Mad Amos Malone

Witchen Woes

I think that once writers have decided to put the word “witch” into a story, they should be able to go in any direction they choose and produce something of interest. My wife introduced me to the fable of the kitchen witch, who keeps watch over that part of the home. But in my mind, “benign” and “witch” are not words that play well together.

What if a kitchen witch turns out to be more witch than kitchen? Worlds might not be at stake, empires might not tremble: after all, your average kitchen witch tends to run to the diminutive. But even a characteristically small one could, if so inclined, make a lot of trouble in a household. Malone always being ready to lend a helping hand, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant the problem, I thought I’d present him with a conundrum more irritating than earthshaking.

Not much of a problem, you might say. But then, it’s not your kitchen that’s under siege.

Amos Malone was sipping at his fourth whiskey when the distraught woman wandered into the saloon. Her mere presence served to indicate the degree of her distress, for no female citizen of good repute would enter a hard-core drinking establishment unescorted unless her motivation arose from intentions indecent or insane.

Her arrival distracted several pairs of eyes from cards, drinks, and the unwholesome hostesses who were the only other non-males present that afternoon in the Piccadilly. Several hands groped for her, and her country prettiness provoked more than one lascivious proposal. She ran the gauntlet of hopeful debauchery as she searched the crowd for someone in particular, twisting out of one grasp after another, skirt and hair flying, yanking her shawl free of the grimy, rum-slick fingers that clutched at it.

One ex-miner was more persistent (or less drunk and therefore more accurate) than the rest, for he soon had her in a firm grip with both hands. “Now, don’t be so contrary, little lady.” He leaned close and spoke with breath that was borderline flammable. “Howsabout a little kiss?”

Her back arched as she fought to dodge his mouth and the miasma that issued from the inebriated depths beyond. “I am a married woman, sir, and a decent one. I’ll thank you to let go of me!”

Laughter rose from the surrounding tables at this pious declaration. “Shore you is, missy,” her captor jeered. “As to the fust, thet don’t give me no trouble, and as to the second, it naturally explains whut yer doin’ in a fancy hotel like this!”

More laughter—which Malone found he could not ignore though he had done so to the entire contretemps up to then. Generally he was of a mind to attend solely to his own business, but there was something in the woman’s attitude and tone that led him to believe she might be as upstanding as she claimed. Anyhow, it was a slow afternoon in the sleepy town of Sacramento, and he didn’t have anything better to do, so he downed the last of the amber liquid remaining in his shot glass, set the glass down slowly on the oak bar, wiped his lips, and turned. On his face was an expression that made the bartender make haste to sink out of sight.

“Pardon me, friend,” Malone rumbled in a voice that sounded as if it were rising from the bottom of a mine shaft, “but it appears the lady is in some trouble and doesn’t need any additional of your makin’.”

“And jest whut business be it of…” The ex-miner hesitated as he caught sight of his questioner. “…Mad Amos Malone?” he continued, his voice suddenly less than a whisper.

Mad Amos Malone stood a mite taller and spread a tad wider than most men… and not a few bears. He was—or had been—a member of that unique breed known as the mountain man: that peculiar subspecies of Homo sapiens closely related to both the angel and the Neanderthal. Sane folk left such individuals alone.

The young woman wrenched around, and her eyes grew wide as she caught sight of Malone. “Sir, if you are truly the Amos Malone they call mad, then you are he whom I have been seeking.”

Danged if she didn’t have green eyes, Malone mused. He’d always been a sucker for green eyes. “Then that makes it personal.” Malone took a step toward the ex-miner, who was no featherweight himself. “You kin understand my concern now, friend.”

“Yeh. Shore I kin, mister.” The other man kept his eyes focused on the mountain man as he let go of the woman and edged aside.

“Now then, ma’am,” Malone said politely (such limpid green eyes!), “this is hardly the place to engage in genteel conversation. I suggest we step outside.”

“Thank you, Mr. Malone.” Pulling her shawl protectively about her shoulders, she headed for the swinging doors, Malone following in her wake.

As they reached the doors, Malone sensed the nervous whisper of retreating air behind him. Air’s funny that way. It can laugh, it can cry, and it knows when to get out of the way. Air ain’t no fool.

Neither was Amos Malone, who whirled and brought his hand up as he jerked to one side. Several gasps were heard, and a few cards fluttered to the floor of the saloon as he plucked the knife out of the air not three inches from the place his neck had been just seconds earlier.

The ex-miner who had thrown it let out a strangled cry and crashed through the back-alley door, pausing neither to recover his property nor to turn the lock.

Years later, a few who claimed they had been there swore that they saw the mountain man lean forward and whisper a few words to the knife before throwing it in return. One of those insisted that the knife answered back. At the time, though, none of them voiced their observations, not wishing to be thought of by their friends as unbalanced. On one account, however, all agreed. Malone threw that knife so hard an echoing thunder trailed behind it like a dog worrying a wagon. It went straight through the gap the miner had made in the course of executing his precipitate exit, then turned sharply to the right, down the alley. A minute or so passed before a distant scream reached the attentive listeners.

The piano player circumspectly resumed his off-key rendition of “I’ll Wake You When the Mail Boat Comes In,” and the other inhabitants of the Piccadilly Saloon returned to their poker and drinks.

“I hope you did not kill him, Mr. Malone,” the young woman said as they exited into the street.

“No, ma’am. I don’t cotton to killin’ drunks. Most times they don’t know what they’re about. Just gave him a warnin’ prick, so to speak, somewhere between his waist and his holster.”

“I am glad to hear it. I would not want to be the cause of another man’s death.” She looked a little uncertain. “Am I mistaken, or did I clearly see that knife you threw make a sharp turn to the right upon leaving this establishment? Such a thing is contrary to nature… for a knife.”

Malone shrugged, his expression noncommittal. “There’s not much that’s contrary to nature if you just know how to sweet-talk her along a little.”

“Which is precisely why I have sought you out among those ruffians, Mr. Malone. It is said among those in the know that you are familiar with many things the rest of us have no desire to be familiar with. I have desperate need of someone with such knowledge, for I am at my wit’s end what to do.”

She started to sob. Malone knew they were real tears, not merely tears concocted for his benefit. Real tears smell different from falsified ones, and mountain men are known for their acuity of smell.

Malone thought the tears looked faintly green.

“Now, ma’am, it’s true I’ve been exposed to certain things they don’t teach in eastern colleges, but I can’t presume to help you until I know the nature of your trouble. Clearly it’s affected you deeply.”

“Not only me,” she replied, “but my entire family as well. It’s a calumny for which I blame myself.”

“Family? Oh,” said Malone, crestfallen (ah, fare thee well, ocean eyes). He drew himself up and put aside his disappointment. “I’ll help if I can, of course. I was never one to turn away from a lady in distress.”

“You are gallant, sir.”

“No, ma’am, just stupid. What be your problem… and your name?”

“Oh. Excuse me for not saying to start with. Mary Makepeace is my name, sir, and Hart Makepeace my husband.” She dabbed at her face with a tatted handkerchief redolent of lilac. “I have a kitchen witch, Mr. Malone.”

“Call me Amos. Or Mad,” he chuckled, “if you prefer.” Then, seriously, “A kitchen witch? You mean one of those little good-luck figures made out of paper and wood and paint and scraps of old cloth?”

“No, sir… Amos. A real kitchen witch, and the very manifestation of horror she is, too. She won’t leave me alone, and she won’t bring back my poor family, and I… and I…” The flow of tears started again from those vitreous green orbs, and Malone found himself holding and comforting her—a not entirely unpleasant circumstance.

A derisive snort sounded nearby. Malone glanced toward the hitching rail, where a mongrelized, oversized, squint-eyed hooved quadruped was giving him the jaundiced eye. He made a face at the sarcastic creature, but he did take the hint. Reluctantly, he eased the unhappy Mrs. Makepeace an arm’s length away.

“A real witch, eh? In the kitchen? I’ve heard of ’em before, but they’re supposed to be pretty scarce hereabouts. They’re the inspiration for those little doll figures you find in kitchens, but the real ones are twice as ugly and a hundred times more dangerous.”

She stared up at him (with emeralds, he thought… olivine and malachite). “You… you mean that you believe me, sir… Amos?”

“I can tell a liar as far off as a month-dead wapiti, ma’am, and ’tis plain for any fool to see that you’re tellin’ the truth. I’m not sure if I can be of any help, though. For its size, a witchen—for that’s what you’re afflicted with as sure as a djinn dry-cleans his clothes—packs a mighty powerful wallop. But I’ll do what I can. Where’s your place at?”

She turned and pointed eastward. “That way, a half day’s ride, Amos Malone. But there’s no stage going back that direction for another fortnight.”

“Then we’d best get started, ma’am.” He turned and mounted his horse, extended down a hand, and pulled her up behind him as though she weighed nothing at all. “Let’s go, Worthless,” he told his mount.

The horse turned and started eastward.

“Your pardon, Amos,” said Mrs. Makepeace from her delightfully warm position immediately at his back, “but I don’t believe I saw you unhitch this animal.”

“That’s because he wasn’t hitched, ma’am.” He patted the horse’s neck. “Worthless don’t cotton to bein’ tied up. He’s pretty good about staying in one place, though, so I don’t insist on it no more. I only have trouble with him when there’s a mare in heat around.”

“That’s understandable, of course,” she replied gravely, putting both arms around his waist and holding tight.

At which sight the piebald steed of uncertain parentage let out a most unequine laugh….

The Makepeace farm was located beside a burbling little stream not far from the north fork of the American River. Less than twenty years before, the entire length of that river had been aswarm with thousands of immigrants in search of instant fortune, for the bed of the American River had been paved with gold. Now the gold and most of the immigrants were gone. Only the scoured-over river remained, draining farmland that was worth far more than the yellow metal that made men blind. A few, though, like Hart Makepeace, had seen the richness in the soil that had been stripped of its gold and had stayed on in the hope of making a smaller but surer fortune.

Now, however, it seemed that something small and vicious was determined to quash that dream. Malone could smell it as they trotted into the fenced yard. His suspicions were confirmed by the sound of a plate shattering somewhere inside the modest little farmhouse.

“She’s still at it,” Mary Makepeace said nervously, peering around the bulk of the mountain man. “I’d prayed that she’d be gone by now.”

Malone shook his massive head, squinting toward the house. The evil that lay within was strong enough to make his nose wrinkle and start a pounding at the back of his neck. “Not likely, ma’am. Witchens are persistent stay-at-homes, especially if they choose to make your home theirs. They’re not likely to leave voluntarily, nor put to rights the damage they’re fond o’ doin’.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“What we can, ma’am. What we can.” He dismounted and helped her down….

The kitchen had been turned into a wreck worse than that of the Hesperus. Only a few pieces of porcelain and crockery remained intact. Cracked china littered the wooden floor, mixed with the contents of dozens of baskets and jars. Pickles lay scattered among fruit turned rancid. Home-canned jams and preserves had made the oak planks slick as river rock. A butter churn lay forlorn and shattered across the room, below the sink pump that had been torn loose from its mounting bolts. Broom straw was everywhere, sticking to walls and floor alike.

Buzzing and soaring through the air above this culinary wreckage on a sliver of wood the size of a good cigar was the tiny figure of a wrinkled old woman. Her gray hair flowed from beneath a little scrap of a bandanna, and her skirt was stained with pepper sauce. She had a nose the size and color of a rotten grape, and her skin was the shade of old tobacco juice. On either side of that heroically ugly nose flashed tiny eyes sharp and dangerous as the business end of a black scorpion.

“Hee-hee-hee-hee!” she was cackling as she tore through the air of the ruined kitchen like a drunken dragonfly. “More’s the food and more’s the pity, hee-hee-hee!” Crash! A pot of beans went spinning to the floor.

Mary Makepeace huddled fearfully behind the imposing bulk of Amos Malone. “M-m-make her go away, Amos. Oh, please make her go away and put to rights the damage she’s done!”

“Where’s the rest of your family?” Malone asked her.

“Over… there.” She fell to sobbing again as she pointed.

Standing in a far corner of the kitchen, a fistful of cigars clutched in one frozen hand, was a wooden figure of startling realism. It was not made in the image of a stolid Plains Indian, though, but rather in that of a young man clad in woolen white shirt, suspenders, work boots, a pair of Mr. Levi’s revolutionary new pants, and an expression that mixed bafflement with sheer terror.

“That’s my husband, Hart,” Mary Makepeace bawled, “and those large cookie jars at his feet are our sons, Frank and Christopher.”

Malone nodded, his expression grim. “You got yourself a mean’un, for sure.” He readied himself.

They waited while the witchen continued to engage in her orgy of destruction. At last the tiny evilness clad in the guise of an old woman zoomed over to hover in the air a foot in front of Malone’s beard.

“Oh-ho-hee-hee,” she laughed gleefully. “So the missy of the house has come back, eh? Good! I was so busy, I missed you the first time!” She glared mischievously at the terrified Mary. “What would you like to be? A nice harp, perhaps? You’d make a good-looking harp, missy. Or maybe that’s too fine for such as you, yes, too fine by half. A beer mug, maybe, for some filthy-minded man to drink from? Or how about a slop jar? Hee-hee-hee! Yes, that’d suit you, yes, yes, a green-eyed slop jar!” She whirled around in a tight circle, delighted at her own perverse inventiveness. Mary Makepeace cowered weakly behind Malone.

The witchen tried to dart around him. Each time, he blocked her path with a big, callused hand. Finally the enraged little nastiness floated up to stare into his eyes.

“Now, what’s this, what’s this what interferes with my housework, eh? I think it’s alive. I think it does live, I think. At first I thought it was a big sack of manure the missy had pushed ahead of her to hide behind, but now I see that it moves, it moves, hee-hee-hee. Could it be that it talks as well, could it?”

“You are, without question,” Malone said studiously, “the vilest, most loathsome-looking little smidgen of bile it’s ever been my displeasure to set eyes upon.”

“Flattery’ll get you anywhere, sonny,” she cackled. Then, in a dark tone rich with menace, she added, “Perhaps if I put those eyes out for you, you wouldn’t be troubled with setting them on me, eh?” When Malone didn’t respond, she said, “What shall I do with you, with you? You’re too big to make into a piece of furniture for this besotted kitchen. Maybe I’ll turn you into a kitchen, yes, yes? Yes, with a nice little cook fire in your belly.” Her tiny eyes blazed threateningly. “I’ll bake my bread in your belly, man.”

Ignoring her, Malone whispered to Mary Makepeace, “Have you and your husband been fighting lately, ma’am?”

“Of course not,” she started to say. “We were happily…” Then she recalled what Mad Amos Malone had told her about being able to smell a liar some good distance away and thought better of her response. “Yes, yes, we have been.” She was shaking as she stared at the floor. “But if only I could have him back, Amos! We fought over such little, insignificant things! And the children… I’ll never yell at my dear boys like that again!”

“Most folks don’t think clearly about the consequences o’ strong words when they’re spewin’ ’em, ma’am. That’s what likely brought this badness down on you. Fightin’ can poison a home, and a kitchen’s especially sensitive to it. If the other conditions are right—not to mention the ether conditions—well, you’ve seen what can happen.”

“Please give my family back to me, Amos,” she pleaded. “Please… I’ll do anything for another chance. Anything.”

Green eyes rich with promise fluttered at him, but Malone turned resolutely away from that beckoning gaze with a resolve a Kiowa pony would have envied. “Just stay behind me, ma’am. Just stay behind me.” He turned his attention back to the waiting witchen.

“I don’t think you’re goin’ t’ turn me into no fireplace, filth-fingers,” he told it, “and I aim to see to it that you don’t hurt this lady no more and that you undo the damage you’ve already done.”

“Hee-hee-hee, you do, do you?” She took her little hands off the nape of the tiny broomstick and waved them at him. “Hibble-de-glum, mubble-me-mock, fire and iron, kettle and stock, make of this mountain a—”

Malone didn’t give her a chance to finish. He had the advantage of volume, if not timing. “Bellow and roar all you wish, balloon-beak, but you won’t sunder me. I’ve been circled round by the five fingers of Rusal-Ratar, Queen of the Kitchens of the Earth and personal chef to Quoomander, Ruler of All the Djinn, Spirits, and Unassigned Ghosts of the Nether Regions!”

“—two-armed stove crock!” the witchen finished emphatically.

There was a flash of smoke and fire as she threw something at him. Mad Amos Malone disappeared in a cloud of green haze. From behind it Mary Makepeace let out a despairing scream, and the witchen’s “hee-hee-hee!” of triumph soared above it.

Her triumph, however, dissipated as rapidly as the haze, for within it Mad Amos Malone still stood in the kitchen doorway, unchanged, unharmed, and certainly unstoved, though a faint fragrance of unholy boiling did issue from the vicinity of his slightly scorched belt.

“Now then, wart-heart,” he whispered huskily as he reached toward his waist, “how’d thee like to try riding a bowie knife for a change?”

“No, no, no, no! Not possible! It’s not possible… eeeee!” The witchen found herself dodging Malone’s huge knife, twisting and spinning for her life as the mountain man sliced and cut at her agile little form.

But she was quick and experienced, and while Malone was so fast that the knife seemed but a shining in his hand, he was not used to dealing with so small a target. “Hold up there,” he finally told his quarry, gasping for breath. He bent over and put his hands on his knees as he fought for wind. “I’m plumb tuckered out.”

So was the witchen. Exhausted, she landed on a shelf and climbed off her broomstick, dangling withered little legs over the edge. “Fast… so fast he is,” she wheezed. “Almost too fast for old Beeblepwist, almost, almost… but not quite, not quite.” A sly grin snuck over her extraordinarily ugly face. “Should be a better way to settle this, settle this. A better way, yes.”

“Don’t listen to her, Amos!” Mary Makepeace shouted from her position just outside the kitchen. “She’ll try to trick you and…”

“No harm in hearin’ what she has to say, ma’am.” Amos took a deep breath, straightened, and was eye to eye with the sitting witchen. “I’ve no stomach for this constant chasin’. What have you in mind, corpse-cleaner?”

“No stomach for chasing, for chasing, eh? Have you stomach for some food? A cooking contest, yes? Yes, me and thee, hee-hee-hee?”

Malone considered the proposal carefully. He was a man of many talents. There were those who regarded him as a middlin’ to clever cook. “Cookin’ contest with what as its aim?” he asked guardedly.

“You win, I’ll put this hovel to rights and lose myself in the Bottomless Jar. I win… hee-hee-hee… I win, and you become part of the decor, along with Little Miss Priss, there.” She threw a short finger of fire in the direction of Mary Makepeace, who barely kept herself from swooning. “And one other thing,” she said, her voice becoming less scratchy than usual, “one thing other. I keep your soul, man, your soul.”

“I thought you wanted me for a stove,” he said nonchalantly.

“I do, I do, but a soul’s no good to a stove, and I can always find a buyer for a spare one.”

Malone scratched his beard. “If you think a good stove don’t need no soul, you ain’t half the cook you think you are. I agree. What kind of cookin’ do you propose? We ought to work similar, or there’ll be no basis for comparison.”

“I’m partial to spicy foods,” the witchen said encouragingly. “Think you the same, the same?”

Malone nodded. “I can handle tol’able condiments in my food.”

“Then something spicy it shall be,” cackled the witchen, adding, unsurprisingly, a “hee-hee-hee!”

Soul or surcease at stake, it was determined that the spiciest dish would be declared the winner. A truce blanketed that abused kitchen then, for both mountain man and witchen needed time to gather the ingredients for their respective dishes. Mary Makepeace saw a few of her precious utensils and pots restored for the purposes of the contest.

Three days slipped by. The sky over the farm grew as dark and angry as the odors that began to issue from it. People remarked on the peculiar scents in the air as far away as San Francisco to the west and Chinaman’s Bar to the east. Rabbits dug their burrows a little deeper that autumn, the birds moved their nests higher in the treetops, and for the first time since its founding, the citizens of Sacramento were not plagued by hordes of mosquitoes from the swamps along the Feather River—all the insects having dropped dead of unknown cause.

The heat that began to rise from two steaming kettles blistered the wood of the farmhouse on the north fork of the American River. Paint peeled off furniture hauled undamaged clear across the country from New England, and rusty iron was scoured miraculously clean. Mary Makepeace huddled on the floor just outside the kitchen, not daring to peer inside, yet she still acquired a tan so deep and permanent that from that day on people mistook her for a Mexican.

By the third night the two dishes were nearly finished. A deep yellow-orange glow illuminated the kitchen, and no bullfrogs called along the length of the American River.

From the kettle above which the witchen danced and flew rose a pink glow alive with tiny explosions of spice. It emanated from a soup the color of pahoehoe, the thick ropy lava that sometimes flows from the lips of angry volcanoes.

Mad Amos Malone stood like a russet cliff above his own pot, stirring the contents occasionally with an iron bar until the mixture was thick and sizzling and the bar had melted clean away. The glow from both kettles suffused the room with the hues of Hell. So spice-ridden were the two concoctions that the wood fires burning beneath each pot had begun to cower away from the metal bottoms, so that witchen and mountain man alike had to chide the flames back into heating them.

And when the smell and temperature were at their highest, when both courses were ready for the tasting, the witchen floated in the hot air rising from her own pot and said with great anticipation to Mad Amos Malone, “You… go first… hee-hee-hee.”

Mad Amos somberly removed his wolf-skull cap and unbuttoned his buckskin shirt. Ceremoniously, he downed half a gallon of cold stream water from a still-intact jug. The soup ladle burnt his fingers slightly when he picked it up, but he held tight to it. Cupped in the scoop of the ladle was something that bubbled and burst into little sparks. He brought his lips to the edge of the spoon. Mary Makepeace peered fearfully around the corner of the open doorway, one hand shoved reflexively into her mouth.

Malone hesitated. “What is it?”

“Why?” the witchen challenged him. “You afraid of a little soup, hee-hee-hee?”

“Nope. Just like to know what I’m eatin’.”

“It’s soup,” she cackled, her eyes bunting evilly. “Just plain red pepper soup, seasoned with brimstone and jellied kerosene and a few other personal spices. A delicate consommé sure to please as rugged and discerning a palate as yours, man. My own recipe… hee-hee-hee.”

Malone nodded once, his face aglow with the light rising not just from the boiling kettle but from the liquid frothing on the ladle, and downed the contents in a single gulp. He smacked his lips and put the ladle back in the pot.

Water started to stream from the corners of his black eyes, to cascade down his cheeks and into his beard. The tears were so hot that the hairs of his beard curled aside to give them free passage and the hair on his head began to writhe desperately as if trying to flee his skull. Smoke began to rise from the region of his belly, and the leather there darkened ominously. The veins in his eyes swelled until there wasn’t any white for all the red. A fingernail fell intact and smoking from the fourth finger of his right hand, leaving a steaming scar in its wake.

Malone opened his mouth, and a gust of fire issued forth that put to shame the roaring of the falls of the Yosemite—a great, intemperate blast of flame that turned the iron pump on the edge of the sink into a tired lump of slag. A sharp explosion shook the house as the heat of that exhalation blew out every one of the house’s twelve imported windows, and Mary Makepeace held her head and screamed and screamed. Outside the kitchen, where the blast had struck, twenty-five feet of grass and brush was vaporized in a swath five feet wide.

The force of his reaction had propelled Malone into the far wall of the kitchen, cracking a support log and threatening to bring down the whole upper story along with the roof. The log creaked, but it held.

Slowly, Malone picked himself up from the floor, his eyes still watering, and rubbed at his throat as he nodded admiringly toward the aghast witchen. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” The lining of his mouth had gone numb, and his tongue felt like what a match is like after it’s been used. “Now,” he said softly, “it’s your turn.”

“Hmph! Waste of time this now, waste of time.” She flew over to float above the steaming kettle at which Malone had labored. Some of the bravado had fled from her cackle. Malone ought not to have been alive, much less offering comments on the quality of her most incendiary dish. She stuck her bulbous nose downward and sniffed contemptuously, then dropped lower and studied the simmering surface. “Maybe you survived the tasting,” she said dangerously, “but you won’t survive the contesting, hee-hee-hee.” Using the end of an unlit match for a spoon, she dipped out a sample of the concoction and popped it into her mouth.

For a moment she chewed reflectively. Then it hit her. Her eyes bulged enormously, and her mouth dropped open, for what Malone had wrought was as feral and fey as it was flamboyantly effective. “Ohhh myyyyy!” she exclaimed sharply. Her skin turned from brown to pink to cherry red, and her tiny body ballooned up like a pig bladder. Bigger and bigger she swelled, until at last she burst in a cloud of red heat that filled the whole kitchen.

When the cloud had gone, so had the witchen. A corner of the mountain man’s mouth turned up, and he gave a loud snort of satisfaction. “Hee-hee, hee,” he growled at nothing in particular.

“Mary?” a querulous, uncertain voice murmured. “Mary?”

Malone watched enviously as Mrs. Makepeace rushed to embrace her newly restored husband and children, vowing as long as she was granted life to live in understanding and harmony with him again, to love and honor and all those other words so many people take so casually the first time around. Her only problem was that she didn’t have enough arms to hug him and the children as tightly as she wished.

When the tearful reunion had settled down somewhat and the thankful Hart Makepeace had learned what had transpired during his cellulose sojourn, Mary was able to inspect a gleaming, completely restored kitchen. Even the ruined jams and preserves had been returned to their respective jars. Only the melted sink pump remained to remind all of what had gone before.

Unexpected side benefits arose from the confrontation. For the remainder of his life Hart Makepeace would smoke neither cigar nor pipe. The two Hart children, who spent the rest of the afternoon vomiting up cookies, chocolate, oatmeal, raisins, nuts, and other baker’s ingredients, were able to resist permanently the most tempting blandishments Sacramento’s millers could proffer.

That night, as Amos Malone was preparing to take his leave of the farm, Mary Makepeace asked him, “What was it you prepared that affected her so, Mr. Mal… Amos?”

“A little something I learned from Tullie Kanotay, ma’am.” He cinched the saddle a little tighter, and a warning groan issued from Worthless’s throat. “Tullie Kanotay’s part Apache, part Irish, part somethin’ not entirely human, and all Texan… which latter often amounts to the same thing as the former. Bit o’ the witch in her own right. That dish can only be made up once a year by any one individual, and then only by one who knows the proper proportions, has the touch of a master French chef and the heart of a Hindoo raj, or else the emissions might unbalance the ice which caps the head and backside of our world. Why, I can hardly eat more than a bowl or two of it myself.

“It’s chimera chili, ma’am, and its effects can’t be countered by any spell or magic known, because the taste changes every couple o’ seconds. It had to be that dish and that one only, or your nasty visitor could’ve spelled her way around it. But the flavor kept shiftin’ too fast for her taste buds, not t’ mention her counterspells, and so the moment she sipped it she was done for.” He patted the Sharps buffalo rifle slung next to the saddlebags on Worthless’s back.

“The recipe itself ain’t too hard to work up. Hardest part’s findin’ chimera meat.” He gestured toward the distant, moonlit, serrated crest of the High Sierra off to the east. “Ain’t too many chimeras hereabouts, but you can track one down if you know how they work their meanderings.”

Mary Makepeace listened to this quietly, then glanced back toward the farmhouse, which once more smelled of cleanliness and home. Inside, her husband and sons were reveling in being once more themselves instead of sterile objects of china and wood. She looked back up at the mountain man through eyes made of lime-green glass. “Dear, kind Amos Malone, whom I shall never call Mad, I don’t know how to thank you, but I… I would offer you one last favor in return for your aid.”

Malone eyed her uncertainly. “Now, ma’am, I’m not sure that I ought…”

“Would you… would you… stay for dinner?”

Malone wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. He rubbed gingerly at his stomach. The heat lingered… though it hadn’t really been a bad soup at all. No, not bad at all.

“I’d be pleased to, ma’am. I don’t get the chance to eat much in the way o’ home cookin’. I’ll stay… so long as there’s plenty of plain meat and unsalted potatoes.”

“I’ll lock up the pepper,” she assured him, smiling delightedly, and led him back toward the house.

Worthless watched them go, then ambled off toward the nearby barn. The forehead horn that Malone kept constantly trimmed back was itching again. That meant for sure there had to be a mare nearby who, like himself, would care nothing for the antics of silly humans but only for the things that really mattered….