“Honestly,” Logan admitted, “I don't know. But they're my men. I should have gotten us out sooner.”
“Don't blame yourself, boy. It could have happened to anyone. Hell, it happened to me once. Wyoming, in '74. Hell of a fire. The winds changed, lightning struck, and everything went up in smoke. We nearly pissed ourselves running up the mountain.” Joseph's eyes went unfocused for a moment, but thankfully his gaze was clear and direct when he spoke again. “Only thing that matters is that you're all still alive.”
Logan knew Joseph was right. But he prided himself on his crew's extremely low injury rate and hated to see one of his guys in pain.
“Connor's in the hospital. His hands and arms are wrecked.”
Joseph didn't waver. “Burns heal.”
Logan appreciated the pep talk, but that wasn't why he was here. It was time they had a serious conversation. One he could no longer avoid.
He stood up and pulled open the back door. “Come outside for a minute. We need to talk.”
Bemused, Joseph followed him onto the back deck they'd built together five summers ago. It had been a good sweaty project, full of black, fallen-off thumbnails and a dozen trips to the hardware store for extra nails and perfect, knotless strips of redwood. Dozens of bar-beques and hotshot reunions had gone down on this deck. Logan remembered standing against the rail just a few months ago, drinking a beer and wondering about the girl in the bar, if he'd ever see her again.
Joseph's voice broke into his recollections. “Now I know how you felt when you were seventeen and I was riding your ass all the time, wondering what I was going to come down on you for next.”
They'd never talked about that tough first year when Logan was breaking all the rules. Logan had never told Joseph how much he appreciated everything he'd done for him. He figured Joseph already knew.
“You did what you had to do.” One side of Logan's mouth cocked up as he remembered Joseph's tough lessons. “Although I was pretty pissed at you that night you cuffed me to the flagpole. I almost got it out of the ground, you know. You're lucky I didn't. I had visions of bashing your head in with it.”
Joseph grinned before saying “I always worried you'd end up hating me.”
But Logan had never been afraid of Joseph. Not even when things had gotten physical, when his out-of-control behavior had forced Joseph to run through every available option—even putting him in handcuffs.
“Better than ending up dead or rotting in prison,” Logan said.
Which brought him right back to his reason for stopping by. Logan leveled a gaze at the man who'd been a better father than blood had ever been. It was time to spit it out.
“Are you going up in the mountains, Joseph?”
“What are you asking me that for? You know I hike.”
Joseph wasn't well and Logan didn't want to trigger anything that would make Joseph worse. But he had to at least ask the question. The big one.
“Are you lighting fires?”
Surprise—then anger—crossed over Joseph's face. “Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hell, boy, you don't think I know what I'm doing? Where I'm going?”
Logan clenched his jaw. He didn't want to belittle Joseph, didn't want him to think he was less of a man because age was taking its toll. But yes, that was exactly what he thought.
Over the past year, Joseph had been slowing down and forgetting things. A lot of things. Like what year it was and whether or not he'd taken a shower or eaten for several days in a row.
Logan had tried talking to Joseph's son, Dennis, about it. But Dennis and Joseph had their problems, and Dennis hadn't seemed to want to deal with the situation at all.
After everything Joseph had done for him, Logan didn't want to accuse his mentor if his behavior was simply minor symptoms of aging. Joseph was still active, still enjoyed heading up into Desolation from the trails behind his cabin to go for day hikes. Hikes that Logan feared were becoming a big problem.
Just this week alone, he'd found two campfires burning along trails with entry points in Joseph's backyard. Given his mental deterioration, it wasn't impossible that he was lighting—and forgetting about—those fires.
And now Connor was in the hospital, unconscious, about to undergo hellish skin grafts. If the nerves in his hands were fried, odds were he'd never fight fire again.
Logan couldn't imagine another life. Who knew how Connor would deal with his injury when he came to. It was unthinkable.
Connor's injuries brought him full circle to Joseph. Somehow, he had to walk the fine line between respecting the man who'd given him so much love and dealing with his problems.