"Those carrion eaters are getting to be a problem," said Palmer, casually, reining his horse nearer. He was the Boss's Transport Secretary, a choleric man with deceptively mild blue eyes.
"They are," said Cruikshank, stroking his red-gold whiskers. Both men glanced up, not at the vultures, but at the hovering copter.
"Do you know who was on that plane?" Cruikshank asked.
"Certainly. It was Rumsen, on his way back to Ischia."
"I was afraid of that," said Cruikshank. He was the Secretary of the Army. "The question is now, what will the Duce do?"
"Send another messenger next time, I suppose: that much is all to the good."
"No." Cruikshank turned to look at him directly. "It's a bad business, Gene. I've seen them go like this before. They're like old rogues; they get the taste of it and can't stop."
Palmer took out a cigarette and lit up, blinking at Cruikshank over the pale flame. "He'll never kill anybody in Eagles. That's an obsession with him."
"No, but are you safe now?" He saw Palmer glance up involuntarily toward the dark shape in the copter. "Will you be safe tomorrow, or next month? You know he's tired of slaves, Gene -he wants bigger game."
Palmer said, "I've got to think about it."
Cruikshank sat his horse quietly. The sun was warm on his shoulders; beyond Palmer, the buck's filmed eyes stared up at him. It was a good buck, an eight-pointer. Flies were clustered on the spot of blood that had welled from one nostril. It was a duped buck, of course; plentiful as game was in the surrounding country, they had to stock these few hundred acres for the Boss's hunts. It even seemed to Cruikshank that there was something familiar about the buck; after all it was possible; how many times, he wondered, had this same buck died here in the sun? Palmer said, "If I thought there was any alternative -- " Cruikshank said with gloomy satisfaction, "But there isn't."
"I wonder if we'll like the next one any better?" Cruikshank smiled grimly, gathering up the reins. The foresters were finished and walking toward their horses; the copter was drifting off to westward.
"Julius, Augustus, Tiberius," said Cruikshank under his breath, "Caligula, Claudius, Nero ... "
15
The patrol slogged down the stony mountain trail. The sun was burning overhead in a bright, clear sky. Bringing up the rear, Dick looked with distaste at the bobbing heads of the six foot-soldiers, the rumps of the two pack animals. His throat ached for water, but there was no use risking another rebuff by asking Lindley to halt the column while he refilled his canteen.
The transport had dropped them with what seemed to Dick very short supplies. There was a rule, of course, against carrying a Gismo into hostile territory; they were "roughing it," Lindley said.
Up ahead, a voice was lifted in nasal song: "A girl who played poker with Tucker, was deadly afraid that -- " Lindley, who looked frail as a pipestem, was enjoying himself.
Two days ago, Clay had come to him with an air of suppressed excitement. "Dick, something big is about to happen."
"You mean the turnover?"
"Hush! Yes, that's what I mean. How did you know?"
"You've been building me up to it for weeks, haven't you? I wondered when you were going to say something."
"They wouldn't let me be more definite till now. All right, look, this is your chance to get on the right side. There's a man named Lindley in your regiment who's about to be sent out on a routine mission. When he comes back, he's going to get a promotion and a new assignment, to the Chief Armorer's office. Now, we have to have a man in that spot, and it can't be Lindley -- he's untrustworthy. So we're going to get you assigned to that mission under Lindley. All you have to do is ... make sure he doesn't come back."
There was no question in Dick's mind which side he was on, in spite of the traditional loyalty of Buckhill to the Boss's family. Such considerations did not bother him at all. What was bothering him was this business of Lindley. It wasn't that he liked the man, either: Lindley was a pale-haired, pink-skinned, popeyed man with an intensely irritating condescension of manner, and a really reptilian irony. It would actually be a pleasure to kill him ... and that was the trouble.
Whenever he thought about Buckhill -- infrequently, nowadays, there was so much else to occupy his mind -- he was sobered to realize how deeply he had changed in a matter of a few months. He could still remember the anguish and horror he had felt, that afternoon on the lawn, when Cashel fell.
Now, that image was all blurred and mixed up with the memory of Keel's body dropping into the moonlit canyon. Two duels, two deaths, and now he was being asked to bloody his hands again.
What if he found he liked it? ...
Toward noon they stopped and broke out duped rations, watering the horses from a tiny stream that rushed down the valley side. Lindley, reclining at ease with his pack for a pillow, examined the hill above them through a pair of binoculars. "Ah," he said suddenly. "Sergeant, take two boys and see if there's anybody home up there -- right there, above that big gray boulder."
The slob saluted, motioned to two others; in a few moments they were out of sight in the thick second growth ;of hemlock and spruce. Dick trained his own binoculars on the spot Lindley had indicated. All he could make out was a tangle of dead branches, like a heap of deadwood washed down in the spring floods, or like an impossibly big bird's nest.
After a while he saw the soldiers' mottled green uniforms appear among the trees. Lindley's squawk-box came to life and said, "Nobody here, misser."
"Anything inside?"
"Just some junk, misser -- couple of skins, bones. Garbage."
"All right," Lindley said indifferently, "photograph it, leave a trap and come down."
Dick looked with puzzlement at the two Polaroid snapshots the sergeant brought back: they showed a man-high tangle of sticks, rudely interlaced, matted with dead leaves and mud. The interior view showed a few well-gnawed bones, probably of deer and rabbit, and a small heap of stiff-looking skins. There was a shard of pottery in the litter.'
"Ever see a lair like that?" Lindley asked, taking the pictures.
"No, never. What kind of animal is it?"
"Human animal," said Lindley, scribbling on the backs of the snapshots. "Worst and most vile scavenger in the world. Poisonous bits, too. Well, we'll surprise this one if he comes back. Probably he won't."
"Are you saying that somebody lived in that pile of branches?"
"House, if you please," said Lindley, with his ironic pop-eyed stare. "Don't they have anything like that in your part of the country?"
"No. There are a few colonies of fishers in the swampland, but they live in something that looks like a house, at least -- some even have chimneys."
"That's because you keep the Indians out," Lindley commented. "A mistake, if you don't mind my saying so. Give me a nice clean Comanche any time."
Dick was staring up the hillside. "What do they do in the winter?"
"Oh, starve. Freeze. They've forgotten how to make fire, you know. Some of them last through, eating all the grease they can get. There's plenty of game, of course, but they can only catch cripples. Very bad nutrition. They have scurvy and rickets, not to mention lice, fleas, ticks and mites." He looked at his watch. "Time to be moving. Sergeant, saddle up."
A few hours later they were filing into a steep little valley, past hillsides blue and fragrant with lupines, down to the foaming stream that sparkled under the cottonwoods. Dick saw a fish leap, a clean arc in the sunlight; the air was full of the thunder and spray of the water, the rocks in the stream glistened with it. He swallowed involuntarily, feeling an itch to dismount and clamber down among those stones.