“Not many,” Malone told him. “Say, how come you can speak good English?”
“I, too, went to the haole school.” With obvious difficulty, the old man sucked air. “It is not haole learning I was trying to kill. Only haole culture. It overruns the land like a big wave. It is overrunning this land.”
Hau stepped forward. “I do not know about that, old man, but I do know that it is wrong to kill innocent people. I will have a kapu put on this spot so that none will come here and see what you have tried to do. No one will disturb the metal rope, and this ground will stay peaceful.”
“You will see,” the old man wheezed. “One day you will see. Or your children will.” His head fell back as he gazed into the star-flecked black crystal of night. “I hear the Marchers. They could not protect me, and now they come for me. Life is never just; death always is.”
With that he went away, eyes open to the darkness and unfulfilled.
“Reckon that’s that.” Malone began to secure both ends of the anchor chain, choosing volcanic spurs that were firmly a part of the solid rock of the mountainside. Hau tried his best to help, but though he was accounted a strong man among his own people, he could not move any part of the heavy chain, which Malone handled with apparent ease.
“You have done a good thing this night, Amos Malone. Give me the Manai.” Without word or objection, Malone removed it from the chain and handed it over.
“What’ll you do with that?”
“It is too dangerous to keep where others might find it. I will take paddlers and a canoe far south of here, to the southeast even of the big island, where the sea is very deep. There I will throw it into the ocean. It will fall to the depths and not raise any more land until it is safe.” A sudden thought made him look closely at the massive haole. “What will you tell your friend about our cattle lands?”
“That he’d better get here fast if he’s interested before these españoles already working the slopes buy up all the good grazing. And I reckon you might try to buy some fer yourself as well now that the king’s allowed as how private folks kin own their own plots. Me, I’d recommend acquirin’ thet beach where we met up.”
“Beach?” Hau made a face. “What would a man want with empty beach? You cannot grow anything on it or raise any animals. There is no good water there. Such places are worthless.” The unicorn pricked up its ears, whinnied querulously, and then returned to its cropping.
“Mebbe they are now.” Malone swung himself up into the saddle. “But take my word on it. Your grandchildren’ll thank you.” So saying, he started downslope toward the flickering lights of Lahaina, its raucous inhabitants blissfully unaware of the fiery death they had barely avoided.
Hau followed at his own pace, thinking hard as he descended the slope. Beach? What would any man want to own beach for? He decided that his new haole kahuna friend was joking with him. There was beach all around the island, most of it even more desolate, white, and sunstruck than the place where they had met. No one owned it because it was not worth a single American dollar.
And surely never would be.
Venting
Yellowstone is a wild fantasy landscape all by itself. As it exists, it needs no embellishment. Viewing the place, one imagines all manner of possibilities. Imps in the hot rivers, ethereal beings rising from the innumerable steam vents, all manner of illusory beings gamboling among the hot springs and geysers. Arthur Rackham would’ve loved it.
Given the excessive thermal nature of the region it is only natural for one to envision the possibility of its being home to less than benevolent beings. Since the earth itself seems downright angry most of the time, there’s no reason to expect that any elemental abiding therein would be of an agreeable nature. Dyspeptic, more likely. Quick to take offense and prone to easy aggravation. Full of fire and brimstone and hot spittle.
Just the sort of personality to rub Amos Malone the wrong way.
“You’re going where?” the clerk exclaimed, gaping at his customer. He exclaimed because of what the customer had just told him. He gaped because the individual looming over the service counter was not just a mountain man, but a mountain of a man.
Mad Amos Malone had that effect on people.
It wasn’t just his height—a couple of inches short of seven feet. It wasn’t just his size—bigger than most men and not a few bears. A lot had to do with his attitude: as if he’d already seen and done most everthing, and weren’t ashamed to admit to it. Attitude, and maybe his eyes. They seemed to go in and out of focus, like the lens of a telescope, as if one moment the crazy giant was looking right at you, and the next, at some far-off distant land ordinary mortals knew nothing of and wouldn’t dare visit even if offered the chance for an escorted tour.
“Yellowstone.” Methodically, Malone fingered out coins from a leather pouch to pay for his goods. Salt pork and sugar, coffee and beans, tobacco, bacon, salt, pepper, bullets. Really big bullets, each one three and a half inches long. For buffalo, the clerk assumed. For other things, though Malone did not tell him what.
The clerk, who was young, and skinny, and red-haired, and full of the cocky confidence of a youth too handsome and insufficiently wise, shook his head in disbelief. “Hard to believe they just made a park out of it. Who’d want to take a vacation trip to Hell?”
“Folks who git cold easy.” The mountain man’s massive arms enveloped his supplies and he turned to leave.
“Why you going there?” When Malone turned with a frown, the clerk (who while not wise was not entirely stupid) hastened to add, “If you don’t mind my asking?”
Malone smacked his lips, two leathery lumps of flesh just visible in the depths of his black beard. The clerk thought he saw something else moving in there, but was chary of staring too long.
“Guvmint agent asked me t’ check out a certain part o’ the new park. Somethin’ ’bout some trailbreakers tryin’ to chart a new course into the backcountry. Course, the whole park is new country. Fer most folks.”
The clerk was unable to keep himself from probing just a little further. “What about them trailbreakers?”
“Seems they didn’t come out again.”
The young man had another question or two tingling his tongue. He decided not to ask them, looking on as the giant ducked his head to clear the general store’s front doorway and turned sideways to squeeze through. After allowing a discreet few moments to pass, however, he ambled outside. Doc Jensen was there, too, on the plank sidewalk, and Millicent Lawrence, the wife of Samuel Lawrence, the owner of the hardware store. The three of them stared in unison as the huge visitor rode out of town. As the extraordinary figure trotted past them, other townsfolk also stopped to gawp. But not for too long, lest their gawping be repaid in kind.
“Now, what do you make of that?” Mrs. Lawrence’s voice was a blend of emotions. “I declare, that is the largest human being I have ever set eyes on. And also the strangest. Almost as strange as that odd creature he is riding. I think it must be a horse, but of what breed I cannot for the life of me say.”
“Told me he was going into the Yellowstone.” Her marital status notwithstanding, the red-haired clerk had on occasion entertained impure thoughts regarding the attractive Mrs. Lawrence, and was pleased at the opportunity, however brief, to show off his knowledge of things passing strange.
Doc Jensen nodded sagely and adjusted his spectacles. “I should say an entirely appropriate destination, from the look of him.”