by John Boyd
Then, after the war, Blicket was at loose ends. He could not retain his commission in the army because he had fought on the wrong side; in fact, he was second after Wirtz on the Federals’ wanted list. Since he was too skinny to be a plowboy and not crooked enough to be a lawyer, the end of the war had left The Colonel only the skills of shooting, riding, and commanding men. Society was responsible for Colonel Blicket because society had let peace be declared.
Ian could see the tangled web of the man’s life with startling clarity and even more startling sympathy. If he could sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk with The Colonel, he might point out the folly of the man’s ways. He would have only one problem in talking to Blicket—they would have to yell at each other across a space of twenty yards, the lethal range of The Colonel’s sawed-off shotgun.
Now half-slumped in his reveries, Ian suddenly tensed, realizing the incongruity and danger in his sympathy. Talking to Blicket would be as sensible as patting a rattlesnake’s head, for once the Colonel started to sweet-talk a man, that man was as good as dead. He had to rid himself of such thoughts immediately purge his mind of deadly compassion.
Ian had the purgative at hand. Quite deliberately, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and summoned into his mind the conscious memory of an insult.
Knowing now that Ian’s motive and his cure for passion was about to be revealed, G-7 wrapped its tendrils tighter around the neuron paths in the man’s brain and waited.
In memory, Ian stood again, invisible in the shadows of the ravine, hearing the voices of The Colonel and The Sergeant drift up the draw after Garcia had been killed.
First he heard the rumble of The Sergeant’s voice.
“Loco might think his horse throwed that shoe accidental and try walking to the rendezvous. Reckon I ought to backtrack and kill him, too?”
“No, Sergeant” came the soft, well-modulated tones of The Colonel. “Loco’s not worth the effort. Kill Garcia’s horse to deny him a beast to ride and leave him to the mercy of the desert. A slow death will give him time to consider his errant ways, for the man lied to me in a most reprehensible manner.”
Then The Colonel’s voice dropped letting an eternal note of sadness in.
“Yes, Sergeant, the man you knew as Johnny Loco was Ian McCloud, an ambulance driver in the Army of McClellan. The poltroon who posed to us a rebel sharp-shooter was, in truth, a blue-bellied Yankee.”
Blue-bellied Yankee!
The insult triggered a cyclonic fury in the mind of the man, which swept G-7 into its vortex. G-7’s tendrils quivered. Fully aware that it was losing its objectivity, becoming involved, G-7 was no longer an observer. It shared the anger of its host.
By what arrogance could a barn burning, woman killing, temporary colonel in charge of a ragtag outfit of jayhawkers presume to defame a four-year veteran of Lee’s Miserables with such a term.
Blue-bellied Yankee, indeed.
But a dastard who planned every move had overlooked a simple fact; it was not a horse Ian needed to escape from the desert but a horseshoe. Moreover, Ian found a hammer in the revolver of the dead Garcia with which to drive the nails taken from Garcia’ s dead horse. It was fitting and somehow just that defective planning and Garcia’ s pistol should prove the fatal flaws of Colonel Jasper Blicket.
G-7 was eager for the kill.
Ian was eager, and ready, when the brake shoes clumped against the wheels with enough friction to bring the stagecoach to a jolting halt. Beginning with dactyls and soaring to strophes and antistrophes, a mule skinner’s metric profanity sounded from the driver’s seat, but the tirade against the luck of the road reached its climax in a blast of rifle fire from somewhere to the rear of the stagecoach. Ian heard the rear guard’s body slam against the roof of the vehicle, and he knew the man was dead. The Sergeant, also, had been a sharpshooter with Quantrill’s guerrillas.
From forward, he heard the Colonel’s voice crying up to the driver, “Just hold where you are, sir. You will not be harmed, I assure you. My apologies for having to discommode you in so drastic a manner. All we desire is the payroll box at your feet. Be so kind as to throw it to The Sergeant, sir, and you’ll be permitted to continue your journey in peace to give your fallen comrade a decent Christian burial, though, familiar as I happen to be with the dead gentleman in question, I allow that the blue belly was not much of a Christian.”
It was The Colonel’s method, Ian knew, to feed his victim honeyed words to make the killing easier, to enhance the element of fatal surprise, then throw in an insult to the dead. Once the driver had tossed the box down and completed all the heavy labor, he too would be killed with the sawed-off shotgun The Colonel preferred for close-in shooting.
Without looking out, without seeing the scene, Ian could spot the location of each actor from the sounds: The Colonel atop the gray was forward of the stagecoach horses, the Sergeant scuffling down from the rocks in which he had hidden for the ambush. Ian felt the stagecoach creak as the driver stood to heave the payroll box down, and he heard the man grunt as he released the weight.
Ian opened the door and leaped from the coach.
G-7 fissioned an ion.
Once more, time froze around Ian. He floated out of the stagecoach and drifted toward the ground. Fluttering like a leaf, he twisted in flight and fired a bullet toward the heart of The Sergeant who stood slightly up the hillside, his simian arms lifted to catch a box which was falling slower than the bullet which moved toward his heart. Ian spun farther in his gyre, clockwise relative to the ground, knowing The Sergeant would never catch the box alive. He heard a “splat” as his bullet struck The Sergeant’s sternum before he heard the slowly ascending “kapow” of his pistol, which was merging into the long withdrawing roar of the shotgun’s blast. With his right arm held high for balance, he landed lightly on the balls of his feet to face The Colonel who, teeth bared in a grin was sending a charge of buckshot crawling upward toward the driver.
As Ian’s boot heels came slowly level with the balls of his feet, he brought the pistol down from the height it had reached when he flung his arm. Beneath The Colonel’s head, Ian’s gaze caught the gray uniform of an officer of the Confederacy. He could not find within himself enough sacrilege to despoil the uniform, so he halted the downward progress of his pistol and took careful aim at The Colonel’s head, denying himself a groin shot for the patriotic reason.
Colonel Blicket was turning to the sight and sound of Ian, and his head bent slowly in Ian’s direction. Like a lover bending to savor a kiss, he accepted the caress of the bullet precisely between the eyes, and the “zap” the slug made against the bridge of his nose sounded, ironically, as sensuous as a kiss. As his head snapped slowly back, straining against a neck which dragged his long body off the horse, time resumed its tempo amid the roar of gunfire echoing and reechoing from the canyon walls.
In the interstices of frozen time, G-7 found space to reevaluate its loss of objectivity. It had, itself, indulged a certain pleasure in scrambling the energy systems of The Colonel and The Sergeant, both of which richly deserved cessation. For a moment during the gunfight, it had enjoyed a rare and total rapport with its host, but now that the fighting was over the slow process of reformation would have to be resumed.
By all its canons and creeds destructiveness was a sin. In a moment of passionate weakness it had yielded to the profligacy of the planet, and now it and its host must atone. Casting on Ian’s visual areas the image of Gabriella, her face frozen into lines of disapproval, it triggered a phrase of self-revulsion in McCloud’s mind.
“Look on this waste, you violent, and despair.”
Ian glanced around him.
Nothing had been wasted here. Gabriella with her saving ways ought to appreciate this gunfight. Four bullets had been fired and four people were dead.
But, he was forced to admit, the carnage might have reinforced Gabriella’s dislike of violence. The Colonel’s shotgun blast had driven the driver backwards, and he was spread-
eagled atop the stagecoach, gazing at the risen sun with his one good eye. The right side of his face had been torn away by the charge and the right eyeball, a viscous glob stringing from an attenuated eye muscle, dangled over his cheekbone and seemed to be studying intently something on the ground. To the rear, the shotgun guard’s condition might have also upset Gabriella. The Sergeant’s dum-dum bullet had entered the back of the man’s head, carrying most of his face with it and scattering his brains and bits of skull as far as the driver.
On the ground, only The Sergeant looked natural, lying on his back against the hillside with his face unmarred. His sloping forehead, his heavy eyebrows almost touching his black, kinky hair, made him appear more apelike than human. The only unnatural aspect of The Sergeant was his eyes, open and staring at the sun. There was more expression in them, dead, than Ian had ever seen in them, alive.
It was a monstrous scene, Ian admitted, even to a person with only a clinical interest in the details, but not until he turned to the recumbent form of The Colonel did the taste of death turn to ashes in his mouth. Patting the rump of the giant gray with proprietary interest, he walked to the rear of the horse and looked down.
Ian’s bullet had drilled a hole neatly between The Colonel’s eyes, giving him a three-eyed face. Pressure from the bullet going in had bulged the eyes outward and turned them inward, so, in effect, The Colonel’s normal death’s-head appearance, accentuated by his baldness, retained the illusion of reality slightly distorted which gave the corpse a grotesquerie greater than the others. Ian was looking down on a cross-eyed, bug-eyed monster.
Yet it was not the horror that brought sadness to Ian: It was the knowledge that Colonel Blicket died before he knew who killed him. For any personal satisfaction it gave him, Ian might as well have shot a hole in a fence post, and for all Colonel Blicket knew, he could have died a pillar of the community, surrounded by eager heirs and a grieving widow. The clod stretched out before Ian was as incapable of hating or being hated as a fallen legionnaire of Julius Caesar.
Still, Ian doffed his hat out of respect for the uniform and stood for a moment with bowed head. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” was a part of the Scripture he understood fully now. Only the Lord had the power, if the Lord had a mind to, to get to a man after he was dead and explain to him the error of his ways.
It behooved Ian to think good thoughts about the dead, and the nicest thing he could think about The Colonel was that he had left a good horse for Ian McCloud, not counting The Sergeant’s nag which was built more for carrying weight than for speed. Looking over at The Sergeant, the best thought Ian could think about him was that, as brutal, moronic, and sadistic as The Sergeant had been, he was a more righteous man than The Colonel, mainly because he didn’t have brains enough to make him worse.
Then, too, he was obliged to the two of them for killing the driver and guard.
Suddenly, Ian’s mind soared above funereal thoughts. Horses weren’t the only valuable items around here. Three thousand dollars in greenbacks were in the payroll box. He turned and clambered up the hill.
When the driver tossed the payroll cash down, the heavy wooden container had either hit The Sergeant’s head as Ian turned away or it had hit a boulder and bounced up the hillside. When it fell, one of the planks had loosened. As Ian bent and pried back the loose board, he looked in and saw neat stacks of ten dollar bills banded in groups of ten and so fresh he could smell the ink. Thirty such bundles lay before him, all his.
G-7 had tensed for another confrontation with evil, but its direct-line reasoning had not prepared it for the storm which swept McCloud’s brain when his eyes fell on the money. It was almost shaken from the neuron channels along which it lay, relaxing from its efforts in computing the trajectories of the gunfighter’s bullets and slowing his concept of time. Writhing in the hail of neurons, G-7 recoiled from the storm center, the thalamus. Never before had it truly gauged the extent of this man’s greed.
That greed must be counteracted at once, or the cosmic storm whipping through the hydrocarbons of its host would deetherealize G-7. The being was no longer fighting to save mankind or Ian McCloud. It was fighting for its own existence.
Frantically, G-7 fissioned an ion, nudging a carbon atom here, realigning a molecular chain there, quieting axions, plugging synapses, firing into the cerebral cortex impulses toward social duty, self-respect, obedience to law, human decency, honesty, goodness, unselfishness. It thought it was calming the storm until Ian reached in and picked up a stack of bills and riffled the edges. They were crisper to his touch than a new deck of cards, and the odor of their ink was more potent than the perfume of Gabriella.
Gabriella! Recoiling farther from the thalamus, G-7 sent photons against the visual areas of Ian’s brain and projected a picture of Gabriella, poised, beautiful, but smiling down on him with disapproval.
What a time for wool-gathering about a single girl, Ian thought. With this $3,000 plus the money in the bank, he could have every beauty south of the border, then rent a private railroad car to take him to New England for a fling with Yankee girls, girls who would not be fencing him in with the “do’s” and “don’ts” of a schoolteacher. He bent for another packet of tens to fondle.
G-7 fused two ions and fissioned them as one.
With its new burst of power, G-7 laid before its host a veritable feast of the pleasures of respectability and domesticity. It revealed to the man’s inner vision the delights of a cottage with a rose garden, the esteem of neighbors, loving babes, an adoring and faithful wife, Gabriella. As Ian fanned the bills like cards before him, G-7 wrought in his mind its own version of the Temptation on the Mount.
Ian was not tempted by the appeals of domesticity and respectability. G-7 might as well have appealed to his sense of honor and duty. Ian was shuffling the bills and sniffing them.
Borrowing from the habits of its host, G-7 dropped its straight-line reasoning and drew to an inside straight.
It curved into Ian’s thalamus a three-dimensional image of Liza charged with G-7’s own high regard for the earth mother. It was a portrait of the woman’s head and her robust torso, heaving and bare. But a sadness in the widow’s eyes denied to the man her torso’s promise of pneumatic bliss.
G-7 filled to a royal flush.
“By golly,” Ian said, lifting his head to sniff around him the faint and sulfurous reek of ionized hydrogen, “I never thought of that.”
With her head for business, no wonder Liza disliked the way he was handling this matter. The Colonel over yonder was worth $5,000 dead, and The Sergeant was worth $3,000. Together they were worth almost twice as much as the $3,000 in the box, even though it would take two or three days to collect the rewards. The $7,000 he’d make from the bounties would make him such a heavy depositor to the Shoshone Flats bank he’d lose more in interest than he’d gain from robbing the bank.
Besides, Shoshone Flats was the closest town to the new Indian reservation, and he’d always had a feeling of sympathy for the Indians. They were the CSA of the West because they’d lost their war, too. Staying in town, he might be able to do something nice for the poor, cooped-up Indians.
He tithed four packets of tens for himself from the payroll money and nailed the loose plank back onto the box with his boot heel. The money would be missed, but the Territorial Stage Lines was responsible for the bookkeeping. If the stage line lost its contract through the dishonesty of its bookkeepers, it would serve Birnie right for hiring just anybody who would work for the wages Birnie paid.
He hoisted the box back onto the driver’s platform and lugged the body of The Sergeant over and tossed it lengthwise onto the floor of the coach. Showing deference to the uniform, he set The Colonel’s body on the seat, tilting. the head against the side of the stagecoach and dropping the wide-brimmed campaign hat over the three eyes. Too bad, Ian thought, that there was no sword to lay on The Colonel’s chest.
He backed out of the stage quickly and walked forward to gather the ho
rses . He didn’t mind the odor of blood since it came with the job, but he didn’t like the odor of ozone which hovered in the area as if lightning had struck nearby. His mother, he remembered, always said it smelled like brimstone.
After he rounded up the gray and The Sergeant’s stocky pinto, the odor had drifted away, and Ian got a pleasant surprise. When he tied the gray back of the stage next to Midnight, the black horse whinnied softly and the gray nickered in reply. This solved a problem he was already beginning to worry about, one that might have interfered, even, with his new plans; it hadn’t struck him before but The Colonel’s gray, Traveler II , was a mare.
He lassoed the brake handle by the driver’s seat and, trailing the lariat over his shoulder, mounted one of the lead horses. He could brake the stagecoach by tugging on the rope, and he did not want to sit on the driver’s seat next to the late driver. Without a doubt, he was losing his stomach for this business, so the decision he had made was the right one.
For the second time in a month, almost to the day, Ian rode into Shoshone Hats astride a draft horse, trailing a grisly burden behind. For the second time, he was greeted first by the sunbonnet under which dwelled his most loyal support, Sister Betsy Troop, who stood by the stakes which marked the future site of the McCloud Comfort Station.
“Who you bringing in this time, Ian?”
“Colonel Jasper Blicket and one of his gang, a fellow called The Sergeant. I don’t recall the names of the two gentlemen on top.”
“The driver used to be Graves Paige,” Sister Betsy said. “Lived over near Jackson City. Never took him for the brainy kind, but I can see he had his share. Poor boy, done give his all for the Territorial Stage Lines. Don’t recognize the other one because he ain’t got no face… Well, as I always said, crime don’t pay.”