In the middle of the afternoon I was at work with my absurd duplicating outfit, kneeling with it in front of me on the soft beech-mast on the ground, a little hot and bothered from having to keep at it in the dried-out somnolence. Several of the others were working or resting near by and Keig was a couple of yards away from me, sitting with his broad shoulders against the smooth trunk of a beech as mighty as himself, with his legs stuck out straight on the ground at an angle of sixty degrees from each other and with a sheet of paper on a board in front of him making out another of his endless ration lists—certain types of supplies were beginning to be a problem in our part of the island with communications to the harbour at Portharnel cut off.
And then we heard the quiet challenge of the distant sentry, a sound which even in this languid heat sent a chill of alarm through me.
We all listened in silence.
‘Bit early for Crowe,’ Keig said eventually. ‘Must be someone coming in with a message.’
We waited, and soon enough the messenger appeared, a large bald-headed man with the merest fringe of pale gingery hair round a big head. As he stood to make his report I saw his long fat pink-jowled face was dripping with sweat and his great paunch of a belly was making a patch of dark dampness on the creamy white shirt he wore.
Flies were buzzing and pinging around him.
‘I’ve been sent from over by Hoddick way,’ he said in a heavy rather aggrieved voice. ‘By bicycle. Haven’t been on a bicycle for more’n thirty year. And it’s a good way, must be—’
But Keig was unmerciful.
‘You’ve a message?’ he jabbed in. ‘What is it?’
The great sagging-paunched fellow took in a deep groaning breath.
‘From Mr Conilt, in charge at Hoddick,’ he began reciting.
I was already anxiously asking myself what message from the deserted little resort where we had twice had our headquarters could be so urgent. Our most advanced groups towards Lesneven operated from just south of the place and news from them was likely to be decidedly important.
The fat messenger brushed with a great pink ham of a hand at a couple of flies that had settled on his sweat-beaded face and went on.
‘Confirmed report that a force of eighty troopers under Mr Marcus Calo entered Lesneven at noon today,’ he recited. ‘Reports that they have set up a headquarters at the office of the Oceana Messenger received from two different sources. Mr Conilt requests orders about co-operation and advance into the town.’
A ham-hand slapped pettishly at a fly that had impudently landed on the great pink lobe of his left ear. It missed its target.
‘You can tell Conilt to stay put, nothing more,’ Keig said in his old, calmly matter-of-fact tone.
‘Oh,’ said the fat messenger.
He stood in front of us for a second or two longer, evidently expecting something a little more exciting to be said to him after his bringing of the bad news from Ghent to Aix. But, seeing eventually that Keig had ceased to pay any attention to him, he brushed with both huge pink hands at the flies once again and turned lumberingly and tramped off.
‘ ’Spose I’ve got to bicycle all the way back now,’ I heard him mutter.
It was hard on the poor chap, slightly comic figure though he was, but I imagine no one felt like offering him any sympathy after the message he had come with.
Calo in Lesneven. It wanted some thinking about. Lesneven had seemed so impossibly beyond our reach these last months, as it had been in the summer before when we had watched it through field-glasses from the hills beyond Hoddick. And now, apparently without trouble, it had fallen. And all of us had been miles from the scene, busy with our little local struggles with Parties of Keepers or scout-car patrols. It had been Calo, too, Calo almost as callous of human needs and human life as Mylchraine himself, who had finally broken the last barrier.
Nobody seemed to know what to say.
I remember the long silence with the exhausted August afternoon air hanging, over-sweet with tired summer scents, all round us and Keig going on grimly with his lists, the sheet of paper he was writing on set squarely on the board across his legs.
It was stolid Steven Dowan, with clear unblinking eyes and a small frown of responsibility perpetually on his forehead, who took it on himself to speak.
‘Well, Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘so he got there before us.’
Keig looked up.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s in Lesneven.’
But the very placidness of his voice under the shade of such an eclipse sent wriggling squirms of anxiety through my mind.
Yet it was an anxiety much more tangible and acute that was in my mind by that night. Francis Crowe failed to come back from the brigand Gilhast.
The time at which he ought to have reached us came and went and for a fair while I told myself there was nothing to be concerned about. Accidents of all sorts could so easily happen in the troubled island, for all Keig’s timetable of what must be done when. But after the midnight courier had come and gone and all the news of the little barber was that he had reached Gilhast’s hide-out on time, we all had to admit that something must have gone wrong.
And this time Keig did not delegate. He picked out a small force of us, Pat Boddaugh, myself, half a dozen others, and we set off on a night ride on horseback across the sleeping wolds and into the mountains.
We halted shortly before dawn and tethered the horses some distance away from the cave in the Trigastell Hills where Gilhast had his base. And, as the mountainside began to take on colour with the darkness seeping away the higher we climbed, we cautiously advanced towards the place where we had been told that the cave lay.
When the sun came up we spotted Gilhast’s sentry right away. As the warm light struck a wall of rock some two hundred yards ahead of us the man’s whole head and shoulders became clearly outlined in front of it. Keig examined the lie of the land and then quietly sent off two of our party, one to the right, one to the left, to discover if this was Gilhast’s only guard.
Big Pat Boddaugh let out a snort as they left.
‘But they may be starting on the little fella again at any moment up in the cave,’ he muttered. ‘He’s a funny sort, I know, but you get used to people when you’ve been about with ’em long enough.’
‘We won’t do Crowe any good by being seen before we get to him,’ Keig replied grimly.
And after that there were no more comments.
Eventually our two scouts came back and each reported that there was no sign at all of any other sentries. Keig glanced up at the head-and-shoulders figure outlined against the grey of the rock which apparently rose up some ten yards to the rear.
‘Wait here,’ he said to the rest of us.
He left us at a crouching lope hidden from above by the fold of ground where we waited. Shortly after he had gone Gilhast’s guard lit a cigarette.
‘He thieved it somewhere, I bet,’ Pat Boddaugh exclaimed furiously.
Cigarettes, like anything else imported, were very hard to come by in the island by then.
We lay on our stomachs down among the dew-wet bracken and looked up towards the smoking sentry. Nothing happened for something over five minutes. But then I saw Keig. He appeared suddenly as a figure thrown on a screen between the seated man and the grey rock-face behind him. The sun on the blade of his long-handled axe sent a bright glitter down towards us.
It took Keig two minutes to get near enough to the sentry. And then the axe rose swiftly and descended. The man’s head and shoulders disappeared from view.
We saw Keig look downwards. And next—the action was so clear there could be no mistaking it—he put his foot on the stub of the cigarette and ground it thoroughly out.
After that he beckoned us forward.
Gilhast’s hiding-place was not hard to discover: a wide black cave-mouth splitting the middle of the gorse thicket on a somewhat sheltered, steeply sloping sector of the mountainside. We crept towards it, all nine of us moving one step at a time s
o as not to set off any little showers of debris on the stony ground, and as we did so the sound of voices from somewhere inside became spasmodically audible.
Was Francis Crowe’s one of them? We strained to hear.
And then suddenly his familiar fluty tones came to us loud and clear.
‘No, I have not changed my mind this morning. I shall only repeat the terms of Mr Keig’s request: either you should confine yourself to offensive measures against—’
‘Mr Keig? Mr Keig? Who the hell does he think he is?’
The voice that broke in on Francis Crowe’s over-solemn rendering of Keig’s message was, for all its venom, oddly slow and heavy. There could be little doubt it belonged to Gilhast himself. And now Crowe replied to him.
‘Mr Keig, as I explained last night, is the leader of the forces opposed to Mr Mylchraine.’
‘That’s a lie,’ came the dull voice of Gilhast again. ‘Calo’s head of the rebels, everyone knows that.’
‘I cannot say what Mr Calo is doing to support the cause,’ Crowe answered with a lofty dignity I later treasured the memory of. ‘But I can assure you Mr Keig is the person who landed on the island more than a year ago and has fought Mr Mylchraine ever since.’
‘He has, has he?’ Gilhast replied leadenly. ‘And I suppose no one else ever bested a Keeper only him?’
‘I am sure I have no knowledge what others may have done—’
‘But you knock down every Keeper you set eyes on, do you, you little runt? Well, let’s see how tough you are.’
And following the slow words there was a pause and then the sound of what I took to be a fist smacking heavily into Crowe’s face.
Pat Boddaugh started forward. But Keig barred his way with his axe held out. He looked round swiftly and gestured the rest of us further into the cave-mouth ready for one single rush inside.
‘Untie me at once,’ we heard Crowe say, after a quarter minute of silence, unpleasant silence.
He was speaking with some difficulty, and I imagined blood filling his mouth. I looked across at Keig. Surely we could go in now?
‘I shall report this to Mr Keig,’ came Crowe’s voice again. ‘You needn’t think I’ll overlook it.’
‘You will, will you? You little—’
But Keig had given us his signal. We were deep into the cave in two seconds.
There were a dozen of them inside the cave, some still lying half-asleep, others sitting or standing round Francis Crowe where he was tied upright to one of the gleaming wet rock walls. A single hurricane lamp sploshed goldeny light and huge soft shadows imPartially over the whole scene.
We were into them all, lashing out with revolver butts, before they knew what was happening. But Gilhast himself—there could be no doubting which he was, a great hulk of a fellow, face all pointing forwards to the nose—happened unluckily to be protected from our first rush by one of his men so that Pat Boddaugh, diving for him, had to deal with the other first. In the five or ten seconds which this took Gilhast plunged for the cave-mouth, snouted head down, legs outspread, a shotgun clutched at the end of one extended arm, like a great squealing bear.
Boddaugh was after him in a moment. But none of the rest of us was free to follow.
It was, I suppose, as much as a full minute before I found to my considerable surprise, that I had laid out flat the man I had set on. I got to my feet and looked round. Keig too, I saw, was heaving himself off another prostrate bandit further towards the back of the wild chaos of the cavern.
‘Get after Gilhast, quick,’ he shouted across to me.
I headed for the cave-mouth with Keig, scrambling over still struggling bodies, hurrying to join me.
It was just as he emerged beside me into the now sparkling daylight that the shot cracked out. It came from somewhere up on the mountainside above us, and by the sound of it from a shotgun. We both turned and began climbing on all fours up the steep slope of the gorse thicket. Boddaugh had been armed with a pistol only.
We reached the top of the thicket, hands and faces scratched red by the gorse, at about the same moment. Ahead of us lay a more gently inclined area of dark reedy grass stretching away to a scatter of boulders about sixty or seventy yards distant.
Pat Boddaugh was coming towards us over the reeds. He had an odd look of being almost incapably drunk, lumbering along, his big body bent forwards and swaying. He stopped, tugged off his woollen cap, held it for a moment and then let it fall beside him. After a second or so, apparently pausing to consider, he resumed his staggering march towards us. His face seemed to be hidden by some heavy shadow, only, although the sun was shining now pale and clear, there was nothing in that dark stretch of tall grass in front of us to over-shadow him.
‘Pat,’ I shouted, suddenly seized with sharp unfocused fears.
‘Michael? Michael?’ he called out bewilderedly. ‘Where are you? I can’t see. Where am I?’
He waved his hands round about him like a child playing blind-man’s-buff.
Keig and I ran up to him. We saw then that the shadow on his face was blood, blood welling from his nose and cheeks and running all down his chin. A horrible snorting noise came from somewhere inside his head.
I acknowledged to myself now what I had not been willing to admit in the few seconds before: Pat had been shot in the face at close range.
Even as I grabbed his arm the blood, which had been bubbling from nostrils and mouth, abruptly seemed to cease to flow. The weight of his big body suddenly doubled in my grasp. For some seconds Keig and I supported him, one on either side, and then at the same moment we lowered him to the ground.
‘Run now,’ Keig grated out.
He turned, put his head down and began pelting hard forwards to the distant scatter of rocks. I followed.
Thoughts and half-thoughts came and went in my mind as I plunged through the boggy dark grass. Pat, should we leave him? Gilhast is just ahead somewhere. Pat must be dead: the blood proved it, stopping like that. At any moment he may fire again. Cover? Is there any cover?
There was cover. We had reached the near edge of the rock-cluttered area. I saw Keig fling himself down and I almost fell on my face not far from him. Ideally I should have chosen a spot further away, I knew, but I could not have stayed on my feet a moment longer with the thought of the terrible thing that had just happened to Pat so vividly in my mind.
I lay there on the wet ground, panting hard.
Yes, I thought, Gilhast must still be somewhere among these boulders too, perhaps only twenty yards away. We’d have seen him for sure if he’d run on.
I began to get my breath back and started to think more constructively. Neither Keig nor I with only a pair of revolvers between us had a weapon to match the shotgun Gilhast had taken with him from the cave. But surely before too long more of our party would join us. On the other hand, the mountainside ahead provided plenty of cover. The boulders lay close to each other and it would not be hard to creep and dodge from one to another and slowly get well away. Perhaps this was what Gilhast was doing at this very moment, and given enough time he could easily escape altogether.
I brought my pistol up close to my face and gave it a thorough lookover. It seemed none the worse for having been bashed so hard on the skull of the man I had knocked out in the cave. I slipped off the safety-catch and very cautiously heaved myself up on one elbow and peered over the flat rock in front of me.
The sharp crack of a shotgun that I had tensed myself to hear did not come. I settled myself a little more comfortably and began, methodically as I could, to scan the boulders ahead. I could see nothing.
I was just about to say this to Keig, still lying flat there three or four yards away at the other end of the rock, when from beside a tall upstanding boulder, oval in shape and with a fringe of grass on the top like ragged hair on a head, I caught a sudden yellow-red flare and almost immediately heard the sound of a shot and the whistle just overhead of heavy pellets well bunched together.
I flattened myself to th
e wet ground as if by squeezing into it I could gain more protection.
No other shot came. I did not dare look over the rock again. But I decided to discuss the situation with Keig.
‘At least I know where he is now,’ I said to him quietly.
He made no reply, and as his face was turned away from me I thought that perhaps he had not heard.
‘Keig,’ I called, a little more loudly than before.
Again he said nothing.
Wild panicking fear swept through me that he had been somehow killed. But he could not have been: there had been no shots other than the one, and he had been flat as flat behind the rock when Gilhast had fired that.
‘Keig,’ I called again, sharply and urgently.
There was still no answer, though I thought I saw some movement in those broad shoulders of his.
For several seconds I simply lay where I was, baffled into a temporary paralysis.
Then I began shifting over towards him. I reached him quickly enough and put a hand on his back.
His shoulders were quivering. Quivering uncontrollably. And I saw then that his hands were clutching ferociously at the grass and earth beside him.
‘Keig,’ I said, without thinking, ‘what is it?’
He jerked his head round to look at me then.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.
But before the words were half out I had realized that I was looking at the face of a totally frightened man.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not hurt at all.’
Strong Man Page 29