Horses of the North Page 10

  "But MacEvedy, he's obviously an intelligent adult man, and I find it hard to credit that he truly believes me to be a warlock or werewolf. So what in the world does he really have against me, Arabella. You know him better, have known him far longer, than I."

  "I think, Milo, that he fears you, fears you because he is convinced that you just might persuade Father and the rest of the battalion to leave with you for a new life of herding. If the battalion leaves, he and his people will also have to leave or face death or slavery at the hands of the prairie rovers, for few of them have ever bothered to learn how to fight, always having depended upon Father and the battalion to defend them, the station and the farms.

  "Here at the station, Emmett MacEvedy is a big frog in a very small puddle—the only three people with any real authority here are he, Father and the Reverend Mr. Falconer, all of whom inherited the same posts and commands held by their fathers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers. I think that Emmett MacEvedy fears that if he is forced to leave, he will devolve into a small frog in a much larger puddle, and as I do know the man, I much doubt that he could bear such a descent to lessened power over people, the status to which he was born and reared."

  "I offered him exactly the same status as I offered your dad, Arabella," said Milo. "That of a clan chief, which is the most powerful office that is held by any of our folk in the tribe. He'd still have dominion over his own people—that is, unless he proved himself a poor leader or deficient in some other vital ability and, through mere self-preservation, his clan decided to depose him and elect a new and better chief."

  "And that last is probably just what terrifies him, Milo. His late father was a real organizer, a born leader of men, like my own father, but—and I have heard Father say this over and over again—not only is Emmett lacking leadership ability, he also is often possessed by faulty judgment. His son is no whit better than his sire in any way, and, moreover, both are utterly selfish. Only Emmett's heredity has kept him in his exalted position, and only that same factor will see his otherwise completely incompetent son assume the position upon his demise. He knows full well that he would not long remain a chief in your tribe, the people would replace him and Grant very quickly, once removed from the station and inherited office. Many of the farmers already hate Emmett and Grant, and with good and sufficient reasons.

  "When first the harvests began to fail, he and his son so abused their positions as to begin to appropriate foodstuffs from out the common stocks and hoard them away in secret places for their own personal use. For almost three years, these two watched their own people grow thinner and more sickly day by day, week by week, month by month, watched young babes and children and old people die after the last of the seed grain had been made into bread flour and half the poor cavalry chargers had been slaughtered to keep at least some of the people alive until the traders came, yet they never even admitted to holding their hoards, far less offering to share it out amongst those suffering and dying for want of food.

  "The truth came out only when an officer of the battalion apprehended this precious pair surreptitiously milling some of their hoarded grain by night and marched them straight to my father. Now, Father and Emmett grew up together, Milo, and were old friends, in addition to the fact that their positions had always required them to work together closely almost on a daily basis, so he had thought that he knew Emmett as well as he knew any man at the station. When he so suddenly discovered his old friend's cupidity, he waxed furious, so furious that I thought for several minutes that he was going to shoot Emmett and Grant on that very spot.

  "He did not, of course, though perhaps he should have. He would have been fully justified in those executions, and no man or woman in the fort or the station would have faulted him for it. But he regained control of himself and demanded that the two of them immediately tell where their various hoardings were cached, that his soldiers might fetch them out and distribute them to the people. Instead, Emmett offered to evenly split the stolen stores with Father, noting that as they were the leaders of fort and station, it was necessary and in all ways proper that they two should remain always better fed and therefore more mentally agile than their inferiors.

  "Milo, Father's eyes shot sparks of fire, then. He drew his revolver, cocked the hammer and put the muzzle hard against the left ear of Emmett MacEvedy—it looked as if he were trying to actually push the barrel into his head through the earhole. I still can hear the words he spoke then, in a chilling tone that I never before had heard him use to any person, for any reason or under any circumstances."

  She opened her memories then that Milo might hear just what she'd heard, just as she had heard it.

  "You sorry piece of scum," Colonel Ian Lindsay had grated in tones as cold as the grin of a winter wolf, "You're a disgrace to the memory of your father, you know. You're a disgrace to the office you hold. You're a disgrace to mankind in general, you selfish, heartless greedy thing.

  "Only because of our lifelong relationship, that which I foolishly deluded myself into calling 'friendship,' do I refrain from blowing your worthless brains all over the wall behind you, yours and your darling son's, as well.

  "For the rest of this night, the two of you are going to bide locked up in one of the strongrooms below-stairs, here in the fort. At dawn, you both are going to lead me and a platoon of my men to all of your hidey-holes. When we have collected all the foodstuffs, we are going to assemble the people in the fort quadrangle and distribute every last grain of it to those for whom it was stored and originally intended.

  "Be you warned, Emmett, if you try to balk my purpose, here detailed, in any way, I will surely kill you. You, too, Grant—godson or no, I shall fill your well-fed belly with metal it will not be able to digest."

  He then called back into the room the officer who had caught the midnight millers and brought them to him. "Leftenant, have a brace of men called up here and escort the director and his son down to the ground level. Instruct Sergeant Brodie to fit them both with his heaviest sets of fetters, and then confine them to separate strongrooms for the night. They are to be provided with water and nothing else—they are both well fed enough, as they stand, better fed by far than the rest of us, so they should be able to bide for a while off their fat, I should imagine. Should either of them try to escape or should they create a disturbance, both you and Sergeant Brodie have my express permission to beat them."

  Closing her memories, Arabella silently beamed, "The foodstuffs were all found out and equally distributed by my father and Emmett, in his role of director of the station, but word of what had actually occurred on that night leaked out anyway, and now Emmett is a most unpopular man to the most of his very own people, while the officers and other ranks openly sneer at him to his very face.

  "After that, Father was coo! and proper to Emmett in public, but it was long and long before he deigned even to receive him again in his private office, and never, since that night, has he been in our home at the fort. They only reached something faintly resembling their old relationship when first the fort and the station came under siege of the prairie rovers."

  Milo had deliberately connived to keep Chief Gus Scott out of the discussions conducted within the fort, fearing the sure consequences of putting a hot-headed and openly pugnacious man of Chief Scott's water in close proximity to such troublemakers as Emmett MacEvedy and Gerald Falconer. Solemnly, he had entrusted Scott with the full responsibility for all the hunting parties.

  "You know this country hereabouts far better than do my own hunters, Chief Gus, so you're much more valuable to us all out here than you might be inside the fort yonder. Never you fear—when the time comes, you'll get to meet Chief Ian and all the others."

  As the people of the station and the fort became stronger and more active, they flocked out into the camps pitched under their walls, mingling freely with the folk who dwelt in those camps. Moreover, the continued rantings of Falconer seemed to be accomplishing nothing among the most of his
flock, as Milo was never ill-treated or openly avoided by any of the folk of station and fort, save members of the immediate families of his two bitter enemies—the director and the preacher.

  * * *

  The painfully neat parlor of Gerald Falconer's small parsonage was the usual meeting place for him, the director and Grant MacEvedy, it being the one location in which they could be relatively certain, if they kept their voices low-pitched, of not being overheard by any who might bear their words back to Ian Lindsay. Earlier on, it had appeared that they three might have had a good chance to sway the outcome, to make sure that Lindsay and his battalion would all remain here in the place of their births and not go traipsing off into the unknown wilderness in company with a Satanic man-beast and his godless host of minions. But now it appeared that all of their words had been wasted, for not only the two Lindsays—father and daughter—and their soldiers but all the people of the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station acted willing—nay, avid—to desert the ancient buildings and fields and the safe, secure life that they and their fathers before them had always known. So the mood in the parsonage parlor was unrelievedly glum on this day, as gloomy as the cloudy, drizzly day itself.

  In the not too distant past, Gerald Falconer had deferred to Emmett MacEvedy at their rare private meetings in an almost abject manner—installing the director in the only armchair, personally serving him with mint tea and the finest his parsonage otherwise had to offer, seldom speaking unless asked for a reply. But things had changed drastically in the space of the last year. Since the distasteful affair of the stolen and hoarded stores had so disastrously come to light and general knowledge and caused general respect for MacEvedy, personally, to drop to nil, the parson had taken to treating the director as he treated most of the rest of his flock.

  On this day, Falconer occupied the old cracked-leather armchair, while Emmett and his son perched before him on armless, backless wooden stools. A pot of mint tea steamed softly on the table, but there was only one cup in the room, that one cradled in the hands of Falconer, while cakes and sweetmeats were long since become a thing of the dead past.

  Grant MacEvedy was suffering from a cold, sniffling and snuffling constantly, perpetually dabbing at his sore, fiery-red nose with a stained and sodden handkerchief. The sallow, soft-handed young man had been born a few centuries too late. Although he was an excellent administrator, he detested all physical aspects of actual farming—the dirt, the heat or the cold, the physically taxing hard work, the dealing with smelly and potentially dangerous animals of the likes of horses and cattle.

  He had been sickly from birth, and a brace of doting parents had kept him ever close to home and out of the rough, rowdy games played by his peers. Now an adult, he still cleaved as closely as conditions would permit to his office and his home, spending an absolute minimum of time out of doors. The hair of dogs, the fur of cats, the feathers of birds all had never failed to set him to coughing and sneezing, so he never had had any kind or description of pet and now he feared and hated all animals, although he strove mightily to mask these emotions whenever he was forced to be around the farmers and their beasts.

  He had completely missed inheritance of his father's big-boned, powerful physique. He was of less than average height, with a sallow skin that sunburned very easily, muddy-brown eyes that were positioned too close together and teeth that crowded haphazardly in his two-small jaws. His hands and feet were small and slender, butter-soft and usually ink-stained. In better times, he had been pudgy and paunchy, but now he was become as emaciated as the rest of the people. His rat-brown hair was thin, lank and lifeless, and even now, in his mid-twenties, his beard growth was at best sparse and patchy, and his only body hair sprouted in his crotch and armpits.

  Unlike all of his peers, who had wed in their late teens or early twenties, Grant—rendered painfully shy by his overly sheltered childhood and youth—had never married, continuing to live on with his father and his elder, widowed and biddable sister, Clare Dundas, whom his father had forbidden to remarry after their mother died of pneumonia.

  Annoyed by the young man's snifflings, Falconer set down his teacup and snapped, "Either blow your nose or get out of here, Grant—preferably the latter. You're about as much good to me and your father as you have ever been to us or to anyone else, as much an asset as teats on a boar hog.

  "The decision has been made, anyway. You know your duties and responsibilities, or you should. All that is now left to do is for me and your father to work out the details. So get you home and nurse your cold, but just remember all you have been told and be sure to be where I told you to be when I told you to be there."

  There was, in Falconer's mind, no need to tell the awkward and ill-countenanced young man to keep his mouth shut anent the plans for the demise of the chief instigator of what he and MacEvedy saw as all their present and possibly future trouble—Milo Moray. The preacher well knew that Grant would not babble to friends, for he never had had one and those who worked with him in the station offices were, at the very best, cool and correct in all their dealings with their disgraced and despised superior-by-inheritance.

  "If you and your people all want to stay despite everything, dammit," Colonel Ian Lindsay had declared, "then you and they can bloody well squat here until hell freezes over, Emmett, but my people are all going away with Moray and his tribe ... and to be completely candid, not a few station personnel have come to me and certain of my officers begging to be allowed to come away with us, rather than stay here and keep trying to wrest a bare living out of this contrary acreage."

  "Who?" snapped MacEvedy. "Who were the traitors, the turncoats?"

  Lindsay shrugged. "Only most of your really intelligent, innovative and far-sighted types, those who have outgrown the fetters of now-senseless tradition and know they can live the better without either being forced willy-nilly into the molds of their ancestors or being constantly hectored and bullied by the man who now seems to command both you and the station, Gerald Falconer. And you can save your breath in this matter; I'll give you no names, not one, and that's the end of it, Emmett!"

  "Then you relinquish your honor as well as, as easily as, you forsake your home, your birthplace, do you, Ian Lindsay?" MacEvedy said bitterly. "It was—it is!—your sworn duty to protect me and my station and its people with your battalion, until such a time as some responsible person rescinds the orders originally given your great-grandfather. If you and the battalion do not stay, neither can I and the station people stay safely, and you well know that as fact. Your departure would condemn us all to death, soon or late, at the bloody hands of the rovers."

  Lindsay shook his head. "Not necessarily, Emmett. You'll still have the fort, the rifles, the catapults, the spear-throwers, and you'll have the artillery pieces."

  "None of which the most of the station people know much of anything about the use of," lamented MacEvedy. "It has always been and it still is your duty to protect us and the station, we are farmers, not fighters, and it has always been so."

  "Then it's now far past time that you all stood up on your hind legs and began to do your own fighting, Emmett. You and the others who want to stay can be taught the fundamentals of the uses of the firearms and the tension-torsion weapons by the time the rest of us are ready to leave with the tribe."

  "But . . . but it is not our place," began MacEvedy. "We are all peaceable, peace-loving farmers, we—"

  "Yes, peaceable and peace-loving," Lindsay interrupted him scornfully, "just so long as you had, as you always have had, a group of poor sods to do your fighting for you, save you all from risking your precious necks in war, even while you despised and loathed these men of war, these men whom you have ¦always considered to be your moral inferiors.

  "No, don't try to deny it. Emmett. I've known just how you and most of the station personnel felt about us of the battalion for all of my life. My father knew it, too, and my grandfather, and his sire, the first colonel of the battalion to serve with it here a
t MacEvedy Station. But serve on in spite of it they did. It was their duty and they felt bound by their oaths to the government and the army."

  "Just so!" said MacEvedy. "They were honorable men, but you ..."

  "But I, Emmett, do not any longer fee! myself bound by oaths sworn by my father's father's father to a government, an army, a nation that ceased to exist some century or more ago."

  MacEvedy sneered. "You have only the word of that unnatural devil spawn Moray for that last. What makes you believe him, anyway?"

  "It just stands to reason, man, or are you too blind and hidebound to see it? What responsible government of any kind would set a station and troops to guard it up here and then just ignore it and them for more than a hundred years? Moray attests that he was living when Ottawa was vaporized by one of those hellish weapons that they used in warfare in olden times. Why, Moray says that—"

  "Moray says this, Moray says that," snapped MacEvedy, mocking Lindsay's speaking voice. "I think that that Satan's imp has gone far toward robbing you of your immortal soul, Ian Lindsay. That's what I think!"

  "Emmett," asked Lindsay in a serious tone, "what ever led you to the belief that Milo Moray is an evil demon of some ilk? Such maunderings sound less like you than like that power-mad fool Gerald Falconer."

  "Sweet Jesus, Ian," expostulated MacEvedy. "You saw and heard all that I did. He freely admits to having no reverence for the Lord God Jehovah, seems vastly pleased that this tribe of his are pagans, worshiping the sun and the moon and the wind. And you saw, as I did, the eerie, evil occurrences when your daughter shot him in the chest with your own service revolver. Do you not recall what she gave as her reason for fetching the gun and making an earnest effort to kill him, Ian?