Horses of the North

XIII

Arabella Lindsay’s small freckled hand gently squeezed Milo’s bigger, harder hand in sympathy as she beamed, “Oh, my poor Milo, you must have been so very disappointed. Perhaps, for your peace of mind, you should have ridden out after that man, no matter how long it took you to find him. But I, above all others, save maybe Father, can understand why you did not, why you felt that you could not; duty is an exceedingly hard taskmaster, I well know. But it is a shame, nonetheless, for a man or a woman should live around, near to, his or her kindred, not always alone among those different from him or her.

“You never have found, never have come across others like yourself, then?”

Milo sighed, then beamed, “No, although when I learned to use my own telepathy and to help to awaken that dormant trait in other men and women, I assiduously delved their minds in search of certain signs that Bookerman had noted in the margins of some of the pages of the books he had left me. I delved vainly, however; I never found any of the signs in the minds of those around me.”

“And mine, Milo?” Arabella questioned silently. “Have you delved my mind, too?”

“Yes, my dear, it’s become automatic with me. But you are human, just like all of the others, pure human.”

She smiled. “I am glad, Milo. I deeply sympathize with you, but even so I do not think I could bear the long, searching loneliness of being like you. I could not bear to watch while my little cousins and all of my onetime playmates grew up and grew old and finally died and I remained the never-changing same; I think that I should go mad rather quickly. That you have not done so, and that long ago, shows, I think, the immense strength of your character and mind and will. If anyone can end this deadly enmity between the prairie rovers and the people of the fort and the station, I think it must be you, and I cannot but agree with Father that God and God alone must have sent you to us in our time of greatest need.”

The identities of the MacEvedy Station farmers who had chosen to accompany the departing battalion for the nomadic, herding, hunter-gathering life offered by Milo Moray were no longer secret; they could not be, for with the invaluable aid of clan smiths and wainwrights, the farm wagons were being transformed, rebuilt into commodious carts like those of the nomads—with shorter bodies, higher wheels and stronger axles and running gear.

In the cases of the soldier families, carts were having to be built from scratch, using seasoned wood stripped from some interior parts of the fort itself, and from the dismantling of frame outbuildings, the hardware being fashioned of steel from the mortar tubes and baseplates and from the ancient 75mm guns.

When first it had become apparent that more ferrous metal would be needed were the battalion families’ carts to be done properly and the colonel had ordered that the necessary steel be stripped from the last remaining intact source, the director and his son had come bursting into Ian’s office at the fort, the elder MacEvedy white-faced with rage.

“Now dammit, Ian Lindsay, have you completely lost your mind?” he had shouted. “A squad of your men and some three or four of those godless, heathen nomads are at this very minute dismantling one of the cannons, and they refused to stop it when I ordered them to desist, attesting that it was you who said they could. If you strip us of the two cannons, then how can those of us who still are sane put the fear of God into the plains rovers after you and the rest of those lunatics you lead are gone? The mortars are very short-ranged, and I have not yet figured out just how the catapults and spear-throwers are supposed to work.”

There was no longer any trace of either respect or friendship left in the officer’s gaze or voice when he answered. “You’ll no longer need worry yourself about the tension-torsion weapons, for they’ve been broken down for the timbers, rope and hardware, and the spear-throwers, too. The mortars have gone to the forges by now, and both of the cannons and their carriages are on the way. If it develops that we need more metal, the rifles will follow.”

Grant whimpered, but his father demanded in heat, “And just how are those farmers and their families you and your damned troops are deserting here supposed to defend themselves against the next pack of rovers who come along if you choose to selfishly destroy all of the real weapons?”

Ian smiled coldly. “You no longer bother to keep abreast of what’s happening in the station, do you, Emmett? There aren’t going to be any people left in the station or the fort, with the exception of you, your son and Falconer and his family. Why, even your own daughter, the Widow Dundas, has asked if she might accompany us, and I have gladly welcomed her; she’ll travel with Arabella and me until one of my officers gets around to marrying her.”

“But… but… but…” stammered Grant, looking to be on the verge of tears, “but without Clare in the house, who will … will cook for us and … and wash our clothes and make up our beds and dust and … and everything?”

Lindsay snorted in disgust. “Why, Grant, you’ll just have to start caring for yourselves … unless you can cozen Mrs. Falconer or her daughter into keeping you both in the style to which you have become accustomed.”

“But … but … but … Father and I are just too busy running the Station to … to …” sniffled Grant.

“Why you brainless, ball-less young ninny,” snapped Lindsay. “Can’t you understand plain English? There’s not going to be any station to administer. All of the farmers are going with me and the nomads, everyone, excepting only you, your father and the Falconers.”

“But … but … but you … you can’t, Godfather!” Grant sobbed, his tears beginning to come in floods. “Without you to … to take care of us, without the farmers to grow food, without even … even Sister Clare to … to cook and keep the dust out of the house, we’ll… we’ll all die! You … you just owe it to us to stay here and keep us all safe.” He ceased to speak then, giving himself totally over to gasping, shuddering sobs of mindless terror.

“My God, Emmett,” rasped Lindsay, “for all your other faults, you are at least a man. How in the name of all that’s holy did you and Martha Hamilton ever manage to produce a man-shaped thing like this? Get out of my office and out of the fort, and keep out of my affairs, both of you! I’m sick unto death of the sight and the sound of you!”

On the next Sunday following that meeting, the few older people who had attended divine services arose and slowly filed out when the Reverend Gerald Falconer cleared his throat to commence his sermon. Their departures left only the station director, his son and Falconer’s own family, less his eldest daughter, Megan, who had earlier in the week surreptitiously moved into the nomad camp and sent back a note declaring her intention of there remaining and of leaving with the battalion.

What issued from Gerald Falconer’s mouth during the next three-quarters of an hour was not a sermon. He ranted, he raved like a frothing lunatic on the disloyalties of parishioners, children and other relatives. He damned every prairie rover ever born orspawned, laying upon them the full blame for every ill that had afflicted the station in the last fifty years. At last, when he had worked part of the frustration and rage out of himself, he paused for a long moment to catch breath.

Then he bespoke his wife. “You get out of here now, and take the children with you. Have my dinner ready in an hour. I needs must have words with Emmett here.”

For all that Jane Falconer had been Gerald’s wife for over ten years, she still was a young woman—not yet twenty-six—and not even his years of browbeating had worn her down, any more than identical treatment had broken the spirit of his daughter by his deceased first wife. She and Megan had, indeed, thoroughly discussed in secluded whispers the girl’s decision to quit the house of her overbearing father and seek a chance of happiness in the nomad camp. She had thought to remain with the husband whom so many had already deserted, not through any sense of love or duty, but because she had felt pity for him. But after today’s diatribe, she now entertained serious doubts as to his mental and emotional balance and the wisdom of her and her tiny children’s remaining in proximity to him.

She did go home, but she remained only long enough to get together her clothing and that of her children, her Bible and a few especially treasured kitchen utensils. With everything packed in the garden wheelbarrow, her youngest child perched atop the load, she led the other two in the direction of the camp of the nomads.

“It must be done in front of as many of our people as is possible,” averred the Reverend Gerald Falconer. “I leave it to you two as to how to assemble them. Lie, if you must. God will forgive you, for it’s being done in His Holy Name.

“When we have them and him there, I will advance upon him and offer him the silver cross, demand that he hold it in his hand, kiss it and bow knee to me. He will, of course, recoil in horror and loathing from the sacred cross, and that will be your signal, Emmett, You must then bring out the pistol and place that silver bullet as close to his foul heart as you can, praying hard that God Almighty will guide your eye and hand.

“I will not, of course, be bearing any weapons, but Grant will have a rifle, and—”

“But … but Reverend Falconer,” protested Grant MacEvedy anxiously. “I … I don’t know anything about shooting rifles. Besides, the noise is so loud that it gives me headaches for days afterward, sometimes.”

“All right, all right,” snapped Falconer shortly. “Get yourself a hunter’s crossbow, then. That ought to be noiseless and simple enough for even you at the short distance you will be from your father and me. All you have to do is put your bolt in anyone who makes to prevent your father from shooting the Beast. Do you think yourself capable of protecting your own dear father, boy?”

Grant MacEvedy left the chapel meeting and repaired to the empty, echoing, now-dusty house that he shared with his father. MacEvedy pere had, in better times, been a hunter and owned the usual collection of hunting weapons, clothing and equipment.

Grant was not and had never been a hunter. He ate game, just as he ate domestic animals, but he had never even thought of killing his own food, for it was just so terribly messy a job. He had always insisted that his meat of any kind be cooked completely through, for the sight—indeed sometimes even the mere thought—of blood could render his delicate stomach unable to hold food of any type for some little time. Besides, hunting as practiced by fort or station people had always included dogs—before the folk had had to eat them, the cats and even the rats and mice—and close proximity to any furred animal had always set Grant to sneezing, wheezing and coughing, his eyes so red and swollen and teary that he could not see clearly.

Because of Grant’s utter inexperience in the use of and his complete unfamiliarity with the construction and appearance of weapons—to him, all of the prodds and crossbows closely resembled each other—it were perhaps charitable to forgive the born blunderer his grievous error in arming himself for the imminent confrontation into which he had been most unwillingly dragooned.

After all, every person or other living thing that he had ever seen shot at and hit with a fired bullet or a loosed arrow or quarrel bolt or a prodd-pellet had immediately fallen, either dead or mortally wounded. Therefore, the young man had a much-overinflated faith in the never-failing efficacy of all firearms and other missile weapons. He did not for one single minute doubt that immediately his father blasted the holy silver bullet into the breast of the werebeast, Moray, the sinister, unnatural creature would curl up and die, thus proving for once and always to all and sundry of the misled, mutinous people that Director MacEvedy and the Reverend Mr. Falconer had been right all along.

He seriously doubted that he ever would have to actually make use of the heavy, clumsy, terribly dusty weapon he finally chose, but he always had obeyed his father, and his father had instructed him to cooperate in every way with the Reverend Gerald Falconer.

He left the room that housed the director’s modest arsenal with a medium-weight crossbow and a belt pouch of quarrels, just as he had been bidden to do. However, that device which he took for a crossbow, because of very similar shape, was actually a double-stringed prodd or stone-thrower, while the pouch of quarrel shafts—which, of course, he had not bothered to check, nor likely would have known for what differences to look, had he checked—were tipped with smooth, blunt horn heads and were intended for use in a lighter, one-stringed weapon when hunting birds or rabbits.

After severely skinning the knuckles of his butter-soft hands while trying to operate the built-in cocking lever of his chosen weapon, Grant brushed away his tears, blew his sniffly nose twice, then carefully washed off the scrapes before donning a pair of pliable doeskin gloves, lest he be again so injured.

Next came the problem of concealing the fact that he now was armed. The pouch of quarrel bolts presented no difficulty; he simply allowed his shirttail to dangle down untucked, as he often did in hot weather. But the awkward and, to him, ill-balanced prodd was something else again. At last, despairing of really effective concealment, he wrapped the ill-shaped weapon in a rain cape and took it under his arm, still uncocked. Then he left the house and set off for the chapel, whence all three of them—Director Emmett MacEvedy, the Reverend Gerald Falconer and he—were to set off together for the fateful confrontation with the Satanic beast and the God-sanctioned, fore-ordained successful conclusion of their deadly purpose.

Soon, very, very soon, Grant assured himself, everything in the fort and the station would be just as it had always been. At the orders of the director, the reverend and himself, the people would join together to kill or to drive off the dirty, smelly, godless, heathen, prairie rovers—keeping their cattle and sheep and goats and horses, of course. Then, with proper order again restored, he and his father and the reverend would firmly reestablish their God-given sway over the deeply repentant insubordinate subordinates. Personally, he, Grant, relished his thoughts of making the faithless folk of station and fort squirm for many a year to come as he hashed and rehashed the tale of their faithlessness and gullibility to the wiles of Satan.

As for the arrogant, violent and often—to Grant—frightening Colonel Ian Lindsay, he would be utterly discredited for all time, and whenever Pa died and Grant, himself, became director …

So, thinking thoughts of ultimate power and revenge for all real or imagined wrongs done him in his lifetime, Grant MacEvedy trudged on to his appointment with destiny.

The quadrangle of the fort was become an open-air smithy and wagon-building yard, wherein the Clan Ohlsuhn smiths—they being traditionally the best practitioners of the art in Milo’s tribe—and the smiths of the Scott tribe labored on as they now had for long weeks at turning archaic steel scrap into useful hardware with the willing assistance of the smiths from fort and station.

In the area near the wide-opened main gate and outside, beyond it, the gathered lumber had been piled, and men scurried like ants around and over those piles, busy with measuring instruments and tools—cutting boards into fellies, turning dowels and then shaving them down for tapered spokes, assembling running gear, bending wood for ox yokes and tying it into its new shape with wet rawhide strips and then hanging it within the heat radius of the ever-glowing forge fires in the quadrangle to set and season.

But carts were not the only uses of the lumber. Thinner, lighter laths were being turned into lattices to make up the sides of yurts, the joints each joined with treenails. Shorter but wider and thicker pieces became doorframes and center wheels, slotted to take the roof supports, the lower ends of which dovetailed into the side-bracing timbers.

Inside a building that had once been a stable, its box stalls now gone for lumber, nomad women of Milo’s tribe worked at and instructed the women and girls of the Scott tribe and of the fort and station in the proper making, fullering and hardening of Horseclans felt to cover the yurt frames that the men were constructing. Of course, there would not be nearly enough of the new felt for a long while yet to come, but the generous nomads would share of their own with the newcomers, and the available canvas from tents would be used, layered under and over the felt, along with green hides, worn-down carpets and whatever else turned up to temporarily plug the gaps.

Other women and girls thronged the nomad camps, avidly absorbing the teachings of their new role models in the arcane arts of properly managing a nomad household. An old, wrinkled woman of Clan Krooguh was teaching identification of roots and tubers and leaves and flowers of wild plants relished by the folk of the clans. Another, much younger, woman was instructing a group of younger, stronger young women in use of the stock whip and ox goad; as she spoke, she likened various of her actions to saber strokes and promised to teach the use of that weapon to any interested females, later on, on the march.

Within the fort itself, Colonel Lindsay and some of his officers, helped by Milo, who sympathized and agreed with the commander in many ways, had just finished stowing the last of the books and records of the battalion and its fort in stout copper- and brass-hooped casks, waterproofing them with tar and safely stowing them in a secret space behind a false wall of the strongroom. The colonel had agonized for days in drafting a letter to accompany those records, and he now felt that he had offered the best reasons of which he could think for ordering the desertion of the station, the post to which the last legal government of Canada had assigned the original battalion, then commanded by his ancestor, the first Colonel Lindsay of the 228th Battalion (Reinforced) to guard MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station and its government-sponsored research.

The metal sheathing of the strongroom’s outer door had long ago gone for body armor, and that double-thick oaken door itself had more recently gone, with its massive frame, to provide the boards for strong fellies for the carts. But the records still were as secure as possible under the circumstances, for with the pivoted section of wall eased back into place and securely latched, the chamber looked to the uninitiated like simply another empty stonewalled room, stripped now like all of the others of furnishings, carpets and all of its wood paneling.

When he rounded the chapel to see only the barest trace of smoke—no more than what could be expected to emanate from a banked fire—arising from the parsonage chimney, Gerald Falconer’s righteous wrath, never far beneath the surface anyway, began to arise. A man could not be expected to attempt or accomplish God’s work on an empty stomach, and he had issued unmistakably clear orders to Jane that she have a hot meal ready for him in an hour’s time, something that would have required the addition of more wood to the stove fire at the very least.

The front door gaped open, and this, too, annoyed him. “Wife!” he roared, in the growling tone that denoted his vilest rage. But there came no answer of any sort, not even the expected whimpering of one of the younger children, who could recognize the tone of his wrath and had felt his kicks and cuffs often enough to fear him when he chanced to be in such a degree of anger and ill-controlled violence toward anything that moved or made a noise.

He searched the parsonage from low attic to root cellar, then opened and entered the semiattached privy, storage shed and stable, but there was no trace of Jane or of the little children. He then searched again, and it was in the course of this second vain search that he noticed the facts of missing clothing items and certain familiar objects from kitchen and cupboard; moveover, the big, capacious wheelbarrow was gone from its designated place against the back wall of the shed. Then the light of knowledge dawned in his narrow mind like the sudden blaze of sunlight emerging from behind dark clouds: his wife, his own wife, given into his service by God Almighty, had taken his children—the blessed fruit of his loins—and with them left his bed and board, deserted him and the Lord for the camp of his nemesis, following in the wake of the backsliding, heretical daughter who had earlier had the effrontery to desert him and the Church and God.

“Well, we will just see about that matter!” he snarled to himself, from between gritted teeth. His stomach agrowl, the Reverend Gerald Falconer stalked off toward the nomad camps, whitefaced in his anger, a two-foot billet of firewood clamped in his hand, resolved to have his wife and domestic slave back even if he had to beat her into insensibility to accomplish his holy purpose. When she came to her senses and fully realized the perdition from which he had saved her immortal soul, she would most abjectly thank him, of that he was more than certain.

At the edge of the nomad camp, an elderly, silvery-jowled and near-toothless hound approached him, its motheaten old tail waggling a greeting. Without breaking his firm stride, Gerald Falconer raised his cudgel and brought it down with such force as to crush the friendly animal’s skull and simultaneously snap its neck like a dry twig. He felt much the better for the act as he proceeded on into the camp, threading a way between the haphazard arrangement of openwork wooden-walled and felt-roofed tentlike things in which the heathen lived out their lives of utter damnation.

Deep into the camp, a semicircle of women and girls from fort and station modestly sat or immodestly squatted watching while a trio of nomad women—recognizable by hair first braided, then lapped across their pates, as well as by their terribly unchaste men’s clothing—fitted a yoke to a huge but gentle pair of oxen, then expertly attached the stout lines that hitched the device and the animals to a high-wheeled cart.

Falconer’s keen brown eyes picked out his errant wife’s mahogany-hued hair from a distance, and he stepped around and over the two rearmost ranks of women and girls until he stood just behind the rapt Jane Falconer. Stooping, the parson grasped a handful of that thick hair, hauled her over onto her back and wordlessly commenced to belabor the shrieking woman with the wooden billet still tacky with dog blood, even as he slowly backed from out the aggregation of females, dragging her with him.

At least, that had been his plan, but he had not backed up more than two or three short steps when he himself shrieked in pain and surprise and let go his wife’s hair to clap the freed hand to a smarting and now bleeding buttock. Still grasping his cudgel, he spun about to confront a lithe nomad woman who held a cursive saber in a businesslike way, the blade of the weapon an inch back from the fine point now cloudy-pinkish with his blood.

“How dare you, you godless, pagan hussy!” he yelped. “You have no right to interfere with the high and holy work of the Lord. Get you gone ere I smite you.” He raised the cudgel in a threatening manner, but she just smiled mockingly at him.

“You try laying that club on my body, dirt-scrabbler, and I’ll take off your damned hand at the wrist, for all that your scrawny neck does offer me a most tempting target, and I doubt me not that you could do most comically a rendition of the dance of the headless chicken, to the amusement of all of us.”

“Woman of Satan,” said Falconer, in a heated anger that completely overrode his fear of this obviously demented nomad strumpet, “you know not to whom you speak. I am the—”

“You are the shitpants coward who needs must have a heavy club to attack a woman half your size from the rear, with no warning,” the swordswoman sneered. “That’s what you are! And if you don’t get out of this camp quickly you’re going to be a very dead shitpants coward.”

“The … she … this woman is my wife, and you have no right to interfere in domestic affairs,” stated Falconer, conveniently forgetting how often he had done just that to his parishioners, and generally to no real or lasting good effect. “She is my God-given helpmeet, and her proper place is in my home caring for me and our children. It is her duty, ordained by God’s Holy Will.”

He had hardly finished speaking the last word when there came a whhuushing noise from behind him and the long tail of a stock whip suddenly wrapped around his billet and then jerked it from out his grasp. An identical noise immediately preceded what felt to him to be the laying of a red-hot bar of iron upon his shoulder and diagonally across his back. He screamed then and bent to retrieve his cudgel, whereupon the same or another hot length of iron bar was pressed across his already sore and wounded buttocks. Forgetting the billet of wood, forgetting his mutinous wife, forgetting his empty stomach, indeed, forgetting everything save only his unaccustomed pain, the Reverend Gerald Falconer leaped forward in a dead run, heedlessly knocking the lightly built swordswoman asprawl from out his path. His long legs took him with some speed, nor did he stop until he once more had attained the safety of his empty house, with a barred door between him and his tormentors, whose mocking, shrill laughter and obscene, shouted jibes still echoed in his ears, where he leaned against the mantel, panting.

Emmett MacEvedy had been at the door of the chapel for a good half hour, having arrived a bit before the appointed time, when the parson made his appearance, walking slowly and a bit stiffly, wincing every now and again, as if some injury might lie under his black vestments. The large silver pectoral cross hung from his neck on its silver chain, the polished surfaces glinting in the sunlight. Arrived before the chapel, the parson seemed about to climb the four steps up to the stoop, then he apparently changed his mind.

“Are you ill or injured, Reverend Falconer?” inquired the director solicitously. “If you are, perhaps we should postpone our plans until another day, when you possibly will be feeling better.” Emmett MacEvedy would just as soon have postponed their act of desperation indefinitely, having experienced some very foreboding presentiments as regarded it.

“No, no, I am well and uninjured, Emmett,” Falconer assured him, possibly sensing that did he expect the MacEvedys to act in accordance with his directive in this matter it were best done now, at once. “I … I nearly fell and think I have only strained a muscle in my … uhh, leg. Yes, that’s it, I slightly pulled a muscle in my leg, but it will no doubt improve with careful use.

“Where is your son, Grant? He too should be here by now.”

“Oh, he’ll be along, Reverend,” said MacEvedy. “He’s often tardy for things he doesn’t care for. You should remember that about him from his school days.”

“Yes, yes,” Falconer said impatiently, “but it speaks ill of him to be late for this, the Lord’s work.

“How of you? Did you do as I told you? Did you spy out the present whereabouts of the Beast?”

MacEvedy nodded. “I could not find him for a while, but then he and Ian and some of the other officers came out of the main building of the fort. Moray and Ian are now in the space before the main gate, overseeing the construction of carts in company with that other prairie rover chief, Scott. Most of the men and bigger boys of both station and fort seem to be thereabouts, too.”

“Very well, then,” said Falconer, “immediately your son, your laggard son, comes, we will go to the fort and do God’s work, perform the task He has set us. Come, come, Emmett MacEvedy, smile. You should feel pride in having been chosen to be an instrument of the Lord.”

Although Emmett was able to coax his lips, at least, into a grimace that parodied a smile, the load of encroaching doom was weighing heavier and ever heavier upon him; he knew, knew without knowing, that no good would come to him this day, knew that all three of them—him, his son and Falconer-moved in the bright sunlight under an invisible but horrifyingly palpable black cloud of deadly and irrevocable doom.

“Oh ho,” muttered Ian Lindsay to Milo. “Yonder comes trouble.”

Milo turned to look in the direction indicated by his companion. The Reverend Gerald Falconer was pacing in their direction as fast as his awkward limp would permit, his black vestments swaying about his ankles and the big silver cross bouncing up and down on the front of his torso. Some pace or so behind the parson came Director Emmett MacEvedy, trudging slump-shouldered, his demeanor that of a convicted felon bound for his execution. A few steps behind the director came his son, his shirttails flapping out and his arms supporting an angular bundle that looked very much like a crossbow wrapped hurriedly and most inexpertly in an old rain cape; MacEvedy fits did not look any too happy either, and his pale, beardless cheeks both bore the red imprints of recent slapping hands, while tears glittered unshed in his eyes and his Sips could be seen to be trembling.

Milo disliked the look of it all. He had already been apprised as to Falconer assaulting his wife and being whipped out of camp by Manda and Sally Kahrtuh, Chief Bahb’s two youngest wives. Yes, it had been extreme, to say the least, but he agreed that Falconer had fully deserved every last stripe he had been awarded, for not only had he clubbed to death an old hound for no apparent reason, his vicious attack upon his wife had broken at least three of her ribs, several fingers and her right lower arm, both bones of it.

So now, deserted by all of their subordinates and personal dependents, these three approaching men were become desperate, and desperate men are often wont to do or attempt to do mad, desperate things.

“Chief Gus,” said Milo swiftly and softly to the Scott chief at his other side, “arm as many bowmen as you can quickly and unobtrusively. At least one of those three is armed with what seems to be a crossbow, but he doesn’t apparently want anyone to know of that fact.”

“Why not let them get a little closer and drop them before they have a chance to do whatever they’ve come for?” asked Scott. “They hate you and Chief Ian and care little, they’ve made it clear, for me or Jules or any other rover. You throw a knife every bit as accurately as do I, and Chief Ian has his belt gun, so what need have we three of archers?”

“There may possibly be more than just those obvious three, Chief Gus,” said Milo. “They could have infiltrated a few more armed men into this gathering, and we’d never have noticed the fact, probably. So let’s play it safe—get those men armed and watch carefully for any treachery from any quarter.”

The Reverend Gerald Falconer limped up until he stood only an arm’s length from Ian Lindsay and his Satan’s-spawn companion. Clearing his throat, he unhooked the silver pectoral cross from its heavy flat-link chain and held it bare inches from Milo’s face, intoning in his best pulpit voice, “Begone, imp of Lucifer!”

Milo just threw back his head and laughed, then said, “You superstitious fool. If you really, truly believe me to be some kind of Satanic monster or demon, then you and your two toadies there are the only ones hereabouts so stupid and childish. We’re all busy here, as you can clearly see, at men’s work. If you try to hinder us, I’ll send for two women I think you’ll remember; I’ll have them whip you back to your kennel, this time around.”

Emmett had no idea, of course, just what Moray was talking about. Still heavy with dread and certain doom, he nonetheless was awaiting the words and actions that would be his cue to draw from under his shirt the old .380 caliber revolver with the silver-bullet cartridge carefully set as next to fire in the cylinder. The parson would press the cross even closer to the face of Moray and demand that he kiss it to demonstrate to all here assembled his submission to God Almighty and his abnegation of Satan and all his unholy works. When the Beast recoiled from the sacred silver, Emmett knew that—for good or, more likely, for ill—he must produce the revolver and fire the silver slug into the heart of the thing that called himself Milo Moray.

“If you are not a lover of Satan,” said Falconer, “then kiss this cross, take it and press it to your breast, then bend a knee to me and swear that you abjure the Fallen Angel and do truly love and reverence the Lord God Jehovah and that you expect the salvation for which His only begotten Son died upon a cross like this. Doit, and I will believe you.”

Grinning, Milo extended a hand and jerked the cross from Falconer’s grasp. Bouncing it on his palm for a moment, his grin broadening, he nodded, then thrust it under his waist belt, saying, “Solid, isn’t it? Heavy, too—obviously solid silver or at worst, sterling; no hollow casting, this one. I thank you for the gift—it will melt down into some very impressive and valuable decorations for my saddle.”

The Reverend Gerald Falconer just stood rooted, gaping and gasping like a sunfish out of water. The damned creature clearly was not harmed in the least by contact with the holy silver. It was on his mind to speak a word that would stop Emmett when the sound of the pistol shot boomed in his ear.

Now sterling—an alloy compounded of about nine parts of pure silver to one part of pure copper—is somewhat harder than is pure silver; and pure silver, alone, is considerably harder than is lead; so this blessed bullet, propelled as it was by a load nearly triple that customarily used behind leaden pistol rounds by the fort armorers, sped undeformed through Milo’s hide vest and shirt and flesh, went completely through the head of a man standing thirty feet behind him, then blew off toward an unknown lighting place out on the limitless prairie beyond.

His grin became a grimace of pain, Milo drew his big, heavy-bladed dirk in a twinkling and, taking a long step forward, drove its sharp blade deep into Emmett MacEvedy’s solar plexus, holding the man’s pistol arm tightly and twisting the blade about in his vitals with vengeful relish.

Frantically, Grant MacEvedy unwrapped the crossbow, drew back the cocking lever, then fumbled a quarrel bolt from the pouch under his shirt, managing in the process to spill out all the rest onto the ground at his feet and tear the shirttail jaggedly. Glancing up for a moment, he saw the big knife of the bleeding but patently still living rover leader flash briefly in the sun, then he saw his father start violently, heard him make sickening noises.

Bringing up the crossbow, he tried to fit the bolt into the slot, only to find that it would not, for some reason, stay in place or straight. After frantic split seconds that seemed long as hours to the inept young man, he thought that he at last had gotten it positioned properly and he raised it up to sighting level in shaking hands.

Emmett MacEvedy gurgled and vomited up a great gush of blood. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and his head lolled. When Milo let go the man’s right arm, the legs buckled and the bloody corpse sprawled on the ground at his booted feet.

Aiming at his father’s killer, Grant MacEvedy squeezed his eyelids tight closed and jerked the trigger of the crossbow. The blunt, unpointed bolt took the Reverend Gerald Falconer in the small of his back a couple of inches to the right of his spine. The quarrel tore and lacerated a way through his right kidney and into the frontal organs beyond. But due principally to the fact that it had been launched from a bow that it did not really fit, it lacked power and did not—as it would otherwise have done at such close range—go all of the way through the parson’s body, but rather lodged in its agonizing place, heedless of the shrill screams of the man whose body now harbored it.

Poor, hapless Grant MacEvedy never even got a chance to see the bloody handiwork wrought by his clumsy efforts, for a brace of arrows from nomad hornbows pinned his eyelids shut and bored speedily, smoothly, relentlessly into the brain behind those eyes. He fell into a bottomless pit of darkness and was dead even as he hit the ground.

MacEvedy, fils et pere, both lay dead, and once Colonel, now Chief, Ian Lindsay regarded the gory bodies of his boyhood friend and his godson sadly, deeply regretting so sad and savage an ending, but recognizing that he had done all within his power to prevent it, done it in vain.

The Reverend Gerald Falconer knelt in a spreading pool of his and Emmett’s blood, hunched over the pain, hugging his agonized body and shrieking mindlessly, until Chief Gus Scott stepped forward, grasped a handful of the parson’s hair, tilted his head back and slashed his throat almost to the spine. The noises made by the death-wounded man had begun to rasp on his nerves.