Horses of the North Page 9

  "Therefore, Mr. Moray, I can only conclude that you are what you say, a human man, for all that my senses and logic assure me that you must be superhuman, at the very least. I am a religious man, Mr. Moray, and firmly convinced that God has a purpose, a plan in all that He does. We here at MacEvedy Station are in dire straits, as you have guessed, besieged and unable to work our fields, much of our livestock lifted by the prairie rovers, our people all ill and almost starving. I believe that the Lord God tested Emmett and me to our utmost capacities, planning from the start to send us you in our hour of darkest need. You may not even know it, Mr. Moray, but I have faith that you are our God-sent savior."

  With his tribe of clansfolk camped in and about MacEvedy Station, Milo and a few of his warriors, all heavily armed, rode out to the camp of Chief Gus Scott, Milo grim with purpose. They were received with warmth by the chief and his tribesfolk, and all invited to share food. While the rest ate and fraternized, Milo closeted with the chief in that worthy's otherwise unoccupied tent.

  Gus Scott, smiling broadly, unstoppered a stone jug, splashed generous measures of trader whiskey into two battered metal mugs and handed one to Milo, then clanked the side of his against Milo's in ancient ritual before drinking.

  Handling his half-emptied mug, Scott remarked, "Damn if you ain't a pure whiz, Chief Milo, no shit a-tall, neither. I've come for to like you a lot, and so it pained me some to think the end of the fine feast what you and yourn throwed would most likely be the lastest time I'd set eyes to you with the wind and blood still running in you; I'd of laid damn near anything I's got thet them bastids would've blowed you to hell afore you'd got anywheres near to thet goddam fort. Me and some of my boys, we all watched you ride down there from way off. Damn, but you looked smart on thet big ol' white horse-as straight up in the saddle as the pole of thet white flag you was. When them bugtits come out and led you th'ough them gates and then closed 'em ahint you, I figgered sure thet none of us would ever clap eyes onto you again in thishere life. Yet here you sits with me, big and sassy as ever. How the hell did you cozen your way out'n thet damn fort, Chief Milo?"

  A smile flitted momentarily across Milo's weather-darkened face. "It was far easier than you'd probably believe, Chief Gus, far and away easier than I'd dreamed it would be. You, you and the others, you have greatly misjudged and hideously maligned the men of MacEvedy Station, you know; they are in no way the rabid, ravening, bloodthirsty beasts you gave me to understand them to be."

  Seeing Gus Scott's hand go to the pitted, disk-shaped piece of ancient shrapnel depending from his neck on its chain, Milo raised a hand placatingly, saying, "Regardless of what these people's parents and grandparents may have done to your own grandfather and his generation, I am convinced that were you but to meet the current war chief of that fort you would not only like him but find much in common with him. I have come to like Chief Ian Lindsay and many of his subchiefs as well. In fact, I have moved the camp of my tribe into and around the MacEvedy Station compound."

  Scott just sat staring goggle-eyed at Milo, his mug dangling forgotten from his fingers, the precious whiskey trickling from its rim down onto his boot. Then he straightened up, and a smile began to crease his face.

  "Heh heh heh," he chuckled. "Had me a-going there for a minit, you did, old feller. Took me some time to figger out jest where you were a-headed, but I see now. It'd take a prairie rover borned to tell the diffrunce 'tween your fighters and mine or LeBonne's or any of the others, so we jest let your hunters ride out day by day, 'cepting more rides back in then went out until we has us enuff fighters hid in your tents and all to massacree ever damn bugtit in thet place, right?"

  "Wrong, Chief Scott, completely wrong," Milo replied firmly. "There will be no further attacks or raids against the MacEvedy Station, not by you, not by LeBonne, not by any of the other warbands. If attacks and raids do take place, the attackers and raiders will find themselves up against not just the men of the station but my fighters, as well. Let's get that much of the matter clear right now, at the outset."

  "So, you done sold out to the murdering bastids, have you?" Scott declared bitterly. "Sold out to 'em jest to git a clear crossing of their fucking ford. Damn it all, I'd never of thought a man like you'd do a thang like thet to his own kinda folks. And I'd thought you was my friend, too. With your fighters on top of my boys and LeBonne's and the others, we could of jest flat rode over thet place and their fucking rifles be damned."

  Milo slowly shook his head. "You're wrong, Chief Gus, wrong about a lot of things. You must learn not to jump to quick and erroneous conclusions.

  "To begin, recall if you will that I said at the start that your generations-long feud against the people of the MacEvedy Station was not my fight or my tribe's fight, and that if we could find a way to do so, we would keep out of it."

  Scott nodded slowly. "Yeah, I recollect thet, Chief Milo, I surely do, but I still would never of thought you and your tribe would of thowed in with them sonofabitches, made a common cause with the folks who crippled up my grandpa."

  "Chief Gus, what if, after a very hard winter, a collection of men rode into your camp and demanded that you allow them to take all the jerky and pemmican you had left, plus all of your best horses and cattle? What would you and your tribe do then?"

  "Do our damnedest to kill off every mother's son of the damn fuckers, thet's what!" snorted Scott. "But whut's thet got to do with you selling out to them murdering bastids, huh?"

  "A lot, Chief Gus, one hell of a lot," stated Milo solemnly. "All of the station folks both read and write; so, too, do I. I was allowed to read their records, and those ridiculous demands were precisely what the leaders of the force of which your grandfather, father and uncles were a part insisted was their due. When those demands were not met, they attacked the fort and were cut down by rifle and artillery and mortars long before any of them got even within bow range of those walls. So, you see, the then chief, the present war chief's own grandfather, did no more than you yourself admit that you would do under similar circumstances; your grandfather simply suffered for the overweening arrogance of the leaders of that group of massed warbands. So blame them; don't continue to blame the descendants of fighters who were only doing the natural thing—protecting themselves, their families and their stock.

  "As I understood from our first meeting, the other thing that you and some of the other war chiefs hoped to accomplish was to once and for ail make safe and easy the passage across that ford commanded by the station complex, correct?" Scott just bobbed his head.

  "Well, it is possible that that purpose will be achieved, Chief Gus, and without any bloodshed to accomplish it, either. My subchiefs and I are in process of persuading Chief Ian and the other survivors of the original complex complement to leave those lands on which they have been nearly starving for years, now, and come with us to the high plains, give over farming and become nomadic herders and hunters. We are making some progress, although it is slow and fitful at present, but I entertain very high hopes for this project; they'll come as one, maybe two new clans of my tribe. You and yours could be a third new clan, if you and your subchiefs but indicate interest in so being. I like you, personally, and I admire your leadership abilities; your tribe and the station people added would almost double the size of my tribe, make of us a real power on the plains and the prairies.

  "With the strength that such numbers would give us, we could set about clearing the grasslands of all the squatting farmers so that these grasslands would be ours and ours alone, completely free and fenceless for our families and our herds, for our children and their herds to roam at will in peace."

  All the time that he was speaking aloud, Milo's powerful and long-trained mind had been projecting into the unshielded mind of Gus Scott thoughts favorable to the merging of the three disparate groups of people. His many years of life had convinced him that any man who failed to make use of any personal advantage in argument or fight was a fool and an eventual loser.

 
It was, therefore, no real surprise to him when Scott nodded and said, "Whutall you's said, Chief Milo, it all makes a heap of good sense to me. I likes you, too, you know, and that's why it pained me so bad, first to thank you was a-going to get yourse'f kilt, then thet you'd sold out to Chief Ian and his folks.

  "I thinks my folks would like being a clan of your tribe, too, and you right, ain't no sense to being little and weak when you can be big and strong. And you right 'bout us having to git shet of them damn dirt-scratching farmers, too; ain't never been too many of the fuckers up nawth, here, but they done been a plumb plague further south and looks like ever year it's more of the sonofabitches, a-plowing up the graze and a-fencing off the water.

  "It's a passel of no-count herders, too, ought to be kilt or drove off, but I never been strong enuff to do 'er alone, jest my tribe and me. But let's us plan on taking care of all the damn farmers, first off, like you said, then we can git after them fucking sneak-thieving bastids like of the Hartman tribe.

  "But really, Chief Milo, we 'uns should oughta ask Chief Jules to come along of us, too; true, he ain't got all thet big a tribe, but they's all of his fighters good boys."

  Milo thought to himself that he would liefer adopt a clan of diamondback rattlesnakes than the scruffy, filthy, constantly conniving Jules LeBonne and his pack of prize ruffians. But just now was neither the time nor the place to refuse a friend of Chief Gus Scott's a chance at joining the projected tribal alliance, so he agreed with what he hoped resembled pleasure. The sad and bloody events of the two ensuing weeks were to give Milo Moray much cause to regret this action.

  Chapter VI

  With the hunters of Milo's tribe and those of the Scott tribe as well, out all day, every day, while parties of girls, women and younger boys scoured the surrounding grasslands and wooded areas for edible wild plants, nuts and the like, the station people began to eat well and regularly once more, and to recover their strength.

  Milo himself spent many a long hour conferring with Ian Lindsay and Emmett MacEvedy, endeavoring to convince them of the futility, the suicidal folly of remaining at the station and attempting to derive sustenance from played-out land for so many people. Ian seemed to be wavering toward Milo's side of the argument, but MacEvedy was adamantly opposed to leaving, and each time Lindsay made a favorable mention of departure, the director was quick to point out that it was the inherent duty of Lindsay and his men to remain and defend the station. The parson, Gerald Falconer, who sat in on a few of the discussions, seemed unequivocally a MacEvedy man. Arabella Lindsay, however, and every one of Ian's officers eagerly favored a mass departure from the station and its barely productive farms for a freer-sounding life out on the grasslands.

  Milo saw his plans and arguments stonewalled at almost every turn by the strangely hostile MacEvedy and the even more hostile Reverend Gerald Falconer, He was become so frustrated as to almost be ready to seek those two men out on some dark night in some deserted place and throttle them with his own two bare hands.

  Very frequently, Milo was forced to carry on two conversations at one time—his oral one, of course, and a silent telepathic "conversation" with Arabella Lindsay, who, while at least quite interested in the affairs under discussion by Milo, her father, MacEvedy and whoever else chanced to be present at any particular time, was even more avid for bits and pieces of assorted knowledge concerning aspects of the lives of the nomads on prairies and plains.

  She did not even have to be present for him to suddenly feel the peculiar mental tickling that told him that her mind was now there, in the atrium of his own, with another question or five. Not always questions, though; sometimes she imparted information to him.

  "Milo," she beamed to him early on a Monday morning, "the Reverend Mr. Falconer said terrible things about you in his sermon yesterday, Father probably won't tell you, so I suppose that I must. After all, we are friends now, you and I, and that's what friends are for: to guard each other's backs. Is that not so?"

  In his two-plus centuries of life, Milo had but infrequently run across any "man of God" of any stripe, creed or persuasion that he had been able to like trust or even respect; all seemed to have imbibed greed, backbiting and hypocrisy with the milk of whatever creatures bore and nurtured them. Ever since their initial meeting, he had known that Gerald Falconer heartily disliked him for some reason that the man had never bothered to bring out into the open and discuss; Milo judged him to be not the sort of man who willingly discussed any matter openly unless he was dead certain, to start, that he had the unquestioned upper hand.

  He replied, "I know his kind, of old, Arabella. What did he have to say about me?"

  "He started out by criticizing poor Father most cruelly ," was her answer. "His scriptural text had been the story of Job, and he compared Father to Job, saying that Job had had great faith in God and that Father's faith had obviously been scant, since it had evaporated under mild adversity."

  "Mild adversity?" Milo mentally snorted. "Mild adversity is it, now? By Sun and Wind, the man's clearly either a madman or he totally lacks the wits to come in out of the rain! A good half of the station people have died in the last four years of either malnourishment or the plethora of diseases associated with it, most of your crops in this same time have been stunted, blighted or completely nonexistent, your herds have been either eaten or lifted by the rovers, and your leaders have had to strip this place of all luxuries or treasures and of many necessary items of equipment, armor and weapons to barter to the traders for a pittance of food. If these sufferings and privations are to this Gerald Falconer merely 'mild adversity,' I'd truly hate to see what he would characterize as strong adversity, Arabella."

  "What he said of you was worse, Milo, far, far worse. His hatred of you, whatever spawned it, seems to be really and truly depthless."

  "Well," he prodded, "just what choice cesspit dredgings did the mealymouthed bastard decide applied to me?"

  "He declared that the devil can quote Scripture when it is to hell's benefit, then he carried on for some time about how mere mortal men can, under great stress and especially when possessed of little or deficient faith, succumb to Satanic wiles. He went on to say that you, Milo Moray, are without doubt a disciple of Satan, that you bear the mark of the beast, that—although you go about on two legs and project the appearance of being a man—you are a beast yourself, an evil, hell-spawned, bestial creature of the sort who dwelt amongst men of old, before men were taught by the humble servants of Christ how to detect them, drive them out and kill them—witches, vampires, ghouls and werewolves, all immune to the sharp steel or lead bullets that would take the lives of mortal men."

  "Oho," Milo silently crowed. "Emmett MacEvedy apparently forgot his oaths to your father and me as soon as he and his superstitious mind and his loose, flapping tongue had exited that office. That must be why this Falconer seemed to hate me from the moment of our first meeting, why he wears that big silver pectoral cross constantly and never misses an opportunity to wave the thing around, mostly near to me. I'd wondered about him and what I took to be his idiosyncrasies, Arabella, but I've never been able to read his mind, or MacEvedy's either. I think that both of them are just adept enough at telepathy to have developed natural shields.

  "And anent that matter, Arabella, just how many of the folk of the station here are possessed of your telepathic abilities? Do you know?"

  "Well, there's Capull . . . but he's not a person, of course."

  "If this Capull is not a person, Arabella," inquired Milo, "then what is he?"

  "Why, he's a stallion, a Thoroughbred stallion, my father's charger and my best friend."

  "And he is telepathic? You can actually converse with him, a horse?" Milo was stunned.

  "Of course I can," she replied matter-of-factly. "And with a number of the other horses, too, though not as well as with dear Capull. I was chatting with that big white stallion on whom you first rode into the fort when I was found and summoned up to my father's office to try to read you
r thoughts and so determine if the words you spoke were truth."

  "Well, I'll be damned!" thought Milo. "Why did I never think of trying to communicate telepathically with any of my mounts? If I did, and if the horse was a cooperative sort, I'd need no bridle at all and could keep both hands free for my weapons or whatever. Nor would there be any need to hobble or picket such a horse, either—you could simply beam your command for him to come to you whenever you were ready for him. Son of a bitch, the things I've learned at this place!"

  To Arabella, he beamed, "Do you think . . . Could you teach me how to bespeak this Capull and, perhaps, some of my own horses?"

  "Certainly I can," was her quick, self-assured reply. "Your mind is much stronger than is mine in this matter of mind speaking to mind, anyway. Furthermore, I have found myself able to bespeak over half of the horses I have met in your camp already, so there is no reason why you should not be able to so do, whenever you wish."

  Then, in a bare twinkling, her mind imparted to his the tiny change of direction necessary to reach the minds of equines. It was so simple, yet it was something of which he would never have thought on his own, he realized and admitted.

  "But Milo, this matter of telepathy aside, you must be most wary of Reverend Mr. Falconer, and of Director MacEvedy and his son, Grant. They all hate you and will use any means at their disposal to poison the minds of our people against you and to see you and all your people either killed or driven away, back out onto the prairie, whence you all came."

  "I can understand a bit of why Falconer dislikes me, of course, Arabella. You weren't around the day that he demanded to know to just what brand of Christianity my tribe subscribed and I told him bluntly that we are not any of us any form of Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jain or anything else that he would recognize, that we neither support nor tolerate parasitic priests or preachers, that the only things we consider to be in any way sacred are the beneficial, life-giving forces of Nature—the sun and the wind, principally—those and the Laws of our tribe. At that point he sprang up, stared at me as if trying to will me to death, then stomped out of your father's office, trying to bear off the door with him, to judge by the force with which he slammed it. Very shortly afterward, MacEvedy left on some flimsy-sounding excuse or other.