribe.

Adam reentered the circle of light. He reached out to comfort him, but the other man first turned toward him. Jamie looked away, as if seeking sanctuary from these tears, but there was nowhere to go to escape them.

Jamie walked forward to embrace Adam Cartwright for the very first time.

Closing his eyes in surprise at the impact, Adam held him tighter, as if making up for all the hugs they'd never exchanged.

He held the younger man back to make a point. "Now, you see? You were meant to be part of us. From the very beginning," Adam said, blinking back his own moist eyes. "I hope that's balm for some of the wounds I caused."

Jamie grinned through his tears. "It's a whole lot more than that. There's no way on earth I can thank you for this, Adam. You just gave me…everything…"

"There is a way you could thank me. Go back to Wyoming and fetch your family. Bring the boys home so we can get to know them. Come home at least for Christmas. Or heck, move home for good, and help me do battle with these interlopers around here. I surely could use an ally."

Jamie looked up at him fully, for the first time in years. "I got a couple allies. But I surely have missed having a brother."

"You've always had three brothers, Jamie."

Jamie nodded, pulling the pocket watch with picture from his suit. He opened it, smiled into it, then handed it over for Adam to see. "I know that now."

Adam studied the old portrait, standing beside the other man in the circle of light near their father's desk. They stood finally at peace with each other, like two ends of their father's love, at last drawn back together.

END