Possibly he could make black powder, if he had to. But to the best of his present knowledge, he would have to be willing to make a long and probably perilous trip through strange territory, south, to get sulfur. The silver nitrate for the primers was there to be extracted from bird droppings. But gathering the droppings would require more time than he had to spare.
A much better alternative would be to have something else to kill cattle and large game with—something for which he could make the missiles himself. Something that would have the additional value of being silent so that he would not attract attention by the carrying sound of firing a firearm if someone was down, out of sight on the flatlands but still within hearing.
The ideal answer to all this would be, he thought, a crossbow. He had once handled and even shot a handmade crossbow, its bow part made of a steel leaf from an automobile spring. Its short, heavy bolt—or arrow—with its metal broad-head arrow point, had gone completely through a target of three-eighths-inch plywood. With the forge now operating, he could build himself such a weapon and missiles. By using the crossbow for hunting whenever possible, he could considerably stretch his remaining ammunition supplies.
In addition to this, he had planned, ever since it was clear they must stay, to make an addition above their present cave. He planned to use window frames and glass scavenged from the ranch, which like most isolated dwelling places, had its own supply of extra glazing materials.
So he could even put glass in one or several of those window frames that had had their glass knocked out by the raiders or destroyed by the fire. It would only require that the frame itself be solid. What he intended was to build a sort of skylight window in an upward-extended section of the wall of the cold room, which would let outside sunlight over a floor, sealing it off from the cold room, below, directly into the inner room.
The window he had in mind would actually be three of the ranch’s windows fastened, one on top of the other, so that essentially he would have triple glazing to keep the cold out and still let the daylight come through.
But both the crossbow and the skylight would be time-consuming jobs, and with the hunting and other necessary duties, it was hard to believe he would get them done as fast as he would have liked. The sooner he got the crossbow working, the sooner he could start saving on his firearm ammunition. On the other hand, the window would have to be finished before winter.
The work did not seem like much compared to what the two of them had accomplished the past months, Jeebee thought, but now Merry would have her hands full most of the time taking care of Paul.
It was only gradually, in the weeks and months that followed, that he learned differently.
Out of his almost nonexistent knowledge of women who had just had children, Jeebee had rather fuzzily assumed that Merry would be, except for feeding young Paul, something of a near invalid for a month or more after the birth. Able perhaps to get around in the cave and just outside it and do minor things there. But not up to any kind of ordinary work that might require heavy exertion from her.
To his surprise, by a week and a half after the birth, she had not only rigged a carrying chest pack for Paul, but was doing a number of light jobs. They had reached the point where some of the seeds that she had saved from the ranch’s garden and replanted in its rich topsoil (possibly trucked in for the purpose) had begun producing food ready for harvesting.
As a result, even now, in midsummer, they had a quantity of homegrown foodstuffs to bring back to the cave from below, and to cook and store. Apparently the people of the ranch house had regularly put up much of their garden produce in glass sealer jars, in the fall. Merry also knew how to do this. While Jeebee hunted and did other necessary things, she was busy cooking and sealing a great deal of what could be preserved this way.
Where there was more of certain vegetables than they had jars for, and some that could not be stored well in sealer jars, these Merry cooked. Some of these were cooked into forms more fit for such storage. From ripe tomatoes she made tomato sauce, and even a variation of catsup. Carrots, rutabagas and such other root vegetables would keep well with their stems cut off and buried in open boxes of dry sand.
These boxes, like the sealer jars, they stored in a cool area. Jeebee had opened up the inner room’s back wall and dug the equivalent of the ranch house’s fruit cellar in the soil behind it, to house them.
Meanwhile Jeebee was busily at work at the crossbow. Happily, on the occasion in which he had seen the crossbow demonstrated and had a chance to shoot it himself, he had also been shown the plans from which the crossbow had been made, and his memory was good in that respect. He redrew them on some of the paper he had gotten from the ranch, just to make it all clear in his own mind before he began work.
The wooden stock required something stronger than pine, in his estimation, and the ordinary two-by-four would not be wide enough at the butt end for him. Happily, over the fireplace that had been at the ranch was a mantelpiece of varnished wood, which Jeebee identified as oak. It was a foot wide and some eight feet long and about two inches thick.
With a little labor he removed it from its position and brought it back up to the cave. There he sweated to saw off a length of thirty inches, which he then roughed out into the wooden part of the crossbow with an ax.
When he was finished, he had a wooden stock about six inches wide at the butt and curving up underneath to its narrowest point. The material for the bowstring he had already obtained, the brake cable from one of the cars, the loop of it at each end of the bow—a leaf from one of the automobile springs—held by the small set screws that already existed with the brake cable to hold it taut and in place in its original duty on the car.
Next he drilled upward through the stock at its narrowest point, making a place to set the trigger. That trigger would release a nut—he would have to make it—which would hold the bowstring in place when cocked. From the notch that held the nut, forward to the front end of the stock, he cut a groove in which the bolt would lie when the crossbow was strung and ready to fire.
This groove notch and the passage for the trigger needed only another slot across the stock near the front of it into which he could mount the lower edge of the steel leaf spring, once it was ready to act as a bow; plus a couple of slots lower on the stock near its front, to which he would be fixing a forged steel stirrup.
This would be needed so that he could put his toe in it to hold the weapon down while he pulled its string back into cocked position on the nut. There would be two more holes needed through which leather thongs could go, to lash the bow stave firmly in place once it was in its slot. On second thought, he decided to use animal sinew, put on wet and allowed to dry-shrink to the point where it was as tight as necessary.
The rest of the work was all at the forge. He had to do some forge work on the steel spring to put it into a slightly recurved bow shape. He also had to make the steel stirrup and the rivet that would hold it. Then, there was the trigger, which was a length of metal bent twice, once semiparallel below the stock to be pushed up against the stock to trigger the nut above in the opposite direction, pivoting over a pin halfway up the slot and pressed against a notch in the bottom of the nut, where it was held in place against the tension of the bowstring, once it was strung. To fire the bolt, he could then just pull up on the trigger, depressing the sear at the trigger’s far end and releasing the nut, which would then rotate and let the bowstring fly forward.
The last part of the mechanism he worked on at the forge was the nut itself. This was essentially a thick circle of metal, as wide as the stock, and with a pie-shaped cut taken out of it where the bowstring would loop over it, and a slot through it so that the bow could notch to the string, ready for firing.
He also added the useful, though not completely necessary item of another spring-steel finger bolt, secured on the bottom of the stock, to provide cocking tension to the exposed part of the trigger to fire the bow.
There was only a little extra forge work required once the bow itself had been made and assembled. This consisted of forging broadhead points for the hardwood shafts—made from leftover parts of the mantel—together with a forge-rolled section behind it that could be glued to the front of the shaft. The shaft also had fins, where a plain bolt would have had feathers, and these he made of wood and also glued on. The glue was something that Merry knew how to make out of cattle hooves.
The glue gave off an almost unbearable smell in the making—which fascinated Wolf—but when done worked very well for Jeebee’s purposes, not only in making the crossbow but in other instances where glue was useful.
All in all, the making of the crossbow was a fairly straightforward procedure. But it ended up taking Jeebee a number of weeks, counting the time involved in obtaining the necessary parts from the car and the ranch house and doing the work of assembly. One of his last jobs was stringing the bow before it was attached to the stock.
Since the bow had, he estimated, between eighty and a hundred and ten pounds of pull, he would barely be able to cock it with his foot in the stirrup and lifting up on it. Stringing the bow in the first place was therefore a
