Wild Country

Chapter Forty-One

A big rectangular two-story pile of quarried limestone, Mul Garner's home loomed out of the dark, solid as some medieval fortress, its upper windows lit like hollow eye sockets. The place seemed all of a century old, with ornate woodwork tracing the eaves of its broad wooden porch. A tangle of rosebushes, all evidently dead of neglect, flanked the porch like barbed wire. The house might stand for centuries more, but the porch had seen better days.

"I'll just keep the tape on 'til the old man sees you this way. You need all the sympathy you can get, Quantrill." It was the first time Cam Concannon had indicated their earlier acquaintance. "I told you before, you and me never met."

"Right."

Concannon knocked, waited a moment, then opened first the screen door and then the big wooden door with a squall of hinges that had forgotten the taste of oil. Inside, the hallway floor was honest oak, innocent of covering, scarred from generations of men wearing spurs — some with Spanish rowels, to judge from the dotted scars. A broad staircase angled down to the big hallway, but Concannon steered his prisoner into a library the size of a bunkhouse. No, it was a parlor, but one built to entertain whole families. It spoke in a hollow voice musty with age of quilting bees and tired ranchers toasting their boot soles before a great fireplace that now yawned cold and blackened between bookshelves at one side of the room.

"We brung him in, Mr. Garner," the foreman called, mocked by echoes in two corners where antique floor lamps lit the recesses with rawhide lampshades. "In the sittin' room." He turned; saw Quantrill sniffing the air. "Them goddam Cuban cigars of his," he said with rough affection.

"They don't do his emphysema no good, but…" He finished with a shrug.

Quantrill, toeing the enormous hooked rug underfoot: "Nice old place."

Concannon, guiltily: "Needs fixtn'. When the missus was alive she kept me fart in' around here a day a week. But I can't be ever'place at once." He looked up, as if he could see through the high ceiling, following creaks of footsteps above. As the steps began to move down the staircase he added, "Wild Country Safari don't even know who-all's on its payroll, it's that big. They could have a dozen Sam Coulters for all I know, but you got your ownself into this, and your story's your problem."

Quantrill nodded silently, knowing that spoken thanks would be rejected. This way, Concannon could deny — even to himself — that he was helping this troublemaker.

The old rancher who stepped into the room had once been a giant of a man? Even with the big shoulders stooped he stood well over six feet in the western boots that poked out from worn denims, his turned-up sleeves revealing the corded forearms of a man who had wrestled many a fencepost into its socket. But from all appearances, Mul Garner no longer spent his days in the sun. He was pale, with a mane of white hair and sideburns he probably trimmed himself. His eyes were pale too, a piercing light blue of a color sometimes seen in Siamese cats.

Concannon stepped away from Quantrill; smiled half in apology like a disappointed hunter. "This is what the boys brung in, Mr. Garner."

But the old man — not so very old in years, though he had not been kind to his body — was already staring at Quantrill. "Goda'mighty. Cam, how dangerous can he be?"' He took Quantrill by one arm, looked at the livid bruise with blood now dried and cracking near Quantrill's left temple. Speaking now to Quantrill, pacing his words with the short breaths of a man with half the lungs he should have: "My foreman carries that hogleg forty-four, 'cause he can use it. I want your word he won't need to."

"I won't cause trouble," said Quantrill, with the faintest stress on the word "cause."

"Already did," said Mul Garner, and passed his hand across his leather vest. A flash of brass and polished bone, a flick, and the rancher had opened his balisong, the long-bladed Philippine equivalent of a switchblade.

Quantrill started to pivot, merely from reflex action; then stopped, realizing the rancher intended only to cut his bindings. Garner stood still and sucked a tooth for a moment. "I don't cause trouble either, young fella. And I only settle it when I have to."

"Sorry, sir. It's been a long day," Quantrill said wearily, and let the man slice the tape from his arms and wrists.

Garner was laughing to himself, a soft wheeze punctuated by deep breaths, as he stepped back and flicked the balisong shut with another sleight of hand. "You have a gift for understatement, judging from that goose egg on your forehead." He watched Quantrill rub his wrists, running his eyes over the trespasser. Judging. He chose a suede-covered chair, its back as high as a throne, settled into it as the others followed. Quantrill did not sit, because Concannon did not. "Let's have it, then; your name and story and whatever lame excuse you might have."

Long ago in army intelligence, Quantrill had taken crash courses in language; had never been sorry for it. Mul Garner kept the cadence and twang of Wild Country but had developed a wider range of pitch changes. His phrases were those of a man who might have acted in college plays, or perhaps he simply read as widely as Sandy. Perhaps a man with a romantic streak who would understand peculiar quests.

By now, Quantrill had a story ready. He was Sam Coulter, part-timer with WCS, he said; ex-army, now considering a career as a veterinarian with exotic game. "There's a Brit lieutenant who claims he ran up against the biggest boar in the solar system out here a day or so ago," he went on, "and I got curious. A boar like that would be worth more alive than dead, I thought." To himself, he added that it wouldn't hurt Ba'al's chances if Garner got the same idea.

Concannon: "That tallies. He was out near Faithful Creek on a WCS cycle with a vet's kit and a rifle that shoots hypos." A sudden grin, then, "Kept Billy Ray and L. J. pinned down for hours, told 'em it was a shotgun with boosted ammo."

"It's louder when you discharge it without a load," Quantrill chipped in. That told Garner he hadn't shot to kill.

Mul Garner had heard nothing of Wardrop's folly and spent five minutes questioning Concannon, irritated to find that an S & R crew had answered an emergency on his land without his knowledge. Turning again to Quantrill: "This is the dumbest goddamn story I ever heard. Coulter. Might as well go after a Brahma bull with a willow switch."

"That's what everybody told the Brit."

"It applies to you, too. I know that damn hog's been on my spread for years, and I know what he's done. Live and let live, I say. Even if you knocked him out with a hypo, how on God's brown prairie did you expect to haul him back to WCS on a two-man cycle?"

Quantrill told the truth: "I only figured on fixing him up, if he was hurt like the Brit said."

Garner sat back, shaking his white mane. "And make him your pet? Was that the idea?"

"Something like that."

"He'd eat your lunch and save you for supper. Coulter. They didn't name that hog 'Ba'al for nothing. He's a devil incarnate. I can't keep you from hunting him entirely, but I sure as hell don't want him munchin' your bones on my spread. And trespassers do tend to get shot in these parts. Do I have your word you won't cross my fencelines again?"

Somewhere inside Mul Garner, amusement was bubbling to get out. Quantrill saw that the man considered him little more than a harmless ass. In some ways, Quantrill agreed. It was hard not to agree with, and not to like, the rancher. "My word on it, Mr. Garner," said Quantrill.

Concannon said respectfully, "I reckon cookie can build him a sandwich and I can drive him far as Rocksprings tonight, if you want."

"If you would. Cam. You might steer him to disinfectant and a bandage, while you're at it." The rancher reached to a squat, hand-carved table and flicked the top from a cedar box. "But I haven't heard how you got bashed up, Coulter, and I intend to. While you humor me, you fellas might join me." With that, he withdrew three big green cigars and offered two to the others.

It was hard to tell whether Concannon's sigh was for the cigars or for the wasted time. Quantrill accepted this symbol of hospitality and took a chair when he was told to. He was thirsty again, and full of aches. The cigar, he found, was the least offensive stogie he had ever lit.

Quantrill was in the act of admitting he did not know how he struck his forehead in his fall when he heard a screen door, somewhere in the back of the house, complete its shallow skritch and bang. He paused, hearing several sets of footsteps.

"That'll be my boy," said Garner.

"I thought it might," said Concannon. The foreman's expression was carefully noncommittal.