He blamed himself for not thinking of making use of the two-wheeled wagon before. With it, he could have brought up the two-by-fours and much of the other lumber in just a few loads, if not in one large load. He had carefully been increasing the amount carried in the trailer, and watching the horses to be sure he did not work them too hard. It was as necessary to him, as to them, that they keep their strength.
Now he got into necessarily heavier loads, and into loads he had not thought of carrying originally. Ignored by himself as well as the raiders was an aluminum building set off at some distance from the rest of the ranch structures. This was something he recognized as a pole barn, a structure made of poles and aluminum sheets solely for the purpose of housing and protecting baled hay from the weather so that it could be stored into the winter and its contents available for use to whatever horses or other such animals were at the ranch. It had been set apart like that simply because hay caught fire very easily, and the whole structure could be destroyed in a twinkling by a carelessly dropped cigarette.
Now, on seeing it, he realized that he would have to lay in a supply of fodder for the two horses during the winter months up at the cave. Here was the fodder, ready for him, and the trailer could transport it. Not only that, but he found his attention attracted by the pole barn itself. Its doors, sides, and roof were modular, light enough to carry, and of a size that could be carried in the two-wheel trailer.
The side poles were set in the earth. The rafters were attached to horizontal boards nailed between the side and corner poles of the barn. The wall and ceiling strips of aluminum were four feet wide to bridge the distance between poles and some ten feet in height. All together they enclosed a remarkable amount of baled hay.
He could strip the siding and roof off, take the rafters and dig up the poles and simply transport the whole thing to the cave. On second thought, he need not even dig up the poles. He could cut and set log poles at the cave to attach the aluminum strips to. All in all, it was well worth the days it would cost him to take apart and transport the movable part of the pole barn and its contents.
He did so, accordingly, during part of the following week. The segments of the pole barn made an awkward, but not over-heavy load for the trailer. The hay was a slower business, not only to transport but to load—and it drove him crazy with the chaff and straws that worked their way into his hair and through his clothing to itch him to a frenzy.
Nonetheless, finally it was all done, and he had a strange sense of pride at looking at it, set up, filled with fodder, and ready to take care of the horses during the winter.
He turned back to moving his other necessities up to the cave and getting the cave itself finished. He was racing against the calendar. He wanted all his needed materials up at the meadow before snow came.
Two of his most difficult trips came when he began to break loose both the front and back doors of the ranch, complete with their frames. One of these at a time was a full load for the horses to pull to the cave. He was forced to make two trips to get them both up.
It took a good deal of muscle on his part to transfer each one to the trailer, even once he had loosened them from the house. But he must have them. He had decided he would need solid-core, outer doors for his cave because he wanted them to be as resistant to low temperatures, wind, and snow as possible.
The frames were necessary because Jeebee had no faith in his ability to either build a door frame or hang the door within one. He had heard once that it was a tricky thing to do. The door had to be hung just right, both vertically and in the frame. In the end he got both of them up to the cave, where he put the first one into the opening he had left for it in the outer wall.
His weather front for the excavated home was now complete. Only the interior remained undone. But he could take his time about the work inside, he told himself.
He celebrated that day by taking down the wire fence. It was only late afternoon, but Wolf had already returned and watched him remove it.
To his surprise—although afterward, thinking about what he knew of wolf behavior, it should not have been—Wolf did not at once enter into the territory that the fence had guarded.
Instead, he began by taking his time about making a leisurely approach to the now rolled-up fencing, lying in the meadow a little way from where it had been set up. Finally, he got close enough to sniff it over completely, both the fencing and the angle-iron posts that had secured it. But then, little by little he came deeper into the earlier-denied space until he reached the wall itself, which he then examined closely, from one end to the other.
The next morning, after Wolf had left, Jeebee began work inside the wall.
His last work outside had been to put a roof over the end of it that was far enough away from the face of the cliff so that the space needed bridging—that space where he hoped to set up his smithy. He had needed to fit the rest of the roof tightly against the face of the bluff, digging into the actual earth, with wood slanting upward into it so that any rain would run off. Later on he would undoubtedly find chinks and openings in the roof and wall, but he could then patch them with clay. When winter came, snow and ice would help by filling any openings and freezing them shut.
He was so concerned with having the structure tight that when he finally went in at last to start work on the inner cave section, he discovered something he had completely forgotten. With the wall up and the roof in position, it was too dark inside to see what he was doing.
He had already established that the solar blanket would charge the car batteries, even if it took some time to do it. But he found that working in constant gloom, he used up the batteries’ charge faster than he could replace it.
He found his solution in connecting the batteries to the ceiling lights of the cars. The idea of using these had occurred to him earlier; but he had forgotten it. Now, it turned out to be ideal. The automobile interior lights gave him more than adequate illumination, and drained a battery only slowly.
But in the end he finally gave up and went back down to take out one of the ranch house’s unbroken windows and bring it back to put it in a space he cut in his front wall.
Accordingly, he lost another day and a half of working time before he was able to resume excavation of the cave’s interior in earnest.
He had made some preliminary sketches of how he might do the timbering. Now he began work by digging back the earth that faced the front wall from a few feet short of the end opposite to the blacksmithing area and over to the point where the bluff itself curved back to make the smithy space.
He had to pause occasionally to let dust clear the air of the cave and settle. This slowed him down still further, but he developed the habit of stepping out and doing some other little chore for a while. Eventually, however, he had created a space about four feet deep with a level floor. It was as far as he could go, simply digging.
He began the putting up of two-by-fours as studs, and building a second, interior wall, topping it off with an inner roof to hold back the sandy soil of the bluff above him. He would timber a bit, dig a little further, then timber again. Eventually, he planked between the studs of his inner wall as far as the curve of the bluff, leaving a space in it three feet in from the outer wall, and leaving a space in both outer and inner walls that would be filled by the two doors he had brought from the ranch house.
Once he had done this, he was ready to dig and timber the inside room of his cave. But his estimate of materials had been woefully short. He was forced into more trips to the ranch for used lumber and nails.