Arslan (34 page)

“I'm going for Dr. Allard.”

“No.” He tried to raise himself.

“Relax, Hunt. You can trust Jack Allard as well as you can me.” I patted him back down on the couch and went out again by the back door. I hadn't gotten very far before Sanjar caught up with me. He ran like a hunting cat—low, and all but silent. I turned to meet him. “What's the matter?”

He caught hold of my elbow. “Don't get the doctor. I can take care of Arslan.”

“You can take care of him all you want to. I'm getting the doctor for Hunt.”

He hung on, and I half dragged him along. “You mustn't let him know Arslan's here.”

“Don't worry, Sanjar. You can trust Doc Allard not to tell tales.”

“No!” he squeaked, his urgency too much for his young voice. He jerked at my arm, and I stopped again and faced him. The moon was down, but I could see that his face was twisted with earnestness. “I can't even trust
you!
” he burst out. “You see? You're going to tell the doctor!”

Under the circumstances I couldn't laugh at him. “All right, Sanjar. My story is that Hunt came in with a broken leg and I went for help without waiting to find out how it happened. You hurry back to Hunt now and figure out a nice plausible lie. Don't forget he's got to explain how he got here alone on horseback.”

“Thanks! Thank you!” He melted back into the darkness.

The story Hunt told was sketchy, but not unbelievable. He had been thrown and dragged in the neighborhood of Reedsboro, where there was no doctor, and the Reedsboro people had given him the doubtful favor of an amateur bonesetting job and tied him to his horse. People would do things like that these days. It was a funny thing that Arslan's plan of independent communities really had taken effect in some ways. There were business trips like Hunt's, there was trade, and news filtered around fast enough; but by and large, people stayed in their own districts, and they didn't take in strangers.

When the doctor was gone, I made sure Hunt was as comfortable as he could well be and went upstairs. There was no answer to my knock. I opened the door and stepped into the dawn-lit room. A curious noise was going on, a continuous soft rustle punctuated with irregular rasping sounds.

“Sanjar?” I couldn't locate him for a few moments. Then I looked at Arslan in the bed and found Sanjar, too. He had fairly plastered himself onto his father, his arms locked around Arslan's chest, his face profiled against Arslan's throat. He was looking sidelong up at me with a look I knew all too well, the look I had seen in the eyes of dozens of wastrel's sons as they faced their inevitable paddlings—the hopeless, utter defiance of the outlaw's child. The noise was coming from Arslan. He was shaking, shaking helplessly in the grip of his cold disease, and he was not conscious now. His breath came in noisy heaves. Sanjar had put everything available on him—sheet and spread, the blankets he must have found in the old dresser, his own hot body.

I looked at them for a minute. “You're pretty proud of your father, aren't you?” He gazed at me with his steady desperation, the look that accepted hell. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.

Those were a peculiar three days. It was hard to get used to the idea that Arslan might very well die in my house. I had to plan burial arrangements without mentioning the possibility to anybody. As for his northward expedition, I'd heard nothing but Hunt's “We won it.” The physical results didn't look very triumphal. Arslan himself had changed from a South American peasant's rags to an equally ragged uniform—anonymous khaki, totally without insignia. Maybe that was a step up.

Kraftsville was willing enough to do business with Hunt, but he wasn't what you could call socially popular. The silver lining of that was that we were spared the normal flood of neighborly visits and inquiries. Jean Morgan came, of course. “He's doing very well,” I told her. “He's comfortable.”

“May I come in?” We were standing in the open front door. Hunt was just out of sight at the far end of the living room.

“Jean,” I said, “you know I can't go back on my word.”

She set her jaw and looked at me hard. “I'd laugh, if I felt cheerful enough. Just tell me, Franklin, did you ever hear of a more ridiculous situation? My son is in there with a broken leg, and I'm here on the doorstep begging admittance.”

But begging was something Jean Morgan couldn't have done. When she saw I meant what I said, she went away without more ado.

I stretched my charity to the point of offering Arslan, through Sanjar, a pair of my pajamas. They were politely declined. As before I saw nothing of Arslan, but this time I saw more of Sanjar. With Hunt immobilized, he undertook to do all the cooking, after he'd asked my permission very prettily. As a cook he was a little less than inspired, but about as competent as you could want for an eleven-year-old. He took whatever I brought into the kitchen, and inevitably he boiled it. We lived on nondescript gruels and unclassified stews. And while his pots simmered, Sanjar squatted or sat cross-legged beside Hunt's couch, deep in cheery discussion. I left them alone; it was pretty obvious they preferred to speak Turkistani when I was within earshot. I hadn't seen Hunt so animated in years. And since Arslan had come through his chill, Sanjar was all smiles. He hadn't really learned yet that his father was mortal.

But except with Sanjar, Hunt had lapsed back into the inarticulateness of his first days with Arslan. I tried exactly once to ask him what had happened. He fixed me with that remote look of a visitor from another world, as if we faced each other through barriers not simply of language but of perception. “It was a battle,” he said. “We won it.”

“What happened to Nizam?”

He shrugged, and after a while he said in an answering tone, “What happens to Nizams?”

“I expect they succeed or they die trying.”

He nodded slowly. “Nizam's dead.”

“What was he trying for?”

“Exactly,” he said.

Chapter 24

The third day, Sanjar was as restless as a young cat wanting out. Arslan's next chill was due tomorrow, and the prospect seemed to infect the boy with jumpiness. For the first time since he was a tot, I saw him get really mad, flaring up at Hunt in the course of their chats, swearing—multilingually—like a trooper over his cooking. But it was with an air almost of contrition that he came to me just after lunch.

“Mr. Bond, I want to catch us some fish for supper. Arslan's asleep. He won't need anything for a few hours, and I'll be back by then.”

“In broad daylight, Sanjar?”

He gave me the humbly calculating look of a wise child facing the barrier of adult prejudice—considering how to convince me he knew his business without displaying a confidence that would look like overconfidence. “I can keep out of sight,” he began cautiously, and I clapped him on the shoulder and told him to go ahead.

He flushed with relief and pleasure. All the same, he managed to delay for half an hour, fussing up and down stairs, he was so anxious to leave Arslan well provided for. When he finally went, he went through the kitchen window, surging out the way he always did, with the unreal grace of a shadow or a dancer. There was a certain crazy beauty about Sanjar. He preferred windows to doors—and he was entitled to windows.

It must have been about two in the afternoon when a wagon pulled up in front of the house. I was working in the side garden—somebody had to do Hunt's chores—and I straightened up to watch.

Three men were getting out. One of them I recognized immediately—Harry Flaxman, a trapper from over by Blue Creek. The other two I placed as belonging to the middle-aged generation of town loafers, but couldn't call their names to mind. Flaxman was hitching the horses to the gatepost. I headed up front in a hurry. This was a visit I didn't like the looks of. Flaxman was a loner, a childless widower who was said to have worked his wife to death. After Arslan's coming he had let his little farm grow up in brush and taken to trapping for a living. He was a drinker, a poacher, and a chiseler, efficient and mean.

By the time I got to the front walk I had placed the other two: J. G. Sims, a shiftless drunken no-account, like a milder Ollie Schuster; and Cully Johnson, a lanky, gentle-mannered loafer who lived on the charity of his relatives and whose only serious vice, as far as I knew, was absolute laziness. Hunt's dog was yapping and snarling around them, but that little dog wasn't worth two cents, and they could tell it at a glance. I stepped up on the porch, to get solidly between them and the door. There was a gun upstairs in my bedroom, but it might as well have been on the moon. Flaxman was leading the way up my front walk, and he swung a rifle loosely in his hand.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, now, Mr. Bond,” Flaxman began. He was grinning widely at me. He mounted the porch steps and stood facing me, while the other two formed up behind him. “Mind if we come in and talk about it?”

“I'll have to ask you to put the gun down,” I said. “It's a little rule I have—no firearms in the house or on the porch.”

He nodded a little exaggeratedly and rested the rifle butt on the top step. “We really come to see Hunt Morgan.”

I looked quickly at J. G.'s face, and Cully's. If it was only Flaxman's viciousness that inspired them, we had a better chance. But all three pairs of eyes were lit with the same vindictive fire. There had never been a lynching in Kraftsville, to my knowledge, but the conclusion was obvious: they had come to lynch Hunt.

“Hunt's resting, and he's not in shape to talk to anybody. I'm sorry I can't ask you in.”

“Well, Mr. Bond, you just don't have to ask us.”

So there was no use being polite. “Sorry,” I said, in a different tone. “I'm busy. If you have anything to say to me, you can say it tomorrow in my office. If you have anything to say to Hunt, I'll take the message.”

“Seems like it's hard to find you in your office,” Flaxman said. He was still grinning. The dog had given up and sat down, still growling uneasily. “Least that's what I hear. I don't have much occasion to come looking for you, myself.”

“Somebody says to me,” J. G. chimed in conversationally, “'If there's ever another war in Kraft County, they'll never make the Supervisor surrender.’ I says, ‘Why not?’ And he says, ‘They can't never find him.'”

They all thought that was pretty funny. “I'd advise all three of you to tend to your own business and let me tend to mine. You'll find out I'm in my office, all right.”

“Right now our business is Hunt Morgan,” Flaxman said.

“No.” I saw Flaxman's muscles shift as he tilted just a shade forward, ready to take the offensive, but Cully and J. G. were already losing their nerve. “We've got laws in this town, mister, and you ought to know by now that I enforce them. You can't go around disturbing people in their homes.”

“We ain't going to disturb you one bit, Mr. Bond. We ain't even got to come in if you bring him out.”

“Get back,” I said. Flaxman's face twisted as he tried to stare me down, and I felt a swell of comfortable warmth. They weren't so tough. “Mister, you've still got time to leave quietly and there won't be any charges. But don't you forget, the KCR has an interest in preserving law and order, too.”

Now they were all three whipped. Flaxman half turned away, riding his hand loosely up and down the gun barrel, figuring out his parting sneer. The gun might not be loaded; on the other hand, if anybody still had cartridges, it would be people like Flaxman, too selfish to turn them in and too smart to waste them. “We'll get him, Mr. Bond,” he said with a travesty of pleasantness. “Don't you worry, we'll get him. There's other ways.” He took the first slow step down.

“We got the proof, Mr. Bond,” Cully blurted. “That's the God's truth.”

A brown flush surged over Flaxman's neck, and he spat on the steps to clarify his stand on Cully's insubordination. “Get off my property,” I said. Flaxman turned his vicious face, surprised. “I mean you. Take that gun and get out, and don't come back here or I'll have you jailed.”

Flaxman teetered murderously, not sure whether to show his teeth before he slunk off, but J. G. and Cully, looking chastened, were already started toward the gate. “You come back here, Cully,” I said. “I want to talk to you.” He turned back hastily. Flaxman shrugged, and dawdled down the steps, passing him. “What proof have you got of what?”

He came up close to me and said, in a husky, confidential voice, like somebody discussing a dirty disease, “We just happened to find out, Mr. Bond. All three of us, we seen him with our own eyes.” He nodded. “Hunt Morgan's a spy for Arslan.”

Flaxman had stopped halfway down the walk, looking back. “Out!” I called to him, and motioned with the back of my hand towards the gate, and he shrugged again and went on out to the wagon where J. G. was already waiting.

“What did you see, Cully?”

He shuffled a little, or managed to look like it without actually moving his feet. “We was out on a fishing trip. First time in a long time, I mean a real trip like that. You know how it is, nobody goes out of county no more. Don't know why—do you?”

“How far did you go?” You had to be patient with Cully. Flaxman and J. G. were leaning against the side of the wagon, watching.

“Clear up to the Wabash. Nearly far as Clairmont, I reckon. Spent most a month, if you can believe it, Mr. Bond. I mean if you count coming and going.” If he had had a hat, he would have taken it off now and turned it round and round in his hands. “And it was up there we seen Hunt Morgan. Riding that there red horse of his. I'd of knowed him and the horse both, five miles off. Seen him ride up to a little old house there was, one of them little summer houses some people used to build up there, and he waited there most near half a day till somebody come and met him. And you know who it was, Mr. Bond? A soldier. Yes, sir. One of Arslan's soldiers, I'll swear. He had the uniform and all. And they was talking there all evening from noon till clear up dark. We was watching the whole thing from the river bank, all day long, first to last. Then we seen them ride off again back the way they come, Hunt south and the soldier north. He wasn't just no private, neither; he was some kind of a officer.”