He had kept as many as possible of the batteries on standby at full charge ready for use.
He estimated that he had battery enough for light, even using the headlamps, for at least thirty hours.
Still, the illumination he got this way, while good, was not what he might need at the actual moment of birth. For that time he was relying on the solar-powered yard floodlight that had apparently been overlooked by the raiders.
Why this was, Jeebee did not really know. It was true the floodlight had been tucked up under the eaves at the back of the house. But unless the defense of the ranch house, together with the fire, had kept the raiders from looting until daylight when the floodlight would have automatically shut itself off, Jeebee had no idea how they could have missed it.
However, the fact was they had. When he first found it, and tried it, it was dead. He had been about to give up on it when he noticed that its receptor surface had been completely coated with a sort of tarry black substance, which seemed to be ashes mixed with a resin that had possibly bubbled out under the heat of the fire from the roofing material of the ranch.
Carefully, he cleaned this off and exposed it to sunlight, and was impressed at the bright light he got from it, after a full day of exposure to the sunlight.
Its battery was only good for about ten hours; but it would not be required, he thought, until the moment of actual delivery itself, so all its power could be kept in reserve.
Merry was equally delighted with it. Like the bike Jeebee had ridden out of Michigan, it was powered by the most advanced type of solar cell, and it could be switched to various intensities. At high intensity it would be a good equivalent for what would effectively be an operating-room light. He rigged this to its own bar on the tripod, near the top, with a clamp so that it could be rotated into any position necessary. Meanwhile, Merry had finished making baby clothes and blankets, and had insisted on building, by herself, a small, high-sided crib to keep near the fire so the baby would always be warm. It was late spring now, and to Jeebee the nights were only pleasantly cool. But he could understand how a baby might have different needs as far as warmth was concerned.
Unexpectedly, Jeebee found himself with nothing more to do but wait. He puttered around with the bed, the stool, the tripod, and the lamps, essentially making work for himself, until Merry literally drove him out of the inner room.
“Go find something to do someplace else!” she said finally. She was not angry but she was definite.
“What, for instance?” said Jeebee. The expected date of birth was only a week away.
“Find something!” said Merry. “Build something in that forge of yours!”
Jeebee went to the forge and found himself with no ideas whatsoever. Running through his mind were only the words of the various books that Merry had made him memorize. For want of anything else to do he built a fire in the forge. Some weeks since, he had removed that part of the roof that was closest to the bluff, preferring to be soaked by an occasional sprinkle of rain to being roasted alive by the heat of the forge in the enclosed space.
With the fire going, he examined the pieces of metal he had brought up. There was some angle iron, some steel rods, some lengths of steel water pipe, and a couple of pieces of axle stock from one of the older cars.
He examined the shorter piece of axle stock, which was about a foot and a half long and about an inch and a half in diameter. It suggested nothing useful to be made from it, and he looked at it morosely. It was too bad, he thought, he did not have some means of drilling it out and then tightly wrapping it with wire. He could make at least, then, some sort of single-shot equivalent of a rifle, which Merry could have with her after the baby came, when he was gone and had left her only with the revolver.
The episode with the cougar had made a large impression on both of them. The big cat might run away from a full-grown adult—or might not, next time—but if cougars were like wolves, a child would be in worse danger.
Jeebee still felt guilty for being absent at the time. His conscience had been troubling him ever since. He had considered—and discarded—a number of possible ways to leave Merry adequately armed while he hunted down on the flats. He had even considered leaving the rifle and trying to get cattle with the revolver alone.
Now, as he looked at the piece of axle stock, a wild idea came to him. Merry had told him to find something to do. He might as well do this. He had envisioned something like a long spear before this. Something with which Merry could at least hold off an animal like the cougar.
As the image took a firmer shape in his mind, he began to envision the axle hammered out, drawn and flattened to perhaps half again or more its length, and then perhaps cut in half and formed with a spearhead. Spearhead, and part shaft, of metal, that could form the front half of such a spear. The back half could perhaps be made from one of the pieces of water pipe, cut to length and one end fitted around the butt end of the front piece and then forge-welded to it.
He started heating the axle stock in the fire and hammering. As it began to flatten under the hammer blows he had a further inspiration. The spear should have a crossbar. In fact it should be something like the boar spear of the Middle Ages, in which a crossbar kept the boar from charging up the shaft of a spear embedded in the animal, in its frenzy to get to the man holding it and use its tusks on him.
The piece of axle stock was approximately one and a half feet long and one and a half inches in diameter and round. He hammered it out until it lengthened and flattened into what looked like a two-and-a-half-foot metal paddle with a one-inch-square handle some six inches long. The paddle end was three inches wide and three-eights of an inch thick.
He made two lengthwise cuts in the paddle end, using the hardy, that same small chisellike device that Nick had given him back at the wagon to start him in backwoods blacksmithing. The hardy had a square handle about an inch in diameter, which fitted through a hole in one end of his anvil with its triangular head pointed upward, its chisel edge providing a blade against which he cut the forge-heated metal. The paddle had now become a handle that had three pieces running forward from it.
Two of the pieces he spread out at ninety-degree angles, then cut them off at lengths of three inches. What he had left looked something like a rough metal blank for a sword, or cross, the handle being the top leg of the cross, the three-inch extensions on either side forming what would be its crossbar and the center section of the original paddle being either the long leg of the cross or the rough for the blade.
In this case, it was neither. The long leg would form the spear shaft and head.
He used the hammer to make this shaft definite, and hammered the far end of it into a wickedly barbed spearhead with backward-pointing tines a good four inches in length.
From one of his lengths of one-and-a-quarter-inch water pipe he cut off a two-inch length and fitted it over the short handle end of the front spear piece. Heating pipe and end together in the forge, he set them together on the anvil and hammer-welded them until they were one piece.
Finally he had a finished spearhead, ready to be mounted on a shaft, which preferably should be hardwood.
The woods all around the cave were pines. But he had brought up from the ranch last fall a number of the tools, including a rusty hoe, with a metal blade that was half broken off. He had had thoughts then of mending it in his forge; half as an experiment, half as an attempt to produce something useful for gardening.
Now he decided to sacrifice it as a hoe and simply cut off four feet of its wooden handle. Trimmed down somewhat, this slid into the end of the hollow pipe section he had just welded to his spear. After that it was merely a matter of using a punch to make a couple of holes opposed to each other on either side of the water pipe and then hammering a nail through the holes and wood. When it protruded through the further hole, he cut off the nail and flattened both ends so that it became a rivet, fastening the wood shaft into the metal spear end securely.
By the time he had reached this point it was just about noon, four days later, and he had become completely engrossed in making the spear. He was just flattening the ends of the nail he had cut off to use for a rivet when he heard Merry calling.
He threw the spear aside and ran back to the inner room. Wolf had already greeted them and left some three hours earlier, for which Jeebee now was grateful, because there was a note in Merry’s voice that had suddenly driven thought of everything but her from him.
He burst into the inner room, distractedly shoving the door to behind him, to find Merry sitting on the bed, smiling happily at him. The smile lasted for just a second before it disappeared in a moment’s stare of great intensity.
“It’s time, Jeebee,” she said in a remarkably calm voice. “The pains have been coming for some time, but I wasn’t sure. Now, I think the baby’s really ready to come!”
Jeebee stared at her. Abruptly, his mind was a complete blank. He could not remember the words of the
