DISCLAIMER: The following is an original work of fan fiction based on the television series "The Magnificent Seven". No infringement upon the copyrights held by CBS, MGM, Trilogy Entertainment Group, The Mirisch Corp. or any others involved with that production is intended. No profit is being made - enjoy!!

Mongoose: A Sensible Man

ACT SIX
PART FOUR

If you would like to see St. Barb's illustrations, click on the links as you read.

“In here,” Mrs. Potter called, sweeping her children ahead of her through the doorway of their room. They knew they were sleeping with her tonight, and they knew why, so they didn’t protest their removal from their self-appointed post at the top of the stairs.

Francis maneuvered Vin and Ezra through the bedroom’s door with a grunt to Tanner’s snarl. Together, they put Standish in the bed farthest from the window that overlooked the flat roof of the one-story kitchen extension and the outside staircase.

Francis stepped back from the bed, to stay out of Tanner’s way as much as to make room for Mrs. Potter. She clucked and murmured as she took stock of the Squire’s condition. At her quiet instructions, her children fetched hot water, salves, fresh bandages. Standish lay like the dead through it all, and Tanner’s face grew more and more clenched with every second that passed. She put her hands in her lap when she was finished, yielding her place to Tanner with a look before she rose and stepped back to look down on both of the Southerners she had taken to her Yankee bosom.

Tanner’s hands were shaking as they pulled the clean, white sheet up across the Squire’s chest. Glancing down at his own hands, Francis discovered that they, too, were trembling like he had contracted palsy. Clenching them into fists, he succeeded only in concentrating the tremble into a shuddering in his arms. Exhaustion was creeping up the back of his throat and blurring his vision, burning like salt in his mouth and stinging like sand in his eyes.

‘It’s this bloody room,’ he told himself. ‘Too soft, too safe....’ It was wooing his weariness, courting it until it dulled the anger that had kept his blood singing in his ears. Women did that to a man; it didn’t matter if they did it with a cup of tea and your slippers or a buffalo robe draped over a corn husk mattress laid by a warming fire, they knew how to buckle your knees and coax your eyes to close.

Tanner was madder than he was, burning hot with it, but he’d been fighting longer, been stretched thinner, stretched until they’d seen right through him, until he’d snapped. He couldn’t hold out against the gentle onslaught any longer than Francis could.

Mrs. Potter let the rungs of the rocking chair she brought over to Tanner scrape the floor and bump over the rag rug, making sure that they would have no more surprises.

The sight of the chair’s smooth maple curves and its cheerful red and blue patchwork cushion made refusal impossible. Tanner hissed as he lowered his suddenly stiff, aching body into the chair. The Potter girl latched her mother’s trap closed by bringing him the chair’s footstool, with its matching patchwork pillow for his bandaged ankle. No man alive could have resisted the child’s imploring gaze, any more than Francis could refuse to sit in the chair that the Potter boy brought to him with the straight shoulders and stiff face of all of the drummer boys Corcoran had ever known.

“You’ll be hungry,” the Potter woman said. “I’ll go fix a tray while you keep an eye on Ezra. Josh, Amy – go draw Mr. Tanner a bath.”

‘Outflanked,’ Francis thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. Poor Tanner – with a handful of words, he’d been neatly superseded. Looking at the other man’s bloodshot eyes, Francis decided that the demotion, however temporary it would be, was just what Tanner needed. God bless and keep the good sense of womankind, who knew that a warm plate of food, a cold glass of beer, and a hot bath could bring a man’s soul home from hell.

++++

End of Act Six Part Four

ST. BARB'S MONTAGES - The whole collection of Act Six montages in a smaller format.

We would love to know what you think... email me

NEXT CHAPTER OF MONGOOSE: A SENSIBLE MAN

since 14th August 2004