“It isn’t you,” Mallory consoled him, with shrewd, sleepily lowered eyelids. “I hear it too, as I sit here, don’t forget. And if you’ve seen strange things, maybe I have too, and maybe I haven’t spoken about them either. I haven’t seen any smoke signals, maybe, but on many a ride when I was out by myself, I’ve had the feeling of eyes watching me from over a rock. But when I turned to look, there never were any there. And many a hand I’ve lost” — he swept his arm out expressively — “who didn’t go down that way.”
Yes, but you’re still better off than I am, thought Jones bitterly. With you, it’s still on the outside of you. Not in your very bed with you, like me.
They fell silent after that. Presently Jones drifted down the steps and ambled about in front of the house.
At one point he stopped, with his back toward Mallory, and a flickering orange halo outlined his head for a minute while he lit a cigarette. As it went out there was a slight spat from the ground, somewhere close to him.
He turned his head and looked intently downward.
“Did you do that? Was that you?” He thought the other man had spat over the rail, over to one side of him.
Suddenly he’d taken a quick step over, dropped down on his haunches, and stayed that way, peering close.
“Come here a minute.”
Mallory was already on his way down the steps to him before the summons was uttered. He crouched down alongside him.
They could barely see it in the dark. Jones struck another match, and it came into view. It was slender, motionless, just a long line on the ground.
Mallory said to him in a curiously hushed voice, as though there were danger of their being overheard, “You know what that is, don’t you?”
“Certainly I know what it is. What I’d like to know is—”
Mallory didn’t let him finish. “Put that damn light out.” He did it for him with a sharp jet of his own breath, without waiting. “Let’s get back under the veranda. The light was what attracted it to you, and we’re both right out in the open here.”
Jones plucked at the ground, and they both straightened up, turned, and ducked back under the veranda shed again. “Don’t touch the point,” Mallory warned. “There may be something on it.” He opened the door and motioned him in with a swift punch of his thumb. “Bring it in with you. I want to get a good look at it in the light. I can’t out here.”
He closed the door quietly after the two of them. “Keep your voice down. Don’t let them hear us.”
Jones was teetering it upright alongside of him, running his thumb and one finger up and down its surface. “Look at that. It’s nearly the height of a man’s body. Ghosts, eh?” He jutted his chin up at the other man. “That wasn’t thrown by any ghost.”
“Maybe not, but—” Mallory took it over and looked at it, lengthwise. The color in his face dropped a little. “It’s an archaic weapon.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I’m no archaeologist, but look at it for yourself. The head’s a piece of whittled-down obsidian. That stuff hasn’t been used in hundreds of years. All weapons were fashioned of it in the days of the Aztecs and Toltecs and Mayas. I’ve seen some just like it in the museum down at Puerto; that’s how I know for sure. And hummingbird feathers dyed scarlet; that was another characteristic of—”
“It still could have been thrown by a modem.” Jones’s voice was a little unsteady.
“Yes, but there’s no reason for any modem to have thrown it — against us or anyone else. There’s no race consciousness in this country. The whites and the Indians have been living peacefully side by side since the sixteenth century, and now you can hardly tell which is which any longer.”
“In other words, we’ve had a spear thrown at us out of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and it is your idea that the hand that threw it is also out of the fifteenth or sixteenth century?”
“No,” Mallory said stolidly. “Hands that were swinging in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are dead by now. But I’m holding a weapon from those days in my hand and we’re both listening to that thing throb out there. Now let’s hear your idea on it.”
Jones swallowed a couple of times, plumbing for an answer. He couldn’t seem to get hold of one.
Mallory took the spear and stood it up in a corner of the room. Then he shifted a chair out before it so that it couldn’t be readily seen.
Jones was back at the door again. He opened it and stared sullenly out into the boiling darkness. “I’m going out there again and see if I can—”
“Watch yourself,” Mallory said tonelessly. He came over and closed the door against the other’s staying hand. “This is no time for hero stuff. There’s just the two of us here by ourselves now, with two women on our hands.”
Jones turned away reluctantly, moved back to the table, drummed on it rebelliously. “It’s the drums that get you so itchy,” he snarled. Then he suddenly clenched his fist, raised it, and pounded it like a mallet.
“Want a drink?” Mallory asked with quiet understanding.
Jones shook his head, already repentant over his own outburst. He ran his hand over his hair a couple of times in a sort of unspoken apology. “Guess I’ll turn in,” he muttered lamely. “I may as well listen to that lying down as standing up. It’ll never stop.” Then he added, “Think it would be a good idea to lock things up?”
“I don’t think it would be a bad idea.” Mallory went over to the door and drove home a crude cross latch. “The only trouble is it’s like locking up a sieve. These wooden wedges are no good. The place is nothing but doors with a roof over them.”
“How about one of us sitting up, then, and keeping watch for a while?”
“I was thinking of that,” Mallory agreed. “I’ll do it.”
“What’s the matter with me?”
“The place belongs to me, after all. You go inside and get some sleep. I’ll call you in about an hour and you can relieve me, if you want.”
He slung a chair over by the door and settled it just inside it. He opened the door leading to his own and Chris’s living quarters and stepped quietly inside for a moment. Then he came out backward, with a revolver in his hand, and closed the door again. “May as well bring this out with me,” he said. He went over to the chair and took up his position in it, the gun loosely across his knees. “Put out the light before you go in,” he said.
Jones turned the wheel of the oil lamp and killed it. Mallory disappeared in the dark, as if wiped out with an ink brush. There was nothing left but that rabid thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, sounding on a new triumphant note now that it had the night to itself.
The last thing Mallory said to him, as they separated in the blackness, was: “No need telling the girls about — that.”
Jones knew what he meant. The spear from nowhere. The spear from five hundred years ago, dropping to earth only now, like something aimed from one of the stars.
Chapter Sixteen
It was the silence that woke him. He couldn’t tell what it was at first. There was some lack, something missing. It was the contrast that had roused him.
Then he got it. The drums had stopped. They were dead. The air hung tense, as breathlessly still as a swollen cloud about to erupt into a torrent. It weighed heavily on his chest.