“What…what happened?” he finally got out.
“Sleeping off a drunk? Fell down a flight of steps?” Mallory said. The sound of his voice seemed to wake Humphrey all the way up and his eyes flew open.
“What? Who?”
“Humped and you.”
When he could focus, Humphrey saw that Mallory was lying on his side just inches from him, so that their noses were almost touching.
“What a giant pain in the rear you turned out to be. My partner and I have a sweet deal going. First Bilgewater and Sadie have to push their way in and cash in on our con, and then you…. Well you show up and try to ruin everything—not to mention the whole killing me thing.”
Humphrey did a good job of putting some distance between him and Mallory, considering how he was trussed up. “Where are Bilgewater and Sadie?”
“Ran off screaming, ‘Please, please don’t kill me!’ right after I hit you in the head,” Mallory said.
Bilgewater had asked Mallory to keep their conspiracy hidden from Humphrey, saying, “He’s like a bad coin. He just keeps turning up. I’d just as soon he didn’t know we double crossed him.”
Mallory considered the frightened man in front of him. “I’ll take care of them later. You on the other hand…. Frankly, you ruined my dinner. You know how hard it is for me to digest when I learn someone wants to kill me? And at a discount no less! Seriously, fifty coins to kill me? Why do I even try, what’s the point? You work and work and work at scaring the crap out of people and for what? Fifty coins? It’s an insult!”
Mallory stood up, dusted himself off, and walked over to throw some logs on the fire. Not because it was cool, just because he was sure where the human’s mind would go when he saw him tending the fire. Seeing Humphrey swallow hard he knew he hadn’t guessed wrong.
“Look, dragon, I know you aren’t some stupid animal. Let’s make a deal. You let me go, and I run away and never tell a soul about your con game.”
“I’m not seeing what I get out of that deal,” Mallory said, stirring the fire with a stick and then just for good measure throwing a ball of fire into it.
“You get me not telling the town’s people what you’re doing,” Humphrey explained.
Mallory laughed the most evil laugh he could dredge up, and he’d been practicing. “They don’t know what we’re doing now, and as long as you stay right here they aren’t going to find out. You can just stay tied up till Duncan has collected that reward money and we go.”
“I can’t stay tied up like this for days. How will I go to the bathroom?”
“Well I suggest you just don’t eat anything, drink as little as possible, and move away from any puddle you happen to make.”
“That’s inhuman.”
“Hello! Dragon.”
“You can’t do this!” Then, as if he had just thought of it, he started screaming at the top of his lungs, “Help! Help me! Help!”
“Seriously? Seriously? Do you really think we’d be close enough to town that they could hear you scream? Do you take me for a rank amateur? Besides which they’d just be even less likely to come up here figuring I’m torturing you or worse.”
“Then I’ll scream what you’re doing.” Humphrey drew a deep breath and started yelling again. “Duncan is in cahoots with the dragon! It’s a swindle!”
“Yes, yes. Why don’t you scream that a thousand times? You know what that sounds like to anyone close enough to hear any part of it?”
Humphrey shrugged, no doubt saving his voice for his message.
“‘Help, help! Send Duncan! The dragon’s killing me!’ So knock yourself out.”
The human screamed his message for about five minutes, and then Mallory jumped, landing with his feet just inches from Humphrey’s head. He glared down at him. “Of course, if you irritate me enough I could always just eat you.” Humphrey fell silent. “That’s better, now you be a good boy. I’ve got a little errand to run.” Mallory grabbed his vest, checked the pockets, and took off. The minute he left Humphrey started screaming again, but Mallory was right and long before he got close to the town even his sharp ears couldn’t hear the man’s voice any more.
* * * *
He found Christina waiting in the clearing for him. She waved big and skipped up to him with a bouquet of wild flowers. He handed her an apple he’d brought with him from camp.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” Christina said.
“Nonsense, I said I’d come, didn’t I?”
“Uh huh. I like your vest.”
“Why thank you.” Mallory watched as the child devoured the apple greedily. “Have you been waiting long? You seem awful hungry.”
Christina was quiet for a minute then she looked up at him. Her blond hair framed her tiny face and her blue eyes were swimming with tears. “I gave my daddy the money and he went to get groceries but…. Instead he bet all the money on you, so we still don’t have any food and….”
“No offense, but your father is a fool.”
“I know. That’s what Mommy says,” Christina said. She looked up at Mallory and smiled “I brought jacks. You want to play jacks?”
“You’ll have to teach me how,” Mallory said.
They’d been playing for a while and Mallory still couldn’t think of any way to bet on jacks—at least not so you could cheat and win. “Christina, this just might be the fairest game I’ve ever played in my life. It’s been fun, but I have to go. I’ve got work to do.”
Mallory thought about it only a minute then he reached into one of the immense pockets in his vest and pulled out two bags of coins. It was in fact everything they had besides what was still in his cheek pouches and the twenty-five coins Duncan had in his pouch. “Can you do exactly what I tell you, Christina, without telling anyone at all about me?”
“Of course. We’re friends,” Christina said.
“Take this small pouch to your mother. Tell her you found it in the street. I assume your mother will actually buy groceries with it.”
Christina nodded excitedly.
“Take the other bag—the big one—and take it down to the hotel. There are some people staying there, strangers from out of town. The man is called Bilgewater and the lady is called Sadie. They’re the ones who people have been betting with. You go in and you bet all that money on Duncan to win.”
“But he’s not really going to hurt you because he’s your friend, right?”
“That’s right. You will win a lot of money. When you collect the money you bring it here and I will split it with you, and then your family will have lots of money. Do you understand?”
Christina nodded.
“You can’t tell anyone about me and Dunc. You got that? No one can know.”
She nodded again. “I won’t tell no one, Mallory, ‘cause we’re friends.” She hugged him and he hugged her back.
“I have to go. I’ll meet you back here around this time tomorrow.”
* * * *
“Where were you?” Duncan asked hotly as Mallory walked back into camp.
“I had an errand to run.” Mallory shrugged.
“An errand to run. You aren’t supposed to be doing anything but getting ready to attack the town tomorrow, let me kill you, and then hide while I collect the reward. You were supposed to be watching Humphrey so he didn’t get away. When I got up here he had pulled himself over to the fire and was trying to burn the ropes off his hands. And he was screaming his head off.”
Mallory looked at where Humphrey lay on the ground and frowned. “Look what you did now. You got me in trouble. Well I hope you’re happy, young man.”
“Where were you?” Duncan demanded.
“I wanted us to cash in on some of the action Bilgewater and Sadie are getting so I found someone to make a bet for me on you.”
“You told someone. Someone in town knows you aren’t really going to kill them and that it’s all just an act!” Duncan was in a near panic. “Why would you do that, Mallory? Why would you do that without
asking me?”
“Relax, Dunc. You’ll give yourself an ulcer. You keep forgetting I’m the financial genius of this team. Don’t worry. I got a little kid to make the bet for us.”
“A kid? Are you insane? Mallory, kids can’t keep secrets.”
“They can if they think it might get them into trouble if they tell. It’s perfect. No one’s going to believe a kid. If she says I’m not a bad dragon and it’s all a scam they’ll just think she has a vivid imagination.”
Duncan nodded. As usual, what Mallory said made perfect sense.
“Besides the kid’s family is broke, and they need the money. It’s in her best interest not to tell anyone what we’re up to.”
Then Duncan noticed Mallory’s vest wasn’t riding as low as it had been. “How much did you bet?”
“All of it,” Mallory said, looking at his claws and flicking some dirt out from under one of them.
“All of it! All of it! Are you nuts?”
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides it’s a sure thing, Dunc. Calm down, what could go wrong?”
“I can think of any number of things that could go wrong. Not the least of which is that Bilgewater and Sadie might skip town with the money and not pay anyone.”
“I think not. They strike me as the kind who hedge their bets by not burning bridges behind them.”
“They aren’t going to pay on any bet we make.”
“They won’t know we’re making a bet.”
“They’re going to let some little kid bet a bag of coins on me knowing I’m going to win?”
Mallory seemed to think on that for a minute, looking somewhat troubled.
“That’s what I thought! You didn’t really think about it at all.” Duncan jumped up and almost hit his head on the roof of the rock overhang they’d made camp under. “You put the whole operation in jeopardy without asking what I thought, and let’s face it, I’m the one who is out there not you.” Duncan started stomping around. “I have a bad feeling, Mal, a real bad one.” He looked to where Humphrey lay silent but smiling. He hadn’t felt good about anything since Humphrey showed up.
“What are you grinning at, you jackal!” He stomped close to Humphrey, sending a plume of dust into his face.
“Nothing.” Humphrey coughed and shrugged as best he could.
“Remember what you said about coincidences, Mallory?”
“Yes, and we already know it is no coincidence that any of these people are here. Look, the worst thing that happens is you’re right and Bilgewater and Sadie won’t let the kid make the bet. In which case you’ll still get the reward money, and I’ll get our money back from the kid.” But Mallory didn’t seem so cocky now, which bothered Duncan more than a little.
If Mallory wasn’t sure things were going to go his way then Duncan was sure they were in for some huge calamity.
The dragon motioned for Duncan to follow him out of earshot of their prisoner. “As soon as you get the reward money…” Mallory knelt down and drew a crude map of the town with a stick in the dirt. “…meet me in the woods here. It’s a small clearing about a hundred yards from the back of this house. We’ll collect our winnings, if there are any, or just our money if Christina couldn’t make the bet.”
“I can’t believe you gave all my money….”
“Our money,” Mallory reminded.
“I can’t believe you trusted all our money to some little girl. Did you take a hit on the head or something, Mal? Maybe eat some plant you shouldn’t have?”
Mallory shrugged. “What can I say? I have a soft spot for kids.”
“All our money, Mal. You’ve gone soft, soft in your head.” He took his foot and rubbed out the map because he didn’t trust that their prisoner wasn’t going to escape. “I’ve got to get back to town. Make sure they know I’m there to protect them….”
“Protect them. Oh, that gives me a great idea. We could run a protection racket….”
“Don’t even think about it. If we get out of this one alive and with any money at all, I say we head for home and put all of Winterhurst behind us for good.”
Mallory nodded. “All right, partner.”
Duncan grabbed his cloak and sword. “I’ll be on the porch of the general store at high noon,” he said in a whisper so that Humphrey couldn’t overhear him.
“I’ll be there,” Mallory said, giving him a thumbs up with his opposable claw.
“Keep an eye on him,” Duncan said, pointing at the hog-tied man, “He’s not as stupid as he seems, and if he gets loose.…”
“He won’t,” Mallory said. “I’ll tie him good and tight just before I leave camp.”
“You better sleep with one eye open, too. He’d just as soon kill you as look at you,” Duncan added again in a whisper.
Mallory nodded his understanding and whispered back, “I abhor violence, Dunc, but that doesn’t mean I have no sense of self-preservation. If it came down to me or him, have no doubt—he’d lose.”
Duncan started for town, and the dread he was feeling as the darkness started to descend on him was as bad as if he were actually fighting a dragon the next day.
* * * *
“You want to do what?” Bilgewater asked the kid for a second time.
“I want to bet all this money on Duncan,” the little girl said.
Bilgewater opened the bag, looked in, and didn’t even dump it out to count it. He didn’t have to count it to know that this was more money than any kid should be carrying around.
As if reading his mind Sadie smiled at the child, “Honey, where did you get all this money?”
“My daddy. Mommy won’t let him bring the money himself because he…well, he is always losing all our money,” the little girl said.
“And you’re sure he wanted you to bet on Duncan, not the dragon?”
“That’s what he said.”
Sadie grabbed Bilgewater’s arm and pulled him aside. “There is enough money there at the odds to seriously eat into our profits.”
“I know,” Bilgewater said, looking from the child to the bag in his hand. He smiled. “Of course we could always just mark it in the book wrong. Who’s going to believe a kid got it right?”
“No, we absolutely could not do that, Bilgewater,” Sadie said. “I don’t often draw a line, but this is one you will not cross. You heard what she said. Her family is probably broke from her father’s gambling and….”
Bilgewater sighed and half listened to all the reasons what he had said was totally and completely wrong. And why they made him the worst sort of person, and why if he wasn’t very careful he was going to push things too far one day, and they were going to jump right back and bite him on the ass.
“Sheesh! If I’d wanted to hear a sermon I’d have gone to church. Well, what do you think we should do, Sadie?”
* * * *
Duncan went to the town bar and bought himself a beer. He watched the crowd as they kept their distance, but he could hear pieces of their conversations.
“He’s very brave and a bit good looking,” one of the saloon girls said.
But mostly he overheard things like, “He’s a dead man.”
“Not a ghost of a chance.”
And even muttered chants of “Dead man walking” when he’d come in.
No one came near him to cheer him on. In the last two towns the people had near worshiped him. They’d all rushed around him to cheer him on.
Bilgewater and Sadie’s betting pool had put a stop to all that. These people, most of them, had bet against him, so they felt guilty as they watched him. They wanted him to lose so that they could collect some money more than they wanted to be safe from the dragon.
Part of Duncan wished he could talk Mallory into killing a couple of them just so he’d seem like a bigger menace.
He wasn’t getting the good feeling this con had given him before, and he was ready to get this over with and get back on the river. Ready to put a little distance between himself and this town filled with n
ot-very-nice people, all hoping to cash in when he was eaten by a dragon. He left the bar early and went to the room he had rented for the night, but he didn’t enjoy either his bath or his bed.
As he tossed and turned trying to go to sleep he started to wish he’d found some way to stay in Hellsbut. Be their new blacksmith, and just have a nice, calm, not-so-adventurous life surrounded by people who thought he was a hero.
When he finally got to sleep he had a dream that he was the blacksmith in Hellsbut. It started out being a rather sweet dream. He had two little kids and their mother had a wart on her hand that foretold the weather.
Everything was nice, just how he thought it might be, and then his wife’s wart looked right at him and said, “It’s going to be a bad winter. The worst yet.” And then he was freezing. He was trying to work metal, but the anvil was too cold, and no matter how much coal he put in the forge, no matter how hard he worked the bellows, he couldn’t get warm. Then his feet, which were suddenly bare, turned blue and when he tried to walk they broke off and he fell. When he did the bucket went flying into the air and he was covered in crap from head to no toes.
He woke up screaming and sat straight up in bed. His breathing was coming heavy, like he’d walked uphill on a winter morning. When he looked down his feet were sticking out of the covers, and they were cold but still there so he started to calm down.
He heard knocking on his door. “What is it?”
“Complementary breakfast,” a woman said.
“Give me a second,” he said. He picked his pants up off the floor and put them on. Then he stood up and went to the door. As he opened it he could see a young woman carrying a tray laden with a pot of steaming coffee, pancakes, bacon, eggs and sausages. There was so much food that the tray was all but too heavy for the woman who carried it. She set it down on a small table by the window beside which stood a single chair.
“The manager wanted you to have a hearty breakfast.”
“Since it’s going to be my last meal and all,” Duncan said with a half smile.
The Adventures of Duncan & Mallory Page 26