Horses of the North Page 13

  Smiling coldly, he said, "Do you remember me, General Ponce? I told you last year that I'd be back."

  "You .. . you murderin' bastard, you!" the big man half-sobbed in frustrated rage, his jowls and sagging belly aquiver, spittle showering through his gapped, filthy teeth and hot rage beaming from his black eyes. "You may crow big now, but you gonna sing a diffrunt tune when my boy gits back here with his calvery p'trol, you. Thishere's our land, just like I tole you and your other sonofabitches las' year, and don't nobody pass over it or th'ough it lessen we gets our choice of ever'thin' they got, first."

  Milo smiled grimly. "Those days are over for you and your pack, Ponce. We've seen to that this morning, for good and all. Oh, and I'd not advise that you try holding your breath until your boy and his mounted patrol come riding back in, either. If you wonder just where they are, wait until it gets full light and head for the spot up northwest where you'll see the buzzards circling.

  "We've burned down half your settlement here—your motorized transport, your powerboats and all of your fuel, the weapons and ammo we could easily locate in a short time. Without those things, you swine are going to play merry hell trying to mount raids against your neighbors or exact cruel tolls of travelers, as you bragged of doing for years when last we met. When my main party arrives, we are going to loot your settlement far more thoroughly, believe it, Ponce."

  And it was so done. With the arrival of the wagons and the carts, the settlement—what by then remained of it—was stripped of long years' worth of ill-gotten gains, food, clothing, usable artifacts and equipment, animals to add to the milling herds, plus a baker's dozen of captive women and some thirty children gotten on them by their captors during the years of their vile captivity.

  With the wagons and carts and riders and herds on the road to the southeast, Milo had the remaining inhabitants of the town that had once been a resort called Laketon tied up and roped together. From his saddle, he addressed his parting remarks to the self-styled general, Ponce.

  "You know, what I should do is send riders around to the various nearer settlements to let those off whom you and your pack have been battening for years know that you all are now here, unarmed and with neither motor vehicles, boats nor horses." He cocked his head, as if in consideration of the matter, and Ponce paled to the color of skim milk, while several of the bound men began to struggle vainly against the ropes.

  When he could see the smoldering rage in Ponce's beady black eyes replaced by fear, Milo shook his head and said, "But my schedule simply will not permit me to see real justice done to you and this collection of scum that you've gathered around you, so I suppose that we'll just have to leave you all here the way you now are. Eventually, one or more of you will wriggle loose, out of those knots . . . and maybe they'll then free the rest of you, but don't count on it, Ponce. There's no honor among thieves.

  "And even when you do finally get loose, even if some of your former victims don't chance on you and stake you out over an anthill with your eyelids and certain other parts cut off, you all are going to have a rough life for some little time. You'll have to actually do hard, manual labor, just to eat every few days, like as not, but most of you seem to have enough fat to keep you going for a while, at least. And all through your sufferings, both the big ones and the lesser ones, just remember that had you not coldbloodedly shot down one of my men last year, then stolen his horse and a few others from the remuda, all of this might not have occurred here today. I say only 'might not,' Ponce, for I don't like or even easily tolerate your brand of predatory opportunist. People of your stripe made a terrible situation far, far worse, after the War, for the few survivors of the plagues and the starvation. So I just might have done what I did to your den of thieves on general principles, even had you not murdered young Robin Ogilvie at the conclusion of what you had assured us was to be a peaceful, friendly meeting."

  Milo made to rein about, then turned back, admonishing, "Oh, and if you and any of your crew had any idea of following us, forget it. Any of you I catch after this day, I'll turn over to the thirteen women I rescued from you, them and some folks who were held as slaves by a group like yours years ago, down to the south, in Nevada and California."

  Without further incident, they crossed the Bear River into what had once been the State of Wyoming and, in the southerly outskirts of the deserted ruins of a close-clinging cluster of small towns, they camped, rested the herds and draft beasts and explored the nearby ruins for anything they might want to use, then headed on, first east, then southeast, to the place at which Route 30 merged with a former interstate road, Route 80.

  They halted again, briefly, at the empty town of Rock Springs, rested and scavenged, hunted, fished, performed necessary repairs to the wagons, carts, harnesses and other equipment, washed out their water barrels and laundered their clothing, washed themselves, their riding and draft beasts, collected a few head of feral cattle and even a half-dozen wild horses to be broken and added to their horse herd. They also managed to rope a fine, big burro stallion, which feat Milo and the other leaders considered a very good omen, for their mules were all aging and, as the sterile hybrids did not reproduce more of their kind, younger ones were become impossible to acquire.

  Despite the most vociferous urgings, it simply proved an impossibility for the train and herds to average anything in excess of about ten miles per day, so it was thirty-two days before they reached what had been called Cheyenne.

  They rolled onto the cracked streets of that all but deserted city to a rousing welcome from some hundred or so people and the mayor, Clarence Bookerman—a wiry little man of indeterminate age and some bare five feet-six inches of height, but full of energy and with intelligence sparkling from his bright blue eyes. He greeted the van of the train mounted on a tall, leggy, splendid red-bay Thoroughbred which he handled with the relaxed ease of a true horseman; both he and his people seemed beside themselves with the pleasure of meeting the folk of the train and quickly proved themselves gracious, generous hosts.

  After a sumptuous, delicious dinner, that night, Milo arose and introduced their host to the assembled leaders. "Gentlemen, unlike the most of us, Mayor Bookerman is a highly educated man, holding both an M.D. and a doctorate in biology, and he was, before the War, a professor at a university in Colorado, south of here.

  "He it was who organized the survivors hereabouts and got them to farming and rounding up animals to be certain that they could feed themselves after the food stocks they had scrounged and scavenged ran out. He got them formed into a militia to beat off the inevitable marauders that seem to survive any disaster of whatever dimensions. He persuaded them all to take to shank's mare or horseback in order to preserve the available stocks of fuels for heating and electrical generators. He has kept this community going for nearly thirty years now.

  "But as he knows this country so well, he now thinks that the climate is changing here just as it has in other places, and not for the better, unfortunately."

  There was a single, concerted groan from the leaders of the Snake River folk. The journey here had been long and hard on them, their families and their animals, and they had thought, had hoped, had prayed that they were migrating to a land that was, if not flowing with milk and honey, at least capable with proper care and tillage of sustaining them and theirs for years to come.

  Milo held up a hand, palm outward. "Hold on, there, Harry, Jim, the rest of you. Let me finish what Dr. Bookerman told me an hour or so before dinner.

  "He is not saying that anyone has to mount up and move on tomorrow or even the day after." He grinned. "No, what he is saying is that we should not hunker down to stay for a generation or two. For as much as five more years, we will all of us be able to wrest a good to fair living from the surrounding land, but we should not plan to stay beyond that time, for the winters here have been getting colder and longer, year by year, just as they did on the Snake, back in Idaho."

  Olsen demanded, "Well, where in the hell are we all supp
osed to go from here, Uncle Milo? Not that I mind traveling—I think if it was up to me alone, I'd travel and herd and hunt for a living full-time. But this stop and go, go and then stop again shit is sure hard on me and a whole heap of other folks."

  "I know, I know," said Milo sympathetically. "But we're only talking about one final migration, Dr. Bookerman and I, and that not for three to five more years. When we move on, he is of the opinion that we should move southeastward again, down into eastern Colorado, out of the mountains. He and I looked at the maps he has, and he has made several suggestions as to the eventual destination. When we decide on one, or at least narrow the choice down to three or four, I'll scout out them and the roads just as I did before.

  "For now, we all should let Dr. Bookerman's people show us to the better stretches of currently unused farm and pasturelands, do what building or repairs we have to, then get ourselves ready for spring and all that that will entail. But just keep it in mind that we are not going to be here for more than five years, come what may, unless the climate improves drastically."

  It did not. That first winter came on suddenly with no bit of warning, and was exceedingly hard, with deep snows and long days and nights of howling blizzards which often left buildings, trees and all other exterior surfaces sheathed in ice. That first winter lasted far longer than should have been normal, to judge by old almanacs and records from before the War, and when at length it did relent, the floodings were massive, with the snowmelt abetted by heavy spring rains, which made quagmires of the fields being prepared for planting and bogs of the pastures. It seemed to the recent immigrants fully as bad as anything that the Snake River country had had to offer. Talking at some length as he worked at his forge for those in need of his services, Olsen began to gather converts to his idea of leading a lifelong nomadic existence, rather than trekking from one place to another in search of land that was easier to farm in the face of increasingly hostile weather.

  I was fully aware of the blacksmith's ongoing campaigning, speechmaking and arguments with whomever he had around his forge, but I did nothing, said nothing. You see, I was beginning to agree with him. I was coming to the conclusion that, as the climate seemed to have changed and as few mechanized farming devices were still in usable condition, we were beating our collective head against a brick wall by trying to farm." Milo stopped the flow of his memories briefly to beam to Arabella Lindsay. "It had been my scouting expeditions that had shown me just how much easier it would be to live off the country—off the profusion of game animals and feral beasts, wild plants and, in some areas, volunteer crops of grains and vegetables still growing on deserted farms. And my own people had become pretty good at fabricating functional, well-made, tough and capacious wagons and carts, stout running gear and finely fashioned harness. They had learned through practice to make tents very comfortable and weatherproof. Furthermore, some looms had been scrounged while we abided in the Snake River country, and some few of the women had become quite adept at fashioning cloth starting with only raw wool sheared from our own sheep, and others had experimented with and developed the art of felting assorted varieties of hair and fur. We'd been tanning, of course, for many years and working the resultant leather. If we supplied Olsen with the proper amounts of good-grade fuel and metal scrap, there was damned little that he couldn't fashion for us in the way of hardware. We also, of course, numbered among us many fine, if self-taught, wainwrights, carpenters and cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, horse leeches, midwives, trackers, horse tamers, seamstresses and the like. I reckoned that we could, if necessary, be as good as self-sufficient and could learn to live as well off the country as the American Indians had done for thousands of years, probably better, due to the fact that we had a resource available to us that they had lacked utterly—our herds. So I just allowed Olsen to maunder on, doing my work for me, as it were."

  Once more, he opened his memories of events long years in the past.

  They all nearly starved to death the third year, when an early winter came down too soon for the necessarily late planted crops to be harvested properly. They only squeaked through the dark, bleak period by slaughtering ail of the swine and a larger number of cattle and sheep than Milo, Booker-man and the other leaders liked to see go down. The following spring was when the Cheyenne people started collecting the materials to build carts and wagons with the help of the experienced newcomers from Idaho.

  Olsen, perforce, moved his operation and his gospel into a place prepared for him in the city, closer to the supplies of fuels, timber and metals and in the hub of the activities of the wainwrights, wheelwrights, carpenters and their new, willing, but mostly unskilled apprentices.

  Almost all of the Cheyenne people had become riders, because of Dr. Bookerman's dictates against the use of fuels in the remaining motor vehicles, but none of them had any experience in driving horses for anything other than plowing or short-distance draft of agricultural implements, hay wagons and the like. So Milo and others began a school in the arcane arts of the long-distance trek. As soon as the crops were in, they broadened the courses to include maintenance of wagons, carts and harness; the pitching, striking and care of tents and other camping gear; the proper laying and making and feeding of cookfires; and the basics of archery, afoot and ahorse, for even though they would leave the Cheyenne area well supplied with arms and ammunition, their stock of cartridges would not last forever and there was no assurance that wherever they stopped to scrounge and scavenge, they would be able to find more of the correct calibers and still usable after years of improper storage.

  Supplied with antique weapons from a Cheyenne museum, Milo taught some of the better horsemen of both groups of people the basics of saber-work on horseback and resolved to himself to see to it when the then-overworked men had the time that Olsen turned out blades for similar sabers and for light horsemen's axes, as well. He considered lances, which would have been easy enough to fashion, even without the services of the smith, but he had never used one on horseback and felt that he should give himself time to digest a couple of books he had dug from the stacks of the main Cheyenne library before he began to try to teach the use of the tricky weapon. Best to confine his instruction to weapons he did know—bow, saber, light axe.

  Dr. Clarence Bookerman quickly proved himself to be the most adept of Milo's pupils. His horsemanship had been consummate, from the start, and after a few days, he handled the heavy saber as if it were a mere extension of his wiry arm. Milo was amazed, at first, that so old a man—to judge by his experiences and attainments both before and since the War, the mayor had to be somewhere between sixty and seventy years of age—could handle so difficult a weapon so well within so short a time, and he told his accomplished pupil just that.

  Smiling faintly, Bookerman said, "True, I have not held a hilt in many years, Milo, but it is not an art which once fully mastered one forgets easily. I studied for some years in West Germany, you see. You have heard of dueling societies, perhaps?" The old man outlined with one fingertip two scars—one over his left cheekbone, the other low on his right cheek, a bit above the upper perimeter of his carefully trimmed chin-beard.

  "In the Verbindungen, we used a straight blade without a point, of course, but I can see the advantages to a horseman of a cursive, pointed blade, especially if his opponent be on foot."

  Milo relaxed in the supportive stock saddle, resting the flat of his blade on the top of the horn. " 'Bookerman,' Doctor, has a decided Teutonic ring to it. Are you, perchance, of German origin or descent?"

  The mayor smiled again, a bit more broadly. "And I had thought, I had imagined, that I had gained complete mastery of standard American English, Milo; I thought that I spoke it with the fluency of a native."

  "You do, Doctor," Milo assured him. "Look, it's none of my business, really, and . . ."

  "No, no." Bookerman shook his head rapidly. "Are we two to live out the remainder of our two lives in close proximity, it is proper that you should know such things. And this particu
lar thing is no longer of the slightest importance.

  "Yes, I was born in Germany and lived the most of my youth on one of my father's estates in Niedersachsenland. I took my M.D. in Germany and came to the United States in order to pursue a course of study which interested me. I met and married a fine American woman and decided to stay and become a citizen. For a number of reasons, we Anglicized our name to Bookerman, rather than staying Bucher-mann, and at the same time, I changed my baptismal name from Karl-Heinrich to Clarence.

  "But please believe me that it all was aboveboard and most completely innocent, Milo." He grinned, adding, "I was born far too late to have had anything to do with the Third Reich, along with anyone now still living, although several relatives of my father were, rightly or wrongly, adjudged war criminals after World War the Second—two of those men were hanged and one was sent to prison, solely for being good officers who remembered their oaths and their honor and followed the lawful orders of their military superiors. However, as I have said, my friend, none of this now is of any slightest importance—not to you, not to me, not to any of our dependent peoples and not, especially, in this new and strange and possibly deadly world within which we all now must live ... or die."

  Then, still smiling, the elderly little man whirled up his saber and delivered a lightning-fast overhand cut with the dull and padded edge which Milo barely managed to stop with a parry in the sixth, the force and shock of the blow tingling his hand and wrist and arm clear up to the shoulder.

  Bookerman laughed. "Your reflexes are excellent, Milo. Your style is most unorthodox, however; I can tell that you learned the blade in no Fechtsaal. There is a veneer of the Olympic to your style, and that is what you have been teaching here. But when you are not thinking, then comes out an entirely different mode of combat and defense from your subconscious, an instinctive one, if you will, that I think was learned from no modern master."