Andromeda Gun (18 page)

Somehow, Ian’s daydreams about the coming fracas weren’t as pleasing as they should have been. After going six weeks without killing a man, his bloodthirst should have been sharp; he should have been snorting for the smell of gunpowder. Maybe he was getting out of the habit of killing people.

Maybe he could even break the habit if he wanted to, and that was the strangest thought of all.

Ian became alert to the final sentences of the mayor.

“Knowing our deputy will be fully taken up by his law-enforcement duties under the capable administration of our beloved old-timer, Sheriff Faust, I have contracted for the remainder of our town’s roads to be graveled by private means. To supervise this great work, I have called upon a merchant well known and well served by us all. We will now hear a few words from Mr. Timothy J. Bain, our new Commissioner of Public Roads.”

Ian knew he was being scrouged out of a place at the road fund trough, that Bain was being paid off, politically, for his support of the mayor, but it mattered little. After he had killed The Colonel and The Sergeant, he would circle back, wait for the bank to open, and make off with the road fund, administration fund and all the other funds. He would ride north on a horse that couldn’t be caught through Gentile country, where every ablebodied man for miles around would be suffering from hangover and indifferent to any call to join a posse.

For once, a straightshooter was going to win out over a politician.

Bain arose to say that he appreciated the honor conferred upon him by the town s beloved mayor and that he would continue the policy so ably begun under the mayor’s administration by putting gravel on the remainder of the roads in the metropolitan area of Shoshone Flats. Since the contract to gravel the roads had already been let by the able and energetic mayor, his first official duty as road commissioner would be to dedicate the first finished portion of the road network.

At a nod from the mayor, Gabriella had descended from the platform to stand by the ribbon, and Bain continued, “So now, Miss Stewart, stand by as I take great pleasure in naming this road with a name that symbolizes our future and honors our past. You may cut the ribbon, Miss Stewart.”

Gabriella cut. As the ribbon fluttered to the ground, Bain continued, “I hereby formally open the new Winchester Pike.”

As Gabriella whirled, eyes flashing, hands on hips, a loud shriek arose from under a sunbonnet far back in the audience. “It’s McCloud’s road. Why don’t you call it that—McCloud’s Road?”

Amid derisive hoots and catcalls, the honor guard turned with drawn shovels and would have climbed the platform to belabor the new commissioner if O’Shea had not barked, “Stand fast, you scalawags! There’s more to come.”

Smiling benignly, raising his hand to silence the jeers of the crowd, Commissioner Bain bellowed above the tumult, “Ladies and gentlemen, Deputy McCloud has not been forgotten. Let our mayor speak.”

“He’d better talk fast,” Jebediah Clayton yelled, shouldering his vast bulk toward the platform, and the mayor responded, talking fast.

“Because of Deputy McCloud’s great contribution to the actual construction of the road and because of its part in bringing Gentile and Mormon closer together in this valley, we have reserved a special honor for Deputy Ian McCloud.”

Watching Jebediah Clayton advance, Winchester sacrificed eloquence of speech for a rapid delivery.

“Fifty yards south of here, on the spot, yonder, where you see the boulders piled, your road commissioner has contracted with our general contractor, Mr. Michael O’Shea, to erect a stone building along the lines of the Taj Mahal, with the addition of architectural features our deputy is particularly fond of, which should prove a welcome addition to the ladies of the community.”

J. C. stopped and the mayor continued at a more eloquent pace.

“We Gentiles in the valley cherish our ladies because of their rarity, but we must welcome the wives of our Mormon friends and look also to their comfort. Today, we have no facilities at all for the fair sex. The barbershop is a male tonsorium. The hotel is infested with drummers. Ladies do not enter the barroom. So, even before Mr. O’Shea commences construction of the Bryce Peyton Territorial School, he is going to hasten the immediate construction of the Ian McCloud Comfort Station which will be large enough to accommodate six ladies simultaneously.”

Applause swelled from the throng as the mayor sat.

Fearing now that no force this side of heaven could divert McCloud from his self-appointed ends, G-7 felt itself comforted by the mayor’s announcement. Through an instrumentality it had considered even less likely than McCloud, peace and religious unity might be coming to the valley, and G-7 was grateful. Although for the time being it was no longer fighting to save mankind—only the one man—it welcomed all the help it could get in the fulfillment of its larger aims, and the mayor’s gesture was providential.

Not even the sight of its spaceship, lying slightly apart from the other building stones beside the road and apparently scheduled to be the cornerstone for the privy, disturbed G-7’s appreciation for the turn of events . It was not alone in its striving for the common good. While it watched its chosen host careen toward a confrontation with evil, its work toward religious brotherhood had found an ally in a low, grafting politician, the mayor.

G-7 was still blessing Winchester when a strangely furious Liza leaned across the justice of the peace and whispered to McCloud, “There’s a lot of talk about giving the women the vote in Wyoming. That old four-flusher’s stacking his deck with your cards. In this valley, the Mormons’ vote is the women’s vote, what with all their wives. Winchester’s aiming to corral the Mormon vote. He don’t care nothing for the ladies’ comfort. He’s using your good name to get hisself reelected.”

Bernbaum nodded and intoned a solemn, “Selah!”

Though he knew the widow spoke the truth, Ian was not disturbed. In fact, he was well pleased. To his knowledge, there was not another outlaw in the whole West who had a six-holer named in his honor.

From Wind River to Shoshone Flats, the stage route wound over mountains. Night turned chilly in the high altitudes, which gave Ian an excuse for riding inside the stagecoach, but, in addition to his plan to ambush the robbers, he had another reason for wanting to ride inside—squeamishness. He did not wish to get too friendly with either the driver or the rear guard, knowing they would both be dead by sunrise.

Ian could not understand his concern for his horse. Tied to the rear of the stagecoach, plodding along at a fraction of his normal pace, Midnight might grow chill from the lack of exercise. His sensitivity toward the men bothered Ian.

After pulling this job, he decided, he might invest some of his loot in railroad stocks, learn something about railroading, and take to robbing trains. A man had to progress with his times, and the future was in railroads. He was getting too picayunish and too smart for outdoor work.

Although he tried to doze, he was constantly being awakened as the stage lurched and pitched on the upgrade. Past midnight, after he heard the clunk of brake shoes on the iron rims of the wheels, all desire for sleep left him. The stagecoach had topped the crest and was heading down. By dawn, it should reach the stretch of road where the mountains dropped sharply to a canyon’s floor. At that point, with the cliff almost sheer to the left and a five-hundred-foot drop to the right, the road took a sharp bend around the cliff and became too narrow for the driver to take evasive action. Here, Ian figured, The Colonel would place a barricade and wait around the bend. Probably The Sergeant would hide among the boulders above the road and gun down the guard from the rear, figuring he was killing Johnny Loco.

Tension was growing in Ian’s mind, and, unknown to McCloud, it was a dual tension. The being inside was growing more alert.

Outside the window, the first faint glow of sunrise was touching the canyon’s rim to eastward. Ian removed from his lap the shotgun furnished by the stage line and unholstered his revolver, sliding to the floor of the coach to conceal his silhouette from a watcher outside. He was crouched low, his legs spread, his left hand on the door handle and his right on his pistol.

A shotgun was impractical for Ian’s purposes. At the close range he figured The Colonel would be, a blast from a shot gun would tear his victim in two, and he wanted The Colonel to die slowly. It didn’t matter about The Sergeant. He would die like the animal he was, specifically an ape, but The Colonel was a man of sensibilities, a Southern gentleman.

A Southern gentleman!

G-7 sensed a residual respect in the term its host verbalized, a remnant aura of an old regard, and it seized on the connotations.

It responded to the tensions in the mind of McCloud with its own tensions, resolving that this man must be saved. It would never again desert its host. It settled its tendrils firmly along the neuron channels of the man’s brain and tapped the brain’s obsession, using the feedback to power a counterobsession, stroking McCloud’s beta waves.

Hatred had carried McCloud down this tortuous trail to his showdown with Blicket, and McCloud had never faltered from his purpose. Would the love which had arced the galaxies endure less? The heavens forbid! G-7 nursed the one area of near-warmth in the ice-mind of McCloud, charged it, enhanced it with coiling tendrils of light.

A Southern gentleman.

Unaccountably, Ian relaxed slightly on the floor of the coach, thinking; he’d learned a few things from Blicket, he had to admit. When he first met The Colonel and was admitted to his outlaw band on the strength of a service record as a Confederate sharpshooter—seventeen Yankees killed, seven wounded—The Colonel had been solicitous of Ian’s well-being. The older man had gone out of his way to impress on Ian the value of planning in a successful holdup, and The Colonel was one of the softest-talking men Ian had ever met.

It had been a pleasure just to listen to The Colonel use the language; that and his military flair had a way of making every job sound interesting. Their last holdup of a U.S. Cavalry squadron had been like old times during the war, with Ian decoying the bluecoats up a draw into ambush while Blicket directed operations from behind the lines.

He had never tried to understand the man, Ian admitted, but only obeyed orders. Squatting now on the floor of the lurching stagecoach, Ian ransacked his memories of Colonel Blicket, trying to understand the man’s behavior and groping, subconsciously, toward the principle that to understand all was to forgive all.

Blicket’s life had forced the man to become a harsh disciplinarian. As a brevet colonel commanding a squadron of irregulars in Quantrill’s guerrillas, Blicket’s troops had been mostly barn burners, night riders, bushwhackers, and border ruffians—the scummiest bunch of murderers on horseback ever assembled—and the mildest form of discipline such men understood was a pistol-whipping.

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.