oom : stables

It's been a long few days. He's been keeping busy, mostly to himself. Maybe it's the fact that he still can hear the gunshot ringing out across the desert, the scream of a terrified horse as it loses the rider upon the saddle to the earth.

Tommy was only fourteen and a half.

And you're only twenty-three.

He's outside of the bar, near the stables, with an axe in hand, splitting wood for rails and posts. There's a section near the far edge where the snow cover has rotted away a bit of the wood and it needs repair. There's something comforting about the feeling of the hickory handle in his hands, the way the blade strikes against the wood and splits down the middle with the force of the blow. It's not easy work, but it gives him a distraction.

His mind wanders.

He ends up with the pile of split rails twice the size that he needs, so he stacks the extras into a spare stable that they're using for storage and then makes his way out to repair the fence. Once that's done, he cleans up a bit, feeds the horses (and other beasts) that need to be fed and makes a note to leave with the bar about ordering a certain type of feed that they're running low on.

They've been hiring a lot of help around the bar these days. Bartenders. Gardeners. Kitchen and waitstaff. And well, he could use a hand out in the stables, or a few pairs of them, especially since the door had taken an awful long time to show up the last time he'd been out.

And you're not sure if you'd come back when you're dead.

Doc considers for a few moments, before he finishes up his work outside, and heads back into the bar.