The saddlebag’s straps yielded easily to his deft fingers. He’d filch the cup and be clean out of the county before morning.
Lifting the nap, he dug around inside until his hand closed over the unyielding wooden cylinder. Extracting his prize, he held it up to the available light. In the moonlight it was outstanding in its ordinariness, and for an instant he wondered if there were more than one of the vessels. That was absurd, he knew. There was only one of what he sought. Only one in all the world, and now it was his, his!
He turned it in his fingers, letting the moonlight play across the bowl and rim. So plain, he mused. So utterly unremarkable. It was slightly bigger than he remembered it, but then, his first and only previous view had been clouded by astonishment and the realization of inherent possibilities.
His gaze narrowed. There was a hint of movement within the vessel. Lingering water or possibly some more viscous liquid.
Something crept out of the bowl to wrap itself around his left wrist.
Startled, he inhaled sharply. At the sound of his soft gasp, the horse looked back wearily. Then it delivered itself of a decidedly disinterested whinny and returned to its browsing.
A panicked Ramses tried to shake loose of the cup. He flung his hand about wildly and banged the vessel against the back of the stall. But the old wood was tough, and the sinuous band around his wrist was like a steel cable. It was gray in hue and ichorous and glacier-wet. As Ramses fought to extricate himself, it began to snake farther up his arm. With his free hand he fumbled frantically for the derringer he kept always in his right shirt pocket. While he did so, he made rapid breathing sounds, like a dog after a long run, as he struggled to scream but failed.
Before his wide, disbelieving eyes a second serpentine coil emerged from the interior of the cup to wrap itself around his head, blocking one of his eyes. It was cold and slick, cold as ice. The tip forced itself past his clamped lips and down his throat. He started to gag.
Tilted toward him, the depths of the cup revealed a pair of eyes. They were about the size and shape of a sparrow’s eggs, bright red with little black pupils centered on fiery crimson. Of any face they might front there was no sign. As he goggled madly two more emerged below the first pair.
Then he saw that all four were part of the same countenance, which he finally got a good look at. He did scream then, but the sound was muffled by the tentacle swelling inside his throat, and no one heard.
In the stalls across the way two dray animals, a mare and a gelding, looked on motionlessly. Well, they were not quite motionless. Both were trembling violently, and sweat was pouring down their withers.
The mountain man’s steed munched straw while ignoring the flailing, thrashing man who occasionally bounced off his hindquarters and legs.
More tentacles erupted from the abyssal depths of the cup, far more than it should have been able to hold. They lashed and bound the softly screaming, utterly desperate Mohet Ramses before they began to retract, dragging the unfortunate doctor with them. As he didn’t fit inside the bowl of the vessel nearly as efficiently, there ensued a great many cracking and rending noises as he was pulled in, until only his spasmodically kicking legs were visible protruding beyond the smooth rim. Finally they, too, vanished, and lastly his fine handmade shoes, and then he was all gone.
It was quiet again in the stable. Across from the silent stall the dray pair gradually ceased their shivering.
Amos Malone rose early and, as the other guests looked on in fascination, ate breakfast enough for any three men. Then he made his way outside. A few other pedestrians were about. They glanced occasionally in his direction, but not always. Unusual men frequented the frontier, and Malone was larger but not necessarily more unusual than some the townsfolk had seen previously.
At the smithy he chatted awhile with the owner, then paid him his fee and entered the stable next door.
“Well, Worthless,” he informed his steed as he set blanket and saddle on the broad back, “I promise you some oats first decent-sized town we hit. You look like you had an uneventful night.” The stallion snorted at Malone as he cinched the saddle tight, shaking its head and mane.
The mountain man hefted the bulky saddlebags and prepared to secure them behind the heavy saddle. As he did so, he noticed the cup lying on its side in the dirt. Plonking the awkward load astride Worthless’s butt, he bent to pick up the stray vessel, considering it thoughtfully in the morning light. The old jet-black wood drew in the sunshine like a vampire sucking blood. With a sigh he moved to place it back in its container.
“Warned him,” he muttered. “That ain’t the way it works. A smart man doesn’t go foolin’ around in another feller’s kit.” Reaching inside the near saddlebag, he pulled out a second cup and held it up to the light. The morning rays turned the burnished cedar the color of Solomon’s gold, pure and radiant.
“Course, it didn’t help him that he got ahold o’ the wrong grail.”
Neither a Borrower Be…
Roy Rogers had Trigger. The Lone Ranger had Silver. Hopalong Cassidy had… c’mon now, western trivia buffs. All the great western heroes had great western horses.
When I was a kid, it made me sick.
I mean, come on, now. Who wants to watch a film or TV show where the horse is obviously smarter than the hero? Not to mention braver and better-looking. The giants of animation recognized this contradiction and jumped on it with all four pencils. In Robert Clampett’s Buckaroo Bugs the horse can barely stand his idiot master. Tex Avery (as one would expect) frequently gave the horse as many lines as the other protagonists in his western-theme cartoons. Chuck Jones satirized the western horse in Drip-Along Daffy, even allowing two of them their own shootout on Main Street.
And the inimitable Jay Ward gave us a heroine in the Dudley Do-Right cartoons who quite senslbly (and with just a hint of borderline bestiality) preferred horse to hero.
No, sir, pardner. If I’m expected to survive in the real Old West, I don’t want no gussified, slicked-up, pommaded palomino between my legs. I want a horse that’ll kick and spit and bite and go all day on a diet of sagebrush and tumbleweed. That’s to match me. One to match Amos Malone would be something.
Might not even be a horse, strictly speakin’.
For three days it had snowed hard enough to freeze a preacher’s sermon to his pulpit. Now it had let up some, but while Mother Nature had become less profligate with her precipitation, sporadic flakes still spiraled to earth fat and flat, heavy with moisture, while a blindingly blue sky flirted with the fast-moving clouds as intermittently as a Swedish dancer.
The little brown box of a cabin was two-thirds blanketed and buried. Smoke curled fitfully from the stone chimney, winkling its laborious way skyward, cutting a sinuous path through the drifting snow. The rough-hewn unpeeled logs of which the modest structure was fashioned differed in appearance from the surrounding pines and firs only in their spatial orientation. The living trees towered above shelter and snowpack alike, their branches slack and burdened with hermetic whiteness. They dominated the surrounding mountain slopes, clawing toward the barren, rocky tree line.
A bit away from the building, the crest of a split-rail fence barely showed above the snow. It enclosed a partially cleared oval of bare ground. Accepting of the deceptive moderation, the scraggly grass thus revealed thrust bravely toward a bright sun and a false spring.