And Crispin was an artist, a painter of pictures. Doc said he was a true artist. He didn't want to look at her beauty just to slobber over it, he wanted to put it in beautiful paints on canvas. He meant things honorably.
All right, she said to herself, I'll do it. I'll go and pose for that picture.
Quickly she began to put her clothes on again.
Gander Eye had watched from his own front door as Slowly went into her living quarters. He waited for minutes until she appeared again and headed up Main Street toward the store.
Now, he decided, he'd go for a little walk in the woods. He wanted to see things by the broad open light of the day, where it had been so hard to see them last night where the moonlight didn't soak in.
He went back into his bedroom and changed into army surplus fatigues. They were the kind that were patterned with green and brown leaves over tan, the kind that might deceive a human eye, though perhaps not an animal s. He put on a pair of cleat-soled boots that laced up over the bottoms of the pants.
From his stand of rifles he chose the Springfield. He fed a clip of cartridges into the magazine and clicked on the safety, and put several more clips into the pouchlike pockets of the fatigue blouse. Into the hip pocket of the pants went his pistol.
Then he walked out and ambled to the ruins of the bridge at the end of town toward Dogged Mountain. He did not cross on the litter of fallen timbers, but headed along Bull Creek into the woods. Under that cover, he came upslope to where he reached the stone-studded pair of ruts that made that road of sorts to the Kimber settlement.
Keeping well under the branches to the side, he strode along up the sloping way, looking everywhere and listening to everything.
VII
Gander Eye had hunted relatively seldom in this direction, the direction of the Kimber settlement. The Kimbers liked to hunt there themselves, with all sorts of guns they used extremely well. When they met someone on what they felt was their own hunting grounds, they were icily polite about telling him other places where, perhaps, the hunting was better. On top of that, Gander Eye wasn't sure what he was out looking for. And when a man wasn't dead sure of that, he'd do well to go along carefully, as if maybe something was out looking for him.
Therefore Gander Eye held close to one edge of the rocky ruts, ready at any moment to fade silently in among the tree trunks. Where sunlight patched the ground, there grew tufts of blue dustflower, of freckle-bloomed jewel weed, off to the left of the trail tumbled Bull Creek, tumbling lower and lower as the slope ascended. He kept his ears sharp, as sharp as his eyes. He could hear a cardinal, calling grumpily to its mate far away. When a little blue lizard scuttled across in front of him, he could hear its supple body whisper in the grass as plainly as he saw it.
What the Kimbers called a road was bad even to walk on. Gander Eye wondered who had made this road to start with, and how. It wasn't a road kept up by the highway department, that was for sure. The Kimbers had done it long ago, probably by hand, probably blasting rocks out of the hard face of Dogged Mountain and filling in here and there with what they blasted loose. He looked leftward to where Bull Creek raced along, and across to the far wall of the height that rose on the other side. The trees grew interestingly there, fresh-leafed oaks and locusts and gums mixed in with darker evergreens. He wondered if Jim Crispin wouldn't enjoy painting this kind of scenery.
But the Kimbers had told Crispin nothing doing about painting the baptism scene at their place. They might even say nothing doing about coming this far up their road to paint. Gander Eye had accomplished a couple of miles of his expedition; he was in the range of country the Kimbers more or less claimed. If some of them were to show up now—
His ears, wide open, tuned in all the time, caught a faint hint of sound, up the road ahead of him.
At once he slunk into the thickly tangled growth at the inner side. A sort of trail was half-hidden there, it seemed to lead higher along the slope among the stems of pines. He followed it thankfully. It was steep, but quite hard and smooth under his cleated soles, almost like a pavement of clay. Water must have washed it into that smoothness. As he scrambled along into deeper cover, he wondered how that trail came to be there. He had never noticed it before. Under a serviceberry's cloud of slim petals, with just a touch of pink in the whiteness, he knelt to see what had made that noise.
Voices. Gander Eye felt better about that, for voices meant men, and he had never been afraid of men, only cautious now and then. He drew aside a branch of spruce pine to see better.
A minute passed, seconds more than a minute. Then they came into view on the road he had quitted, three of them. They were Kimber men, two young and one older, tall and fine-looking, dressed in those clothes their women sewed for them. They had wide, shapeless pants held up with home-tanned leather suspenders, collarless shirts, and picturesquely tattered hats. Gander Eye's own hat was old, but not that old. They carried empty burlap bags and big oil cans. That told him that they must be headed for the store at Sky Notch, to come back loaded down with supplies of necessary staples for their homes. He should be through with his own scouting adventure and headed home before they got back this far.
He watched them walk loosely down the road and out of sight, then he waited. They would need a minute or two along their way before he could emerge into the open without danger of being seen. He glanced down at the path up which he had come, wondering again how it had come to be made.
He felt more surely that it was like a channel where water had run in wet seasons. It was a yard or more across and well driven down into the earth among the tree trunks. If rain was falling, that channel would be slippery as grease underfoot. Gander Eye bent his head and looked closely. He could not remember ever seeing anything like it. Rising to a crouch, he moved uphill along its line, carefully moving branches from his way and easing them back behind him as he passed.
The sunken course made a curve as it mounted. He held to it until he came into the open and saw, in a moment of utter surprise, what it was.
The trail led to a great collection of rocks in a clearing among the pines, a gathered mass there of big fragments as though a giant had collected them. They were heaped one upon another, not like a wall or building, but nevertheless in a certain strange order. Gander Eye left the trail that had led him upward and came close to look.
At the very top of that sunken way was poised a great chunk of dull gray stone, the size and somewhat the shape of a barrel. Where it lay half-lodged in the ground, two or three smaller stones had been shoved in as though to keep it from working loose and rolling down the slope.
For, once sprung free, that rock and all the others would roll down indeed, right down along that channellike path. The channel would guide their plunge into the road below. There the torrent of boulders would bounce, and the downward slope would keep it whirling, rolling, jouncing downhill on the road itself.
Those smaller rocks kept the big fragment in place; but, as Gander Eye judged, they could be kicked loose in a moment of time. The second boulder was close set against the first, to follow it if it rolled, and others behind would be freed.
Gander Eye pursed his lips to whistle, then decided not to. He surveyed the mighty collection of rocks. Here and there among them lengths of wood jutted upwards, wedged in there. Those could act as levers to start more rocks from more solid resting places. It would become an avalanche.
He moved cautiously, almost on tiptoe, along the lower edge of the far-flung pile. He estimated that sixty or more boulders were gathered there, in downright baleful arrangement. At one point he stooped among bushes. A second channel led down, sunken and smooth like the one he had seen by chance and followed upward. Beyond that opened the mouth of a third.
All of this, then, was an armament poised against a possible unwanted approach up the rutted road. Two or three defenders up here could trigger it all into a tumbling stream of big stones, a whole torrent of destruction, like the mountain itself rushing down. A car climbing up
the dubious road could be struck, smashed, hurled over the slope into Bull Creek below. A whole procession of cars could be overwhelmed. And if men on foot were coming up the road, and were not wanted there—
Gander Eye was not one to shudder, but he hiked his shoulders and scowled tightly. All this was a new idea to him, and a highly unpleasant one. Whoever had gathered this arsenal of mighty fragments, whatever the purpose in gathering it, Gander Eye did not like it. Was it some kind of war preparation by the Kimbers? Surely the Kimbers knew about it, roaming these belts of mountain forest as they did. Perhaps it was one of the reasons they discouraged visitors, whether strangers or acquaintances.
But whatever its origin, here at last was something Gander Eye must talk about to someone. Not that it was what he had come out to look for on this road. Maybe these rocks were not anywhere near so dangerous as what he had meant to find, either. Maybe the danger abode in whatever had made the pile.
Carefully he retraced his steps along the threatening lower edge of the collection to the side in the direction of Sky Notch. Pine trees grew thickly there, and he moved among them, scaling the steep face of the mountain to where he could turn and head back above all those rocks. As he walked he looked constantly in all directions and strained his ears to hear. At last he came to a halt at a midpoint above the expanse of stacked boulders.
From there he could see, at fairly close quarters, one of those leverlike poles that was wedged perpendicularly in the stack. It looked like a tough piece of a locust tree, the sort that can stand in the open for years, resisting the winds and the rains, resisting, too, the attacks of boring insects. But this pole did not seem to have stood wedged there for years. The bark was not yet dried enough to flake away. Gander Eye judged that the locust pole had been cut only short months ago.
He gazed at it, and his eyes narrowed down to slits. His mouth twitched as though he would speak, but he kept silent.
Brown scorched patches showed on that bark.
Gander Eye forgot his determination to stay under cover on this hillside, forgot his worry about those loosely piled chunks. He ran out on them, stepping cautiously from one to another as though crossing a stream on a line of stones, and stooped to look at that locust pole.
He could see more plainly that it had been lodged in place fairly recently, that it had been cut not too long ago. The scorched areas were plain to his eyes. It was as though the pole had been gripped in some sort of heated grappling irons, in at least three places. The bark had been seared through to the wood beneath, without charring it black.
It had been nothing red-hot, then. But hot. As hot, perhaps, as that chunk of gold had been when it was flung to his feet on the road in the darkness last night.
He picked his way back to the sheltering pines above the rock pile, went well in among the close-set trunks, and sat down with his back to one. He'd better study this mystery well.
This poised and hair-triggered landslide, masked here in readiness for a roaring, tumbling disaster on the road below, was nothing the Kimbers had set up. The Kimbers didn't work with hot metal claws. The Kimbers didn't have any sort of equipment to drag together such rocks as these. And the Kimbers weren't about to declare war on anybody if they could help it.
All right, then; what was afoot, if it had feet, in these mountains, and what was doing whatever it seemed to be doing?
No answer came from within him. He gritted his teeth over it. At last he rose and took up his scouting journey again, among the trees above that daunting arrangement. He won to a point well beyond it, crept down the steepness of the wooded incline, and gained the upper side of the road. He gazed long and keenly both ways before he dropped into the open and walked on, next to a rut.
The upward grade of the road became gentler almost at once. Gander Eye kept his way close to the inner side, ready to dart into hiding at the slightest hint of anyone else abroad. He glanced back along the road. It descended so steeply in the direction he had come that it seemed almost like a chute. Again he imagined a storm of descending rocks on that road, smashing into cars or men. He hiked his shoulders as before, in something very much like a shiver.
He kept looking to the side for more mouths of more channels from up the slope and was relieved to find none. The road attained the crown of a rise and sloped the other way beyond, though not so abruptly. Here, at least, would be no ambush of granite and sandstone blocks, or it would be set to rush toward the Kimber settlement.
He crossed to the side of the road above Bull Creek, many feet below at this point. Stooping, he studied tufts of laurel and hemlock and tangled oak scrub on the downward slope. After a long moment, he spied what he had come to look for. The foliage was brown in patches here and there, as though by the touch of heat. If it had been a little hotter, he decided, the growth might have burst into flame.
Right here, then, was more or less the spot where he had been offered that gift of gold.
He did not go down for a closer examination, but turned and trotted back the way he had come. At the stretch opposite the masked clutter of rocks above, he felt an irritating chill within himself and quickened his pace. On the way down the grade beyond, he turned and looked, despite himself, turned again. He asked his heart if it expected a sudden pursuing gallop of boulders after him.
Back he came to where he could drop down to the creekside and enter Sky Notch from the point where the ruined bridge stood. Entering his house once again, he racked up his rifle and put his pistol in its drawer. He looked at the watch he wore on a leather strap at his wrist. It was nearly noon. He sat down and put into articulate thought the things he had halfway found out up there, on the road up Dogged Mountain to the Kimber homes. He was going to have to tell somebody about all this.
Emerging at his front door, he walked purposefully up Main Street to the side street where Doc Hannum lived. The door stood half open, and Doc sat at his table inside, writing.
"Come in the house, Gander Eye," Doc called to him, taking off his spectacles to polish them.
Gander Eye lingered on the threshold. "I don't want to pester you if you're busy," he said.
"Don't give it a thought." Doc laid down his pen. "I'll tell you about what it is. Maybe Jim Crispin, with all his painting, give me the notion of being creative myself some way or other. I've been doing an outline for what may become the history of Sky Notch."
"History of Sky Notch," Gander Eye said after him. "What kind of history is there to write about that?"
"Oh, things have happened here," replied Doc. "I have access to the town records, you know, and they go a long way back. And folks like you can tell me about things." He studied Gander Eye shrewdly. "But to judge by that tight look around your mouth, you haven't come here just to wonder what I'm scribbling down here."
Gander Eye came in and sat down at the table. Doc went to a shelf for two glasses and a fruit jar of blockade and poured both of them a drink. Gander Eye sipped, studied his glass, and sipped again.
"I don't rightly know where to begin this," he confessed.
"Why don't you begin with where you went this morning when you left home with a rifle in your hand?" Doc suggested. "Maybe you think nobody noticed you, but I did. Old men sit and look out their front doors at things, you know."
"All right, that's where I'll start off, then."
Hesitantly, picking his words. Gander Eye told the tale of his adventure on the road to the Kimber settlement. He described the mighty heap of rocks, the locust pole with its scorched bark. Then he told of his brief glimpse of the unknown creature on the day that Crispin had arrived in Sky Notch, and of his encounter in the night with the creature that had given him the ingot of gold. Doc listened attentively, once tilting more blockade into his glass.
"I don't reckon you're about to believe any of this tale," he finished.
Doc grinned so broadly that his whole strong old face looked chubby. He took a sip and grinned again.
"No," he said genially, "I don't reckon I am."
"Ain't a many men I'd take that off of," he said.
"Not many, but you and I are old, old friends." Again Doc tasted his drink with bland approval. "Old enough friends for me to remind you that I've noticed and enjoyed the pranks you're always playing, the tall stories you come up with, to make life in Sky Notch a little more interesting."
"Just what in hell are you getting at, Doc?"
"Why," said Doc, "just look at the last two days with you. First you go about helping Duffy Parr commit suicide, and drive him pointblank into marriage and total abstinence. Not content with that, you devil poor old Uncle Cliff Pelton and frighten him to the very roots of his soul with your climbing irons—don't stare at me, that adventure's being told all over this end of the county. Gander Eye, you're more or less a natural genius of mischief for mischief's sake. I'm going to write you into my history as the Till Eulenspiegel of Sky Notch."
"Never heard of that fellow," said Gander Eye.
"I'm forcibly reminded of your adventure a few years back, the day that Derwood Ballinger, lord mayor of no fewer than two hundred and fifty souls here in Sky Notch, was fishing in Brummitt's Pond. You swam I don't know how far under water that day, just to hang a dead groundhog on his hook. And it was just the mercy of hell that you didn't put the barb of that hook through your thumb."
"I'd never have done that," said Gander Eye. "Hook myself, I mean."
"And now you want to come and tell me a tale taller than Mount Mitchell," accused Doc gently.
Gander Eye sat up straight. "What if I was to take you up yonder and show you that there big stack of rocks?" he suggested.
"No," said Doc. "I'm pretty well stricken in years to go scrambling over these scenic heights with you. And neither one of us wants to drive a car along that travesty of a road." Again he grinned, more broadly than before. "Tell me one thing, Gander Eye. Were you at all frightened when you saw that big heap of rocks set ready to roll down, the way you say they are?"
The Beyonders Page 7