Riding slowly homeward, Cory Balleau wondered uneasily about Kay Bates. What held him back from the girl? He had the feeling that, through stubborness or sheer stupidity, he was eschewing something of great delight. The rich manhood in his body, held in check behind the deeply bred obstructions, was sullen and complaining.
Then, as the house and outbuildings came in sight, Cory heeled his horse and forgot about Kay Bates. There was a big black goff in the yard and the boy was suddenly happy.
He hurtled across the back field, yelling at the top of his lungs:
“Nate! Nate Goodrow! You old son-of-a-son-of-a-son-of-a-son! Nate!”
A gangling form appeared from the back door of the house as Cory cleared the back fence, skidded from his goff and pelted across the footbridge at the narrow end of the pond.
Nate Goodrow had changed little in eight years. And, to the youth, he had changed none at all because his periodic visits were frequent enough to make any aging imperceptible. He was still steel under purple leather, and the hand he wrapped around that of Cory Balleau had the grip of a vise.
“Ambling back down south,” he drawled. “Stopped off of course. Wanted to see if you still fit your pants.”
“You’re staying a while, aren’t you? Sure you are! You’ve got to tell me about your trip. How far did you get into the north forest country?”
JOHN BALLEAU followed the visitor from the house. “Take it easy, Cory. He just got here. And by the way, where have you been? We’re waiting supper.”
“I was swimming,” Cory replied, his eyes still on Nate Goodrow.
His uncle smiled. He enjoyed seeing the sparkle in Cory’s eyes and the vitality bubbling to the surface. The boy was too quiet. He existed too much within himself. He seemed to brood a lot and that worried John Balleau.
The lack of a mother had a great deal to do with it, of course. John Balleau had done his best, but no man could take the place of a boy’s mother.
It had been a terrific shock to Cory, back there on the Marsport River when his mother had died. He’d never been away from his mother for a single day up to that time.
At the river, he had stiffened over night and jumped the years of childhood in a matter of hours. To John Balleau, his shyness and tendency to seek solitude appeared to stem from that time. He didn’t care to visit Ngania alone or in company with the elder Balleau. Cory should know others of his own age, his uncle believed. He should have contact with young women. It bothered John Balleau that Cory was not on speaking terms with a single young Terran woman in Ngania or the surrounding country.
“The weather hit us up in the forest country,” Nate Goodrow was saying. “The train holed up south of the fringe and I meandered back. Came down through the Sweet Water. Guess I got a hankering for the south. Got me a piece of land near the Red Canal and I’m going to settle down.”
John Balleau smiled as he pushed his chair back from the table and lit his pipe. “How long do you think you’ll be able to sit tight? You weren’t made for sitting. I figure you’ll be coming north again soon and that maybe you’ll take Cory on your next trip.”
“Say, now that wouldn’t be a bad Idea. How about it, son?”
Cory smiled briefly. “Uncle Frank couldn’t get along without me here. He’d bog down in a week.”
“How do things look for you?”
“Good—good,” Balleau said. “The air-freight’s coming at last. This country will boom now. It looks as though we’ve been able to wait it out.”
Goodrow sobered. “That’s fine. Too bad a lot of those other first settlers couldn’t hang on.”
Later, stretched on the lawn John Balleau had built down to a pleasant curve in the pond, Nate Goodrow was taking his ease. He watched Cory skidding flat stones across the water;
“You’ve never had any itch to see the country at all, have you, son?”
Cory dropped to the soft sod beside his friend; “I guess not. I don’t know. It’s pretty nice here. I guess I don’t care much how anybody else lives.”
“From what I hear, you don’t take after your daddy. He cut himself quite a swath back on Terra.”
“I guess he did all right.”
CORY HAD only fleeting memories of his father. A kind, mercurial man who was never in one spot for any great length of time. He always thought of the past in terms of his mother, and the bittersweet memories invariably left him depressed.
“I doubt if I’ll be coming north again, son. Getting kind of old and stiff in the bones. I want you to remember the name, Candalla. Nice little town. Nice country. Want you to remember that name and swing down to see me sometime. You’ll want to move around before long. It isn’t natural for a boy to cling to one spot all his life.”
Cory rolled over and looked at the sky; “How many men have you killed, Nate?”
“Eh?”
“I said—how many men have you killed in your time?”
The scout was a trifle surprised at the abruptness of the query; “Counting Martians you mean?”
“I suppose so. Counting all of them.” Cory reached over and drew the Gort knife from its sheath on Nate’s thigh. The shining blade threw back the rays of the lowering sun and was thus tinged with a red hue. There was a worn line around Nate Goodrow’s waist, spilling down to a large shiny spot on his right thigh. The pellet belt and the black pyro-gun, were in on the living room table.
“Don’t rightly know now, son. It’s pretty hard to stay peacable and tramp over the country like I do in these times.”
Cory ran the tip of his finger along the edge of the knife.
“I keep it right sharp,” Nate said. “Use it to shave with quite a little.”
Cory held out the knife. “Hit something—the way you used to when I was a kid.”
Nate took the knife by its blade-tip, held it between the first sections of his right thumb and first finger. His wrist flopped limply as he looked around seeking a target.
“That fly,” Cory said.
The fly was on a post some twenty feet away. Nate raised his arm and there was a movement of blurred leather. The knife became a glimmering arc in the air.
“Missed,” Nate said.
The knife quivered and was still, its blade buried an inch in the post. The fly was not in sight. Nate got to his feet and stretched his long arms. “Who owns all the land that was homesteaded by the pilgrims in the first train—the ones that couldn’t hold out?”
“The bank I guess—most of it. A man named Bates owns the bank so I guess he owns most of the land.”
“It’ll pay off right handsome now the ships are coming through.”
FRANK BATES’ dream of Martian empire was growing apace. As his holdings increased so did his sense of sureness and his confidence in himself. Also, his attitude toward right and wrong took on a new and darker hue in his sense of justice became covered over with the tarnish of avarice.
After all, it was purely a matter of the survival of the fittest. Any feeling of brotherhood he had ever had for pilgrims struggling and blundering toward independence, had turned to pity and then, as his land holdings expanded—had become impersonal contempt. The land should not be sliced up into little garden patches, he opined. He subscribed to the economic principle of monopoly as a convenient way of justifying himself as the core of that monopoly.
Seated at his desk, with his map before him, he smiled in satisfaction at the tremendous black area southwest of Ngania. He had plans for that land, and upon this day, one of those plans had been consummated. There was a goff waiting outside the bank. The man quitted his office, mounted the animal, and rode southwest.
The cattle had been there since dawn; scrawny bone-bags, the scum of a dozen Terran herds assembled. Three hundred wrecks. A man, idling by the herd, turned his goff and came to meet Bates as the latter approached.
The man was a great shaggy hulk of bone and muscle. He dwarfed the goff he rode and had a belligerent tilt to his head and shoulders. Red dust was thick on his luxuriant wh
iskers.
“Hello, Frake,” Bates said.
“All safe,” the man returned. “Only ten died on the freighter.”
“Your man was in town early this morning. I got out as soon as I could.”
Frake had no comment. He swung his great head left and right—eyes squinting. “I’m quite a cattle man.”
“How did the trip go?”
“We came slow—cost less on the slow freighters—and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. It was the start that stuck in my craw.”
“How so?”
Frake scowled. “Did you ever walk up to a Terran cattle man and say: ‘Got any half-dead vulture bait for sale, mister? I’m looking for any old bags of bones that can stand without being propped up. I’m going to ship them to Mars!’ Did you ever walk up to a cattle man and say that?”
Bates smiled faintly. “No I never did.”
“They’re laughing all over West America. They’ll spend the next ten years wondering what I wanted of this worm-eaten mess.”
“Let them wonder,” Bates said. “They were cheap and they’ll serve the purpose much better than valuable stock.”
“I hold title—is that it?” Frake asked.
“Of course. That’s the most important angle. I’m renting your grazing land.”
“We didn’t go into the details about men,” Frake said.
“You’ll need them, of course.”
“By the way, mister,” Frake said. “What’s the law around here?”
“In a word—I am. We have a town marshal, man named Dalton. You’ll deal with him through me if the need for dealing should ever arise.”
“I want to. keep two of the boys with me. The other three are heading back to Terra. With Mel Dorken and Tip Snead I think I can get along for a while.”
Bates extended a canvas bag. “A thousand credits a month for you and three hundred for your men. When the job’s finished we’ll discuss a bonus.”
Frake took the bag and Bates said, “That’s gold. Any money transactions will always be in cash. Nothing on paper. No receipts.”
“When do we start operating?” Frake asked.
BATES SWUNG suddenly from his saddle, bent backwards and stood rubbing the small of his back. “I’ll let you know. I’ll tell you the time and the place and exactly what to do.” He glanced sharply at Frake. “It’s understood without question that I’m boss. You do as I say, when I say.”
Bates would have been surprised to know how little men of Frake’s ilk cared about bosses. Frake grinned and raised his hand and tipped it in what might have been a mock salute.
“Right—boss.”
“This wouldn’t have been necessary if they’d held the freighter station off another year. I’d have gotten what I wanted through ordinary legal procedure then. But it’s coming and so my hand is being forced. You’ll get orders very soon.”
Frake said nothing, and Bates went on:
“These men Dorken and Snead—are they trustworthy?”
Frake grinned now. “That’s a hell of a word to use in the kind of business you’re going into.”
Bates flushed. “All right. I’ll leave the men to you. But let me know before you take on any more.”
Frake tossed the money bag into the air. He caught it in a palm into which it disappeared completely. “Where do we bunk?”
“You’d better make your headquarters at the old Croft place, about six miles due east of here. It’s been abandoned for some time but the building is in fair condition.”
He remounted and looked out toward the herd. His lips twisted in amusement. “I hope they’ll live long enough to serve our purpose,” he said.
Frake grinned back.
Bates glanced back at Frake, raised his hand and put heels to his mount.
As he moved off across the prairie, the grin slid from Frake’s face. He sat staring thoughtfully after the retreating figure. He was even now wondering how this affair would terminate. There was always an ending. These things could never be plotted through in advance. They always took unexpected turns. Frake’s talent lay in his ability to take good care of himself under any and all circumstanoes.
“That’s the way it sits,” he was telling two men over the fire that evening. “I only know part of what Bates has got up his sleeve. Maybe it’s good and maybe it isn’t but if things start flying to pieces, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t stick around with a basket.”
Tip Snead shrugged. “Why not?” There was a great deal of a snake about this man. He had the look of a snake in the flatness of his face; the expression of a snake in the cold opaqueness of his eyes; and the treachery of a snake in the way he could slide a knife from his sleeve and hurl it into a back. “Why not? What have we got to lose?”
The third man was of Frake’s cut—a mountain with a beard. He was nothing much more than a skinful of cruelty walking around on two legs. There were no acts of viciousness, sadism, or lust in the whole gamut, that Mel Dorken had not committed. There was a trick with cats. You tied the tails of two Toms together and threw them over a clothesline. A no more primitive nor vicious combat could be arranged; one to sicken the stomachs of even hardened men. Mel Dorken liked to find two trusting cats. There were things that could be done, with fire, to dogs. Dorken knew of these things.
With women—
Mel Dorken lived only to satisfy his senses. The physical appetites were paramount. Nothing beyond them mattered.
“Count me in,” he said, lazily. “You ride herd tonight, Tip. I’m tired.”
“Let them drift,” Frake said. “We’ll all sleep.”
“Couldn’t let the land stand idle,” Frank Bates told an inquirer in Ngania, “so I rented it out as grazing land. Just temporary of course.”
“I was wondering,” the inquirer replied. “Seemed odd to bring in cattle at this stage of the game—with the road coming through the farmer’s fight is won.”
“It’s going to be a great country,” Bates said. “If any of the boys want to sell out, tell them to see me. I’ll back this country with my last credit.”
“I guess most of them will hang on now. In fact there’ll probably be some buyers nosing around—”
“Yes sir! I believe in this country.” Frank Bates gave the man a hearty handshake and went into his bank.
IN LATE afternoon of the following Saturday, John Balleau pulled up in front of the largest general store in Ngania—Galpin’s Complete Supply. He jumped from the light truck and glanced back to where Cory still remained on the seat.
“I’ve got some business at the bank and I’ll have to hurry to catch Frank Bates.”
“How long will you be?”
“Not more than an hour. Meet me in the Golden King and we’ll have a drink before we go home.”
Cory didn’t care much for liquor, but it made little difference where he killed the time. He nodded and got down from the wagon.
John Balleau hurried down the street toward the most imposing building in Ngania. He went inside; a shirt-sleeved clerk looked out from behind a grill.
“Is Mr. Bates in?” Balleau asked.
The clerk turned away without answering and went through a door to the left. He hesitated in the doorway.
“Tell him John Balleau is calling.”
The words carried and Frank Bates appeared immediately at the door. His smile was cordial. “Come in. Come in. A pleasure to see you, Sir.”
He stepped back and John Balleau went into the small office. The clerk went back to his glass.
Bates indicated a chair beside his desk, sat down, and leaned back expansively in his plastic-back swivel.
“I dropped in to talk about the railroad,” Balleau said. “I thought you might have some late information.”
Frank Bates laughed. “I haven’t got any more than anyone else, but the line’s coming through. It will be a two-station mile spur northwest from the Second Canal System. The first freighter will pull into Ngania in less than three Marsmonths.”
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Balleau nodded. “It will be a great thing for the section. Looks as though a man could borrow crop credits now with a fair degree of safety.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Bates returned, heartily. “You showed rare judgment in holding off. Too bad others didn’t follow your example.”
“Some of them probably acted upon bad advice.”
Bates shrugged. “No doubt. We run a bank, though, and you can’t refuse people loans if they have the security.”
“What would you say my place would stand in the way of a loan?”
“There won’t be any trouble on that score. You’ve got the best set of buildings for miles around. You’ve got a well located place and good land. How much do you have in mind?”
“I thought I’d buy a cultivator-unit and a seeder. We’ll really need them now. And throw up a couple of granaries, so we’ll be ready. About two thousand?”
“With pleasure!” Bates came erect and started for the door. “I’ll get the papers ready for you. Won’t be a minute. We may as well finish it up now.”
He opened the outer door and turned back. “Shall we make it twelve Marsmonths? Does that suit you?”
John Balleau hesitated. “I’d like to play entirely safe— How about eighteen?”
“Of course. We’re here to serve. Eighteen it is.”
HE WENT into the bank proper and John Balleau leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t as confident as he would have like to be but it seemed that he had no choice. The money was needed in order to raise a crop. The time had come to extend himself. Nonetheless, he shrank from the prospect.
Bates returned with a sheaf of papers. He laid them on the desk and stood over John Balleau.
“Here it is,” he said. “A regular eighteen-month form—there in the print.” He reached over and picked up a pen from the desk. “Six percent straight. You sign in three places.”
He checked off the signature lines and then straightened up, still holding the pen. “By the way—do you want any cash now—today?”
“A couple of hundred would be convenient.”
“Fine—fine. I wonder if you’d just step out to the grill and sign for it? Fred will give it to you right away. It’s closing time and he likes to get out.”
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 28