Mad Amos Malone

Wu-Ling’s Folly

Amos Malone didn’t exist when I began to write Folly. As hinted at already, the story’s genesis involved a dragon. A Chinese dragon, to be precise. I made him a visitor from the Far East because I get tired of your standard European dragon and because such an origin allowed me to place him in the context of the Chinese laborers building the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad. Add in the dragonish affection for gold and… well, the story began to take form from there.

But how to deal with such an intimidating intruder? Who, in the Old West, could handle a dragon? It would have to be someone with knowledge of such creatures, someone unafraid, yet someone who belonged to the environment. I couldn’t just import a white-bearded wizard in a pointy hat to magic a dragon away with a wave of his wand. So… no pointy hats. No wands. No long white beards.

The exploits of the mountain men in the early American West often read like magic. Why not a mountain man who could work a little magic himself? An outsized talent in every sense of the word, but one who retained his essential mountain manness. I’d have to equip him with the right weapons, the right attire, an appropriate mount, and a pair of saddlebags capable of holding, should a particularly sorceral situation arise, more than hardtack and salt pork. Locals would be sure to find such a character passing strange. Maybe even a little bit… mad.

So Amos Malone came into being as a foil for an expat Chinese dragon. And after that, wouldn’t you know it: the dadgum half-crazy sonuvabitch and the worthless steed he rode in on just wouldn’t go away.

Hunt and MacLeish had worked for the Butterfield Line for six and seven years, respectively. They’d fought Indians, and been through growler storms that swept down like a cold dream out of the eastern Rockies, and seen rattlers as big around the middle as a horse’s leg. All that, they could cope with; they’d seen it all before. The dragon, though, was something new. You couldn’t blame ’em much for panicking a little when the dragon hit the stagecoach.

“I’m tellin’ ya,” Hunt was declaring to the Butterfield agent in Cheyenne, “it were the biggest, ugliest, scariest-lookin’ dang bird you ever saw, Mr. Fraser, sir!” He glanced back at his driver for confirmation.

“Yep. S’truth.” Archie MacLeish was a man of few words and much tobacco juice. He was tough as pemmican and as hard to handle, but the incident had turned a few more of the brown-stained whiskers in his copious beard gray as an old Confederate uniform.

“It come down on us, Mr. Fraser, sir,” Hunt continued emphatically, “like some great winged devil raised up by an angry Boston temperance marcher, a-screamin’ and a-hollerin’ and a-blowin’ fire out of a mouth filled with ugly, snaggled teeth. ’Twere a sight fit t’ raise the departed. I gave it both barrels of Evangeline.” He indicated the trusty ten-gauge resting in a corner of the office. “And it ne’er even blinked. Ain’t that right, Archie?”

“Yep,” confirmed the driver, firing accurately into the bronze-inlaid pewter spittoon set on the floor beside one corner of the big walnut desk.

“I see.” The Butterfield agent was a pleasant, sympathetic fellow in his early fifties. Delicate muttonchop whiskers compensated somewhat for the glow the sun brought forth from his naked forehead. His trousers were supported by overloaded suspenders that made dark tracks across an otherwise immaculate white shirt. “And then what happened?”

“Well, both Archie and me was ready t’ meet our maker.” Hunt was deadly earnest. “You got to understand, Mr. Fraser, sir, this varmint were bigger than coach and team together. Why, them poor horses like t’ die afore we coaxed and sweet-talked ’em into town. They’re bedded down in the company stable right now, still shakin’ at the knees.

“Anyways, this ugly bird just reached down with one claw the size o’ my Aunt Molly’s Sunday dress and plucked the strongbox right off the top o’ the coach, snappin’ the guy ropes like they was made o’ straw. Then it flew off, still a-screechin’ and a-brayin’ like the grandfather of jackasses toward the Medicine Bow Mountains.”

“God’s truth,” said the driver.

“This is all most interesting,” Fraser mumbled. Now, while known as a sympathetic man, the Butterfield agent would have been somewhat disinclined to believe the tale to which his two employees were swearing, save for the fact that MacLeish and Hunt were still standing in front of his desk rather than cavorting drunk and debauched in the fleshpots of Denver, spending free and easy the ten thousand in gold that the missing strongbox had contained.

And, of course, there was also the confirmation afforded by the stage’s three passengers, a reputable Mormon rancher from Salt Lake and two of his wives. At the moment, the ladies were under the care of a local physician who was treating them for shock.

“Couldn’t it have been a williwaw?” he asked hopefully.

“Nope,” said MacLeish, striking with unerring accuracy into the spittoon a second time. “’Tweren’t the likes o’ no wind or beastie I ever seed nor heard tell of, Mr. Fraser. I kinna say more than the truth.” He squinted hard at the agent. “D’ ye doubt our word?”

“No, no, certainly not. It’s only that I have no idea how I am to report the nature of this loss to the company. If you’d been held up, that they would understand. But this… There will be questions. You must understand my position, gentlemen.”

“And you should’ve been in ours, Mr. Fraser, sir,” Hunt told him fervently.

The agent was not by his nature an imaginative man, but he thought for a moment, and his slim store of inventiveness came to his rescue. “I’ll put it down as a storm-caused loss,” he said brightly.

MacLeish said nothing, though he made a face around his wad of fossil tobacco. Hunt was less restrained. He gaped at the agent and said, “But there weren’t no storm where we was comin’ through, Mr. …”

Fraser favored him with a grave look. Hunt began to nod slowly. Meanwhile, MacLeish had walked to the corner and picked up the ten-gauge. He handed it to his partner. The two of them started for the door. And that was the end of that.

For about a week.

“Another month, boys, and I think we can call it quits.” A bulbous nose made a show of sniffing the air. “Snow’s in the wind already.”

“Damned if you ain’t right, there, Emery,” said one of the other men.

There were four of them gathered around the rough-hewn table that dominated the center of the cabin. They were spooning up pork, beans, jerky, dark bread, and some fresh fowl. It was a veritable feast compared to their normal cold meals, but they had reason to celebrate.

Johnny Sutter was an eighteen-year-old from Chicago who’d matured ten years in the twelve-month past. “I,” he announced, “am goin’ to get me a room in the finest whorehouse in Denver and stay stinkin’ drunk for a whole month!”

Loud guffaws came from the rest of the men. “Hell, Johnny,” said one of them, “if’n yer goin’ t’ do that, don’t waste your time doin’ it in a fancy place. Do it in the streets and let me have your room.”

“Dang right,” said another. “You’ll get yourself too stiff t’ do what you’ll want t’ be doin’.”

“Not stiff enough, mos’ likely,” corrected the mulatto, One-Thumb Washington. He laughed louder than any of them, showing a dark gap where his front teeth ought to have been. He’d lost those two teeth and four fingers of his left hand at Shiloh and never regretted it. Two teeth and four fingers were a fair enough trade for a lifetime of freedom.

Wonder Charlie, the oldest of the four, made quieting motions with his hands. His head was cocked to one side, and he was listening intently with his best ear.

“What’s wrong with you, old man?” asked Johnny, grinning at all the good-natured ribbing he was taking. “Ain’t you got no suggestions for how a man’s to spend his money?”

“It ain’t thet, Johnny. I think somethin’s after the mules.”

“Well, hellfire!” Emery Shanks was up from his chair and reaching for his rifle. “If them thievin’ Utes think they can sneak in here the day afore we’re set t’—”

Wonder Charlie cut him off sharply. “’Tain’t Utes. Ol’ Com-it-tan promised me personal two springs ago when I sighted out this creek bed thet we wouldn’t have no trouble with his people, and Com-it-tan’s a man o’ his word. Must be grizzly. Listen.”

The men did. In truth, the mules did sound unnaturally hoarse instead of skittish as they would if it were only strange men prowling about the camp. It if was a grizzly, it sure would explain the fear in their throats. A big male griz could carry off a mule alive.

The miners poured out the cabin door, hastily donning boots and pulling up suspenders over their dirty long johns. One-Thumb and Emery fanned out to search the forest behind the hitch-and-rail corral. The moon was swollen near to full, and they could see a fair piece into the trees. There was no sign or sound of a marauding grizzly. One-Thumb kept an eye on the dark palisade of pines as he moved to the corral and tried to calm the lead mule. The poor creature was rolling its eyes and stamping nervously at the ground.

“Whoa, dere, General Grant! Take it easy, mule…. Wonder what the blazes got into dese mu—”

He broke off as the mule gave a convulsive jerk and pulled away from him. There was something between the camp and the moon. It wasn’t a storm cloud, and it certainly wasn’t a grizzly. It had huge, curving wings like those of a bat, and wild, glowing red eyes, and a tail like a lizard’s. Thin tendrils protruded from its lips and head, and curved teeth flashed like Arapaho ponies running through a moonlit meadow.

“Sweet Lord,” Johnny Sutter murmured softly, “wouldja look at that?”

The massive yet elegant shape dropped closer. The mules went into a frenzy. Wonder Charlie, who’d been at Bull Run as well as Shiloh and had emerged from those man-made infernos with his skin intact, didn’t hesitate. He fired at that toothy, alien face, the rifle kabooming through the still mountain air.

The aerial damnation didn’t so much as blink. It settled down on wings the size of clipper ship toproyals and began digging with pitchfork-sized claws at the watering trough just inside the corral. The mules pawed at the earth, at each other, at the railing in a frantic desire to crowd as far away from the intruder as possible.

One-Thumb ducked under the sweep of a great translucent wing and shouted in sudden realization, “Curse me for a massa, I think the monster’s after our gold!”

Sure enough, several moments of excavation turned up a small wooden box. Inside lay the labor of four men sweating out the riches of a mountain for a year and a half, a glittering horde of dust and nuggets large enough to ensure each of them comfort for the rest of his life.

Monster bird or no, they’d worked too damn hard for any of them to give up so easily that pile they’d wrested from the icy river. They fired and fired, and when it was clear to see that guns weren’t doing any good, they went after the intruder with picks and shovels.

When it was all over, a somber moon beamed down on a scene of theft and carnage. The gold was gone, and so were the bodies of young Johnny Sutter and One-Thumb Washington and a mule named General Grant….

There were not many physicians residing in Cheyenne at the time and fewer still who knew anything about medicine, so it was not entirely coincidental that the one who treated the Mormon rancher’s wives would also become conversant with the story related by the unfortunate survivors of the Willow Creek claim. He brought the information to the attention of Mr. Fraser, the local Butterfield Line agent who had seen to the care of the distraught passengers. Now these two comparatively learned men discussed the events of the week past over sherry in the dining room of the Hotel Paris.

“I am at a loss as to what to do now, Dr. Waxman,” the agent confessed. “My superiors in Denver accepted the report I sent to them which described the loss of the strongbox on a mountain road during a violent, freak storm, but I suspect they are not without lingering suspicions. My worry is what to do if this should occur a second time. Not only would the cargo be lost, I should be lost as well. I have a wife and children, Doctor. I have no desire to be sent to a prison… or to an asylum. You are the only other educated citizen who has been apprised of this peculiar situation. I believe it is incumbent upon the two of us to do something to rectify the problem. I feel a certain responsibility, as an important member of the community, to do something to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens, and I am sure you feel similarly.”

A thoughtful Waxman ran a finger around the edge of his glass. “I agree. Something must be done.”

“Well, then. You are positive these two men you treated yesterday were confronted by the same phenomenon as the one that afflicted my drivers?”

“There seems to be no doubt of that.” The doctor sipped at his sherry as he peered over thick spectacles at the agent. “With two of their companions carried off by this creature, I should ordinarily have suspected some sort of foul play, were it not for the unique nature of their wounds. Also, they are Christians and swore to the truth of their story quite vociferously to the farmer who found them wandering dazed and bleeding in the mountains, invoking the name of the savior repeatedly.”

The agent folded his hands on the clean tablecloth. “More than citizen safety is at stake in this. There is a growing economy to consider. It is clear that this creature has an affinity—nay, a fondness—for gold. Why, I cannot imagine. What matters is that next time it may strike at a bank in Cheyenne or some smaller community when there are women and children on the streets. But how are we to combat it? We do not even know what we face, save that it surely is not some creature native to this land. I suspect a manifestation of the Devil. Perhaps it would be efficacious for me to have a talk with Pastor Hunnicutt of the—”

The doctor waved the suggestion down. “I think we must seek remedies of a more earthly nature before we proceed to the final and uncertain decision of throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Creator. God helps those who help themselves, whether the Devil is involved or not.

“I have had occasion in my work, sir, to deal with certain individuals whose business it is to travel extensively in this still-wild country: Certain acquaintances sometimes impress themselves most forcefully on these bucolic travelers, who are usually commonsensible if not always hygienic.

“In connection with unusual occurrences and happenings, with unexplained incidents and strange manifestations, one name recurs several times and is uttered with respect by everyone from simple farmers to soldiers to educated citizens such as ourselves. I have been reliably informed that this person, a certain Amos Malone, is presently in the Cheyenne region. I believe we should seek his counsel in this matter.”

The Butterfield agent stared across at the doctor, who, having finished his sherry, was tamping tobacco into a battered old pipe. “Amos Malone? Mad Amos Malone? I have heard tell of him. He is a relic, a throwback to the heyday of the mountain man and the beaver hat. Besides which, he is rumored to be quite insane.”

“So is half of Congress,” the doctor replied imperturbably. “Yet I believe we need him if there is to be any chance of resolving this business.”

The agent let out a long sigh. “I shall defer to your judgment in this matter, sir, but I confess that I am less than sanguine as to its eventual outcome.”

“I am not too hopeful myself,” the physician admitted, “but we have to try.”

“Very well. How are we to get in touch with this individual? These mountain men do not subscribe to civilized means of communication, nor do they usually remain in one place long enough for contact to be made.”

“As to that, I am not concerned.” The doctor lit his pipe. “We will put out the word that we require his presence and that it involves a matter of great urgency and most unusual circumstance. I believe he will come. As to precisely how he will learn of our need, I leave that to the unknown and ungovernable means by which the breed of man to which he belongs has always learned of such things.”

They waited in the doctor’s office. Just before dawn a light snow had salted the town. Now the morning sun, hesitantly glimpsed through muddy dark clouds, threatened to melt the serenely pale flakes and turn the streets into a boot-sucking quagmire.

Sitting in the office next to a nickel-and-iron stove were the Butterfield Line agent and a distraught, angry, and bandaged-up Wonder Charlie. Wonder Charlie wasn’t feeling too well—his splinted right arm in particular was giving him hell—but he insisted on being present, and the doctor thought the presence of an eyewitness would be vital to give verisimilitude to their story.

The clock on the high shelf chimed six-thirty.

“And that’s for your mountain man,” snapped Fraser. He was not in a good mood. His wife, an unforgiving woman, had badgered him relentlessly about risking an attack of colic by tramping outside so early in the morning.

Dr. Waxman gazed unconcernedly at the clock. “Give him a little time. The weather is bad.”

There was a knock at the door. Waxman glanced over at the agent and smiled.

“Punctual enough,” Fraser admitted reluctantly. “Unusual for these backwoodsmen.”

The doctor rose from his seat and moved to open the door, admitting a man who stood in height somewhere between six feet and heaven. He was clad in dirty buckskin and wet Colorado. Two bandoliers of enormous cartridges crisscrossed his expansive chest. In his belt were secured a bowie knife and a LeMat pistol, the latter an eccentric weapon favored for a time by Confederate cavalry officers. It fit the arrival, Fraser thought.

The man’s beard was not nearly as gray-speckled as Wonder Charlie’s, but there were a few white wires scattered among the black. His eyes were dark as Quantrill’s heart, and what one could see of his actual flesh looked cured as tough as the goatskin boots he wore.

“Cold out there this morning,” he said, striding over to the potbellied stove. He rubbed his hands in front of it gratefully, then turned to warm his backside.

The doctor closed the door against the cold and proceeded to make formal introductions. Fraser surrendered his uncallused palm to that massive grip gingerly. Wonder Charlie took it firmly, his age and infirmities notwithstanding.

“Now then, gentlemens, word’s out that you folk have got yourselves a little gold problem.”

“Bird problem, ye mean,” Charlie said promptly, before Fraser or the doctor could slip a word in. “Biggest goddamn bird ye ever saw, mister. Killed two o’ my partners and stole our poke. Took off with m’ best mule, too. Out o’ spite, I thinks, for surely One-Thumb and Johnny would’ve made the beast a good enough supper.”

“Easy there, old-timer,” Mad Amos said gently. “It don’t do to make your head hurt when the rest of you already does. Now, y’all tell me more about this gold-lovin’ bird of yours. I admit to being more than a mite curious about it, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“And just why are you here, Mr. Malone?” Fraser asked curiously. “You have no assurance we are able to pay you for your services or even what extremes of exertion those services might entail.”

“Why, I don’t care much about that right now, friend.” He smiled, showing more teeth than men of his profession usually possessed. “I’m here because I’m curious. Like the cat.”

“Curiosity,” commented Fraser, still sizing up the new arrival, “killed the cat, if you will remember.”

The mountain man turned and stared at him out of eyes so black that the agent shrank a little inside. “Way I figure it, Mr. Fraser, in the long run we’re all dead.”

With the doctor and the agent nearby to assist his memory, Wonder Charlie related his story of the devil-thing that had attacked his camp and killed two of his partners. Then Fraser repeated what his set-upon driving team had told him. He and Charlie argued a little over details of the creature’s appearance, picayune disagreements involving color and size, but basically they and their respective stories were in agreement.

When they’d finished, Mad Amos leaned back in the rocking chair into which he’d settled himself. It creaked with his weight as he clasped both hands around a knee. “Shoot, that ain’t no bird you’re describing, gentlemens. I thought it weren’t when I first heard about it, but I weren’t sure. Now I am. What came down on you, old-timer,” he told Charlie, “and what lit into your stage, Mr. Fraser, weren’t nothin’ but a full-blood, gen-u-wine, honest-to-goshen member of the dragon tribe.”

“Your pardon, Mr. Malone,” said the doctor skeptically, “but a dragon is a mythical creature, an invention of our less enlightened ancestors. This is the nineteenth century, sir. We no longer cotton to such superstitions. I myself once had an encounter with a snake-oil salesman who guaranteed to supply me with some powdered unicorn horn. I am not unskilled in basic chemistry and was able to prove it was nothing more than powder from the common steer.”

“Well, y’all better readjust your heads a mite, ’cause that’s what got your gold, and those stealings ain’t no myth.”

“He’s right, there,” Wonder Charlie said sharply.

“I had thought perhaps a large eagle that normally resides only among the highest and most inaccessible peaks…,” the doctor began.

“Haw!” Mad Amos slapped his knee a blow that would’ve felled most men. His laugh echoed around the room. “Ain’t no eagle in this world big enough to carry off a full-grown mule, let alone twenty pounds of gold in a Butterfield steel strongbox! Ain’t no eagle got bat wings instead of feathers. Ain’t no eagle colored red and yellow and blue and pink and black and everything else. No, it’s a true dragon we’re dealing with here, gentlemens. By Solomon’s seal it is!”

The Butterfield agent spoke up. “I cannot pretend to argue with either of you gentlemen. I have not your scientific knowledge, sir,” he told the doctor, “nor your reputed experience in matters arcane, Mr. Malone. The question before us, however, is not what we are dealing with but how we are to be rid of it. I care not what its proper name be, only that I should not have to set eyes upon it.” He eyed the mountain man expectantly.

Some said Malone had once been a doctor himself. Others said he had been captain of a great clipper ship. Still others thought he’d been a learned professor at the Sorbonne in France. General opinion, however, held to it that he was merely full of what the squirrels put away for the Colorado winter. Fraser didn’t much care. All he wanted was not to have to explain away the loss of another strongbox filled with gold, and there was a shipment of coin coming up from Denver the very next week.

“That’s surely the crux, ain’t it? Now, you tell me, old-timer,” Malone said to Wonder Charlie, “how many appendages did your visitor have streamin’ from his mouth? Did he spit any fire at you? Was his howling high-pitched like a band of attacking Sioux or low like running buffalo in the distance? How did he look at you… straight on or by twisting his head from one side to the other?”

And so on into the late morning, Malone asking question after question until the old miner’s head ached from the labor of recollection. But Charlie persisted. He’d liked Johnny Sutter and One-Thumb Washington, not to mention poor ole General Grant.

Canvas tents pockmarked the side of the little canyon, their sides billowing in the wind. Piles of rails and ties were stacked neatly nearby, along with kegs of spikes, extra hammers, and other equipment. Thick, pungent smells wafted from a single larger tent, while others rose from the far side of the railroad camp. One set of odors indicated the kitchen, the other the end product.

The line from Denver to Cheyenne was comparatively new and in need of regular repair. The crew that had laid the original track was now working its way back down the line, repairing and cleaning up, making certain the roadbed was firm and the rails secure.

The muscular, generally diminutive men swinging the hammers and hauling the iron glanced up with interest as the towering mountain man rode into camp. So did the beefy supervisor charged with overseeing his imported workers. Though he came from a line of prejudiced folk, he would brook no insults toward his men. They might have funny eyes and talk even funnier, but by God they’d work all day long and not complain a whit, which was more than you could say for most men.

“All right. Show’s over,” he growled, aware that work was slowing all along the line as more men paused to track the progress of the hulking stranger. “Get your backs into it, you happy sons of heaven!”

The pounding of hammers resumed, echoing down the canyon, but alert dark eyes still glanced in the direction of the silent visitor.

They widened beneath the brows of one broad-shouldered worker when the stranger leaned close and whispered something to him in a melodic, singsong tongue. The man was so startled he nearly dropped his hammer on his foot. The stranger had to repeat his query more slowly before he got a reply.

“Most unusual. White Devil speaks fluently the tongue of my home. You have traveled that far, honored sir?”

“Once or twice. I’m never for sure how many. Canton’s a nice little town, though the food’s a bit thin for my taste. Now, how about my question?”

The spike driver hesitated at that. Despite his size and strength, the worker seemed suddenly frightened; he looked past the visitor’s horse as though someone might be watching him.

Mad Amos followed the other man’s gaze and saw only tents. “Don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. “I won’t let the one I’m after harm you or any of your friends or relatives back home. I will not allow him to disturb your ancestors. Will you trust me, friend?”

“I will,” the worker decided abruptly. “The one you seek is called Wu-Ling. You will find him in the third tent down.” He leaned on his hammer and pointed. “Good fortune go with you, White Devil.”

“Thanks.” Mad Amos chucked his horse’s reins and resumed his course up the track. The men working on the line watched him intently, whispering among themselves.

Outside the indicated tent he dismounted, pausing a moment to give his horse an affectionate pat. This unique steed was part Indian pony, part Appaloosa, part Arabian, and part Shire. He was black with white patches on his rump and fetlocks and a white ring around his right eye. This eye was unable to open completely, which affected the animal with a sour squint that helped keep teasing children and casual horse thieves well away.

“Now you wait here, Worthless, and I’ll be right back. I hope.” He turned and called into the tent.

“Enter, useless supplicant of a thousand excuses,” replied an imperious voice.

Seated on a mat inside the tent was a youthful Chinese clad in embroidered silk robes and cap. He wore soft slippers and several jade rings. There were flowers in the tent, and they combined with burning incense to keep out the disagreeable odors of the camp. The man’s back was to the entrance, and he gestured with boredom toward a lacquered bowl three-quarters filled with coins.

“Place thy pitiful offering in the usual place and then get out. I am meditating with the forces of darkness. Woe to any who disturb my thoughts.”

“Woe to those who meddle with forces they don’t understand, progenitor of a hundred bluffs.”

The genuflector whirled at the sound of English, only to find himself gaping up at a hairy, ugly, giant White Devil. It took him a moment to compose himself. Then he slipped his hands (which Mad Amos thought might be shaking just a little) back into his sleeves and bowed.

Mad Amos returned the bow and said in perfect Cantonese, “Thy ministrations seem to have exceeded thy knowledge, unomnipotent one.”

A hand emerged from silk to thrust demandingly at the tent entrance. “Get out of my tent, Devil. Get out! Or I will assuredly turn thee into a lowly toad, as thy face suggests!”

Mad Amos smiled and took a step forward. “Now let’s just settle down, inventor of falsehoods, or you’ll be the one gets done to. I can’t turn you into a toad, but when I finish with you, you’ll look like a buffalo carcass a bunch o’ Comanches just finished stripping.”

The man hesitated but did not back down. He raised both hands and muttered an important-sounding invocation to the skies.

Mad Amos listened a while, then muttered right back at him.

The would-be sorcerer’s eyes went wide. “How comes a White Devil to know the secret words of the Shao?”

“That’s a long, nasty story. Course, I don’t know all of ’em, but I know enough to know you don’t know what the hell you’re invoking about. I suspect that’s what got you into trouble the last time. I know enough to know this is all a show to impress your hardworking kinfolk out there. You ain’t no Mandarin, Wu-Ling, just as you ain’t no Shao sorcerer. You’re nothing but a clever amateur, a dabbler in darkness, and I think you got yourself in over your head with this dragon business.”

“So that is what inflicts you upon me. That damnable beast!” He threw his cap to the floor. “May its toenails ingrow a thousand times! I knew it would bring me problems from the moment the incantation expanded beyond my ability to control the signs.” He sat heavily on a cushion, no longer bold and commanding, now just a distraught young would-be lawyer whose pact with the forces of darkness had been overturned by a higher court.

Watching him thus, Mad Amos was able to conjure up a little sympathy for him, no small feat of magic in itself. “How’d you come to have to call him up, anyways?”

“I needed something with which to cow my ignorant kinsmen. There had been mutterings… a few had begun to question my right to claim their support, saying that I was not a true sorcerer and could not threaten them as I claimed or work magic back in the homeland for their relatives and friends. I required something impressive to forestall such uncertainties once and for all.”

“I see. How’d the railroad feel about your brothers supporting you in luxury while they worked their tails off?”

“The White Devil bosses care nothing for civilized behavior so long as the work is accomplished on time.”

“So you finally had to produce, magically speaking, or risk going to work with your own delicate fake-Mandarin hands. That about right?”

“It is as you say.” Wu-Ling turned and assumed a prideful air. “And I did produce. A dragon of whole cloth, of ancient mien and fierce disposition, did I cause to materialize within the camp one night. Since then there have been no further mutterings among my kinsmen, and my support has multiplied manyfold.”

Mad Amos nodded and stroked his luxuriant beard. “Yup, you got a nice little racket going here. Course, there might be some trouble if I were to stroll outside and announce that you’ve got no more control over this dragon than I do over a thunderbird’s eye. I think your toiling kinsfolk would be a touch unhappy.”

The young man’s boast quickly turned to desperate pleading. “Please, you must not tell them that, White Devil! Please… they would linger over my killing for weeks if they once learned that I have no power over them.” His gaze sank. “I confess all this to You Who Know the Words. I have no control over this dragon. I tried to make it vanish once its purpose had been accomplished. It laughed at me and flew off toward the high mountains. I have tried to call it back, to no avail. Now it does as it pleases, threatening your own people as well. I was an overanxious fool, determined to overawe my people. I should have settled for a less dramatic materialization.”

Mad Amos nodded sagely. “Now you’re learning, inheritor of troubles. It’s always best to make sure you’ve put all the parts back into a disassembled gun before you go firin’ it. I kinda feel sorry for you. The main thing is, the damage this dragon’s already done wasn’t by your direction.”

“Oh, no, Honored Devil, no! As I confess before you, I have no control over it whatsoever. It does as it desires.”

“Okay, then, I’ll strike you a bargain. You quit dealing off the bottom of the deck with your brothers out there. Pick up a hammer and go to work alongside them. I promise it won’t kill you, and you’ll gain merit in their eyes by working alongside ’em when you supposedly don’t have to. Tell ’em it’s time for you to put aside wizardly things and exercise your body for a change. You do that and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

The young man rose to his feet, hardly daring to hope. “You would do this for me? My ancestors will bless you a hundred times.”

“They’d damn well better. I’ll need all the help I can gather if I’m going to do anything about this dragon you cooked up, Wu-Ling.”

“But you cannot! It will surely slay you!”

“Sorry. I’m bound to try. Can’t just let it wander about, ravaging the countryside. Besides which, this country of mine is a young one. It ain’t quite ready to cope with dragons yet. Havin’ enough trouble recoverin’ from the war and the devils it spawned. Now, this ain’t one of those types that likes to carry off women, is it?”

“It would be in keeping with its lineage if it chose to abduct and consume a virgin or two, l am afraid.”

Mad Amos grunted. “Well, even so, that ain’t a worry. There ain’t a virgin between here and Kansas City. That means it’s just this gold affinity we got to worry about. That’s a new one on me, Wu-Ling. What’s it want with this gold it keeps stealin’?”

“I thought one so wise as thyself would surely know, Honored Devil. Gold is a necessary ingredient in the dragon’s diet.”

“It eats the stuff? Well, I’ll be dogged. And all this time I thought it was doin’ something normal with it, like buying up spare souls or accumulatin’ a memorable hoard of riches or some such nonsense. Gulps it right down, you say?”

“Truly,” Wu-Ling admitted.

“Huh! World’s full of wonders. Well, gives me something to think on, anyways.” He gazed sternly down at Wu-Ling. The would-be sorcerer paid close attention. A baleful look from Mad Amos Malone was something not to be ignored. “Now, you mind what I told you and quit leeching off your kinsfolk out there. They’re good people, and they deserve your help, not your imaginary afflictions. It’s tough enough gettin’ by in a foreign land. I know; I’ve had to try it myself. I’ve ways of knowin’ when someone gives me his word and then backs off, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. You follow me, son of importunate parents?”

“I follow you, Honored Devil.”

Wu-Ling allowed himself a sigh of relief when the giant finally departed. He wondered by what method the dragon would slay him.

Mad Amos worked his way up into the heights of the Medicine Bows despite the signs that winter was arriving early that year. It would be bad if he were caught out on the slopes by a blizzard, but he’d weathered bad storms before and could do so again if compelled to.

Near a fork of the Laramie River he paused and made camp, choosing an open meadow across which the river ran free and fast. To the west the crests of the mountains already slept beneath the first heavy blanket of snow.

“Well, Worthless, I guess this is as good a spot as any. Might as well get on with it. Oughta be an interesting business, unless I’ve figured it all wrong. In that case, you hie yourself off somewhere and have a good time. These mountains are full of herds. Find yourself some fine mares and settle down. Bet you wouldn’t be all that sad to see me go, would you?”

The horse let out a noncommittal whinny, squinted at him out of his bad eye, and wandered off in search of a nice mud wallow to roll in.

Mad Amos hunted until he found a willow tree of just the right age. He cut off a green branch, shaped it, and trimmed off the leaves and sproutings. Then he sharpened the tip with his bowie, fired it in charcoal, and used the white-hot, smoking point to etch some strange symbols in the earth around his kit. Some of the symbols were Chinese ideographs, some were Tibetan, and a few were not drawn from the lexicon of man.

Next he rummaged around in his battered old saddlebags, which some folk whispered held things it were best not to talk about. Out came an owl’s head, a bottle of blue goo, several preserved dead scorpions, three eagle feathers bound together with Zuni fetishes, and similar exotica. He reached in a little farther and withdrew a shiny metal bar. It was five pounds of enriched tumbaga, a gold alloy made by the Quimbaya Indians of the southern continent, composed of roughly sixty-five percent gold, twenty percent copper, and the rest silver. This he set carefully down in the center of the inscribed symbols.

Lastly he pulled the rifle from its fringed and painted holster. The holster had been fashioned by one of Sacajawea’s daughters. Good gal, that Sacajawea, he mused. Someday when they were both ruminating in the Happy Hunting Ground, he hoped to meet her again.

The rifle had an eight-sided barrel, a black walnut stock, and a breech large enough for a frightened cottontail to hide inside. It was a Sharps buffalo rifle, fifty-caliber, with a sliding leaf sight adjustable to eleven hundred yards on the back. It fired a two-and-a-half-inch-long cartridge loaded with a hundred grains of black powder and could drop a full-grown bull buffalo in its tracks at six hundred yards. The bandoliers draped across Mad Amos’s chest held oversized three-and-a-quarter-inch shells packed with 170 grains of black powder.

The Sharps was a single-shot. But then, if you could fire it proper without busting your shoulder, you only needed a single shot. To Mad Amos’s way of thinking, such built-in caution just naturally led to a man improving his marksmanship.

He loaded it with more care than usual this time, paying special attention to the cartridge itself, which he carefully chose from the assortment arrayed on his chest.

Then he settled down to wait.

The moon was setting and the sky had been temporarily swept clean of most clouds when he heard the wings coming toward him out of the west, out of the mountaintops. Soon he was able to see the source of the faint whistling, a streamlined shape dancing down fast out of the heavens, its long tail switching briskly from side to side as it sniffed out the location of the gold.

It landed between the river and the camp and strode toward the lonely man on feet clad in scales of crimson. Its neck was bright blue, its body mostly yellow and gold, its wings and face striped like the contents of a big jar stuffed with assorted candies. Moonlight marched across scimitarlike teeth, and its heritage burned back of its great eyes. “Whoa up there!” Mad Amos called out sharply in the dragon tongue, which is like no other (and which is hard to speak because it hurts the back of the throat).

The dragon halted, eyes blazing down at the human, who had one foot resting possessively on the golden bar. Its tail twitched, flattening the meadow grass and foxgloves, and the tendrils bordering its skull and jaws twisted like snakes with a peculiar life of their own. Its belly ached for the cool touch of yellow metal; its blood burned for the precious golden substance that purified and helped keep it alive.

“Oho!” it replied in its rasping voice. “A human who talks the mother tongue. Admirable is your learning, man, but it will not save you your gold. Give it here to me.” It leaned forward hungrily, the smell of brimstone seeping from its garishly hued lips and parted mouth.

“I think not, Brightbodyblackheart. It ain’t that I resent you the gold. Everybody’s got to eat. But you scared the wits out of some good people hereabouts and killed a couple of others. And I think you’re liable to kill some more afore you’re sated, if your appetite’s as big as your belly and your desire as sharp as your teeth. I’m not fool enough to think you’ll be satisfied just with this here chunk.” He nudged the bar with his foot, causing the hungry dragon to salivate smoke.

“You are right, man. My hunger is as deep as the abyssal ocean where I may not go, as vast as the sky which I make my own, and as substantial as my anger when I am denied. Give me your gold! Give it over to me now and I will spare you for your learning, for though gluttonous, I am not wasteful. Refuse me and I will eat you, too, for a dragon cannot live by gold alone.”

Casually, Mad Amos shifted the rifle lying across his knees. “Now, this here’s a Sharps rifle, Deathwing. I’m sure you ain’t too familiar with it. There ain’t the like of it where you come from, and there never will be, so I’ll explain it to you. There ain’t no more powerful rifle in this world or the other. I’m going to give you one chance to get back to where you come from, hungry but intact.” He smiled thinly, humorlessly. “See, I ain’t wasteful, neither. You git your scaly hide out of this part of the real world right now or by Nebuchadnezzar’s nightshade, I’m oath-bound to put a bullet in you.”

The dragon roared with amusement. Its horrible laughter cascaded off the walls of the canyon through which the Laramie runs. It trickled down the slopes and echoed through caves where hibernating animals stirred uneasily in their long sleep.

“A last gesture, last words! I claim forfeit, man, for you are not amusing! Gold and life must you surrender to me now, for I have not the patience to play with you longer. My belly throbs in expectation, and in my heart there is no shred of sympathy or understanding for you. I will take your gold now, man, and your life in a moment.” A great clawed foot reached out to scratch contemptuously at the symbols so patiently etched in the soil. “Think you that these will stop me? You do not come near knowing the right ways or words, or the words you would have uttered by now.” It took another step forward. Fire began to flame around its jaws. “Your puny steel and powder cannot harm me, worm-that-walks-upright. Fire if you wish. The insect chirps loudest just before it is squashed!”

“Remember, now, you asked for this.” Quickly, Mad Amos raised the long octagonal barrel and squeezed the trigger.

There was a crash, then a longer, reverberating roar, the thunderous double boom that only a Sharps can produce. It almost matched the dragon’s laughter.

The shot struck Brightbodyblackheart square in the chest. The monster looked down at the already healing wound, sneered, and took another step forward. Its jaws parted farther as it prepared to snap up gold and man in a single bite.

It stopped, confused. Something was happening inside it. Its eyes began to roll. Then it let out an earthshaking roar so violent that the wind of it knocked Mad Amos back off his feet. Fortunately, there was no fire in that massive exhalation.

The mountain man spit out dirt and bark and looked upward. The dragon was in the air, spinning, twisting, convulsing spasmodically, thoroughly out of control, screaming like a third-rate soprano attempting Wagner as it whirled toward the distant moon.

Mad Amos slowly picked himself off the ground, dusted off the wolf’s head that served him for a hat, and watched the sky until the last scream and final bellow faded from hearing, until the tiny dot fluttering against the stars had winked out of sight and out of existence.

From his wallow near the riverbank, Worthless glanced up, squinted, and neighed.

Mad Amos squatted and gathered up the tumbaga bar. He paid no attention to the coterie of symbols he’d so laboriously scratched into the earth. They’d been put there to draw the dragon’s attention, which they’d done most effectively. Oh, he’d seen Brightbodyblackheart checking them out before landing! The dragon might bellow intimidatingly, but like all its kind, it was cautious. It had taken the bait only when it was certain Mad Amos owned no magic effective against it. Mere mortal weapons like guns and bullets, of course, it had had no reason to fear.

Malone used his tongue to pop the second bullet, the one he hadn’t had to use, out of his cheek and carefully took the huge cartridge apart. Out of the head drifted a pile of dust. He held it in his palm and then, careful not to inhale any of it, blew it away with one puff. The dust duplicated the contents of the bullet that had penetrated Brightbodyblackheart: mescaline concentrate, peyote of a certain rare type, distillate of the tears of a peculiar mushroom, coca leaves from South America, yopo—a cornucopia of powerful hallucinogens that an old Navajo had once concocted before Mad Amos’s attentive gaze during a youthful sojourn in Canyon de Chelly many years before.

It was not quite magic, but then, it was not quite real, either. The dragon had been right: Mad Amos had not had the words to kill it, had not had the symbols. And it wasn’t dead. But it no longer lived in the real world of men, either. In a month, when the aftereffects of the potent mixture had finally worn off and Brightbodyblackheart could think clearly once more, it might wish it were dead. Of one thing Mad Amos was reasonably certain: the dragon might hunger for gold, but it was not likely to come a-hunting it anywhere in the vicinity of Colorado.

Carefully he repacked that seemingly modest pair of saddlebags and prepared to break camp, casting an experienced eye toward the sky. It was starting to cloud over again. Soon it would snow, and when it started it again, it wouldn’t stop until April.

But not for two or three days yet, surely. He still bad time to get out of the high mountains if he didn’t waste it lollygaggin’ and moonin’ over narrow escapes.

He put his hands on his hips and shouted toward the river. “C’mon, Worthless, you lazy representative of an equine disaster! Git your tail out of that mud! North of here’s that crazy steamin’ land ol’ Jim Bridger once told me about. I reckon it’s time we had a gander at it… and what’s under it.”

Reluctant but obedient, the piebald subject of these unfounded imprecations struggled to its feet and threw its master a nasty squint. Mad Amos eyed his four-legged companion with affection.

“Have t’ do somethin’ about that patch on his forehead,” he mused. “That damn horn’s startin’ t’ grow through again….”