The women who were attracted to Douglas Glen-cairn probably know what it is about him that they found so irresistable but men were wont to shake their heads and mutter when evidence of his attraction faced them, as is the way of men when confronted by a better man.
That Douglas was irresistable in a vast majority of cases is a matter of known if not recorded fact and such mutterings only served to point up the many and various facets of his difference to the average man.
It could have started when Douglas aged thirteen, was playing one Sunday afternoon with a neighbor's daughter, a Miss Alicia Ogilvie who was a precocious and somewhat full blown sixteen, filled to the brim with information where twenty years ago she would have been equally as full of misinformation.
Sunday afternoon on a large plantation in central Mississippi can be dull and this one was no exception. The two families, having decided to visit a sick neighbor, had left Douglas and Alicia to their own devices since they had advertised their disinclination to visit the neighbor, sick or well, rather lustily.
The plantation house was a modern rambling structure set in the unbiquitous grove of oaks with the equally unbiquitous outhouses, barns, pens and sundry other structures common to all well stocked plantations.
"I'm glad we didn't go," pouted Alicia as they sat on the porch watching the Glencaim sedan disappear in a swirl of red dust.
"Me too," said Douglas raking his hands through a notable ruff of stiff red hair. "All those kids know is playin' house and I hate playin' house.
... Imagine a man playin' house."
Alicia whose inner stirrings had become something of a plague lately after a sneak date with an eighteen year old boy and subsequent day dreams which had intensified and embellished certain phases of the date to improbable proportions. In addition to the date there was the effect of a certain book which had secretly circulated at school not long ago and which things along with Alicia's natural imaginativeness and bold and inquiring spirit had stirred her blood stream into early and discommoding activity.
Alicia was not a fool and she knew what happened to girls who went into such things with their eyes blinded by overwhelming emotion.
She let her eyes rove languorously, and she thought, glamorously, over Douglas' well knit body and picked him as a possible assistant in her determined field of experimentation.
"What do you like to play?" she asked, casually.
He shrugged and chewed on a blade of grass he had plucked. "I like to ride after cows," he said.
"I mean something we could both play."
"You're a girl," he said as though that was the only necessary reply.
"Of course, I'm a girl," she retorted. "What's that got to do with it?"
He blinked as he thought this over. "What," he asked absently, "would you like to play?"
She grinned. "Let's go watch the cows in the pen. Maybe there's a bull there."
He shrugged. "Okay, but when the bull climbs on a cow don't you get scared and run."
"Silly ... that's what I want them to do."
"Why?"
"Don't you like to watch them?"
He spat a shred of grass from his mouth. "Sure, but I'm a man. That's different."
"What's different about it?"
"Just different that's all." He started out into the yard.
She flounced from the chair sending her white flannel skirt high, revealing legs that were straight and round and soft, a sight Douglas missed because he wasn't interested in girls' legs no matter how attractive they were.
Alicia covertly zipped her sweater down until her budding breasts were all that held the soft knit together. She arched her back and bit her full lower lip as the wool raked the sensitive tips into erection but still Douglas plodded along barefooted and unimpressed.
Alicia wore no suport and savored every thrill set in motion by boys ogling her and giggling. She ignored them with fine disdain, drew in her stomach, lifted her chest and was thrilled all over again at the looks on their faces which she managed to see by a dint of visual angling at which women have been adept for untold centuries.
The cattle in the big feeding pen were indisposed to perform for the edification of the youngsters and switched their tails resentfully when Douglas threw sticks at them and made them get to their feet.
Something came belatedly to Douglas' mind and he turned to Alicia. "You ain't supposed to see...." and he told her in flat frank language what she, being a girl, wasn't supposed to see.
"Why not?" she asked belligerently.
"Because ... you're a girl."
She sniffed. "What do you know about girls?"
He was stumped. "Well ... not much."
"So there you are! Nothing! You haven't even noticed that I'm grown."
Douglas fell to the ground and whooped with coarse laughter. "You grown ... Hot damn...." He laughed more making Alicia's face flame with fury. "All right Mr. Smarty. What does a grown woman have that I don't?"
"Shucks...." He spat loudly at a beetle and launched himself erect. "Maybe you are grown, kinda," he conceded grudgingly. "Even grown women ain't suposed to watch cows and dogs and things like that. It ain't nice." Another matter came to plague him. Now that he had noticed her it became quite fascinating to continue, especially when the neck of her sweater was opened so far down and he could see the exciting plunge of skin that sank away from the half exposed firmness of her breasts. Douglas was probably as far in advance of his age as Alicia except that he had been able to direct his energies in many directions and was, after all, three years younger.
"See there," she said coming closer, her skin shivering deliciously as she noticed his rapt and brand new interest. "You don't know yourself anything, do you? And what if women aren't supposed to see such things, there's nobody here but you and me. You wouldn't tell on me would you?"
"No ... I don't never tell on people. You know that."
Alicia, pursuing her new adventure further came close and looked soulfully into Douglas' eyes. "That's so sweet of you. I just knew I could trust you." She exulted in her voice, having modulated it exactly to the range used by Ramona of Red River Valley when she had said the same words over TV three days ago. Alicia was an avid fan of the soap operas and committed whole paragraphs to memory and filed them away for later use. This one had been perfect and Douglas was touched, but he turned away and dug his toe into the ground. At his age almost all things emotional were at the same time fraught with certain elements of embarrassment. "Shucks ... I wouldn't tell on nobody."
Alicia let her face fall. "I thought ... maybe you meant it just for me."
"Well, all right. Just for you ... but I still wouldn't tell on nobody. It ain't square."
"Douglas?"
"Hunh?"
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
He gave her another quick examination and silently cursed the wave of excitement that coursed through him when he discovered, also for the first time that she was, indubitably, pretty. Her skin was fair, her hair a reddish brown and naturally wavy, and in protected places, like the valley between her breasts her skin had a rich creamy texture, pure, flawless, and lovely. He swallowed a thick feeling in his throat and glanced away carrying the picture of her full sensitive lips, her long dark lashes, the pert angle of her nose and the fragile pink tint of her ears where they peeped out of a tangle of russet hair.
"Oh ... you'll do."
She came close again, making him desire to flee. "Thank you Douglas." Her voice was of a contrived quality but to Douglas it was a poem, a chord from a lovely instrument. Abruptly he turned away and started for the barn, a turmoil of mixed emotions that he could neither sort nor identify, except that they frightened, therefore angered him. Alicia trailed docilely along sensing with woman's preter-naturally acute perception that she had impressed him. His sudden flight was merely a gauge by which she read the exact depth of the impression. He walked freely along with a natural grace, his bare feet plopping forcibly in the dust, his shoulders square and erect and his head held with a sort of kingly assurance that he did not feel. Alicia hugged herself and thrilled anew. Douglas from this vantage was not the child he had always seemed. She had to repress a giggle because she was discovering him also. He was taller than she and had for a long time been well formed and muscular. She recalled his swift darting sureness on the basketball court, his flashing form at tennis, having played since he was old enough to swing a racket, and his bull-like rushes at football.
They walked into the gloom of the barn with its sharp smell of ammonia, of hay, corn, mules and faintly the sweet tang of new cotton.
"Wanta play in the cotton?" he asked gruffly.
"Sure." She hugged herself again and tasted the delicious shudder that chased over her skin. They climbed to the attic where the cotton had been weighed then dumped high against the wall. Toward the middle of the floor it angled down to a group of baskets, sacks and a rusty set of cotton scales. Douglas scampered up the sharp angle to the top then flopped on his back and watched her do likewise, thinking of what he might have seen had he stayed behind and let her go first. He blushed furiously and rolled over on his stomach as she fell beside him.
She squirmed and flounced causing one young breast to flash into the open where it stayed for a second, white, tipped in exquisite pink then she giggled and covered it. The sight had made the boy's blood run cold and he drew his legs up trying to swallow the sweet pain of this new feeling out of his throat.
She cuddled near him making him meet her eyes. "See," she said softly. "I told you I was grown."
"Yes," he said thoughtfully, looking down at her as she lay twisted in feline grace, her sweater front spiked high and sharp, her skirt having climbed a bit revealing the shocking smoothness of a thigh. "I guess you're pretty, all right." His first lesson in blarney and it took a great deal of courage to say it, but hard on the heels of the weak, spent, aftermath of his labored compliment came the feeling of power, of a great chasm crossed, of something accomplished that would become easier as time and practice went on.
"That's sweet Douglas." Her voice was a throaty purr that sent a wave of dull warm ache over him.
"It's the truth. You're pretty ... real pretty." He stopped and choked, feeling victorious so far but at a loss for further progress having exhausted the subject and not having another one at close hand ... but he had reckoned without Alicia's assistance. She squirmed again and this time her skirt skidded up her legs, showing for a flash the pink scanties she wore, filled to the bursting with young tender flesh. Douglas felt as though he would suffocate before her hand came down and casually pulled the skirt straight.
Her eyes were almost purple when she caught his and held them. "Do you think I have pretty legs Douglas?"
He nodded, unable to trust his voice the way his throat felt.
"Douglas, you didn't mind my skirt coming up that way did you ... accidental like?"
"No...." His voice was hoarse and surprisingly masculine, to both of them.
"We've known each other so long," she continued, still holding his gaze magnetically, "we shouldn't be bothered with something like that, should we?"
"No...."
"Not even if we showed a lot more ... should we?"
"No...."
"Will you take off your shirt Douglas? I like the way your arms and shoulders look. I've watched you playing tennis without a shirt."
"Okay." He slipped out of the shirt feeling delightfully sinful as he did so.
"You dare me to take off my sweater."
"Gee...." He was almost startled out of the grip of his courage. "You mean...." He stopped and considered quickly. Things were taking an amazing turn but since she seemed all for it, indeed, moving into the spirit of things herself and urging them along, of what was he afraid? Why not play it along and see what happened? Maybe ... No, that was too much to hope for but just suppose ... He rose spiritually and took a mighty grip on himself then relaxed and breathed deeply. "You want me to dare you to take off your sweater?'"
"Do you want to?"
He forced a laugh. "You wouldn't. Sure, I dare you."
Unable to quell the trembling of her hands, but secure in the belief that Ramona would have done it just that way she slowly stripped her sweater off over her head and lay back almost bursting with a curious mixture of pride, fear, and an emotion that had been nagging at her since the stolen date which now struck her with fearful force. Her left breast tingled as she recalled that it was the one Amos Leggett had touched and let his hand glide softly over before she had shoved him away.
Douglas simply froze and looked. Never in his life had he been so completely stunned, so emotionally uprooted. He was so slaughtered that his mouth hung open and rigors chased themselves like droves of ants over his now hypersensitive body. "You did it," he whispered.
She nodded. "Do you think I'm beautiful ... up here."
He then said a very unusual thing. It was torn from him unconsciously without the slightest effort or control.
"They're so pretty I could cry."
Stung deeply by his words and drawn by a power stronger than either of them she sat up slowly and touched his face. "That was the sweetest thing I ever heard." Then taking one of his hands and placing it over a breast she sank back to the cotton half swooning from the impact of sensation, a sensation that was like that produced by Amos Leggett but yet greater by far.
Then Douglas, who had been flogged past the point of accountability gave the first evidence of what was later to brand him among both men and women alike ... if somewhat different in reaction. He cupped the breast in a palsied hand, let it caress the spiked tip of one then the other, drinking in the reaction it set up in the girl then he leaned his face forward and placing it between them gave way to the savage assault of his heart and wetted her skin with scalding tears. This was something, as braced as she was, and as determined to carry out her experiment, that she had not bargained for and her imaginative romantic little soul gave one tremendous bound and went quite mad.
She rolled over and gathering him into her arms held him close sobbing and calling his name. "Oh Douglas ... darling, darling Douglas. We're in love Douglas ... can't you see we're in love...?"
The same circumstances having routed stouter and older persons just as completely, took them into its multifold tentacles and held them there while their young hearts, stretched past all endurance but bolstered by mutual bravery sought and found the most ecstatic solace known to man. They grew quieter after a while but their embrace remained one of frenzy.
CHAPTER TWO
That Douglas Glencairn should not be constructed along the common lines of his fellow men either mentally or physically was not strange once a thorough knowledge of his father was achieved. The father had been born in the rugged and demanding highlands, of parents who were lairds in land and sheep, but peasants in purse, Duncan MacQuale Gordon Glencairn was reared in the Scots tradition of thrift, hard work, oat porridge and mutton leg. From a Dunleven branch of the family he inherited the frame of a prize Angus bull with voice to match and from his father a prodigious thrist, a short volitale temper and a pair of fists that might have been hewn from the sheer granite walls of Cromarty's Cliffs. It has been reliably reported that the temper, thirst and fists formed as lethal a trinity as had been visited upon the naturally sloth citizenry of Mississippi in the memory of man. Not that Duncan Glencairn was a bully or a brawler ... Indeed it has been pointed out that the larger part of his activities in such matters were the direct result of becoming incensed at the spectacle of two or more men brawling in the manner of strange dogs where there is a magnum of barking and snarling and a modicum of productive action.
"Men wha' ficht wi' their mouths put me a mind o' women yappin' ower a tad o' gossip," he would say. "Fusts was made to swing, mouths to drink whuskey wi'."
In spite of his reputation, Duncan was an excellent farmer, cattle man and neighbor. If his father had been penurious and parsimonious, Duncan was neither, although he deplored wasteful habits while being openhanded toward his family and neighbors when the need arose.
His whiskey he made himself, according to the methods of the time, heedless of the commercial distillate which flowed freely if illegally in his state, declaring the home made product to be superior in proof, taste and after-effects to any he could buy in the United States and as for Scots whiskey of the sort that might be had on the marts he was violently contemptious.
His life as a youth had been constrained and the love of freedom which has moved many of his countrymen to sunnier and richer climes sent Duncan searching for greener pastures, but his size and muscular willingness had kept him at sea years past his intention until Mary MacArdle, daughter of a prosperous wool merchant put an end to his wandering and caused him to break out a sea chest full of legal tender and what with that borrowed from his father-in-law (at what he considered usunious interest) bought two thousand acres of cutover Mississippi timberland.
It could not be so recognized because Duncan had turned a wilderness into a paradise, and had fathered four children of whom Douglas was the eldest. Mary was twelve, Duncan Jr. was ten and Jock was nine.
After his entertaining and educational afternoon with Alicia, Douglas seemed to spring upward both mentally and physically into growth that gave rise to emotions of a widely mixed variety. Boys who had chastened him successfully and had looked upon him as their especial property, whose prowess had enforced his loyalty and suport after the fashion of adolescents, were the first to taste the change.
Greg Noble, a lad of considerable size and strength was the first to realize that a new order had been born. It happened during a practice football game, a kind of tank warfare at which Greg excelled suffering almost none of the lacerations and bruises which he distributed with such generosity. One day while bent on the destruction of such linemen as had no better pudgment than face him in one of his bowling rushes Greg felt himself smitten amidships with such authority that the ball squirted out of his arms and a flame of agony whipped upward as the air was crushed from his lungs. Zeus had been struck, ironically enough, by a bolt similar to the ones he was accustomed to deliver and the result was such that twenty-two boys held their breath in a mixture of glee and consternation. After the usual groans, gasps and gobbles Greg rolled over and sat up groggily.
"Who hit me," he gritted.
"Doug Glencairn," piped several busybodies still refusing to admit that their god had fallen in such a manner.
Douglas stood several yards away, gracefully poised, hands on hips and a rather Satanic grin on his face. The grin alone would have been enough to infuriate the average boy and after the assault on the sacred person of Greg Noble it was an outrageous affront, so Greg thought it meet and fitting that his reputation should be recovered at the expense of Douglas', and acted accordingly. There was a flurry of blows during which Douglas held his own surprisingly well, his tall wiry body as flexible as a snake and twice as fast ... until an outstretched foot tripped him and Gregg's weight and strength was brought into play. In the ground he got in several painful gouges and clubbed a right beneath Douglas' right eye ... before the principal stopped the fight and sent the two boys to opposite ends of the grounds while he contrived a punishment to fit the offense.
Mary, an inveterate tattler as are most girls her age, sought her father immediately when they arrived home. "Douglas' been in a fight," she said breathlessly, "and you ought to see the black eye he's got."
Duncan bobed his shaggy head, the stiff red hair dancing "Aye. Tis a preevilege of lads to blocken each ither's eyes. 'Twas a good ficht, mayhap?"
Mary switched importantly and made her coppery brown curls swirl about her head. "Douglas did all right until a boy ... that little old ugly thing of a Bill Albertson tripped him. Then Greg got him down and was beating him and the principal stopped it."
"Stopped it...." Duncan lunged to the limit of his six feet three inches and his eyes burned past his eagle's beak nose. "Did ye say the mon stopped it?"
"Sure. Douglas would have got his head beat off if he hadn't."
Duncan mauled his red mustache fiercely for a moment, then strode away with giant strides. He paused before the room in which Douglas and Duncan slept and hurled the door open.
"Wha' is it, the noo?" he asked, his voice sunk to a gentle rumble.
"What you say, Dad?"
"What's the trooble?"
"No trouble."
"I see ye ha' a block eye."
"Yes sir."
"Where'd ye get it?"
In ten minutes of prodding, Duncan got the whole story and when he had it, he bristled like his best Hampshire boar itching for a fight.
"Poot on ye're cap," rumbled the father. "We ha' a leetle trup to mak'...."
"Where?"
"To the Nobles. And this time there'll be no pruncipal to stop ye. Are ye game?"
"Yes sir."
"Then there's nowt more to be said."
"There's lots more to be said." They turned and the mother Mary stood quietly by the doorway. "What's to be gained by brawling, Duncan?"
"Nowt gained, pussibly ... nowt lost. 'Tis the justeece o' the matter. The lad here was fouled and the prunciple, blost him for an interfeering auld glaggy, bruken it up afore the lad could recover himsel'. 'Twill at least regain his self respect."
Mary, whose years of experience in the ways of men shrugged and walked away leaving them to their folly. Douglas who had received little affection from his rugged father began to see a few things he hadn't noticed before and put an arm about Duncan's waist as they walked toward the car. His father responded by patting him gently on the head. "Ye're a mon, noo Dooglas, and ye've got to ken what it means. Ye scairt?"
"A little. He's pretty big."
"But ye're willin' to tak' him on again, ee'n wi' one eye?"
"Yes sir. He can't do anything but lick me."
A grim smile came over Duncan's craggy face and he nodded. "Richt ye are ... and mak' him ken he's been i' battle afore he does it."
The Nobles and the Glencairns were not close friends. There had been the matter of a horse trade which was said to have soured on Cyrus Noble when his end of the bargain developed glanders and had sprung a set-fast the first time a saddle had been put on him. He, having heard his son's doctored version of the fight which had been a glorious victory for the Noble clan in the words of Greg, came down the steps of his house with a broad grin on his face.
"Well, Duncan, too bad the Glencairn's can't fight as well as they trade horses."
"I didna ken ye was a blind mon," retorted Duncan acidly, "or I'd ne'er ha' traded wi' ye."
Noble flushed redly because to be accused of being blind in a horse trade is a deadly insult. "Well," he snarled, "what do you want?"
"I want ye to root ye're bairn oot here and we'll ha' the ficht all ower again and wi'oot any inter-feerance fra' kids and pruncipals."
"My boy ain't no brawler," fumed Noble taking in Douglas' slender but aggressively graceful body.
"Aye. I've heerd the dodge afore."
Noble flushed again and turning he called back into the house. A moment later Greg appeared clad in shorts and sneakers.
"You want me Pa ... Oh." He stopped at the top step and looked at the visitors questioningly. "What's this all about, Douglas can't take a lickin' without bringin' the family?"
"Wi' less talk that micht be deecided in a vurra few minutes," said Duncan calmly. Then as Greg came on out, said quietly to Douglas. "Tak off ye're brogues and socks. Tak' off ye're shirt, tighten ye're breeks and stand i' the open. Dinna let him get ye cornered and box till he's softened up, then slaughter him.
"I'm agin this sorta thing," fumed Noble as Greg, confident, danced out with his fists up.
"Aye and so'm mysel'. Tis a matter o' boyish pride that a ficht be fit fair. I agree and I warn ye to let things go as they be."
Noble choked back a retort and watched his son loose a frightful right swing which Douglas let whistle harmlessly by, dancing easily to one side. Again came the sweeping right and this time the smaller boy stepped inside it and whipped a solid one two to the midriff, sliping away from the threatened clench.
Duncan grinned while Noble scowled and bit his lip. "Quit swingin' like a door," he yelled. "You'll be winded before you know it."
Greg withdrew and tried to box but he had neither the temperament nor the build for it. He was a bull in mind and body and rush, rush, was all he knew. Rush and overwhelm and if that didn't work ... fear and doubt. Even now with only two blows absorbed, fear was interfering with his breathing and he was beginning to pant and grow red. Casting caution aside he rushed again and this time Douglas hung a wicked left high on Greg's cheek bone cutting it like a knife. It was the blow that ended the fight, because now at Duncan's bellowed directions he tore into the staggering Greg and overwhelmed him with a whirlwind of blows that ended with the bigger boy blubbering in the grass.
"Vurra satisfactory, I'd say, Muster Noble ... what would ye say?"
Noble bent over Greg and seeing that he wasn't badly hurt stood up and kicked the boy heavily in the ribs. "Get up you blubbering coward ... He felt a claw of iron fasten itself to his shoulder and he was swung around irresistaly. "Muster Noble, the lad's a better mon than his Da ... I am late i' discovering," and Duncan Glencairn swung a shattering right to the point of Noble's' chin.
The fight happened when Douglas was seventeen, in his senior year in school and since the day several years ago he and Alicia Ogilvie had been fast friends, so fast in fact that they were almost inseparable which older folk thought was sweet and it is probable that they thought so too since they weren't watched as they might have been, had their lives not been so closely knit. They were looked upon tolerantly like brother and sister, but as it has been shown, Alicia and Douglas were somewhat in advance of any such innocuous relationship, and when Alicia graduated and went to the University they were both exceptionally well educated youngsters.
CHAPTER THREE
One morning he finished his chores which consisted of milking the four fat Jerseys, straining and pouring the milk into thick crocks in the spring house to cool and driving the cows a quarter of a mile to the clover patch that had turned the hill opposite the house a vivid green. With nothing to do he saddled a rangy bay gelding who had been a close friend of his for years, loped off into the back pasture and headed for the woods. He had no destination nor did he care greatly. He had to be doing something and riding aimlessly seemed to ease his restlessness. He plunged into the woods and followed the winding trail as it wound between giant pines, beeches, oaks and magnolias, pausing occasionally to brush the horseflies from Ranger's ears and flanks.
Douglas knew subconsciously that he was nearing Takankta River where the swimming was tops and he dug his heels into Ranger's flanks urging him forward at a brisk canter, being, therefore, unprepared for the meeting that occurred around the bend in the trail. Ranger snorted and shied momentarily, heaved a blasting sigh and grew calm again. There ahead of them standing in the trail was a magnificent Palomino stallion and on his back was a girl no less magnificent. She was a tall Junoesque, slim waisted, lush breasted creature with long strong legs encased in faded denims. She wore a plain blue chambray shirt that was tied in a knot about her middle exposing a goodly amount of finely tanned hide. Her face was petu-lently cast and framed by wild masses of tawny golden hair that flamed in the bright sunlight. She sat on the horse with an ease that spoke of long hours in the saddle and complete mastery over the superb animal she rode.
"I thought I knew everybody in these parts," said Douglas easily, "Hi ... I'm Douglas Glencairn."
Her violet eyes considered him calmly. "The one who beat Greg Noble?"
He lowered his eyes. "Er ... yeah. That's me."
"You needn't be ashamed of it. He needed it and he got it. I wish you'd do it again. I never enjoyed anything so much in my life."
"You ... did you see it?"
"Sure, I saw it. I was standing not fifty yards away when it happened."
"Then you must be...." He stopped and turned as red as a tomato.
"Don't mind my feelings. I don't have any. I'm Naomi Noble."
"I ... I didn't mean...."
"Look Doug, everyone in the country knows I was expelled from school and why."
"I'm sorry Naomi. You were young...."
"I'm as old as Methuslah ... But I've had more damn fun than that old bastard ever did and you know why? Because every time I hear something is supposed to be wrong I go do it. You have no idea how much fun it is. I took off my pants for Aleck Hornsby because I wanted to and if I hadn't been such a fool and done it in the cloak room and if that vinegary old bitch Allenby hadn't gotten nosy we'd have gotten away with it too." Her nostrils compressed and she tossed her hair like a nervous filly ... and Douglas suddenly became aware of a very impressive thing. Naomi Noble in her cheap clothes with her bruised but still wild and unfettered spirit was by all odds the most exciting, inviting bit of feminine architecture he had ever seen in his life, and by a dint of psvchological mathematics worthy of a man twice his age, he came to a very solid conclusion, and with an innate penchant for opportunity did a very bold and revealing thing.
He put every ounce of his personality into a grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes and exposed twin rows of solid clean teeth. "Say, Naomi, damn if I don't like you." It was as simple as a statement could be made and for a second it almost knifed her off her brittle defensive battlements. Her breasts heaved distractingly for a moment and she snapped the violet eyes rapidly to keep the tears back then said. "Thanks, Doug. Let's go sit by the old dipping vat and talk. You're the only person I've seen in years that didn't make me want to vomit."
They tethered their horses to slender tough saplings and walked through the rustling leaves and grass to the concrete drip pen that was still covered with a V shed roofed with split oak shingles. Naomi flopped to the soft carpet of leaves that covered the floor. Douglas lounged against the poles still in place that formed the drip pen.
The girl tossed her head restively and looked at him, her eyes darker in the shade, almost purple under the sweet of her luxuriant golden lashes. "People," she spat, "are...." She told him exactly what she thought people amounted to.
He nodded. "Right." He was playing it her way for a while. "The world is full of them."
"I don't know about that. Maybe the world is full of good people and all we've drawn around here are just what I said. I despise this place with a purple passion. I hate it, I hate the people, I just hate ... period."
"But." he put in gently, "you don't hate the woods."
"No...." Her voice had a faraway quality. "The woods aren't people. You always know what to expect from the woods. They are quiet and friendly. They don't play dirty tricks. They don't try to make you dirt when...." She stopped and bit her lip. He came and sat beside her, leaning back against the poles.
"When you don't think what you did was dirty ... is that it?"
She faced him belligerently because he was beginning to creep beneath her skin with his understanding. "Exactly! If it's dirty why is it so much fun? If it's dirty the day before marriage why is it so sticky-icky sweet and beautiful the day after? If it's dirty when I do it why isn't it dirty when Golden Boy mounts a mare...." He's better than any man I know...." She dashed the tears away and faced him. "I'm not including you in this. For all I know you may be a right guy. It's working out that way."
"On the other hand," he said, "I might be an awful bastard."
"That's right, you might.
"You haven't known me but thirty minutes."
"Forty minutes," she said looking at a man sized wristwatch. "And yet it seems I've known you always. How do you do it?"
"My blue eyes can hypnotize ... look into them steadily."
Deep violent eyes met intense almost cold blue eyes and they held for a long moment, then she reached forward and put her hand over his eyes. "Don't look at me like that, Douglas."
"Why?"
"Because I think you could hypnotize me ... say what the hell am I sitting here talking to you like this for when I'm two years older than you?"
"Not quite a year ... I started to school late." The lie came easily to his lips. "And the talking was your idea."
She lay back and squirmed like a cat, her lithe body rippling with snake-like fluidity. Douglas' heart hammered heavily, briefly, and he leaned over nearer her on his elbows.
"Babes in the woods," he said, his voice controlled and deep, an accomplishment that was not yet old, of which he was inordinately proud. "Just us ... right out in the middle of nowhere. It's warm but not too warm. The air is moving but it is calm. Nothing but birdsong and windsong in the branches. Nothing before me but you, more beautiful than anything I ever saw. You cut my throat and yet no blood comes, you're hurt and I'm sick because I'm not the doctor." No one was more astounded at this burst of romantic flight into the thin yonder than Douglas himself. He drew back and held his breath, aghast, his brain churning with wonder, his throat aching with the impact of what he had said because he was a highly imaginative, vocal and sensitive lad but never before had he launched into such lyricism and it affected even the author.
Slowly the girl rolled to her side and raised herself on her elbows her eyes like clear purple grapes and her lips parted damp, red and delicious, her golden masses of hair in complete disorder.
"Oh Douglas," she breathed ecstatically, "Oh Douglas...."
The sight of her amazement and the accelerated thudding of her heart pictured in the strutted artery in her neck, his recent success and her reaction made his heart soar mightily.
"You're a mermaid rolling like a lovely fish in waves of brown leaves. Your hair is seaweed on the tides of time. I didn't know you and now I do ... and I'm not the same man as I was an hour ago. I'll never be the same again." His voice had sung a soft dramatic note and almost overcome by the eloquence of his own heart Douglas' eyes grew wet and the coppery lashes dampened and clung in small clumps.
Her eyes incredulous and her lips parted, Naomi sat up slowly and shook her head in stunned disbelief. His words had the air of a man speaking of marble halls for the first time in his life and it was more than her sore imbittered heart could stand. She hung her head and cried softly. Unable to comfort her, feeling that his own heart would burst Douglas could only hang his head and wait numbly until she quieted.
When she did she lay back on the leaves again and sighed raggedly. "I'll never forget this till the day I die Douglas. Those were the sweetest words I ever heard. Did you ever say them before?
"No." His voice was husky, almost a whisper. "I don't think I ever thought like that before today."
"Do you think I'm beautiful?"
"So beautiful that the best words I could think of Hon't do even half a job describing you."
"Don't say that ... please don't say that ... I'm...." She bit the back of her hand and writhed in anguish.
"I don't care what you are or what you did or with whom or what who said or did. You're Naomi and no one knows her but me."
She smiled tremulously. "I don't know what's happened to us in these few minutes. A mountain slid down on us or something ... Douglas?"
"What?"
"T think I'm beautiful too."
"That's because you see you without clothes. You know better than anyone else."
"Yes ... I suppose. There are people who don't think I'm beautiful."
"There are some people who can't see a sunset," he said gallantly. "And those same people are the ones who'd say I shouldn't see you without clothes."
"Oh, would they!" She sat up, her eyes flaming and her breasts heaving with bountiful delight beneath the thin shirt. With a jerk she untied the knot in a flash she had unbuttoned the shirt and slid it back over her shoulders. For a moment he didn't breathe ... had no movement or reaction at all save that of the worship. Pink peaked wonders, lush golden fruit that had been fed the choicest of nature's oils, glowing somnolently with a sort of inner fire that made his mouth as dry as a husk and the skin seem too tight for his body.
"Douglas ... people wouldn't like for you to see how beautiful I really am would they?"
He gulped and his throat was a dry as sandpaper. "No...."
She jerked at her belt. "Then I'll show you."
He might have been riveted to the ground as the sight of her fantastic body emerged from the confines of the denims, like a flower emerging from the drab medium that mothered it and bursting into glorious life in the sun, struck his muscles numb and dead. About her waist was a frothy gesture of peach tinted briefs which she swept away with one motion, then stood there as proud as a goddess, unashamed, triumphant over the puritanical mores that attempt to make the body a thing of sin and cover it to the detriment of its health, lifting to blanket its attractiveness but heightening its mystery and desirability.
In spite of the length of her there was an almost pristine purity to every dramatic flowing line of all of which blended with a harmony that was a song, a song to all loveliness and a challenge to the beauty of every created thing. She was a creature of gold, of rose, of milky tan, of white in protected places and Douglas stricken as he had never been before felt that he would explode from the force of the driving forces within him and yet powerless to do aught than stare with fixed eyes.
She turned and reached a higher pole turning slightly to the side, arching her back, flattening the gentle rise of her stomach and pointing the globes of her taut breasts at a high angle. "And this way?" she asked throatily. , "And any way," he rasped hoarsely. "Any way at all. Standing, sitting ... it doesn't matter. You hurt Naomi. You hurt me all over."
He stood up and walking to her with an intent stiff legged gait he stopped a foot away and examined her at close range, then without reason or volition he sank to his knees before her and embraced her, cooling his hot face against the fabulous plane of her palpitant stomach.
A single leaping muscular contortion whipped through her and her back bent forward and he could feel the drip drip of hot tears on his neck and through the thin material of his shirt.
"You feel like that Douglas?"
He did not reply, only held her tighter until a whimper of pain made him slacken his grip slightly. He seized some of the smooth skin in his teeth and worried its surface with the tip of his tongue and only his grip on her held down the leap that made her suddenly as taut as a frightened horse, then she slowly collapsed upon him her body snake-like in its uncontrollable contortions, begging without words and seeking without asking directions.
For the first time since Alicia had led him halting and fumbling over a precipice from which he never returned Douglas was utterly shattered in mind and emotion and in his weakness she was stronger than he and handled him with shameful ease. Sensing the leaden movements of his limbs she stopped and clasping him close, her hair tumbling in disorderly masses she asked in a cry, "Douglas don't you want to?"
"More than anything in my life," he breathed, not a little stricken to have things taken so completely out of his hands.
"Oh, Douglas, this had to happen ... it had to." Her head went back against the leaves the excess of sensation driving her into something very like a convulsion, then it reversed itself.
It was like day darkening at high noon as though the noon's shadow had crept over the sun and struck the world to darkness, then twilight, then the purple and rose of a dawn such as he had never before experienced. Her eyes were open and from them poured a steady stream of tears and her lips trembled from a fullness within that made her afraid to speak.
Touched deeply he wiped the tears away with a trembling hand. "What's the matter Naomi, did I hurt you?"
"You've hurt me," she said thickly, "by giving me heaven ... now I'll go back to my hell ... my own little private hell where there are people and hate and ache and ... Douglas did this happen or did we dream it?"
"If we did," he said gravely, "I'll be thinking how we can repeat it. This is the sort of dream a man wants to repeat."
"You mean it? You mean you don't despise me and think I'm ... I'm what all the rest of them think because I let you have me ... have me like this where all was yours, every part of me, to do as you pleased, my body, me ... everything?"
A chuckle almost escaped his lips. It was hardly that way. She had had him and she had handled him with such awful power and dexterity that even now he ached like he had been a tackle dummy all day. "I guess we're alike in a way. I can't see that you've done anything to change you to ... I mean make you bad. When we came here you were a beautiful girl. Now...." His throat closed on him and the sound it made was even more eloquent. Tears started from her eyes again and ran unheeded into her ears. "It's too sweet Douglas. Something'll happen to it. No one ever really gets to enjoy anything as wonderful as this."
"We just did," he argued reasonably. "Why couldn't we...." He leaped to his feet with a cry of anguish. It was as though someone had poured a bucket of scalding acid from his left shoulder to his feet. "She's right," roared Cyrus Noble, a bull whip in his hands. "There'll be no more of it." The whip uncoiled again and Douglas felt as though he had been cut in two. He fell forward his nerves cording into screaming knots from the force of the lash. It flicked out and stung a red welt all the way around Naomi's middle as she came to her feet, then back to the boy on the ground cutting an eighteen inch purple stripe down his back. This pain served as a sort of antidote to the others and Douglas, ordinarily a stoic leaped to his feet with a scream that he could not contain had it meant his death. Again the whip leaped out and cut an ugly gash in the girl's side marking one of her breasts with a red streak. That was the blow that came within an inch of sealing Cyrus Noble's death warrant. Douglas was a nearly grown man, broad of shoulder and lean of leg and flank. In the last hour he had grown greatly and in his breast was the seed of a love that was to bear him company in many a strange and foreign land. He had been shamefully brutalized with a weapon, the mere threat of which has always been an insult and it had marked a woman suddenly more precious to him than anything in all the world. With a roar that might have sounded like an ancient Caledonian war cry he charged into the flying lash, heedless now of its bite his blood boiling with the fierce adrenalin of his beserker forebears, tore the whip from Noble's hand and fastened two large freckled hands in the man's throat bearing him irresistibly to the ground. He was not now fighting a clever watchful fight but had loosed the tiger and was letting it rend and tear. With tremendous expenditure of power he was raising the larger man's head from the ground and banging it back with thuds that could have been heard a hundred yards. For a while Cyrus fought back from a frightful disadvantage until chance placed a root in the way of his head, then all went black but Douglas only used the relaxation as an opportunity for more furious blows. He felt her hands tearing at his arms and shoulders and he could hear her voice but not the words.
"You'll kill him, Douglas ... You'll kill him ... Douglas." She reeled back panting her lovely body streaked with the blood where the whip had cut but she went back again. Seeing that screams and effort wouldn't help she placed a calm hand on his shoulder and said in a quiet voice. "Please Douglas ... if you love me. don't kill him."
He stopped, dazedly let the man's purpled face fall back to the sward and reeled drunkenly to his feet. "He cut ... you with the ... whip."
"Oh Douglas ... he cut you too. It doesn't matter about me."
His teeth grated as he looked at the bleeding wounds on her lovely body. "Damned dog ... I hope I killed him."
"No Douglas, they'd put you in prison, maybe hang you ... I couldn't stand that."
"You'd care...? You, I mean...."
"Oh you fool ... how blind can a man be." She flung herself into his arms and the blood from their wounds flowed together and washed away the pain in the intensity of their embrace.
"'Tis a fair poor ootlook," said Duncan Glen-cairn as he stood before his son who had but three days before been a boy, now a man before his time.
"Why," asked Douglas dully, his chest dead with the pain of the past few days.
"The mon's a bruken head and is breathin' through a gloss tube i' his neck. 'Tis said that e'en if he makes it through he'll ne'er speaken above a whusper. He had the strenk to mak' it hame but 'twas only after he was to the doctor's and had made his threats that he tucken bad off. Threaten's to make ye wed wi' his dochter which by a' acoonts isna...."
"Be careful, Dad," rasped Douglas coming to his feet, his eyes flaming. "Be careful. I don't give a tinker's damn what people say and he won't have to make me marry her. I'll do it anyway."
Duncan, sorely rocked by this outburst, remembered that it was the first time he had ever seen such fury in his son's eyes. "Foosh," he breathed gently, his own kindling with admiration, "I believe ye mean what ye say."
"Just go on believing it and we won't have any words. I'm sorry I spoke harshly to you, Dad."
"Mavhap I desairved it," said the old man with an understanding gentleness. "After a', 'twas only hearsay. I didna see the gel act oot o' turn."
"And what does that mean?"
His father. "Aye ... wha' i' deed. Tis a guid question and desairves a guid answer, one which I dinna ha' at the moment ... seein' as I do wha' ye're drivin' at. Still, there's the matter of the crime if such theer is. Wha' aboot that?"
Douglas bit his lips. "I don't know. What do you suggest?"
Duncan, faced with this question, was also on the spot. "Weel, 'tis a knotty question. Nowt ye'll say will avail ye anything if it coomes to trial. I ha' nae desire to see ye behind bars or strung up. Noo there's no shuriffs on ye're trail. T'morra there micht be."
"Are you suggesting that I run?"
Duncan shrugged helpless. " 'Twould seem that anything I suggested'd be summat short o' wees-dom. Ha'ye council?"
Douglas looked blindly out across the meadow where mules, cattle and sheep grazed contentedly. He had looked forward to one day being laird over these acres and now the hope was gone. He was one step ahead of the law and freedom suddenly seemed sweeter than Glencairn acres. His decision was swift and sure in the tradition of his forebears. "I'll leave tonight."
Now that it had come, Duncan was shocked out of countenance. "By the hoorns o' Beelzebub," he swore, "ye speak o' leavin' lik' it was a trap to the Capitol."
Douglas stood up, his chin almost trembling, but his jaw set so hard that it couldn't. "Will you tell Mom? I'm going to my room now." He walked away, his heels ringing hard on the heart pine floor.
For a moment the gaunt giant frame of his father remained motionless, his deep burning eyes fixed on the floor. "Nowt for me when young but a crust and a seafarer's bunk, slime and rime and stink. Nowt for the laddie but a wanderer's bed under a tree, i' the snow or i' an alley ... Aweel...." He sat up straight and proud and the old eyes burned hotter and the stiff shaggy hair trembled. "But he's a mon for a' that. A mon wi' his mother's blood and his father's blood i' his veins. 'Twill be well ... but hard ... Aye, harder than he thinks."
CHAPTER FOUR
The weather was hot and the steel deck of the ship was like a griddle exposed as it was to the direct rays of the sun. Douglas Glencairn in dirty white shorts, hatless and shirtless, burned to the hue of fine leather, chipped paint and sweated. He looked about warily and seeing no one of authority leaned against the edge of the rail and looked at the intense blue of the Indian ocean that seemed the ultimate in immensity. To the east a gigantic manta ray leaped playfully from the water and crashed back sending a bevy of frantic flying fish to the surface to sail in every direction where they were chased by frigate birds.
The steamer, an ex-Liberty ship flying the Dutch flag plodded onward at a steady eight knots and except for the splash of the bow as it cut through a wave and the throb of her engines the world was at peace ... a peace that didn't last.
A thug of a second mate crept up behind him and witb one shove sent him sprawling into the steel ladder leading to the wheel house. He lay there for a moment stunned, bleeding from a gash in his scalp.
"Tough ayn't it matey. Tough. Fell and clipped yer blinkin' crumpet on a ladder. Teach yer to loaf w'en I puts yer to chippin' paint. Ruddy Yankee barstard. Teach you." The mate went his way a wicked grin on his face, a weak Limey face that sat in poor company with the thick hairy body, a face that Douglas had come to hate with a passion that was a fearsome thing.
"Pay him no attention poy," an old Dutch seaman had advised. "Id vill ged you only in trouble. Waid undil you ged him ashore vhere you von't mindt to stay. Led him haff it und jump shib."
Douglas had heeded and swallowed insult after insult, his blood growing to a gradual boil that he was having trouble controlling. Still at sea he was under orders and attacking a second mate would cause him trouble. Ever since he had learned by annonymous letter that Cyrus Noble had died three years ago he had ceased considering any possible return home. That was out and having no destination he wandered footloose and carelessly as blew the winds. He did not like the life of a sailor but at least it was moving and moving helped to keep from thinking because he was always interested in whatever locality he might visit ... although sometimes it hadn't been too interested in him ... the male element, that is. As for women his power seemed to attract with even more deadly magnetism until at last he had had to resort to some rather foolish stunts to keep away from them. They seemed to lose all sense of danger and responsibility being able to see only that they desired him and had to have him in the very shortest possible time.
"Poy."
Douglas looked up from his chipping and wiped futilely at the bitter sweat mixed with blood that grimed his face. "Yes sir."
The fat good natured Captain, a Dutchman. Van Groote bv name, frowned. "Vhat iss making bleed of the head."
"Tripped and fell against the ladder."
The old man leaned over and examined the wound. "Pad cut. What you don't gedding Pulver, to sew him opp."
"Thought I'd better finish the job first."
The Captain swore roundly. "Dun't you iss knowing chibbing of baint on a shib ain't neffer finished? Go gedding head sewed opp."
That was before they put in at Mombasa and at the port the opportunity Douglas, for which had been watching, did not present itself but anchored a mile out waiting for the tide to cover Anchor Rocks and sundry other vessel traps that abound on the East African coast, the chance did come. He was leaning against the rail near the stern where the smells of the port waters vied with the stench of seven empty garbage cans stacked along the port rail. A tropical moon was hard at work washing the world down with its magic dust which compensated somewhat for the glaring revelations of the sun during the day. Douglas, who had never quite freed himself from the nagging pain in his chest, suffered renewed pangs every time anything of beauty crossed his vision. Suddenly a vile nauseous hatred drenched him like a surge of boiling water. He tensed and gripped the rail, seeing through the haze of futile anger, the glorious face of Naomi. As clear as day it was, the petulant pouting lips, the hot violet eyes and the disordered gold of her hair. Even her voice came back to him soft, hopeless and telling of the ache in her heart.
"It's too sweet, Douglas. Something'll happen to it. No one ever gets to enjoy anything as wonderful as this."
At this moment Arthur Painter, the second mate sidled up beside Douglas. "Well, 'ere we are, the Cap'n's pet moonin' at the moon. What sort o' laziness yer dreamin' up fer me to kick out o' ye now, Scottie."
Douglas acted on a split second decision which was aided and abetted by his venomous frame of mind and before the words were well out of the Cockney's mouth Douglas had stripped a film of action through his mind complete with alternatives, pivoted and hooked a murderous right, wrist deep in the man's midsection. The left followed with precision and unabated force and as the man bent double in agony, a rocketing knee shattered his face into an omelette of blood, flesh and gristle. His body had hardly struck the deck when the warm waters of the bay closed over Douglas' head.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cornwall King was a hunter first by nature and second by profession. It was his job to pilot tender-feet into the veldt of Tanganyika and Kenya and try to get them back in a more or less recognizable condition complete with pelts and trophies which they would have mounted at great expense to themselves and brag about interminably thereafter at the expense of their friends.
Corny, as he had been dubbed in Nairobi, was a gaunt man with a bony whimsical face, crisp black moustache and firm mouth. Obviously, even to his speech, a Britisher, except that he was an American by birth having escaped from a military wedding some years before under somewhat the same circumstances as the man who now faced him as they sat in the patio of the hunter's comfortable bungalow.
"Thing is, Glencairn," King was saying, "I am a lone sort of operator. I couldn't hire you at decent wages. Why don't you visit the American Consul? He's a friend of mone...."
"I thought I made that plain," said Douglas. He was dirty, tired, red of eye and his hair hadn't been cut in a long time. His beard was almost black from filth and needed clippers now, more than a razor. "I don't want to go back home."
"What then do you want?"
The weary shoulders lifted slowly then drooped. "What do I want?" A sigh seeped forth that made King wince uncomfortably. "I think what I want more than anything else in the world is to go home and never leave it again as long as I live."
"But you just said...."
"I know. I should have said that I couldn't go home. God knows I want to the worst way."
"Well, as much as I'd like to help you...."
"Look, King, don't you think I'd be worth three meals a day and what clothes it'd take to cover me decently?"
King flushed and held his breath for a moment. "I'm sorry, son. I just didn't think you'd want to work at the piddling wage I could afford."
"Train me and we can branch out. You'll get more business. I hear you can't possibly fill the demands on your time. With a King trained man available we could double the size of the safari, go separately but close enough together that they'd feel they had your services too. I want to get the hell away from people. I want to hit the trail."
"This is against my better judgment," said King slowly, "but maybe you've got an idea. Tell you what ... By the way, how good are you at language?"
"Pretty good. I can get along in French, Spanish and German. Can make my wants known in Dutch."
"That's good because you won't be able to make much of the English the natives use. Bush Swahili will get you by. I'll let Pritchard brush you up on the essentials while I'm away. Got to make a trip in the morning. Just an automobile trip to see a friend. I'll be back in a week or so. Before the rainy season lets up completely I'll want you to make a trip to the south for me and pick up two natives. They're my best boys and I'll need them as soon as the weather breaks fair. It's a three day trip and it'll be good for you. I take it your clothes amount to what you have on your back."
"That's the lot. You'll take me on then?"
"At the lowest wage you ever drew. I'll have Pritchard to buy what you'll need in the way of work clothes...."' He smiled. "Then you'd better go down to Baker's and let them fit you with a suit. Unless I miss my guess you'll be in some demand here socially, and I'm not as cheap as I sound sometimes."
"Who is Pritchard?"
"He's my house boy and general watchdog. He can knock an elephant's eye out at a hundred yards with a .470. By the way, can you shoot?"
"I was a pretty fair wing shot on quail. I could knock a squirrel out of a tall tree with a .22 if he didn't run around too much. I've never shot this sort of game."
"Sounds like you might do. Ever afraid?"
Douglas grinned. "Yes."
"Right. I was prepared to work you over on that Do you funk out?"
"Never have. I've been in some tights."
"All right. You'll stay here of course. Bone up on the native chatter and rest. You look like you could use some."
"I could use a lot. Thanks a million Mr. King."
The saturnine lips tightened and smiled. "Might as well call me Corny like everyone else does."
"Thanks. Er ... about that social life. I think I'd better steer clear of that for a while."
"Why?"
"Because ... I mean to have an unfortunate talent for ... er, shall we say putting women in the frame of mind where the removal of certain intimate articles of their clothing is a mere formality?"
King grinned wider this time. "And you call that unfortunate?"
"Maybe uncomfortable would be a better word. I don't have the resistance I should have and I have been placed in some very embarrassing spots."
"Reads like some ancient history of my own. Well, suit yourself about that. You'll find Nairobi a very modern town and the mixture of peoples here has made it quite cosmopolitan. Of course, that doesn't mean that a husband won't shoot you here as quickly as another place."
"That's what I mean. I'd like to feel my way if you don't mind."
Pritchard was small and very black. His native name had been N'Toki, which he assured Douglas did not sound sonorous enough for the personal servant of King-i Bwana, therefore, after some thought and consultation with his lord he had chosen the name Pritchard.
Pritchard had an almost telescopic eye that dealt extensively with minute detail. Although this attitude was obvious about the house and hunt Douglas found that it was also translated into the colored boy's instructive talents. This became apparent very soon after the instructions began and before he knew it Douglas found himself using simple sentences and conversing with Pritchard about small matters in the dialect. In a week's time he had a working fluency and by the end of the month he was making verbal sallies of his own having nearly mastered the vocabulary and jabbered away at Pritchard until the black man's throat began to tire and dry. "This white lord has nearly talked my face into a deep sleep," he complained to King who came back several weeks later.
"Then he is doing well?"
"I never saw a man learn faster. Still, there is the matter of the teacher who has spent endless hours and much sweat that this man be able to converse with your boys. A better job would be hard to...."
"Never mind the sales talk."
Douglas with clean clothes, a shave and haircut was a different man, one that pleased King immensely as they shook hands.
"There has been improvement," he said with a smile.
"Very softly, but insufficiently put," replied Douglas. "Have a seat in your chair and I'll order a whiskey and soda for you."
"Not necessary," said King pointing to the advancing Pritchard bearing a tray holding two tall frosted glasses. "Training does it. Ready for the trip?"
"I guess so. I can do very well with the language now."
"Pritchard says you nearly talked him to death."
"I guess I did. Where is it I'm to go?"
"To a small village on the banks of the Ketongi river. There you'll find Tosavo and a small runt of a busliman called Eki, or so some call him Eki N'kema which, as you know, means monkey. Eki and Tosavo jaw at each other all the time and seem on the verge of coming to blows but they never do. Tosavo is a Moran Masai and a superb hunter. He does magic with spears and is deadly with them. He's a terrific man, taller than either of us and muscled like a bull. Eki will weigh maybe a hundred pounds but is a tracker like you never saw. I wouldn't think of approaching a season without them. Tosavo took on a wounded bull elephant once with a spear whlie I struggled with a stuck cartridge case. Got him too, although he had absolved several well placed .470s. He was still full of murder but Tosavo put one of those long bladed spears squarely through his heart."
"I never heard of spears on safari."
"They aren't used much now but you can't separate a Moran Masai from his spear. He's the chief of the village, such as it is. Actually, they are not of a single tribe ... a collection you might say. Do a lot of tourist trading and make all sorts of native and near native gimcrackery. It's close to darkest Africa but it is still under the influence of Nairobi. You could take a horse here and in two hours bag an antelope or bush buck, maybe a lion, but it is pretty civilized, relatively speaking for some distance. Incidently, there's a woman there...."
"I don't think I'd care for native women," said Douglas.
"Ummm, well maybe. Thing is, this isn't an average native woman. She's something of a mystery and I might say a legend. You'll see."
Douglas who immediately dismissed the woman from his mind found cause to remember later.
The trip in the Dodge four-by was uneventful in one sense and quite the opposite in another. Pritchard who had accompanied him was worn to a frazzle pointing out animals that could be seen from the excellent graded stone surfaced road. As far as the eye could see stretched the great plains of Kenya, dotted with herds of grazing wilde-beeste, impala, giraffe and hundreds of others he could not identify and the names provided by Pritchard being either Swahili or Kikuyu, did not register. At the flanks of these herds slunk the inevitable Carnivora from the jackal to the lordly lion although of the latter Douglas saw but a single pair. Pritchard however, assured him that they were present. "Even as where there are women, assuredly there will be men, where there are the grass eaters there is simba."
"Where," asked Douglas as they stopped beneath a gigantic acacia for a drink, "are your women?"
"Lord, women do not trouble me over much. As I have heard King-i Bwana say in English, I can take them or leave them."
"Man," replied Douglas in his newly acquired language, "It is not nature that a man should leave women or take them as he chooses. He should be after them even as the lion is after the zebra."
"There is a difference O. Douglisi. That, a man as young as you, should know. The zebra is no match for the lion. The buffalo might easily be and there the lion treads warily. Women are soft and of great delight to the senses yet their bite is as that of a snake. I would say, Douglisi, that you a great one for women."
"Your wisdom is for all to see," replied Douglas with fitting humility. "And what else do your sharp little eyes see?"
Pritchard looked him over keenly. "I see a man whose eyes are young but have sad and weary memories. They are eyes filled with a cold fearful fire and yet in their depths is grief."
"Do you see that in my eyes or have you watched me in unguarded moments."
Pritchard looked away. "It is true, Douglisi that I have watched you when your eyes were looking toward the western world and your face told me much. I but spoke with the tongue of honey after the fashion of women when I mentioned eyes. You have been with us only a little-little while but I do not like to see your face sad."
"That is good of you Pritchard, little monkey. There are many men who care not whether I live or die."
"There are many men who themselves were better off dead," said the black boy somberly. "What will you do when M'Dusi comes to your hut?"
The change of subjects was so abrupt that Douglas was somewhat thrown off balance mentally. "Who is M'Dusi."
"It is said by some that she is a great witch. Others say she sleeps with M'Shimba-M'Shamba every other night and is his lover. If that is true then he must not care for virgins because M'Dusi has not been a virgin since she was older than ten years."
"How do you know?"
Pritchard shrugged." One knows ... She is a bad woman."
"Is this the woman of whom King-i Bwana spoke?"
"She is the same. A very evil woman."
"How does she live?"
"There are many men who are her slaves. One, a white man, she keeps in her hut."
"Uh-oh ... You sure about that, Pritchard?"
"As certain as I am that she will cross your path."
Douglas wriggled uncomfortably but had to admit the thrill that coursed over him.
Tosavo was a man of such herculean stature that his obsequious gesture which he had obviously learned from an Indian or Arab, since it vaguely resembled a salaam, seemed a little sardonic. Pritchard had stopped the Dodge a hundred yards from the boma of thorn that surrounded the village as protection against man eaters, old and mangy lions who can no longer hunt successfully, and had gone on foot to meet Tosavo.
"If you should accompany me," he had told Douglas, "the great fool's heard would swell and he would need a taste of the sjambok to bring him back to earth. I shall make him come to you which is the due of white lords unless they are of the drunken, trashy variety upon whom King-i Bwana says the whole world spits. Let him come to you that the first impression be a lasting one."
Tosavo had come and had made his bastard salaam but the level eyes, the proud head and the mighty rolling muscles that encased his powerful body did not sDeak of great humility.
"I see you, Lord Douglisi." he said sonorously, "and it comes to my mind that we will be great friends. You are a man of might as is to be seen by the distance between your shoulders."
Eki, a dried up little man with bright beady eyes had stopped behind his great friend but now he bobbed out. "Tosavo, Bwana, is a fool. His father was a fool and for ten generations back and maybe further his folk have been fools. Now Eki with his wonderful eyes...."
"Silence you small pestilence," growled the big man. "There is a time for the call of small birds but when men speak they remain silent. Bwana. what important words do you bring from King-i Bwana?"
"I bring news that the time for hunting is near and he has need for your services."
"Did he make mention of the time when the Great One was about to gore him and I saved his life?"
"Bwana King-i is a fair man. He mentioned that first."
"But," piped Eki shrilly, "did he tell of the leopard he shot off this large one's back, getting himself well clawed in the act, or the time he ran a spear through a wounded buffalo's heart just in time to prevent this clumsy hippopotomas from being trampled to death?"
"No. He did not mention those things."
Eki nodded and chuckled. "Such a man is King-i Bwana ... and in the same breath such a man is Tosavo, larger than anything save his own great tongue."
"Little man," said the giant ominously, "how would you like to be hoisted to the point of my spear and carried back to the boma then thrown into the thickest thorns?"
"Enough of this palaver," said Pritchard importantly. "You will take Bwana Douglisi to his hut and cause food to be prepared. We have driven far and are hungry as you should know."
Douglas had had experience with native huts on the west coast and did not look forward to occupancy with joy since those he had occupied before were smelly, filthy and generally verminous, but in this small village he was due for a surprise. His hut was clean and floored with sweet smelling grasses, nor did he notice the usual village stench which in other places approached the unendurable. Pritchard of the eagle eye saw his relief when they were shown their hut. "Bwana, if you are surprised that this is a clean village I must tell you a story. Once these folk were being eaten alive by a disease caused from eating mealies and little else. King-i Bwana, taking pity on them brought them two things. He brought them soap and Tosavo."
"I didn't think you liked him greatly," said Douglas smiling.
"That he is a good and fearless man on the hunt I cannot deny. That he is a good chief, also cannot be denied. He is loud of mouth and a braggart but he stands fast in the face of danger although I would rather have a double Holland than the best spear I ever saw, it must be said that Tosavo will always rely on his spear after the fashion of a proud man who is good but not as good as he thinks."
"King-i Bwana made these people bathe every day in the river with soap but Tosavo first provided them with meat and put pepper in the hearts of the men so that they too became hunters and were great rivals in who could bring in the most and the best meat. This he did by reviling them in such fashion that their women grew contempti-ous of them and would seek Tosavo in un-likely places and beg him to put them with child so that the tribe might be strengthened. I doubt that Tosavo did anything to discourage this and the result is that there is scarcely a man in the village who is not the foster father of a son that even at the age of ten or more years begins to outstrip his father, both in size and in hunting cleverness. Should N'Tiki beat his great lout of a son for reasons of jealousy the news comes to Tosavo, whereupon this, that and the other will happen and in the end N'Tiki is sorry that he was ever born. Tosavo has a way of knowing and protecting his own."
Casually but with a small nagging complaint digging at his consciousness he raised himself on one elbow. He gasped and sat bolt upright, quelling the urge for sudden flight at the sight of the woman standing before him wearing only a girdle of grasses about her waist. She was taller than the usual native woman and her contours were not negroid. Her face was controlled, beautiful and as finely chiseled as a Greek statue, the fine structure and slender bones suggesting Arabic mixture. Her color was not black nor was it white but a reddish golden color that seemed backed with negroid pigmentation. Her lips were full and lushly curved complimenting the rather extreme upward sweep of her thick graceful eyebrows.
"I see you, Douglisi," came the throaty mellow voice.
"I see you, M'Dusi," he said huskily, knowing that this must be her.
"M'Dusi knows all things," she said sitting on her feet, her legs crossing with one fluid motion, "but she does not know how you knew her name not having seen her before."
"If, indeed M'Dusi knows all things then she must know that her fame has traveled far and many men have predicted that I would meet her. Who else could you be?"
"I could be no one else, Douglisi. What else did the men predict?"
"Some predicted one thing and some predicted another."
She smiled and her teeth gleamed in the half light. "Only a woman's tongue speaks from both ends."
"And a man's when questioned too closely." He smiled in return.
She laughed, a rare golden sort of laugh that made a thin sheen of sweat break out on his forehead. "You are a strange man, Douglisi. You never lack words. Did not the men predict that you would fall in love with me?"
"They could not look into my heart so they could not speak of it. It is said that you hoard your love and use it to drive men mad."
"And what would you think of such a man?"
"That he needed to arise and be reborn. A man who becomes a mouse is not a man at all.
She shrugged her smooth beautiful shoulders.
"I could not love such a man."
"And yet it is said you keep one in your hut."
She was still for a moment, her jet, almond shaped eyes burning holding his steadily. "There are some things which cannot be explained by the mere word love."
"Of that I am certain but, of course, I do not know of what you speak."
Again came thirty seconds of unblinking regard, then she rose straight up on legs that were curved as delicately as an houri's without touching her hands to the floor. It was slightly uncanny the ease and ineffable grace with which she sat and stood.
Her lins parted and her voice was as soft as honey. "You have pleased me, Douglisi. When the hour is late and the night dark I shall expect you. My hut is beneath the great tree an the river bank. You will come." It was not a question nor yet was it an order.
"Allah knows and he alone," he said toning his voice down richly. "Between that hour and this who knows what he shall bring to my mind."
Her breasts, standing high and solid, as smooth as polished marble and tipped with pink brown, gems of easily excited skin, quivered slightly as she looked down at him. "No man, Douglisi, ever answered me in such a manner."
"You are not offended?"
"No. I'm surprised."
"M'Dusi, you know many things and you have been many things to many men. Hear this one bit of wisdom. Could the biggest elephant that ever lived reach King-i Bwana if he had his rifle?"
"Nay, Douglisi. No elephant could ever reach him because he is a man who never misses."
"Think, then, why is it they will charge him...? Think of the many that have and died. The elephant is a great creature but he must die before he can acknowledge a greater being. Good night, M'Dusi."
A muscular contraction rippled upward from her legs setting each long finely carved muscle into momentary contraction. Her hands clenched at her sides and her arms went stiff but her face did not change. For a long moment she stayed in this challenging attitude then she relaxed slowly. "Good night, Douglisi."
She did not seem to leave, rather to be swallowed up like a ghost in a mist. One secand she was there and the next she was gone.
Douglas swore roundly and wiped his forehead with a trembling hand.
The evening meal consisted of the stewed meat of a monkey and a fowl Douglas could not identity, along with mealies and fresh ripe fruit was greatly enjoyed since it was well seasoned, well cooked and cleanly served.
After they had eaten Pritchard and Douglas sat on a seat in front of the hut that had been carved from a great stump and smoked silently for a while watching the tropical night come into full being. It had rained that morning and the clean washed air was beginning to cool and great bloated stars winked into being in the purple vault over their heads. Across the river a night bird with a harsh voice let go with a crashing cry that made Douglas wince. Further up the river a hunting lion moaned softly while far away one that had fed well roared out his good humor.
Hyenas ripped out short bursts of hideous laughter as they trailed the larger Carnivora hoping to pick up some tidbit left by their haughty superiors. Noises, noises! Noises by animals, noises by birds, noises by the rustling branches of the acacias high overhead and noises of the river as it slipped by with soft gurgles and once Douglas thought he heard the hissing sigh of a bull crocodile.
""If you wish to be visited by the girl N'Gala I will tell her, Douglisi. She who brought your meal."
"I thought Englishmen did not traffic with native girls."
"So I have heard also and it is true that the blonde blue eyed lords hold mightily to their dignity but it falls at times. You are not an Englishman but an American and I like Americans because they are ready with laughter, they are generous and they do not lean on dignity for the sake of looks. King-i Bwana is a man of much natural dignity but I have seen him slap Eki familiarly on the behind. He and Tosavo makes jokes and laugh uproarously at them as equals and yet no man would presume to tread on King-i Bwana's toes. I have seen men both white and black attempt that and I have later seen their toes turned up to the sun and their eyes looked but did not see."
"King-i Bwana must be a great man, Pritchard."
"In this world of treachery and lies," said Pritchard solemnly, "he stands as the giraffe stands above the snake."
"And does he like native women?"
Pritchard shrugged. "No man likes all women." And with that Douglas had to be content because he saw that Pritchard had no intention of pursuing the subject.
Later when Pritchard and the village was asleep Douglas sat outside the hut and smoked in reflective silence. The strange exciting odor came to his nostrils again and then before him stood M'Dusi clad in nothing save a light dusting of starlight, her magnificent body held straight and proud.
"Lord Douglisi, I have come to you since you would not come to me."
"If it seems an insult that I did not come, it is not so, M'Dusi. I am a man whose mind runs deep but I would not hurt any living creature needlessly."
"That," she said woodenly, "places me in company with your dog if you have one."
He got up and ran his fingers lightly over the massed waves of jet hair that framed her pure oval face. "Does it pain so much that you must make it pain more?"
Her lips trembled and her body stiffened. "Does the sight of my body not make you ache with desire?"
"You have known other men, M'Dusi, who were stricken by the sight of your body. It is beautiful, maybe it is the most beautiful I have ever seen but it is beauty that makes my entrails cramp, not the body. I am different from other men. To them half your beauty was the sin of seeing you unclothed. To me all your beauty is of yourself therefore, I am delighted with it but I am not sinning when I observe."
Tears glistened suddenly in her eyes and burned trails down her cheeks. "I do not understand you, Douglisi. What you say is the truth but I did not believe such men lived. I made them want me while hating them for it. I did not want them save for the fleeting passion they gave me. I want you for the breath in my throat, for the ache in my loins and that place adored by all men burns for you with a holy fire."
"And the man in your hut?"
"You will see him, of course."
Douglas gripped both hands until the palms were dank with sweat and nails dug into his palms. What sort of Arabian Nights tableau was this? Where was reality? Where was there one small thing that might bring his mind back to level, sanity? Where did this girl come from? What hell of pride boiled her alive and made her bend her proud triumphant neck for his favor? For a split second Douglas hated himself. Was he the son of a proud civilization as he had boasted to himself times on end? If so why did he feel necessary to break this proud ivory figurine to his will? Why couldn't he in his greater worldliness and superior education allow her the one victory that she had been able with her unearthly beauty to carve from this last end of the world. She was kept alive by her sure power and he had trampled it into dust beneath her very eyes and left her nought save bitter reality which is gall to any woman.
"Lord Douglisi, I do not believe what I see in your eyes."
"What do you see?"
"I see strange things. I see strange women, some you hurt and some you did not and yet they loved you and you them. I see a man ashamed of himself, honestly, for doing something I have done since I was ten. I have never been ashamed."
"M'Dusi, I am a man who does not know everything. I know that you are a beautiful woman. I know that certain men say you are evil. To me you are a little girl who is misunderstood. Men talk and much of what they say are lies."
She nodded slowly. "I had to learn like the elephant. Good night, Douglisi."
She had said it in English so she must know more than she had betrayed. He watched the dejected shape of her until it disappeared then followed her.
Her hut was large, conical shaped with a frame of straight branches pulled together at the top and thatched with fronds of palm and grasses. A curtain of matting allowed a feeble light to creep through showing the location of the portal. He pulled it aside and stepped through.
"Hullo," came a clear cultured voice.
Douglas jumped and turned to see an Englishman who seemed all bones, skin and beard. He was lying to one side of the door on a clean mat and it appeared that he hadn't moved in a long time. That he couldn't be much of a lover was instantly apparent.
"You Douglas Glencairn?"
"Yes, how did you know?"
"Jolly ole Pritchard was here with some quinine. Good chap, King. Take more than quinine to help me though, but he's a chap who always remembers. What did you do to M'Dusi?"
"Something," said Douglas in a clear voice, "that
! I was a little too stupid to avoid."
"Yes. I was tempted to show her how strong I was once too." He laughed rustily. "Life is a rum thing Glencairn. I'm rotting in Africa because I didn't want to rot at a board members desk. Ran off and became an utter rotter, then what happens? Pater breathes his last, elder brother blows a vein or something frightfully paralyzing like that, and senior partner blows one about the same time. Now ole Tinker Barnes is filthy rich lying on a mat I in equatorial Africa."
"Why don't you go home?"
He laughed. "What for? Leukemia is just as deadly there as it is here."
"Oh ... I'm sorry I didn't know. You sure?"
"Sure enough. Acts funny. Some days I seem to mend then down I go again. Spleen as big as a football though. I can feel it myself. Days ... matter of days, I hope."
M'Dusi came through a partition made a strung bamboo sections and without appearing to notice Douglas, knelt before the man and said in a crooning voice. "Your medicine, Barnesi. It is time."
Barnes made a face. "Ruddy sawbones in Nairobi. They give orders and she carries 'em out ... but down the hatch as they say in Africa." He swallowed the stuff and handed her the gourd which she took and went through the partition again. She had put on a silky sort of robe that was nearly as transparent as glass and her body shone through it like the moon through fog.
Barnes stroked his beard and turned his weak eyes on Douglas. "Look, ole fella. This is a hell of a place and everything seems out of joint here. A man discovers things he never knew before. I love her as you have probably guessed but what can a dead man do for a woman as vibrantly alive as she? Under other circumstances I might play dog in a manger. She never loved me except as someone to care for. Wouldn't expect to find a mother complex in a naiad would you? Or in such a spot as this. Couldn't see me at all until I fell sick. Then she loved me because of it." He cackled briefly. "Imagine a sick man performing with such as she ... but I didn't do badly for a while. As I say she never loved me but I think she loves you. No one else ever bent her neck and no one else ever brought tears to her eyes. Go love her Glencairn and try to make her believe that she's the top of the world again. You hauled her down rather abruptly, you know."
Douglas put the back of his hand to his head that seemed to burn his skin. Did he have fever already? Was all this a pipe dream? His head hummed like a hive of bees occupied it and he felt dizzy. Barnes composed his hands on his chest, sighed and closed his eyes. "Go love her, Glencairn ... like she's never been loved before."
Her deep eyes looked up almost in humility as he came in and bathed him in a sudden blanket of sensation that made his back ache.
"Stand up, M'Dusi."
She sat up slowly the silken folds falling away from her like a bubble bath as the bather emerges. Her breasts were golden melons firm and pointed but she was unashamed though conscious of them.
"Stand up?"
"Yes!"
"Why, Lord Douglisi?"
"Here you are a queen. I am but a man. A man I have discovered in his pride has a serpent's tongue. There is only one thing I can do. Will you stand?"
"If you mean what I think," she said breathlessly, "you will have taught me a lesson that will take the sting from the first one which was bitter. Yes, I will stand.""
As before she stood easily, fluidly without any obvious effort, one unbelievable shoulder trailing a pink scarf across her stomach and one round exotic thigh.
Slowly Douglas knelt at her feet and kissed the graceful curve of her instep. Her whole body trembled violently then her legs crossed and she sat down, raising his head in the cup of her two hands. "Tell me," she said, her voice seemingly undisturbed, "from whence you come and what is this power you have that you hurt and heal by the same act?"
He caught her hands and kissed the palms softly. "I don't know. I've wondered ... I've loved much but I never intended to hurt and I don't think I ever did." Se sat up, leaned over and shifted himself around his shoulder touching hers, facing the same direction. "Maybe," he continued softly, "they knew that no matter what happened I held no malice, I did not think them evil or that they had acted ugly. They gave and I gave but it seemed equal. Some men take all and give nothing and their hearts are black. Women know these things." He shook his head slowly. "I think I explained that badly."
"Who knows? It is as good as another and I felt it even as I felt that I had lost when I saw you because I could feel the hardness that might or might not be used."
He slid down a little lower and turning his head placed his mouth over the summit of one golden breast. The tremor that went through her was superceded by a muscular contortion that gave him suddenly a palpitant fragrant woman in his arms, her eyes begging and her body a single heated unit of capricious demand. Whatever her background had been she knew what lips were for and they wove over his spell that was as uncanny as all else to do with her and all the while her hands stroked the back of his neck and her long carefully keot nails raked gently over his skin like metal talons giving rise to a roaring urgency that he had never quite felt before.
He let himself into the full sweep of the tide and kissed her mouth, her throat, down to the rises of her breasts. Her hands forced him closer until he this. Couldn't see me at all until I fell sick. Then she loved me because of it." He cackled briefly. "Imagine a sick man performing with such as she ... but I didn't do badly for a while. As I say she never loved me but I think she loves you. No one else ever bent her neck and no one else ever brought tears to her eyes. Go love her Glencairn and try to make her believe that she's the top of the world again. You hauled her down rather abruptly, you know."
Douglas put the back of his hand to his head that seemed to burn his skin. Did he have fever already? Was all this a pipe dream? His head hummed like a hive of bees occupied it and he felt dizzy. Barnes composed his hands on his chest, sighed and closed his eyes. "Go love her, Glencairn ... like she's never been loved before."
Her deep eyes looked up almost in humility as he came in and bathed him in a sudden blanket of sensation that made his back ache.
"Stand up, M'Dusi."
She sat up slowly the silken folds falling away from her like a bubble bath as the bather emerges. Her breasts were golden melons firm and pointed but she was unashamed though conscious of them.
"Stand up?"
"Yes!"
"Why, Lord Douglisi?"
"Here you are a queen. I am but a man. A man I have discovered in his pride has a serpent's tongue. There is only one thing I can do. Will you stand?"
"If you mean what I think," she said breathlessly, "you will have taught me a lesson that will take the sting from the first one which was bitter. Yes, I will stand.""
As before she stood easily, fluidly without any obvious effort, one unbelievable shoulder trailing a pink scarf across her stomach and one round exotic thigh.
Slowly Douglas knelt at her feet and kissed the graceful curve of her instep. Her whole body trembled violently then her legs crossed and she sat down, raising his head in the cup of her two hands. "Tell me," she said, her voice seemingly undisturbed, "from whence you come and what is this power you have that you hurt and heal by the same act?"
He caught her hands and kissed the palms softly. "I don't know. I've wondered ... I've loved much but I never intended to hurt and I don't think I ever did." Se sat up, leaned over and shifted himself around his shoulder touching hers, facing the same direction. "Maybe," he continued softly, "they knew that no matter what happened I held no malice, I did not think them evil or that they had acted ugly. They gave and I gave but it seemed equal. Some men take all and give nothing and their hearts are black. Women know these things." He shook his head slowly. "I think I explained that badly."
"Who knows? It is as good as another and I felt it even as I felt that I had lost when I saw you because I could feel the hardness that might or might not be used."
He slid down a little lower and turning his head placed his mouth over the summit of one golden breast. The tremor that went through her was superceded by a muscular contortion that gave him suddenly a palpitant fragrant woman in his arms, her eyes begging and her body a single heated unit of capricious demand. Whatever her background had been she knew what lips were for and they wove over his spell that was as uncanny as all else to do with her and all the while her hands stroked the back of his neck and her long carefully kept nails raked gently over his skin like metal talons giving rise to a roaring urgency that he had never quite felt before.
He let himself into the full sweep of the tide and kissed her mouth, her throat, down to the rises of her breasts. Her hands forced him closer until he could no longer breathe but let himself drift for a moment in the delightful sensation of being smothered by the utter wonder of this goddess. He surrendered to the joy of it, sensing each erupting ripple of muscular response which seemed to enliven her. Then came the double bolted electrocution of the touch of her, soft, warm, as smooth as a fruit, fragrant and utterly given now to the rites of love ... in darkest Africa, this maddening creature and a hundred yards away a hyeana laughed ghoulishly and further away a lion roared.
Unreality began to envelope him in a smog of something very like disbelief, as though there was something wrong about the whole thing. The utter fantasy of it, her very presence in tbis primitive setting, the untruth of even the possibility that she could exist and lastly the transformation that had been wrought in this meanest of dwellings.
Her breath was hot and urgent in his face. "Douglisi ... love me now and dream later. I will make you dream because I will draw from you all that is waking, all that is confusion and bitterness. In me it shall be as nothing, in you it is beginning to make you doubt that you are even here."
CHAPTER SIX
Back to Nairobi came Eki, Tosavo, Pritchard and a silent taciturn Douglas. Along the way he had spoken thrice, things that did not have to be said.
Greetings were scattered thickly and much chaff was exchanged between Tosavo and King-i Bwana while Pritchard hung back and examined Douglas critically as he poured a heavier portion of whiskey than the black boy had ever seen him drink. He was worried because quite without knowing why he had come to love this man with the terrible blue eyes and a passion for knowing the native tongues.
"Bwana," Tosavo was saying, "have you many children since last year when I gave you the marrow from the right hip bone of t'chitka to wear around your neck? I know you have no wife in the fashion of your people which seems very silly to me."
"White people," put in Eki, glibly, "leave much of the choice to the woman. In that event, large one, no woman would look upon you twice."
"Silence, you small biting worm,'" growled Tosavo. "While King-i Bwana and I discuss matters of great importance, go you and trail a chicken. Youp may borrow my smallest spear."
"No, Tosavo," replied King laughing and accepting a drink from Pritchard. "I have no small children wetting other men's beds. It is reported that you have many."
"By a count of the fingers," said Tosavo, swelling with pride, "there are thirty of whom I am certain. Regarding the identity of some ten and five more I would be willing to wager a trifling amount could I but prove it ... but you understand how such things are. One could never keep count."
Eki, with an eye to business said. "What manner of madmen are we to thrust upon game in such a manner that a child armed with a rock might kill it?"
"A group which I dislike greatly," said King with a grimace, "but they will pay well and I have extracted a promise of a bonus for you, Tosavo, and Pritchard. One is a white mamma, large of breast and thick of leg. She has a voice like Simba and a fist like Tosavo. Her husband speaks like a baby giraffe and is small and mousy. He cares nothing for hunting but will take along a devil machine for taking pictures...."
"O-ko!" ejaculated Eki sadly, "and he shall want us to stand behind him with a rifle to keep the elephants off him while he takes pictures."
"Kroo-boy, with your west coast speech," spat Tosavo contemptiously. "No one will expect such things from you. I...."
"I with my double Holland and Holland," put in Pritchard, crisply, "and King-i Bwana with his Gibbs will do whatever protecting is done. Spears are not for such things."
The argument waxed hot so King and Douglas went to the front verandah and sat in the cool shade.
"Doug, you don't seem up to snuff. Something happen?"
Douglas who abhorred deviousness nodded and said bluntly. "M'Dusi happened. You knew it would. Tell me Corny, why didn't you go after Tosavo and Eki?"
King shrugged. "Didn't I tell you...."
"You told me to go after them. You didn't tell me why you were sending me instead of going yourself."
King bit down hard on his pipe stem the muscles of his neck cutting lines in his still youthful skin. "You're getting too close to something that is as touchy as a sore tooth, Doug."
Douglas grunted. "Then don't tell me. Keep your secrets. They're yours, you know. On the other hand since I was shoved willy-nilly into it I mentioned it ... when I was asked a question."
"Then you feel that because I asked the question you have a right to know all?"
"I don't know quite how to take you, Corny. If you tell me that there isn't more to you sending me on this jaunt rather than go yourself then I shall be forced to call you a liar. Look fella, I'm a straight forward Joe. Too much, sometimes. You've been living by yourself too long. If it's a sore subject, forget it and I'll never mention it again." He sat back and lit a cigarette taking a sip from his big drink. "Glencairn, you're the goddamndest bastard I ever saw."
Douglas grinned. "I've been told that before."
"If I told you that the whole thing was none of your business and that I'd fire you if you mentioned it again there'd come a day when I'd make an ass out of myself because one of these days when I get a little plastered I'm going to talk my head off. I'm going to tell you everything there is to tell and I'll very likely weep when I do it. Oh, I'm the hardest mug you ever saw but if you ever once break that thin crust I'm as soft as custard."
"You're talking," said Douglas. "You may continue if you wish."
King glared at him with something almost like hatred in his eyes. "You don't let a man hide in the grass do you?"
"Half the trouble in the world," averred Douglas, "is caused by people and nations hiding in the grass from each other. They talk...." He stopped and looked blindly at his cigarette, " ... with both ends of their tongue at the same time."
"Where did you hear that," asked King harshly.
"You," said Douglas softly, "are getting too close to something as touchy as a sore tooth, Corny."
King's laugh was raw and mirthless. "All right. I deserved it. Can you see Pritchard?"
"Yeah."
"Tell him to bring me a drink. Tell him the straight dose in the tall glass ... he'll know...." It was after supper and they sat and listened to the sounds from the plains incroch upon the sanctity of civilization. They were savage yet comforting, peaceful.
King smoked his pipe slowly, his face a little redder than usual from his drinks. "You're a bastard, Douglas. A prying, torturing, Machiavelian, reasonable, bastard. I despise reasonable bastards because they're so reasonable. Humanity is not but they spend a lot of time telling themselves they are." He faced the other his face gashed with hard lines. "What makes you like that?"
"Like what?"
"Oh hell, I don't know." He sat back and rubbed his face. "Tell me something, what is it like ... your relations with women?"
"You're a smarter man than I thought."
"Why?"
"You don't realize it yet but that's what you're driving at. I've done better with women than any one man should. If I was someone else I might be insufferable. I'm too plain and on the surface for that, I guess. You've been irritated because you can't match me in it and subconsciously you realize that in some manner that puts me ahead of you."
"I could fire you, Doug."
"Sure you could. You won't though and I knew that before I'd talked to you ten minutes."
"What makes you think I won't?"
"Because if you did you'd have yourself to live with and there'd always be the reason why you did it. That you wouldn't like."
King sighed gustily. "That," he said slowly and distinctly, "is what I mean about you."
"That's right. I just told you."
"Oh shut up."
"Naturally. Then in three minutes you'll start again and I'll have to start talking."
King's strong teeth gritted on the stem of his pipe. "Well, thank God I had sense enough to realize that some time ago. So you want to know about M'Dusi?"
"Not necessarily. I'll find out."
"Pure unadulterated bastard. Unrelieved, unfeeling bastard. Well it started like this ... ' He sat back and looked a long time out on the star dusted lawn that was still wet from the afternoon's rain.
"I was something like you fifteen years ago although I wasn't as old as you. I was a dog robber for Britisher, name of Calden. Top notch man and one of the wisest hunters I ever saw. Split the party once and sent half one way and half the other. One man wanted pictures and the other trophies. I took the picture party and we ran into trouble. We were way in the back not too far from Lake Victoria, a regular paradise for game or scenery, when we ran into some Arabs or they ran into us, as a hunting party and knew there'd be a wealthy man maybe more and had visions of a fat ransom. They were a small party armed with ancient matchlocks. They had been accustomed to dealing with blacks and didn't use the proper caution. In addition to that Eki practically lived in their camp and knows coast Arabic. I knew they were on the way and what they were after an hour before they got there. I hid on a sort of kopje with two .30 Springfields and, Eki as loader, and a lap full of soft nosed ammunition, after telling Horace Muller, our client, to warn them off and if they came nearer than thirty yards to open fire on them. He had guts, Muller did ... German extraction. Couldn't shoot too well, but he could pull a trigger. Well, they came on and stopped the proper distance away and started the usual trading harangue. It didn't work so they blazed away with their matchlocks and charged. I sat there on the kopje within fifty yards and killed eleven of them before they knew what had hit them. Two ran and I knocked them over at more than five hundred yards ... Eki had a little trouble with a clip."
Doug sat tensed on the edge of his chair. "All dead?"
"I don't think I boast if I say I'm a marksman. I had to be. Did you ever see a man hit with a thirty-oh-six ... soft nosed projectile?"
"No."
"It's not a nice sight." He still didn't say whether they were all dead.
"Then came the investigation, questions, following the constable all over the place and the dis posal of the camp. They had twenty Negro slaves in camp."
"And one kid," put in Douglas.
King looked at him narrowly then said. "Yes. One kid ... female."
"Why didn't the orphanage in Nairobi get the kid? They have one don't they?"
"I'd sav yes ... of a sort. I didn't do it because I don't think there's a man or woman in Nairobi as well equipped to rear a child as Tosavo's mother, you saw the result."
"I saw the result. But what about the way she lives, that hut for instance. There's a small fortune in draperies, silks and satins there."
King smoked silently for a while, "Ah ... yes, the hut." Then he was silent and Douglas saw that he intended to remain so.
"I see," he said quietly.
"What, do you see?"
"A lot...." Douglas dropped his cigarette in the concrete floor and stepped on it. "Not all but a lot. When will you get drunk enough to tell me why you haven't been to that village since M'Dusi was fifteen.
Again the silence during which time King pantomimed a man on an ant heap. "All right, bastard, claw it out me, like a a hyena licking marrow from a leg bone. All right. When M'Dusi was fifteen she was then, far and away the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I took one look and have never been back. I can't go back ... Can't do it?"
Douglas grunted and lit another cigarette. "Why?"
"I was braced for that question. M'Dusi has a reputation you know but like many a siren she doesn't spread herself around. She uses her beauty."
"And the man ain't got no idea the truth he spoke with those words," murmured Douglas. "Tell me about it."
"Go to hell, Corny."
"All right. I told you didn't I."
"Sure. Because you couldn't help yourself. I'm not telling you one word about M'Dusi except what I already have. You're a midwesterner and I'm a southerner. I'm the one who's supposed to be prejudiced. Surely the British haven't injected you with that pukka sahib deal they flaunt."
"Why do you say, flaunt."
"Beacuse their night time activities they don't flaunt. The difference is such that one might assume one to be a sort of antidote to the other. Or is your courage the sort that faces the charge of a wounded lion without turning a hair and caves in at something like this?"
"You surely carry a sharp sword tonight, Douglas."
"I'm Douglas Glencairn, Corny. I'll be him if it kills me."
"Or me," said King with a curious note of distraction in his voice. "I had this thing laid to rest until you came along and...."
"Oh, why don't you shut up. If I ever heard a kid afraid of the dark it's you. You had it laid to rest, by butt. You've been sitting here nursing this thing. How many years? M'Dusi must be twenty three or four."
"M'Dusi, my boy is approximately eighteen."
What?"
"That's what I said. When you begin a siren act at the age of eleven or twelve you get a lot of ground covered in a few years."
They were silent for a long time then Douglas stood up and faced King. "I've never been so disappointed in a man in my life. King-i Bwana, the man whose guts could pave the streets of Nairobi. Who spits at Simba and makes him run. Good Joe, square egg, stout fella and all that sort of rot. Crap ... pure honey-bucket crap. So you take a child from a caravan and dump her way to hell and gone back in some village and buy bolts of pretty cloth for her to dress up her miserable little hut with and you make her so attractive that the flesh still wants to crawl off my bones every time I think of her. You send her to Tosavo's mother whom you believe to be the ultimate mother. She's not a child now, King-i Bwana. She could easily be the most magnificent woman in all Africa ... I haven't seen every woman in Africa. I say she could be. She knocked me for seven loops...."
"Then for Christs sake ... you do something about her." King was a little drunk but his eyes blazed desparately.
Douglas laughed deeply because he felt he had the situation in the palm of his hand. "You've given me an idea, King. By God. I think I'll do just that. You let her mother a diseased Englishman because she needs affection and needs to hover something. That, my boy, is a very good idea."
King leaped to his feet and strode up and down. "Glencairn, I could kill you."
"Go ahead," said Douglas equably. "It would probably settle everything in fine fashion."
King flopped in his chair. "I know how this must seem to you, Doug, but you didn't see her that day. She came into my hut, mind you, or I should say she appeared. I didn't see her come in. Even she wasn't quite real, slim carved like some olden artisan would with a lifetime on his hands, soft doe eyes too big for her face ... a child's face with a woman's smile. She said. "You come to my hut tonight King-i Bwana, and M'Dusi will make magic for you and reveal great things to you." I left the village a day sooner than I had intended. I haven't gone back."
"And the man says I didn't see her when she was fifteen Corny, I saw her when she was eighteen ... Holy smoke."
"What?"
'Er ... nothing. I just thought of something I forgot. See you tomorrow."
He got up and went to the patio where Eki and Tosavo having eaten were gnawing at each other in their usual fashion.
"When the gods made you little man they had run short of materials so they made you mean and small and ugly. I have seen many a monkey who was better favored."
"And when they made you there was a over abundance of very low order of offal. So you were made large and ungainly and afflicted by great height which is easy to see and hit with spear and bullet."
"Enough," said Douglas brusquely as he came up. "Tosavo I would speak with you on a matter of great moment." He had chosen Tosavo instead of Eki for no reason other than an instinct which made the choice for him.
When they were in the farthest reaches of the lawn under a banana bush Douglas faced about. "You have a great liking for your master, is that not true?"
"It is true Bwana, as true as I stand here ... but I have said that before."
"I know and I shall ask you something concerning King-i Bwana's business which has been made my own lately. Is he an unhappy man?"
Tosavo shrugged. "He is a man far from his home. That is not good."
"Is that the only reason?"
Tosavo's eyes looked straight and hard into Douglas'. "I will tell you of something for which I would deserve a beating if it were known but I think you are a man with a seed growing in his brain. King-i Bwana has not been the same since a certain time when he came to my village for the same reason that you came."
"That," said Douglas gently, "was when M'Dusi was fifteen.
"That," repeated Tosavo, "was when M'Dusi was fifteen. In the white man's mind she was a child. We of this land know differently. He has not seen her since and it is eating him from within like the sickness. I watch her as the eye in my head but I do not go near her nor do I say nay to any fancy she may have. I have orders and I obey them."
"This is not good Tosavo?"
"It is not I who needs telling. I have stepped out of my station once to tell him but he was drunk and for the space of five counts I looked death in the face. I have not mentioned it again."
"Understandably! Tosavo, there is something we must do. If he remains eaten from within, some day there will be nothing left and we will not know him."
"The trees fall when their time comes," said Tosavo in the sonorous Masai tongue which Douglas only half understood. "But the tree struck by lightening is like the calf killed by the lion."
"You mean he'll be struck down because of this ... before his time?"
"That is my meaning Bwana and I do not see what we can do."
Douglas leaned forward. "This, Tosavo, is what we can do." He spoke urgently for some time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The rainy season frittered out and Nairobi began to bestir itself. In a week the plains would be dotted with hunting parties each striving to stay as far from the others as possible. It is no fun to be struck by a .505 Gibbs bullet even if it is spent and galloping ... particularly if it is spent and galloping and some hunters who come to Tanganyika and Kenya are myopic to an alarming degree due to their sheltered lives.
King's party being larger than usual and encumbered with women was forced to impress two extra station wagons into service as well as an added truck. He, Pritchard and Douglas were to travel in the jeep and Eki and Tosavo would ride with the baggage. In addition to the three natives mentioned there were five camp boys whose task it was to erect tents and do camp chores. Eki and Tosavo would be impressed if the need arose but under ordinary circumstances they were hunters and nothing else. The Masai, coming from a long line of warriors whose attitude toward menial labor was one of lordly contempt, are especially hard to maneuver into any sort of camp work.
The night before they were to depart King had his employers to his house. It was a small affair with only Carlson Rivertree, his wife and two daughters who, it appeared were young, pretty, and totally spoiled. Their father spoiled them and their mother tyranized them so there was a constant turmoil within the family circle. But since Bertha Rivertree was a happy soul and wanted her own way most of the time the girls managed to do almost as they pleased as long as they avoided their mothers impulses. Bertha proved to be quite a likable soul, much to Douglas' surprise. She was bluff, hearty, standing some five feet seven inches into which height she had crammed a hundred and seventy pounds of hard excellent flesh. Her voice was as ringing as a drill instructor, her laugh a bellow and her handshake that of a man's.
Introductions were made and they wandered around an excellent bouffet supper which Pritchard had prepared giving Douglas an opportunity to observe them separately and in detail. Carlson was mousy, grey and quiet so he disposed of him and let his eyes take in Marley, whose tanned athletic good looks were somewhat softened and stimulated by the undeniable excellence of her body. Her legs were strong and long, curved with care. Her waist was narrow and her breasts small but pouting and sharp.
Louise, bowever, seemed to be the deep one. She was sultry lipped, fair of skin, her hair as dusky as night and her eyes a startling sky blue. She was somewhat shorter than Marley but she carried herself so erectly that it was hardly noticeable and her carriage was no end helpful in accentuating full proud breasts that were not in need of accentuation.
She wore a summer weight blue sweater and a plaid skirt, pleated and very full. Beneath the cloth her finely sculptured legs slipped with such suggestive smoothness that Douglas clenched his jaws and turned to the sideboard where he poured a drink. For the occasion he had rented a white jacket and black pants with a seam stripe, the summer tuxedo the world over. It fitted well and showed off his broad shoulders and slim waist.
"I never knew I was that repulsive," came the throaty voice at his elbow and turning he found Louise, her blue eyes deeply mysterious ... in the poetic light, that is, but to Douglas not mysterious at all.
"Why...." He flushed. " I ... what do you mean?"
"You were looking at me."
Douglas grinned. "That could be interpreted several ways. I didn't know I was being observed."
"Hadn't you heard about the angle of vision of womens' eyes?"
"I hadn't heard of it but I"ve had some excellent examples of it."
"For a man with a Scotch name you certainly sound Irish."
"The Irish can talk, too."
Her laugh was a creamy gurgle. "How kind you can be ... are you always so magnanimous?"
"Depending on various things...." Douglas stepped close and looked into her eyes. For a moment she held the steady blue beam then she began to move with such srentle subtleness that it was scarcely noticeable. She came to him and for a long instant her body was pressed close to his, the movement becoming less vague and considerably more objective.
Douglas came to himself with a start, his eyes sweeping the room guiltily. No one was watching. Bertha was telling about a grizzly she had shot in the Canadian Rockies one year and how many .300 Magnums it had digested before dropping dead at her feet.
Carlson Rivertree was grazing moodily into the depths of a high ball and seemed elsewhere, while Marley seemed taken with the table of food having downed two quick highballs.
Louise also came to herself at the physical interruption of Douglas' start and drew away quickly. "Scottie," she said softly, " I hate you."
Her eyes were smoldering pools of banked fire, her lips quivered with a smile. "You don't really believe that do you? And why did you do that to me?"
"What?"
"That's right, make me explain something I can't explain. Why don't you just rip my pants off and rape me right in front of everyone?"
"Because that is not the Glencairn way," he said easily. "I'd much rather take them off where the unveiling wouldn't cause so much comment."
"Where is that?" came the surprising retort.
Douglas whose talents still amazed him said, "I'll think of something. We'll be together a long time."
A ripple so slight that he barely saw the tremor of it when it reached the solid base of her breasts, passed through her and she sighed raggedly. "Scot-tie, you soeak of time but in your eyes I can read now."
"In rav eyes there was now ... but that would take a little arranging."
She pmiled her perfect Iids drawing easily away from white even teeth. "Then stoD dragging your feet.'" She walked away. each steo moving her lithe body with seductive grace. "A poem," he thought, "a poem that needs a herald to proclaim it and deliver it before the multitude of the senses."
"She does that to men."
He turned and looked into the clear amber eyes of Marley. "Does what?"
"Come now, Scottie, you wouldn't want to deny it would you?" He laughed. "Oh no! Tell me Miss Rivertree, what do men do to her?"
"They challenge her, nothing more. She's more virginal than I because she is a tease and I think if I were treated right, I might. She won't. Complex, you know."
"Complexes fall," he replied tasting his drink.
"Not hers. She's walled them too high because no man is worth her ... she thinks."
"Want to bet?"
Her nose witched a little, then wrinkled with her whole hearted smile. "How did we ever get on this subject ... yes, I'll make a bet with you. How much?"
"I'm a poor man so don't make it too stiff."
She eyed him speculatively. He stepped closer and drenched her with the warm upsetting deluge of his gaze. Her reaction was immediate and violent. A shudder trembled through her, her face went red and a gasp raced through her throat. Her right hand came up swiftly and smacked him resoundingly on the cheek.
A sudden silence fell on the room, one of those destructive horrible sliences during which even thinking is suspended. Bertha was the first to recover. "Sit down Marley," she trumpeted. "I was looking right at the both of you. Mr. Glencairn was looking at you, he neither spoke nor did he pinch your tail. Sit down I say." Marley, her face scarlet at first then white took a chair as far from the rest of them as she could and wept into her hands.
Louise sat cross legged and looked contemptiously at her sister. "It is not quite accurate to say that Mr. Glencairn did nothing Mother. He did something all right but Suzy Belle couldn't take it."
"Don't you dare call me that," screamed Marley arid with a spring she leaped across the room and was about to fill her hands with Louise's dark rich hair when Carlson stepped between her with an exhibition of speed that made Douglas stare. He was sitting nearby, then he was there standing betwen them.
"Sit down, Marley," he said gently. She tossed her head defiantly but she obeyed.
"Well," bomed Bertha, "the Rivertrees have all performed in a few minutes Mr. King. You see what you've taken on."
"I might as well say now," averred King carefully, "that family feuds would be better left here. On safari strange things can happen to tempers. I make it a habit to stay clear of family arguments, but I also never allow family arguments to foul the safari."
'About as straight as you could put it," said Bertha heartily. "Any trouble we cause you can be added to your bill."
"It will be," said King, "also when we're out on the veldt I'm the boss. I can't stop people thinking but I can stop them from making scenes and upsetting the trip."
Carlson nodded agreeably. "I think we were well advised when we came to you. As you can see we might need something more than a hunter."
"I prefer the role of hunter," replied King, shortly.
The party, having suffered a death blow soon ended with the family trailing slowly out talking of nothing in particular, trying to keep the dreaded silence at bay. Louise hung back. "Thought of anything Scottie?"
"A jeep ride on the veldt is the best I can do and after this set to it might not be well received!" She hooked an arm in his and together they walked toward the hired car that had brought them. As they came up she said. "I'll join you later at the hotel. Scottie's going to show me the moon out where nature begins."
Marley looked hatred at her sister but the father only shrugged and Bertha nodded. "Might be nice. Wish I was young enough to enjoy it. Watch out for lions. I hear they come close to town."
Ten minutes later dressed in clean khakis Douglas walked through the living room and held out his hands to her. She smiled and pulled herself close looking into his eyes. "Hurry, Scottie."
"Marley said you were a woman who talked one way and acted another."
"That's her story and it's partly true."
"How do you mean?"
"You won't have to ask any questions after tonight."
At the jeep Pritchard stopped him. "Douglisi, the Holland is in the back seat loaded and extra cartridges are in the hunting vest."
"Think I'll need it?"
"When I tell you that I shot a leapord prowling in the hen yard not two months ago you might disbelieve me but you would have but to ask King-i Bwana."
"I'll take your word, Pritchard, and thanks."
The breeze blew damp and cool in their faces as they hugged the windshield to avoild the squadrons of insects conjured out of the bush by the bright spray of the headlights.
"Where shall we go," he asked, his hand warm to the point of sweating since she had appropriated it long ago and refused to relinquish it.
"How far is hell?"
"Too far and what's there but fire and furies?"
She sighed and slid forward, her plaid skirt sliding upward to uncover four inches of exciting thigh. "Hell is no place except the minds of small people. They make it and it is poetic justice that they should live in it."
"Then you didn't intend going there?"
"Oh no. I was thinking about Marley, really.
I'm a free soul and when I want to do something I do it."
"You sound like a reactionary psychology professor."
"Anyone who can bed down in the fertilizer of mediocrity, of mass action and reaction, the feeble pap of their sun drenched optimism in face of repeated world tragedies, and not be reactionary is unconscious."
He grinned. "Maybe they think contentment is more important than leadership or the Holy Grail."
She nodded. "Possibly. I think a poll of the earthworm population of ten acres of ground would come forth with about ninety percent the same idea, with ten percent, "no opinion."
"You could be burned at the stake in Washington for that attitude."
"How right you are. People have been burned for less and yet I can't think of anyone who's further from any tinge of red. I exalt the individual both in body and mind. They strive to enslave one and destroy the other."
"Well, they have ideas."
"Not so. They haven't had an idea since Marx died. Their notions are all take offs and expediences of the Marxian tune, a tune that was flat when it was first played ... Shut up and look at that landscape." They had come to the top of a gentle rise and before them the plains of Kenya spread with the limitless impression of an ocean. Remembering the spot Douglas took a small trail to the side and drove the jeep to the edge of a rocky kloof and stopped. A hyena burst into hideous laughter almost at their elbow and Louise gasped and slid closer to him.
"What in God's name was that?"
"Hyena. They'll attack a man but they have to know it's a safe venture. Listen...."
Three hundred yards down the dry wash came the muttering rumble of a lion.
"I've heard that," she said. "Movies. Is he hungry?"
"Hardly. A lion has to get pretty old to get hungry out here. The place is crawling with game."
There was silence in the jeep for a while but the veldt was alive with sound. It was raw and savage and frightening and yet there seemed to hang over all it's primordal turmoil a certain Tightness that made man the only wrongingredient.
Louise did a lithe twist and fell backward into his arms. "Scottie would you waste a moon?"
He laughed softly. "Your sister surely had you in the wrong peg."
"Of course ... about the moonlight ... Mmmm." A galvanic shock coursed through her, wrenching long unused muscles into play and directing their undivided attention to the fact that her mouth was now being used to funnel a splintering accumulation of sensation into her body for which it had neither prepared or inured. Five minutes later when he released her she let go a half laugh and half sob. "God, Scottie ... Somehow I knew it."
"What?"
"That you were it. You'll kill me but what is death but the triumph of time over matter."
"What about that moon business."
She laughed and deliberately took his lower lip into her mouth and played with it burnishing it with labial sweeps that made him weak and shuddery.
"This vehicle," she complained, "was not constructed with this in mind."
"We can put the tarp under that thorn tree."
"Put it. What difference will a few snakes and ticks make?"
"Or a lion...."
She was stretched full length on the brown tarpaulin beneath the stunted thorn tree looking at the moon and star bathed sky. "I might be eaten in a few minutes but now I'm at peace ... in a manner of speaking. So far I've had one kiss."
"Take off your jacket Louise."
"Jacket ... why?"
"Take it off." His eyes as shadowed as they were seemed coals of blue fire and she felt a desperate urgency to do as he asked. Se took it off and laid it aside.
"Now take off the sweater."
"The ... sweater Scottie?"
"Yes."
She caught it cross armed by the bottom and pulled. She was now bare from the waist save for the twin cups of a fragile insufficient brassiere that cuddled her ripe breasts.
"Scottie ... Scottie...."She bit her lips and hung her head stifling the desire to rend and destroy in order to get him. Her head began to roll from side to side and pent up tension seeped from between her lips in trembling jets. He clutched her brutally in his arms and kissed her lips, her eyes, her throat and stopped at the confines of the frothy restraint. She tore away from him and with furious wrench ripped the material apart and hurled the useless gesture afar. She took his head in her hands and guided his lips to their goals, giving them to him impartially until she was sobbing uncontrollably.
He kissed her into quiescence again then released her and said, "Stand up Louise."
She stood, her excited breasts sharp tipped, pink and white in the moon, firm and shimmering like golden fruit in the moonlight.
He reached up from his sitting position and gently unzipped the skirt. "Take it off."
Slowly she drew it over her head leaving only the light jersey of a half slip and the now detachable Himensions of briefs that were the blue of a twilight sky. He caught the half slip at the hem and drew it from her and it was as though she was being born through a mouth of sheer white, a flower lifting its bud rapidly through a snow bank. He stood and held her close for a moment while her own hands went rapidly to work and with a magic only a little less than M'Dusi's they stood and considered each other as they had been born, without let or hindrance, without adornment, without fear and without shame.
"You have a lovely body," she said softly touching his great shoulders with light fingertips, letting them trail carressingly downward. "It's strong and hard and big. It could hurt and maim and kill like a python and my muscles will stretch to the breaking and my skin will be flayed and abraided and for every pain I shall give you one tiny fraction of a second of that wonderful space where everything will be superhuman and in all the world there will be only us two."
Douglas, who had never heard a woman speak this way at a time when should be incoherent and frenzied stood amazed and swallowed noisily. "You have a wonderful body, Louise...." The organist had touched his mightiest golden note and her body quivered with its resonance. "You're all love, in the most marvelous shades of white and pink and ebony...." He leaned over and kissed the tip of one breast that quivered tautly under his touch. "The touch of you is like touching the flesh of a peach, soft, cool, damp with nature's oils and aching to be taken."
He looked up and two trails of tears had coursed down her cheeks and collected in glittering globules on her breasts. "Aching ... when will you Douglas ... Scottie. I'm aching ... aching."
They lay close together relaxed in the calm backwaters of a passion that had seemed intent on making them destroy themselves from the sheer fury of it.
"This is what I meant," she said in her throaty voice. "Let the swine lay amidst the filth of their styes. Let half conscious people lay abed with those who know no heights, where this to them would have been a brief biological rush, collision, then forgetfulness and sleep. This can't die because there is a written record of it in our memories. We can never equal it again we can only erect new goals that in their turn cannot be equaled. Each shall be separate and each shall be sacred. This hunt will be my heaven. When it is over I'll go home and look for men like you knowing that I'll likely not find them. It will end and a new search will begin."
"You have it all figured out don't you."
"Do you have a different idea?"
"I could marry you."
"I don't think I'd like you for a husband," she said with a smile stretching backward drawing fabulous lines of classic beauty from her armpits to her stomach. "You'd turn those hot blue eyes on our bridge guests and that would end the game right there. You'd be too hazardous to be welded to legally. I like you better this way."
He laughed and sat up. As he did a momentary bolt of cold blind panic struck his stomach with physical force. There, not thirty feet away, standing atop a boulder, his gigantic head cocked questioningly on the side and a wounded forepaw held up, trembling from pain, stood the biggest lion he had ever seen ... the only lion he had ever seen at such close range.
"Louise," he said conversationally, "for God's sake don't scream or faint or do anything womanly and stupid. There's a lion eyeing us within easy charging distance. He's big, mean, has been wounded and is gaunt from hunger. He's the sort to fear. The rifle is as far away as he is and frankly, kid, I don't know what the hell to do." She rolled casually over and sat up beside him.
"God, what a picture. Dad'd give a thousand bucks for this opportunity."
"And I'd give ten thousand pounds if I had to rob the bank of England to get it if it was him here instead of you and me." She chuckled although it had an odd sound coming on the heels of loud chattering of her teeth. "Aren't we brave sitting here talking nonsense when we may be ground up into hamburger in ten seconds.
"He doesn't know what to do yet."
"He'll have to get in line. I know a couple of more people who are right in there with him."
"Right ... There's only one thing I see to do. He'll charge moving objects in preference to still ones. When he charges me ... I'm going to break for the jeep, see! When he charges me up in this tree you go, thorns or no thorns. Get me?"
"I think...."
"Think nothing. As soon as he takes out after me, you get up that tree. Your punctures will heal."
The great animal bared his fangs and tried to put the injured foot down, winced and growled thunderously. Douglas, his skin glazed with cold sweat gathered his feet under him watching the animal's tail as it switched two and fro lashing the great sides. Inch by inch his feet came up then like a shot out of a gun he leaped up and dashed madly for the jeep. At the same instant the lion with a blood freezing roar leaped out and down. Speeding like a maniac Douglas dove through the jeep and snatched the double Holland on the fly, struck the ground and scurried under the vehicle like a rat. The lion crashed into the jeep almost turning it over, skidding it sideways almost catching Douglas' leg under a tire. The lion temporarily balked and irritated by the man's sudden disappearance circled the jeep and filled his nostrils with the hated odoi. Then seeming to realize what had happened he roared deafeningly and thrusting his head low tried to force his huge head beneath the jeep and sieze the man. The Holland bellowed right in the beasts face and Simba rolled backward stunned to the glancing impact of the four hundred and fifty grains of lead and cupronickel. Douglas crawled out and with an acrobatic bound leaped erect and shoving the muzzle almost in the animal's ear steadied the muzzle against the spasmodic movements of the struggling head, sent a bullet into the brain, then he sat weakly on the ground and it was some time before he realized he had sat on a very potent thorn branch.
Sweat and gathered dust had congealed on his skin like drops of mud and beginning to feel the chill and bitterly sorry about the torn Louise who must be roosting painfully among the thorns he stood up, cursed and gingerly withdrew the thorn twig from his behind. She came running then, her body flashing through the moonlight as her white skin caught its rays.
"Scottie ... Scottie ... you all right?"
"Sure ... You ... Say, you didn't climb the tree?"
"No ... I ... I'm afraid I didn't think of it. It was horrible and wonderful Scottie seeing him try to reach you under the jeep. He took one long look at me then tried to reach you."
All of a sudden he was weak again and bathed in a fresh deposit of sweat that felt cold as ice. "We're fine ones. Hunting lions in the raw ... us, I mean ... Get dressed. Someone might have heard the shots."
It was well that they did because they had hardly gotten themselves partly presentable when a small Sunbeam-Talbot ducked off the trail and turned the full glare of its headlights on them.
"Hullo."
Douglas got out to meet the driver of the Sunbeam who also got out. "Did I hear shots," asked the dapper man with a small neat moustache wearing the now familiar hunting kit and broad hat. "I'm Brooke, Cecil of the given name. Warden."
"Douglas Glencairn, with Corny King. This is Miss Rivertree...."
"How'd you do," he said with a gesture. Sure I heard gunshots. Two of em'. D'ja....
"Yes." Douglas pointed to the figure of the dead lion. "He charged us. Luckily I was armed."
"Jove!" Brooke walked over and looked the lion over then he turned and beckoned. "A moment Glencairn." Douglas walked over and stood beside him. "See that paw?"
Douglas nodded. "Saw it before he charged. Knew we were in for it, then."
"Well, I must say ... Gad Glencairn, what'd y' do, put your muzzle in his ear?"
"The lion," said Louise suddenly finding her voice, "was trying to get Douglas from under the jeep. We were sitting under the thorn tree when we saw him and Douglas got up and ran to lead him away from me."
There was an uncomfortable silence during which Douglas could feel his face getting as hot as a furnace.
Brooke smote his thigh. "Well now ... Glencairn. I consider that a...."
"Oh hell, never mind," said Douglas irritably. "It's late and if you're through with your questions I'd like to get Miss Rivertree home."
"Oh ... certainly. Sorry to be inquisitive and all that, but have to, y' know. Too close to town. Regards to King-i Bwana. Topping chap, King."
"And er ... Brooke. If you don't mind. I shot a lion because I was afraid he'd charge. Wounded, you know."
"Hah ... yes, but you're young, Glencairn. This wound is a good example of what happens when you get a fool on one end of a gun and a lion on the other. Wounded animal and a danger to everyone. As for the report ... He shrugged elaborately. "Have a positive passion for truth. Sorry, I'm sure."
"Brook you're an awful liar," said Douglas dispassionately.
"Haw...." Brooke stood grinning and rumpling his sparse colorless hair.
Waked by Pritchard the next morning with coffee the gimlet eyed Negro uncomfortably.
"Douglisi, my wonderful Holland has been fired and it was dirtier than I get it on a three months hunt."
"Shot it off," mumbled Douglas sipping the scalding brew.
"And did you crawl half a mile in the sand to shoot it off?"
"No ... tripped and fell."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two days out as they camped beside a clear cold stream and the boys skinned impala for meat and scraped a magnificent pair of kudu horns Carlson had picked up, doubtless left from a lion's feast Louise was impelled to ask Douglas a question. "Scottie, one would think you resent saving my life."
Douglas looked up from his task of polishing a well worn but still beautiful Mannlicher and sighed. "Louise, I was scared out of my wits. I was there too. Maybe I saved your life but I saved mine too. No one seems impressed by that slightly obvious fact."
"Oh, quit being such a shy thing. You're not always like that."
He grinned. "Want to take a jeep ride?"
"You have no idea how much I want to take a jeep ride but today I'm so bushed I'm numb. I'll fall dead in the sack in a minute."
"After that roast Pritchard is tending you'll feel like a new woman."
"Not me. It'll take more than meat to wake me." She walked wearily away and was replaced by Marley.
"I'm sorry I slapped your face, Douglas."
"Why?"
The very bluntless of the question set her back for a moment. "Because it was unlady-like."
"What," he asked, bluntness unabated, "is a lady?"
"All right. You're sore. You have a right to be. I said I was sorry. Shall I lick your hand?"
He looked up and grinned. "Your sister's got a lot more instinct. "What ever gave you the idea I was mad at you?"
"Well, weren't you?"
"No. I was interested."
"In what?"
"I was interested in why a woman with no provocation will slap a man's face?"
Her face flamed. "Now I feel like slapping you again."
"Then you're not really sorry."
"Douglas Clencaim, you make me so mad I could spit."
He waved his hand to a camp stool that stood near his left knee but his eyes didn't meet hers. "Sit down, Marley."
She sat while he put the finishing touches to the Manlicher and picked up the Gibbs, then like a robot he turned his eyes to hers, settled them firmly and locked gazes with her so solidly that her body went taut and her face paled. Then without pursuing his advantage he started cleaning the Gibbs.
"Why do you do that?" she asked in a hoarse whisper.
"My dear girl, I just looked at you. What's so deadly about that?"
"You're cruel," she gritted forcefully. "You're hateful because you know what you can do and you do it to see people squirm. I despise anyone like that."
"Don't you think you're being a little hypersensitive and melodramatic?"
"I do not. You're just like Louise. You build fires and...."
He looked up quickly. "And what darling?"
"Nothing ... I ... nothing. "
He chuckled. "Marley, the stars will be so bright that it'll be almost like moonlight tonight. What say we take a walk down by the river. We're on an island and Eki says there are no animals on it now." His eyes were soft now, soft, friendly and innocuous.
"All right, Douglas." With a bound she leaped from the chair and walked stiffly away, her strong brown legs flashing below her shorts, her back straight and proud and her head held high.
Tosavo came walking by swinging his spear. He squatted close by and said. "Douglisi, it seems to me that in each of your terrible blue eyes there sits a very powerful demon."
Douglas looked up somewhat irritated. "Why do you say that?"
"Beacuse when each of the loud fat mamma's children look into them they begin to think of taking you into the brush."
"Your eyes are too sharp, Tosavo. What else have you seen?"
Tosavo lowered his voice conspiratorially. "I have seen King-i Bwana sitting alone away from camp with his eyes boring holes in the ground and a great turmoil in his breast."
"Do you think the time is ripe?"
"As we arranged it, the time is ripe whenever you say the word."
"I think is should be soon because since I spoke to him roughly and with great truth he has been silent and thoughtful."
"Silence is the spear of the wise but thoughts sometimes act like wild goats and put bitterness in a man's belly."
"You are a wise man, Tosavo. Wiser than many would suspect."
"Then if you think so and would so tell that wretched monkey Eki in my hearing, I would be greatly pleased."
Douglas laughed. "I'll do that because I believe it ... and Tosavo, when you see the girl, Marley and I walk toward the river tonight I want you to follow at a discreet distance and warn off such chance creepers as Pritchard, Eki, N'Tosi and anv of the others."
Tosavo grinned. "I knew the first time I saw you that you and I were men of the same mind. It shall be done as you ask and you may depend on my distance. None but the pigmy people love in plain sight of others. No man of honor would consider it."
Sore muscles and weariness drove the camp to bed early that night. King had wandered off with his Springfield under his arm as was his habit, to walk and think. The boys were eating by their tiny fires and Tosavo having consumed seven pounds of roast impala was sitting with his back to a small tree not far away, his spear arranged carefully by his side, his black eyes opaque and ex-pressionles. Suddenly he caught the flash of white near the white mamma's tent joined within twenty feet by a man in khaki. Silently the big black got to his fet, gathered his spear soundlessly and melted into the darkness.
"I don't know whether I should wander around in the night with a man I scarcely know or not," said Marley clenching her hands nervously.
"Well, I think that's because you accused me of lighting a fire that I made not attempt to put out and now you stand revealed as almost a forward woman."
She turned furious eyes on him. "Another crack like that and I'll go back."
"You have my permission to go back now," he said quietly, stepping in front of her and clutching her shoulders, the move bringing her face within inches of his. As he had predicted the starlight was almost as bright as moonlight and though she could not see his eyes very well the effect was there and her lithe strong body stiffened against him. For a moment he let her resist then sliding his arms about her gently brought her forcibly against him and his lips settled over hers. She struggled and fought trying to escape but in contrast to the struggles of her body her lips were deliciously loose and eventually her jaws opened slightly for the entry of a sweetness that effectually robbed her muscles of further resistance and with a sob of surrender and crumpled and hung as flexible as a switch in his arms. Holding her with one powerful arm, as easily as a babe he let the other hand roam over her body to taste the wonder of her long exquisitely sculptured muscles in utter relaxation. She withstood the movements of the hand for a time then he could sense the return, in tiny clonic jerks, of tautness, a process which gathered speed until her whole finely conditioned body was as strong as steel and as flexible as whalebone, crying out its need for the fury he had built within her.
He released her and with an arm around her led her further and further from camp until at last they turned toward the river, leaped down the low bluff that bordered it and walked toward the water, gravel crunching under their feet.
Like an irregular purple ribbon with diamonds hammered into its striated surface the river stretched before them in the night and bathed the air with cool scents.
"Africa was never this beautiful before," she whispered holding to his arm, hard.
"That's because you never looked at it like this before," he said his voice thrumming richly and excitingly against her ears.
She sighed and leaned against him. "And you made it come to me ... by doing that ... back there. It's like a forbidden bottle has been opened and a cloud of new fascinating things have escaped ... like Pandora's box."
"Except that her things were all bad," he said gently. "This won't be bad."
He kissed her, moulding her body close to him, inch by inch and let her feel the tiger she had aroused. A little querilous sound escaped her throat and she aided him, clutching him tightly and closing her eyes against the flood of guilt that covered her but it was nothing against the riptide of passion that shattered away every vestige of restraint with which her rearing had endowed her.
A sob wrenched her and a throaty little dribble of sound grew higher on the scale, soaring on and on, on the wings of that all natural rhythm until it burst forth only to be covered by the rattling snarl of a hunting leapord.
Dark lay heavily about the camp, pierced by waning stars with the suggestion of dawn piling up suggestions of grey mountains about the eastern horizon. Douglas had led the quiet but wearily replete Marley to her tent then he had sought Tosavo who could not be found immediately.
Rousing Eki as quietly as he could Douglas said. "I have searched for the great man and have been unable to find him...."
"One so large cannot be lost, Bwana," argued Eki reasonably.
"Even so, something may have happened to him. You will come with me."
"Yes Bwana."
Fifteen minutes later they found him stretched prone in the grass with four hideous gashes in his head but six feet away lay a leapord with nearly half of Tosavo's favorite spear buried in its body. He was not hard to arouse after they took him to the river and washed his head carefully and splashed water over him.
"In the name of M'Wali, the all suffering cease throwing cold water on me, little man, else I shall beat out your brains and feed them to the ants."
"And would you also beat out Bwana, Douglisi's brains?" retorted the little man, "because he threw more water on you than I did.'"
"I shall not touch a hair of Douglisi's head," averred Tosavo standing. "And if you suggest it again I shall stake you out in the sand and build a fire on your belly and something tells me you shall be sorry."
"What happened, Tosavo?" asked Douglas.
Tosavo frowned. "The white woman was singing the song of love and I could detect a song even in your throat Douglisi, then I heard something else. It has given away many a leapord and I do not know why since they can be as quiet as a walking worm on a branch. He made a rattle in his throat and I saw him headed for you and the small mamma. Clumbsily, I got up from where I sat being in a great hurry and the beast turned on me." He tapped himself thuddingly on the chest, "and reaped the reward shared by his brothers and Simba his cousin, many times over. He charged so fast that I did not chance a full armed throw but snapped the spear at him and caught him in mid-spring. One paw raked my head...."
"Because clumsily you failed to move aside quickly enough," finished Eki.
Tosavo smote Eki smartly across the buttocks with the shaft of a spear. "Silence, beetle, else I borrow King-i Bwana's jambok and flay the hide from your back."
At a safe distance Eki made an insulting sound in his throat and made even more insulting motions with his hands.
The next morning after the stir died down and King had stitched up Tosavo's head unbeautifully but well and had shot him with tetanus antitoxin and penicillin, as claw wounds are dangerous, Bertha clumped out of her tent and brayed her good nature to the world. The day before she had shot a wonderful trophy, the best pair of kudu horns King had ever seen, shot him in mid jump with her Remington .30, bowled him over, and as a consequence was quite happy.
She collared Douglas and said. "What's it about you son, that draws cats. You take Louise out and draw a lion. You take Marley out and draw a leapord. Wonder what you and I'd draw?"
The hue of his face was enough to send her into a spasm of laughter. "Don't worry, son. I'm over those days...." She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. "But I must admit that Pappa was that way a long time before I was. The girls good necking?"
"Er...." Douglas gulped noisily.
"Oh come on and tell Bertha. I know everything, have seen everything, and have just about done everything ... including sneaking out on Pappa when he was buried in his dark room."
"You have two fine daughters," said Douglas with the greatest difficulty.
"Hell, one of those honorable men. Didn't think there were any left." She stalked away with a signal to her gun bearer to shoot guineas who were greeting the sun raucously a quarter of a mile away.
At noon the safari stopped near a small stream and under several large acacia thorn trees they sat and ate broiled guinea with their hands, grinning greasily at each other.
After the meal King signaled to Douglas and while the others composed themselves for an hour's rest they walked some distance down stream.
"No complications so far," said King, a subject which was palpably far from his imemdiate concern.
"Right," agred Douglas sitting on a rock.
"What happened last night?"
Douglas gave him a pair of flat expressionless eyes to ponder over. "A leapord jumped Tosavo."
King made an irritated gesture. "I know that. What were you and Marley doing out in the bush?"
Douglas slid from the rock to the ground and leaned back against it and grinned. "Oh I say, now, old boy. Is that cricket and all that sort of piffle?"
"If there's one thing worse than you being American it's you being British. All right. I don't give a damn what you were doing out ther."
"Then, how come you asked?"
King strode up and down his craggy face cut deeply with lines. "I didn't come out bere to talk about our people."
"That's what I thought."
"You're not being much help."
Douglas gave him a hard cutting stare. "Don't you think it's about time King-i Bwana stopped licking lollipops and started licking whatever in hell's eating him?"
"Yes I do."
"Then let's start and cut out all the blinkin' evasion. I hate it."
"Glencairn, I never knew until I met you what a totally uncompensated person could be like. It's like being beat over the head with a knobkerrie. All right, I'll admit it. M'Dusi is running me crazy."
"That would be a walk, Corny. Where did you ever dredge up all this fear or is it white supremacy that's eating you alive?"
King sat down and wiped a sudden deposit of sweat from his face. "As God is my witness," he whispered, "I don't know. I just freeze up at the thought of her. I was doing all right until you sank your damned fangs in me. Doug, suppose I lose her."
The other loosed a short bark of a laugh. "I'm not certain that you haven't."
King, stung, sat erect. "What's that?"
"You heard me. What did you ever do to get her? Lose her, indeed. I'd say you already have."
King shrugged. "Maybe it's just as well."
Douglas uttered a short obscene word and got to his feet. "Go to hell, Corny. I'm going and talk with Tosavo, who at least talks sense."
"Doug ... don't go." The agony in the man's voice cut him short in his stride. He turned and saw one of the strongest men he had ever known, his face held hard in his hands and his body shaken as in the grip of a chill.
"Take it easy," said Douglas gripping his shoulder, his voice rich and soothing. Magically the tension seemed to break inside the big man. "Never been this way before," he said, holding a death grip on his voice to keep it from breaking. "Never."
Douglas tightened the grip on his shoulder. "Corny, want to let me take over now?"
"What ... what do you mean?"
"You're at the end of your tether. You're a strong man shattered in the guts. You're not fit to be a hunter now. You're not keen and your eyes play tricks on you. Promise me one thing."
"What's that?"
"We hit the mid-mark sometime tomorrow don't we?"
N "Tonight," said king. "We put up a semi-permanent camp there and operate from it as hub."
"Good. Will we make it before sundown?"
"The boys will and they'll have everything ready when we get in. What's all this to do...."
"Let's get drunk tonight, Corny."
King shuddered. "No. If I do I'll break down and blubber like a child."
"You damn near did today. Tonight we get drunk."
"But why, Doug."
"In the morning you'll be King again. Tomorrow there won't be any shakes and knives in your guts.
King stood up and pawed his hair angrily. "How can you stand there and...."
"Careful. Told you I was taking over as of now. Let's get back ... and I want Tosavo this afternoon. He and I have a trip to make in the jeep."
The jeep, aimed at the purple outline of a distant kloof maneuvered around boulders, kopjes and washes. Twice lions challenged their passage bu scuttled away when Douglas tooted the horn. Once a rhino charging blindly, his little tail swishing furiously nearly ran them down and they had to out maneuver the animal and flee.
"Douglisi, my belly is filled with fear. Suppose our plans come to naught. King-i Bwana has killed men before."
"Only a coward dies a thousand deaths," said Douglas quietly as he twisted the jeep around a heavy clump of mimosa.
"True, Douglisi, but could it be truthfully said that a brave man desires life less than a coward?"
Douglas grinned. "Probably not. There is a white man's saying that holds that the giving of a life for a friend is a wonderful thing."
Tosavo massaged the back of his neck. "Even that I can see, since King-i Bwana and myself have exchanged such unselfish acts but it is one thing to give a life for a friend, and quite another to give to him."
Douglas laughed aloud. "I think you may rest easily, Tosavo. It is in my mind that King-i Bwana is beyond matters of killing now. He is a man whose heart is sick within his breast."
"And my own heart beats strongly," grumbled Tosavo, still unconvinced. "My family fetish is strong but I have never seen a fetish that could stop a bullet."
"Where shall we wait, Tosavo?" asked Douglas, changing the subject.
"In the distance, a mile or more you can see a spot of dark green. A little river runs there and there is a thick wood of cedar and thorn and ironwood. We will wait there and if they are late I will take my spear and break heads with the haft."
"We are riding a petrol horse," Douglas reminded him.
"In that case it should be we who are late because petrol horses are sometimes more stubborn than any Egyptian ass."
They sat in the cool shade, their backs to boles of slender ironwood trees and listened to the quiet gurgle of the little river that lazed its way past them.
"Douglisi, since you and I are friends and since you know more than I about white men maybe you can relieve my mind. Why is it that they fasten their minds to a women like a mamba does his fangs and let the memory tear at their entrails?"
Douglas shook his head. "All white men are not that way."
"It would appear that only the good ones are," replied the big black. "Am I?"
Jet black eyes met blue ones for a space then Tosavo said. "I cannot read your heart, Douglisi, because it is not with you."
"What?"
"Even as I said. I have seen you lost in great distances and always you looked toward the west in which direction I'm told America lies."
Douglas nodded. "I am not a man of darkness whose strength is that of hiding what lies inside."
"And that is why I did not have to know you but the space it might take the sun to move a shadow to the breadth of my head to know what manner of man you were."
Douglas sighed and sat deeper on his spine. "White men, Tosavo, have traveled too far from the seed that gave them first life. Black men have not and are in many ways superior for that reason. M'Dusi is beautiful by the white men's rule but her beauty alone is not all. She is mystery. She is a dream that cannot be reached.'"
"King-i Bwana might have reached her any time he put forth his hand."
"Say that again?"
Tosavo obliged but Douglas felt a pain travel through his breast that he savagely squeezed out. If what she had given him was not love what was it? It had been enough to ruin his perspective for days, but....
"Is she in love with him?"
"Who can say that? She belongs to him and he will not take her. She does many foolish things but always she looks to the day when she belongs to him in body as well as in mind."
"What about me and the others?"
"Should she stay at Chuchini and dry up like a waterless tree? Should she say nay to the urgings of her loins? Do white women do this?"
"They say they do."
"Doubtless, but what they say and what they do might not be the same thing."
"As to that," said Douglas with a grimace, "there can be little argument. Such are the ways of women."
Tosavo shrugged. "I know not why white men and women have made such a fuss over themselves. When I was in the village of my father I took what young unmarried women as caught my fancy and that was the end of it. It was great fun but there was no sorrow and no beating with the forehead on the ground."
"As I reminded you," put in Douglas, "the white man has tried to leave his nature behind."
Tosavo grunted. "He will as likely leave his shadow behind."
A noise brought them to their feet and in a little while a number of stalwart blacks came into sight bearing a tipoye curtained against the sun and insects.
"Were there thorns in the path all the way?" sneered Tosavo.
"Lord Tosavo," said the head man with a respectful bow, "the woman is heavy and would not walk."
"It is well that she did not," snarled his chief, "else I should have had the skin pulled from you in strips."
The men placed the tipoye on the ground and M'Dusi clambered gracefully out, her lush damp lips curved in a smile. "I see you, Douglisi."
Douglas gulped and fell back a step. This was no native woman who climbed from the conveyance but a well turned out woman that might have hailed from Hollywood, New York or New Orleans. She wore a white silk blouse, obviously with nothing under it, a pair of well fitting royal blue slacks and on her feet were red strap sandals. "Does the picture of me in white women's clothes j make words stick in your throat?" i "No...." he recovered his voice with an effort, i "No, M'Dusi, it's just another side to your beauty that I had not seen. I was surprised." At a signal from Tosavo the men set up a table and camp stools, placed a jug of water on it with bark cups then discretely faded into the near distance.
Her eyes went straight to his as soon as they were alone. "Douglisi, this venture has been explained to me but not well."
He nodded slowly, seeingly at a loss for words. "M'Dusi, it is in my mind that no matter what has passed between us, you do not love me."
Her gaze was fixed and unblinking. "Did I so speak?"
"No, only acted."
"Actions, Douglisi, spring from the well of nature. To act otherwise in the making of joy would be dishonest."
"Where," he asked abruptly, "is the Englishman?"
Her gaze did not falter. "Barnesi died in my arms three days after you left. "Were you sad?"
Her smile was a faint twitching of her flawless lips. "Douglisi, this is not like you."
He flushed as he realized that he had been devious. "You are right M'Dusi...."
"No," she said, her voice mellow with some strange emotion. "I did not love him. To me he was a doll. A doll that loved me greatly and was dependment on me for the few comforts I could provide him. His body was beyond any help I could give."
Douglas drank a cup of water that he did not want and looked at her with passionless intentness."
"Am I beautiful like this, Douglisi?" she asked softly.
"You'd be beautiful no matter what. You were beautiful in nothing, in the little grass girdle and now in civilized clothes you are still beautiful."
"And do you love me?"
He shook his head slowly. "No M'Dusi, I do not love you. I think I could ... easily, but I am glad that I did not allow myself." r
"And I, too." She leaned forward and a ray of setting sun bathed her smooth skin in a shower of gold dust, setting flames leaping through the stygian masses of her soft hair and making his bowels knot up from the sheer animal magnatism she exuded. "I have been in love but once," she added. The eloquence of her face was something to behold, as though some gigantic light had sprung into being deep within her. "Only once Douglisis, and I shall never love again ... not like this."
"King-i Bwana?"
She sat back and leveled the twin lances of her smoldering jet eyes at him. "Mister Cornwall King of Emporia, Kansas, United States of America."
Douglas flenched like a man struck in the face. "English...." he breathed unbelievingly.
"He didn't tell you that he paid Mr. Barnes to teach me English until Barnes became ill?
"Look, Barnes didn't teach you how to talk English. There wasn't enough time and you speak it too well."
She smiled, the sun glinting redly on the polished surface of her perfect teeth. "I learned from a missionary too but the missionary was French and his English was not good. I could speak it well enough after the missionary taught me but it was Barnes who polished my speech."
"Have you read much?"
"He keeps me supplied with woman's magazines, picture magazines. Books I do not care a great deal about because...." She hesitated then smiled almost shyly. "Douglas, I'm very young according to white standards and maybe I'll learn to like them."
Douglas hung his head, a head that roared with the complexity of this unbelievable person, the crashing opposites which she threw at him, but through it all shone the one thing he could not forget. She loved King ... she had always loved King!
"M'Dusi, what do men say about your parentage?"
She shrugged. "Some say this and some say that. He believes that I'm part Berber, part Negro and maybe a good amount of white."
"Will you be accepted in Nairobi?"
"No!" Her face twisted with a bitterness that made his heart ache. "King-i Bwana, a man who accounts Simba as nothing, who has killed a leapord with a spear, a man who fears no living thing is a trembling child in my presence. In Nairobi the legend I have created has reached but I will never go there."
"But if you did would you be accented?"
"If I went there as his wife, as a Eurasian, or Assyrian ... something like that I would be."
Douglas nodded slowly and a broad grin broke across his face. "M'Dusi", he said in Swahili, "what would you give me if I will give you Cornwall King ... as your own?"
Her eyes flashed and her chin went up. "I do not want him."
His heart fell with a thud but he managed to contain the disappointment. "Why, M'Dusi?"
Her shoulders slumped and her head tilted slowly forward until the masses of her hair slid forward over her shoulders like a black fog of soft delight. Her long slender fingers with their blood red nails raked spasmodically across her thighs making subdued tearing sounds on the cloth of her slacks. Two large wet spots appeared near her wrists darkening the cloth. She held her head up and her eyes glittered with tears as clear as Kimberly's finest gems. Her throat throbbed with passion as the words emerged. "I will have no man who does not love me."
"Now," said Douglas, his voice soothing music, "you are preparing to again learn like the elephant."
"I do not understand."
"Why should King fear you?"
Her body twitched slightly and she looked away. "Maybe...." Her eyes filled again. "I don't know, Douglisi."
"Then you are not as wise as you think, and yet you are wiser than anyone your age I ever saw."
"Lately," she said, almost in a whisper, "I have come to think that I have built a hut of straw which will be laid down by the first wind that blows."
Douglas stood up and motioned to Tosavo who came to him at a run. "Have the boys to put up the tent and arrange it as I have instructed you. You, Tosavo, will remain to guard M'Dusi. I will return and I shall take you back to the camp at that time. We will need you for tomorrow's hunt." He spoke rapidly to M'Dusi for five minutes then he and Tosavo got in the jeep.
Tosavo figited. "Douglisi, if King-i Bwana should become angry...."
"If he does , his anger will fall first on me. This was my idea and your part is not yet known."
Tosavo brightened. "I would prefer that it is never known."
"In a week," prophisied Douglas, "you will be bragging that the whole idea was yours from beginning to end."
"If I do I hope a serpent bites me in a spot that will put half the women in Kenya in mourning," replied Tosavo profoundly.
Back at the camp Bertha, her dungarees dirty and full to the bursting collared Douelas as he whirled the jeep into the tent area. "What," she brayed, "is the matter with King. I killed a lion this afternoon and it was well that I did...."
"Where was Pritchard?"
Her face fell a little. "Well, Pritchard had four .470s in him so I guess all I can claim is an assist, but he came within an inch of King who had emptied his Gibbs at him. I thought he was such a good shoot."
"He is," answered Douglas shortly. "At the moment he is not himself, He'll be all right tomorrow. Where was your husband all this time?"
"Standing there as cool as you please taking movies of the whole thing. I'm glad it wasn't sound stuff. No friend we have could have stood my cussing."
Later in King's tent he approached the white faced man. "Hear you had a brush with Simba today."
"Brush." His voice broke crazily. "I went into a funk and plastered the landscape with bullets. Me, the King. King-i Bwana. Never misses. He let go a short hysterical laugh.
"You're talking like a fool," Douglas told him calmly. "Have you had a drink?"
"Don't want any."
"Good nerve tonic."
"My nerves are gone Doug, shot to hell. I'm through."
Douglas uttered an iterate string of the most obscene words he could lay his tongue to and strode out in search of Pritchard.
Ten feet from the tent door he stopped and said, "Pritchard, bring King-i Bwana a four timer, scotch. No water."
"I forbid it Pritchard," said King at his shoulder. "What the hell are you trying to do to me, Doug?
"Get the whiskey, Pritchard." The voice had the crash of brass in it and Pritchard jumped but only looked miserably at the two men.
Douglas strode to the tent and emerged with a-thin pliable sjambok, and spoke one word. "Whiskey," and Pritchard taking one look at the flaming blue eyes went off at a swift trot.
The jeep disturbed a rhinocerous family from their sleep and all members charged the glaring lights with blind ferocity requiring Douglas to do some neat maneuvering to avoid being trampled.
"Stop the jeep," said King suddenly.
"Why?"
"I said stop it."
Douglas trod on the brake and King got out. "I'm not going another step. I don't know who the hell you think you are but I'm going to show you. Step around in front of the lights."
They stood in the glare of the lights and faced each other. "Now, do you get in and head back for camp or do I tear you apart?"
"Get to tearing," said Douglas leading with a rocketing left to the midsection. King, surprised, folded over only to be snapped erect with a whistling right and the lights went out.
When he woke he saw the flickering flames of the fire that had seemed a candle when he last saw it. He sat erect and rubbed his stomach then his chin. "Anything broken?" he asked.
"No. I checked. I was afraid of the jaw for a moment but you were just out good."
King grinned lopsidedly and reached for the bottle. "Most of the dutch courage is gone."
Douglas stopped the car. "We'll wait here until you've regained it.
An hour later they drove into the circle of light to be greeted by Tosavo.
"Lord," Bwana he began nervously, "if Douglisi tells you I had aught to do with this...." He stopped and looked into the implacable blue eyes, sighed and let his shoulders sink. "He will be speaking naught but the truth."
King, pleasantly plastered, stumbled from the vehicle. His fears and suspicions had disappeared and were now replaced by a sort of soaring confidence. "All right. I'm here, I'm drunk. Now what's all this mumbo jumbo about."
"Will you wait here for a moment?"
King laughed. "And if I don't I'll get the other side of my jaw swollen, that it."
"Something like that."
"All right. I'll play along. Call me when the stew is ready."
Douglas favored him with a quick glance. "You, brother, are the stew...." and disappeared into the night. By the banks of the grumbling little stream he came to the tent giving off a faint glow into the darkness. Without preamble he entered then stood stock still. She was reclining against a disordered pile of multi-colored silk pillows and the walls of the tent had been obscured by the frothy drapes. On either side of her burned two candles surrounded by cones of thin red paper and the resultant illumination was a soft rich red that picked out her dusky olive skin, the highlights of her hair, parted in the middle and drawn to the sides and tied very simply with ivory satin ribbons. Her dress was also ivory satin, ankle length, cut deeply at the breasts highlighting the rich rises to either side and caressing the high sharp peaks. It was very simple and flowing, fitted at the waist and slit up the sides through which a long slender leg peeked daringly.
"Holy Mackerel," breathed Douglas.
The old M'Dusi was gone and in her place was a fresh young girl whose damp eyes and tremulous lips indicated that she was not at all the sure pagan goddess he had seen at his hut.
"Did ... I do ... all right," she asked timidly.
"Perfect, utterly perfect. Now listen M'Dusi. Everything depends on tonight. I can see that you have lost courage. Let the fact that this chance may never come again give you more."
"I am frightened, Douglas, but I shall not be lacking."
"I'm betting on you." He leaned over, kissed her fleetingly on the lips and ducked out of the tent.
King and Tosavo were in a hot discussion the point of which Douglas did not catch but he broke it up. "Come on," he ordered brusquely.
"An' if I don' you'll sock me ... ri'?"
"Yes ... come on."
He led the happily inebriated King to the tent shoved him through and followed.
Like a man stricken with lightening King froze before he had a chance to straighten up. If M'Dusi had been nervous there was no sign of it now. Her eyes were steady as a basalisk's, her features calm and composed.
"Good evening, Mr. King," she said in perfect English, her voice rich with a hint of golden resonance.
King's throat worked but no words would come and Douglas took this as his cue for exit.
"Won't you sit beside me?" she asked softly.
Slowly he straightened up, shook his head. "Mother of God," he breathed.
"I came a long way to see you," she said, her voice spreading over him like soft fresh butter. "I had to come to see you because you would never come to see me."
"I couldn't," he croaked thickly.
"Why couldn't you? Am I so hideous?"
Suddenly the strangling string seemed to break and he aould breathe freer. "You'd burst a man's imagination just trying to think of you. Therp is no you ... you're a figure of ... a bad ... No, a good dream."
"Won't you sit beside me?"
"I'm afraid."
Her eyes darkened and like a fawn she stood with one fluid movement the soft silk clinging to her gold and ivory body. "Mr. King, I think you're being childish."
His chest seemed filled to the bursting, his vision swam and a flood of rending misery roared down on him and sank knives deep into his sense. He staggered and fell to one knee, great tearing sobs wrenching his throat. Suddenly she was beside him and soft arms were about his neck ... then he knew nothing.
"What." asked Tosavo as they jounced across the veldt, "stung King-i Bwana on the chin?"
"Did something sting him?"
"From the looks of it the father of hornets had leaned against it."
"That is a matter between King-i Bwana and I.
There will be no talk of it when we reach the camp." Tosavo let his eyes run over the rugged body beside him and whistled softly. "I thought something of that nature had happened ... and he is no child. I have seen him lay a man as large as me flat with one blow of his fist ... and yet there is not a mark on you."
"He didn't expect it," said Douglas shortly.
Tosavo nodded. "Even so, I can see that you are a mighty man, Douglisi. It is not King-i Bwana's dishonor to fall before such as you."
Back at the camp Douglas went directly to his tent and without lighting a "candle divested himself of his clothes, felt for the mosquito net, and eased beneath it into bed.
CHAPTER NINE
When Cornwall King came back to the recognition of his surroundings he seemed bereft of all volition. His brain was locked tightly and refused to function. His limbs were cataleptic, more like sticks of dead wood than flesh, bone and blood.
She sat a few feet away from her dark somber eyes transfixing him. "Do you feel all right now.
Like a deluge of sleet the old fear came back and with a terrific effort of will that left beaded sweat trembling on his brow he sat up ... swaying. " feel...." His throat closed up and he could only stare dumbly at her like a hurt animal begging for help and mercy.
For a moment she continued to stare at him then her eyes overflowed and silver trails of tears stained red by the rich color of the light ran down her cheeks. "I can't ... reach you. You are here and yet you're not. Since the first time I visited your hut love for you has been like a great root growing through me that would one day kill me and now...." The sigh that came from her breast eloquently spoke of a spirit that had received its last load. "Death ... at least there is no pain there ... And yet I know that you must have suffered too. Why do we bring each other pain? Why when we love as we do ... and you do love me. Women are never wrong about that when they know ... why is there this wall between us? Why must we be choked with the blood of the mortal wound delivered one to the other? Why, King-i Bwana, is it that I who know so much do not know what that one thing is that would break you down and bring you to my arms where you belong? Why is it that you who fear nothing that is dangerous should fear me when all I want is to love you and be loved by you?" Again her sad eyes held him in their pincer-like grip until it seemed that he would scream then she stood up with her curious easy grace and catching the neck of the gown skidded it down. Her only article of clothing now was the two white ribbons and even these she tore from her hair and cast aside.
King shrank back, his skin bathed in a cold bitter sweat, and looked at the unbelievable lush lines of her extravagant body from the trim dancer's ankles upward where her calves swelled in pure curving lines to the strong straight thighs in which an occasional fine muscle flickered briefly, to the swell of her hips and the dense stvgian pelt that stretched almost to her navel, to the fecund bounty of her triumphant breasts, rigid and swollen with rich firm flesh, their peaks a delightful pink-tan. Her eyes were still wet, oblique and mysterious and her face was a thing of the. purest sculpture even in the sadness that weighed upon it, framed in the disordered mass of heavy silken hair that seemed to be a million polished wires as soft as web.
"I can do no more King-i Bwana. I am now as you found me. You took me in and gave me everything you thought I wanted. Yet the very thing I did want you did not give me. For your good intentions I thank you. For your lack of wisdom I curse you. When Douglisi told me of this plan I knew that this was the night. Tonight I'd have you or I wouldn't. I see it all now and I know what I must do. The river has cannibal fish. I threw them a piece of meat and saw the water boil and the click of their sharp teeth."
She stood as straight as Diana for a moment watching his white stricken face then she turned and went through the tent flaps.
For a long ten seconds he lay as one paralyzed then with a hoarse scream he turned and like a beserk elephant tore through the wall of the tent, unable to use the opening in his hysterical haste. He caught up with her at the edge of the river and snatched her back.
"No ... no ... no...." Then all at once his strength returned like a tide of flaming oil. It coursed through his veins and he became a giant. She was swept into his arms like a babe and carried back to the tent where he placed her tenderly on the cushions and denied his tenderness with an embrace that brought a gasp to her lips which choked it back. Her eyes closed and she allowed him to bend her pliant body inward until the breath was almost crushed from her.
He released her suddenly and looked blindly about. "Mad," he said distinctly. "Mad ... mad ... There is no you and me. There is nothing. This is a...."
She clutched his head and pulling it slowly down placed it between the deep palpitant cliffs of her breasts. "It is mad because it is love and love is mad ... when unsatisfied. Is the skin of my breasts a dream?"
A shuddering sigh seaped from his lungs. "No ... only unbelievable."
She raised his head and sank her parted lips into his, sending a bolt of racketing shock through him that hardened his muscles then dissolved them into nothing.
Douglas stuck his head in the tent. "All out. We're ready to shove. King had a trip to make last night and he's just got back."
Bertha came out with her .303 Weatherby Magnum clutched in one hand shading her eyes with the other. King was walking briskly about giving orders, nothing of his yesterday's attitude showing this morning. She nodded to herself and began to inspect the noses of her cartridges.
"Think this .303'11 do against those buffalo," she asked affably as he came up.
"Of course," he said, then grinned. "As long as you don't shoot like I did yesterday. I was off a little."
Bertha roared with mirth. "Off a little? Man you weren't anywhere around."
He grinned again and nodded. "All fit today, though. Shouldn't have gone out yesterday afternoon. By the way, Eki tells me your three-o-three did the trick. One in the spine and one in the heart. Pritchard must have been infected by my disease."
Pritchard standing fifty feet away scowled and said to Eki. "King-i Bwana deals carelessly with the truth this morning in talking to the fat mamma. You were nowhere around the lion when it was skinned."
Eki shrugged. "That might be and might not. Were you in the clump of tall grass ten feet away from the carcass?"
"I was not," retorted Pritchard crossly. "I am not sure that there was a clump of tall grass ten feet from the carcass."
"Then," said Eki looking mysterious, "there was a clump of tall grass ten feet away. I could have been there, seeing all."
Pritchard cursed under his breath and walked away.
Bertha was in fine shooting fettle that day and brought down a mighty Cape buffalo with a single shot and that night there was much feasting and frivolity. On nights following an especially good day it was King's habit to allow millet beer to his men and this night was special because it was not rationed.
"King-i Bwana," said Eki belching loudly, "is a man reborn today. Some good demon must have spoken in his ear last night."
"I," said Tosavo expertly balancing a five pound hunk of barely roasted buffalo meat in his hand holding a goard of beer in the other, "was the good demon who spoke to him. You are a fool, little man and you are not acquainted with our high and wonderful ways therefore you are ignorant.
"Did not Douglisi provide some little help?" asked Eki slyly.
"Douglisi followed my directions like a good man because he is a good man. Afterward he shook my hand and said, "Tosavo, you should have been King of Africa."
"King of Africa," said Pritchard caustically, "is at this moment seated at the table with the fat mamma, her daughters, the little mouse-man who knows no fear and Douglisi. Moreover, he is white."
Tosavo glared at him, bit off a portion of succulent meat and washed it down with copious draughts of beer.
A thin scimitar of a moon rode in the west and a strong breeze blew that was a delight after the hot day's hunt. It kept the mosquitoes at bay that had given threat of fogging their campsite from the nearby marsh and the camp was tranquil and quiet.
Marley had attached herself to Douglas immediately after super and after several abortive attempts to pry him away Louise went to the tent and bounced pettishly on her cot where she did not sleep.
"I should be mad at you," Marley was saying, the others having retired. "Why, aren't you?"
"Oh, I don't know, Douglas. Maybe it's because I love you so much."
"Nuts," he said rudely.
"I don't like the way you said that," she flared.
"That's what I mean. There are any number of things about me that you don't like and you can't tell me one that you love me for."
She was silent for a moment, a great understanding gradually coming to her. It shocked and disgusted her for a moment then she was able to see it in a better light. "I could," she said in a half whisper, "but I won't."
"Want me to tell you?"
"No."
"Better grow up, darling .You're headed for lumps if you don't."
"What about you? Didn't you feel anything at all?"
"I felt everything you did. I just didn't let it swamp me and do emotional cut-ups. I knew it for what it was. You didn't."
"It was the first time, Douglas."
"That's right, honey. You're young and if I may be a braggart for a moment, thank your stars it was me and not some dope that'd let you run blind into a fire."
She threw her arms about his neck and whiskered in his ear. "I am glad Douglas ... so glad." N Her lips quivered under the touch of his and she started weeping. "I don't care ... I don't care ... her body squirmed around and fitted his like a mould. "Please, Douglas ... please."
He glanced about cautiously. The fires had died to beds of coals, the tents were dark and all he could see of life was Tosavo, sitting against the bole of a small tree, looking carefully in another direction.
He stood up and plucked her from the camp chair and held her close for a moment making a vicarious meal from the restless activity of her body as it begged him with more eloquence than her lips, then they turned and disappeared into the shadows back of the camp and in their wake came the giant Masai, his spear held soundlessly between his fingeres, twirling it gently as he walked.
As Douglas prepared for bed King spoke to him. "Haven't had a chance to...."
"How did it pan out," asked Douglas sharply.
"As if you didn't know. It panned out after she came within an inch of committing suicide. That's what it took ... and that's what she provided."
"I figured she'd provide whatever was necessary. What now?"
"Time ... just a little time to figure out all the angles and everything'll be jake ... I don't have a sufficient command of words to attempt thanks. I just wouldn't know how to go about it."
"For which I'm more than duly thankful. It's a chore and usually it embarrasses me."
"I think you know....
"I do know so don't try to tell me. You can't tell me anything I don't know ... not about you."
"Say, what's that little Mississippi town you came from?"
"Cedarville ... why?"
"Nothing. Thought maybe there had been a town in Kansas near where I lived by that name."
For two days they hunted about the marsh, Bertha getting another good head for her trophy room with Marley and Louise getting bitten by mosquitoes and peeved.
That afternoon they came into camp early having hunted hard and unproductively for a particular antelope head that Bertha wanted, just in time to see a small Avro coming into the smooth almost grassless stretch of veldt in front of the camp.
King went to meet the plane in a near trot which in itself was somethnig to cause raised eyebrows even in the boys because King-i Bwana was a man who despised hurry. He spoke to the pilot for fifteen minutes and took off again. It was bedtime before Douglas got a chance to inquire about the visitor.
"Who was the bird in the bird?"
"The warden who found you the night you and Louise went lion hunting in the dark. Brooke."
"What did he want?"
King turned away and began to stoke his pipe. "Routine. Just checking up."
Douglas frowned. "Corny, that sounded a little off key, especially when you almost hoped to meet him. It put you out of character. More than that you were looking toward the east more today than usual. You expected him, why not admit it."
King grinned. "A few days ago I was the suspicious one. I talked to Brooke's outpost on short wave last night. He has a station over Byanti way and they told him I had called so he came on over."
"What for, to look at Bertha's buffalo?"
The other shook his head. "Sorry old boy ... private matter."
"Oh...." Something to do with M'Dusi, no doubt, guessed Douglas ... and he had never been more wrong.
For two days there was little serious hunting. Carlson shot hundreds of feet of film of all sorts of animals because the plains were thick with game. Bertha shot guineas and francolin with her double Ithaca, while Louise and Marley entered into serious competition for Douglas' favors.
Time, therefore, did not hang heavily on his hands except at such times as he would find himself alone, usually about sundown and he would sit on the banks of the stream facing the west and think of home and Naomi. The ache was still there but he had trouble now reconstructing the details of her face. He thought of his father, that granite block of Scotland who seemed imperishable but would, he knew, die some day. He thought of the sweet calm face of his mother and of his sisters and brothers. All grown by now probably. He sighed and shut his eyes against the pain of nostalgia ... and he didn't hear Tosavo sit silently beside him.
"The snake is gnawing tonight, Douglisi."
Tosavo's voice was soft as a woman's and from it Douglas drew a strange comfort. It soothed him and strengthened the bond he felt for this unschooled but immensely sensitive savage.
"Do you know all things, Tosavo?"
"Lord, there are things I do not know. I know of them and maybe I could not name them but in the brain of one man whether he be black or white there is but room for one small grain of the mountain of knowledge."
"A man who knows that is wise if he knows nothing else."
"So I have thought. You are a wise man and yet at times like this something eats away at your bowels. You are young and your spirit is tender."
"Why should you concern yourself with my troubles, Tosavo?"
The great black flexed his powerful arms. "Among my people, Douglisi, I am a man of stature. I would measure myself with them at any time but it took a white man, King-i Bwana to show me that no man is sufficient to all tasks. It was a light that shone brightly in my eyes. In you I have seen the same thing. You struck my master a telling blow ... to save his heart from rotting away within him. Imagine him missing a lion at thirty paces. Such was the state of his mind. Now he is happy and a new man. You who have just came among us took our troubles on your own back. All I have to offer is the feeling within me that I am helpless ... which is worthless and to say that I would have it otherwise ... equally worthless."
"It is folly to say it is worthless. It is a great comfort to know that someone is not blind to a man's pain. It will pass: I left much happiness at my home and since that time I have had little. It is only when I think of it at times like this that I have a sinking: heart."
Tosavo cocked his ears to the west. "The plane bird comes again."
Douglas listened and after a moment could hear the steady drome of Avro. "I think I will walk to the plane with King-i Bwana this time and discover what his secret is."
Tosavo laughed. "King-i Bwana is now a laughing child. He has turned himself out to the sun and now tries to outshine it. Not in ten years have I seen him as he is now."
"Let's go see what Brooke bears by way of news."
Before they could get back to the camp the plane landed and Brooke and King were walking back toward the tents when they arrived.
Douglas waited while they walked toward the tents then walked to meet them.
"Hello Glencairn," said Brooke extending his hand.
"Hello," said Douglas taking the proffered hand. "What brings you here so often? We haven't been shooting elephants with seventy-fives."
"Pritchard," King called, "bring us whiskey and splash and set up a table in front of our tent."
After a second round Douglas, whose irritation was mounting said, "Now tbat we're all comfy suppose you tell us why we're getting all this attention, Broke."
"Us?"
"Us. King seems to know all about it but he isn't saying anything."
Brooke and King exchanged glances and Brooke shook his head slightly. King lit his pipe with great deliberation and faced Douglas squarely. "Doug, what makes you think you killed a man in the States?" rinnglas lit a cigarette with equal deliberation and blew out a puff of smoke. "What's the pitcn, trying to get me extradited?"
"You know better than that. Answer my question?"
"Well, there was a letter...."
"From whom?"
"Frankly I don't know. It was unsigned." For a long moment King looked at him then said. "It was a lie. The man died six months later. He was driving cattle and was struck by lightning. He had stopped out of the rain under a pine tree."
Slowly the color drained from Douglas' face and his hands became balls of whitened skin. "I guess you know what you're talking about, Corny!"
"I do. That's what this is all about. The man did not die ... you didn't kill anyone. There's no reason why you can't go home."
Abruptly Douglas got up and walked away, his breast heaving with the exquisite torture of relief. He walked into a thicket, leaned against a sapling and wept weakly. Louise found him half an hour later standing in the dust of the growing moon near the stream. "Scottie."
"Not tonight," he said shortly. "I'm wrestling with my soul."
"I know. I just came to see if there was anything I could do."
A flood of affection for her went over him and he sat on a flat rock. "Sure," he said huskily. "Come here and sit with me and hold my hand and make me feel seventeen again."
"That's what I meant. I...."
"Never mind. I was a dog to answer you like that."
"No, you had every right taking the past into consideration."
"Louise, you're swell people."
"I know!" She sat and slipped a cool soft hand into his. "Is that better?"
"It's good. You don't know how good."
"Yes, I think I do ... I know I do."
Later they walked back to the camp and Marley saw them. She came at a run but while some distance away Douglas said. "Let her have her time too, Louise. I think you'll be that generous."
She smiled. "That's right, Scottie. I'm not a hog when the chips are down."
"She," panted Marley seconds later, "must be sick."
"On the contrary, she left so you could talk to me alone."
"What?"
"Just what I said. Don't you think it's about time you started appreciating your sister?
She bit the back of her hand miserably. "Oh Douglas, am I that bad?"
"Bad enough honey, but I think you'll recover."
"I wanted to tell you, I'm so glad you can go home but ... We'll miss you ... terribly." She bent her head and wept silently.
"I'm sorry, but I'll have to go. My parents are old now and they may need me." He laughed shortly. "Or maybe I mean I need them, as young as I am."
"Douglas, we won't ever see you again?"
"Ever's a long time. The chances are we will meet. I hope so because I think a lot of all of you."
"How'll you go home?"
"Oh ... work my way aboard ship I suppose."
She looked at him a long time then came close. "Will you kiss me ... one last time?"
He did, and he remembered, too, that it would be the last time. She remembered because she could not forget.
Douglas had a pitiful handful of clothes to pack and that took very little time. After packing he left King and Brooke at a game of cribbage and walked out in front of the tent to smoke.
Like a wraith the spare form of Carlson Rivertree appeared at his elbow. "I ... we, that is, my family and I are overjoyed at the good news, Mr. Glencairn. Allow me to express my personal best wishes and sincere hone for a speedy homecoming."
"Thank you. sir. I have become attached to your family and I shall miss all of you."
"Yes ... quite. Er ... hummm. Would you honor me by having a drink with us?"
"By all means, certainly." He followed the little man to the big tent and found the other three sitting about the camp table sipping whiskey and soda but a funeral air seemed to hang over them. Douglas stood in the entrance and surveyed them individually and collectively and when he spoke the golden organ had never sounded richer. "Now look here," he said with gentle intonation. "Let's have none of this." His eyes caressed Bertha until she became alarmed. They traveled to Louise who leaned forward and tried to drown herself in their depths. When they touched Marley she sank back like a person dazed by an opiate.
"Mr. Glencairn has kindly consented to have a highball with us. Will you fix it Louise, my dear?" Louise would have been pleased to fix it but Marley was ahead of her and when she handed it to him her fingers seemed electrically charged.
They sat and drank silently, ritualistically, feeling keener than ever the loss of his leaving. "Look here," he said suddenly putting down his glass. "I feel this, too. I like every one of you and I'll miss you but we'll all be in the U.S. You have money and can travel. Mamma, what about some quail hunting like you never saw ... and some jungle deer hunting in Louisiana where your shots are never further than thirty yards and you have to use buckshot? Then there's Delta duck shooting, the best there is when there are ducks. After all I'm not going to the Arctic regions and you're not staying in Africa."
"Excellently put," said Carlson with more animation than he had hitherto shown. "I've wanted some color shots of the South for years. Just never got around to going there."
They relaxed after that and the dark aspect of the farewell was dispelled. As he took his leave Carlson followed him out of the tent. "One moment, Mr. Glencairn. You intend going home by ship and I should think after all this time you would be quite anxious and in a hurry."
"Yes sir, but the alternative, flying, takes money."
"Indubitably and I have more money than one man has any business with...." He put up his hand to still a threatened protest. "Please be quiet and listen to me. All my life ... after I made my money, that is, I have indulged my wife and my daughters. I indulge myself, somewhat, but I hardly think I'm as constitutionally radical as they. I have little that brings me acute pleasure. To speed you to your father and mother would provide a rare example of that sort of pleasure. I shall be forced to consider you a dog if you refuse me that opportunity."
Douglas relaxed and grinned. "All right, since I'll be doing you a favor. You, of course, won't be doing me one."
Carlson permitted himself the luxury of a wispy smile. "Let's keep it that way. Oh, there's another thing." Carlson now exhibited the first sign of nervousness Douglas had ever seen. He washed his dry hands vigorously for a moment. "I'd like to thank you for bringing my daughters together ... and for whatever magic by which a miracle was accomplished.'"
Douglas blushed scarlet and muttered something under his breath.
Carlson nodded affably. "I'm not a prude nor a vengeful father. I have, I think, a fair grasp on psychological essentials. They have had too much time on their hands and too many things they didn't have to work for. Their natures were the only thing left with which to experiment. In other hands they might have taken a beating. In yours....
He was chuckling when he pressed a check into Douglas' palm and turned back to the tent. Douglas could have sworn that he heard a short dry laugh.
Brooke, King, Douglas, and the boys made a slow snake out to the Avro, the Rivertrees having declined to see him off, making Douglas wonder how he had crept into strange people's lives to such an extent in such a short while.
"Douglisi, is it said that there are many black men and women in America," said Tosavo. "Are they as big as me?"
"Not many," said Douglas with a smile. "And I doubt that any are as strong."
"In that case I shall stay here. I was searching for real combat."
"It is said Lo Ben* might have been your equal," suggested Eki malevolently.
"He has been dead for years," scoffed Tosavo. "If he were alive I would put him on the earth so hard that his eyes would pop from their sockets."
The boys were all sorry to see Douglas leave but none sorrier than Pritchard and Tosavo. Even in sorrow Tosavo could not resist a last boast. "Douglisi will you forget your children?"
Douglas turned and looked at them and said in Swahili. "Never, so long as I live will I forget any of you and you are not my children but my brothers. Who knows, in the years that come I might wish to hunt in your country and I shall have every one of you with me."
"We shall be waiting, Douglisi," they chorused.
"In that event," said Tosavo, "I shall await your coming and not go with you as was my first intention.
After he had gotten into the plane King shook his hand hard. "I...."
"Don't say it. Corny. Write me after everything is in shape. Maybe I'll be back."
"I think you will. Africa does that to people."
The engine roared, the sleek plane sped down the strip and took off.
--------
*Lobenguela, the great king of the Matabele.
CHAPTER TEN
At the Meridian airport Douglas held his father and mother in his arms and tried to speak but nothing would come so after a moment Mary dried her eyes and said, "Let's get started back home. I That's where we can talk. This is no place for it."
"Aye," agreed Duncan huskily. " 'Tis a place for airsheeps to land."
Douglas drove the car homeward and after he regained control of himself he asked. "What has i happened?"
"Too much," said his mother. "Far too much for one telling, son In brief, Mr. Noble did not die. It turned out his skull wasn't even fractured."
"Did he talk ... I mean about Naomi and me?"
"I speak nae better o' a dead mon that when he was alive," growled Duncan, "but I must admeet that the mon didna say a word. What he did to I the lassie I dinna e'en hear."
"Where is she now?"
There was a short silence during which time he j tried to see his parents in the rear view mirror, but wasn's successful. "She's to the auld place ... now," said Duncan : elaborately casual but unable to keep the emphasis j from the one word. A knot grew in Douglas' throat! that he couldn't acount for and he dared not press his father's for an explanation. "Rode his horse under a pine tree and got him-i sel' strucken wi' lichtening," said Duncan parenthetically. "A fitting end which the Lord, na' myseP ; ordained."
Douglas supressed a grin at his father's construction of a sentence that could have gotten him taken to task by his mother who had never become i accustomed to Duncan's blunt speech. "Any idea who wrote me the letter?" asked Douglas.
"Ideas, all right," replied his father, "but no evidence. We canna proceed on guess work. In any case the mon is dead and wi' his da ... wherever that be."
"You ... you mean Greg is dead?"
"Aye. The Army tooken him and he lasted a fortnicht, or less. They brought him hame and puts him to rest in the Episcopal churchyard. " Twasnal a large gathering."
"Did Naomi attend?"
There was another silence then his mother spoke carefully. "She didn't want to but I prevailed on her. Actually, I didn't blame her in the least but! I thought it would be best."
"So," said Duncan who clearly had disapproved! of the whole thing, "she went. I tooken her."
"You took her?"
"Aye." His father clamped his mouth shut after! the syllable and Douglas, the lump in his throat! twinging did not press the matter.
The old place, like his parents seemed untouched by the years since he had last seen them. All the children were away at various schools and colleges! and aside from an air of desertion everything seemed in place.
As he helped his mother from the car his chest began to swell, starting from the lump in his throat that had grown uncomfortably large.
Home...! Be it the tritest saying that was ever uttered there was certainly no place like it. Hej gulped painfully and followed them slowly up thei walk where a plump old Negro woman stood at the top step frowning severely at them.
"That's right. Go stompin' all over de worl 'thout writin' nobody and tellin' nobody where you is and makin' us all so ... mizzerbul ... and griefed up ... and ... and-" The old woman snatched up her apron and wiped her eyes. "Boy come to yo' mammy."
The flood that had begged exit constantly since he had first seen his mother and father burst as the old woman held him to her ample bosom.
Duncan motioned to Mary and together they i went into the house. "Sometimes a lad chokes up when wi' people too near him. He needs a washing oot and Daisy was always guid for that."
It was midsummer and that night as they sat on the wide veranda Douglas was suffused with a peace that was almost a lethargy. In the dense woods to the west and east of the old house whippoorwills lashed the night with their sweet nostalgic cries. Toads by the thousand kept up a throbbing concert, punctuated by the thin cheep of leopard frogs and the thunderous bass of the bull frogs. It was something like an African night but without its potential deadliness. Here the life and death struggle was confined to the smaller creatures.
"Weel, sit as lang as ye're a mind to laddie," he said softly. "Getting back ha' its shocks. Grow into the place as ye like and take ye're time."
"Thank you, Sir. I'll be all right."
His mother came and kissed him, patting his face gently as she had done for many years then they left him alone.
He smiled as he thought of Tosavo, Pritchard, Eki and the others. These American Negroes were freedom loving and freedom acting but they did not know what they had lost in their transplantation. On an impulse he got up and walked off the verandah. Sniffing deeply at the night scents, the smell of flowers, cattle, horses, the huge watering pond with its lillies, laced strongly with the smell of roasting coffee coming from some Negro house, he pointed his nose toward Aunt Daisy's house and in ten minutes was unlatching the chain that secured the split pine picket gate.
"C'mon in boy," snapped Eli, Aunt Daisy's wizened husband, from his chair on the porch. "Night air ain't helt'y." Eli was overcome at seeing the man he "riz" after so long and he covered the emotion with a show of irascible authority.
Douglas shook hands with the old man. "I'm sure glad to see you again, Eli."
Eli sniffed disdainfully. "Ef you'd been so glad to see me, you coulda writ a letter. Daisy'd read to me.
"I was afraid to. I was afraid they'd trace me I didn't write anyone."
"Set down, boy, set down. Daisy, fetch this boy some coffee."
She came out in a few minutes bearing a cup of strong fragrant brew as hot as molten lead. "What you doin' trompin' round the dark?" she asked as she served Eli then herself coffee.
"Lookin', mebee," suggested Eli. "Mebbe he ain't seen a gal in a long time."
Aunt Daisy grunted and blew on her coffee. "Ain't nuthin' round here worth lookin' at."
"I wanted to ask you about something," said Douglas blowing the heat from his mouth. "Aunt Daisy, what do you know about Naomi Noble?"
Aunt Daisy loaded her pipe carefully, felt in her hair for a match and lit it. "Now, how come you askin' me that?"
"Because Dad and Mamma mention her but they seem to want to cut the conversation away from her as soon as they can and I guess I let them because ... Well, I don't know. Maybe, it's because she had a part in that trouble I got into."
Aunt Daisy sat back in her rocker and puffed comfortably. "Well, I don't reckon hit's no secrut and you gon' fine out 'ventually anyhow. That brother o' hern was such a scound'el that the boss went over there and brung her to live with us."
He sat up abruptly. "You mean she lived with Dad and Mamma?"
"She sure did. Full o' fire that gal is, and she covers all the groun' she Stan's on."
Douglas frowned heavily and bit his nether lip. "How long did she stay?"
"She stayed till...." Aunt Daisy came to a full halt, puffed for a moment, then spat into the yard. "Son, how come you don't go see her?"
"She lives over there all by herself?"
"She sure does. She got a place full o' good hands and they all like her. That's one more fine gal."
"And she stayed here...."
She put a gnarled hand on his leg. "Son, I could tell you ever'thing you want to know, but somehow I think mebbe the boss and missus is right. They ain't no tellin' like lookin'."
"But I don't understand what's...."
"Go see 'er and quit gabbin'," said Eli waspishly, grinding his gums together.
"That's right, son ... Go see her."
"Damn," Douglas clenched his hands and felt a wave of terror strike him, understanding belatedly something of what King must have felt in his fear of M'Dusi.
"Cussin' ain't gonna change nuthin," snapped Eli. "Go see 'er."
"Now?"
"Sho ... now! What's wrong with now?"
"Well, for one thing...." He stopped and ran his hands through his hair. "I need a bath and a change of clothes and I don't know where the horses are stabled...."
"You sound like the wind off a strainin' mule," snarled Eli. "Go on back to the house and bathe yo' skin. Git inter some more clo'es and I'll have the hoss saddled and ready for you."
With all this assistance, Douglas felt a little lost for excuses, so he nodded numbly. "I guess ... All right. You get the horse. I'll do the rest."
"Hit's right heartenin'," barked Eli as he settled his battered straw hat on his head, "to know you can do sumpn."
"Now you auit bully-raggin' mah boy," ordered Aunt Daisy. "He ain't home good an' you starts."
"Got out from under my hand," replied Eli with spirit, "That's how come he got inter trouble."
The nearer the big bay gelding brought Douglas to the Noble house, the more panic plucked at his sleeve and question plagued him. Of what was he afraid? A million things ... How silly can a man get? What million things? He had longed for her for five years with a fierceness that at times such as the brush with the Cockney mate almost unhinged his reason. Of what was he afraid now?
The horse stopped because he was faced with a woven wire fence ... the fence around the front yard of the Noble house. With the exception of the room on the west side of the house, it was dark. A figure passed to and fro in front of the light several times, so with clenched teeth and shaking hands Douglas forced himself to dismount and tie the horse to the hitching post.
He stood before the gate until he realized that it was getting late and if he didn't go in she might go to bed. With a tremendous shrug of his big shoulders he wrenched the gate open and slammed it with a clang and walked rapidly up the brick path.
He was reaching to knock when the porch light snapped on and the door shrank away from his knuckles. There framed in the old cedar doorway was Naomi. She had on a dressing gown of bronze slipper satin that fitted every lush curve with subtle intimacy.
This was a new Naomi but an improved one. Her face was calmer now, having lost much of its petulance and her eyes were a restful amathyst, the fires that had boiled in them banked now and reserved for occasions.
"Hello Douglas." There was no emotional upheaval for which he was thankful.
"Hello Naomi ... it's been a long time."
Her smile was warm and friendly. "Yes ... too long. Won't you come in?"
"Please, I'd like to if it isn't too late."
"It's not at all late. I'm ready for bed but I always read late."
They sat in the stiff old parlor with its uncomfortable chairs, musty smell and dusty portraits, and for some reason it seemed to drive him into mental stagnation. Words came hard and when he managed to speak his throat felt tight and unresponsive. "Was ... was it bad, kid?"
Her eyes seemed to mist over. "It was bad enough, Douglas, but it had its compensations. I shan't pretend I'm sorry they're dead. I hated them, intensely."
"And yet a lot of the hate has gone out of you."
"How do you know that?"
He cleared the phlegm from his throat and felt stifled. "I can tell. You're not the wild, wild woman you once were."
She gave him a crooked little smile. "No, I guess I'm not. Time changes people. I don't even hate any more, and I have done some of it in my time. I have decided it is a mean emotion. It doesn't produce anything but more of the same."
He moved his clenched fingers and became conscious that they were sticky. His eyes felt hot and achy in their sockets and his back stung from tension.
"Douglas ... what's the matter?"
"Er ... matter ... I don't...."
"There's something ... a wall between us. I felt that after ... No ... I won't say that," she clamped her lips together and tossed her head the way he remembered and her golden hair, glistening like, polished metal in the light slid rebelliously into disarray in the old fashion.
"What were you about to say."
"I won't say it. Actually, I have no right to say it."
He shook his head. "I'm confused. I can't seem to think straight ... I wish you'd tell me."
"All right I'll tell you. That day ... Maybe you remmeber it, I thought that here at last is one person that there'll be nothing . , . ever that'll come between us. It has, Douglas. I can't reach you any more."
The knuckles of his hands pooped alarmingly as they announced the agonv of his soul, a torture he couldn't identify, a wall she had said and a wall it was. Composed of what? He didn't know, but it was there.
"I'd give all I ever hope to possess," he said with a strange bitter urgency, "to re-live that day all over again. It has lived with me every minute for the past five years and now you speak of walls ... I guess...." He had to run, to leave to bury himself in the woods, flog the horse to top speed. God Corny, now I know, now I know ... Help me Corny. What's the matter with me. Hit me, knock me silly and I won't lift a hand...."
"Douglas."
"What?" He felt drugged ... stupid. "You look so ... hunted, surrounded. What on earth...."
"Is that my daddy?" It was a strong manly little voice and had Tosavo run one of his spears into his rear Douglas could not have moved faster. With a lunge he came to his feet and some instinct caused him to knock the chair out of his way with a powerful sweep of his leg. The little boy stood in the doorway with a brown tattered top puppy clutched in his hands. He frowned. "Hey, you might break our chairs."
He was a well knit youngster with strawberry blonde hair and a light sprinkling of freckles across his nose. His eyes were deep blue, unafraid but questioning. "I said ... is that my daddy?"
Douglas turned slowly and looked at Naomi who was smiling at the child and through his paralytic consternation he knew he had never seen a sweeter expression on a woman's face.
Her voice when she spoke, both in answer to the child's question and to the same question on the man's torture lined face, was as mellow as the distant note of a violin. "Yes, Douglas, this is your father."
Douglas reeled and fell into a chair, his face white, strained and drenched with sweat. "That one time...."
"That one time." Her face hardened a little at the disbelief in his voice and the sleeping fires began to flame in her eyes.
"Well, what do you think of your son, Douglas?" There was now a definite challenge in her voice. Gone was the mellow note of mother love and pride, back was the truculence.
A cackle of mad laughter broke from his lips which he stifled immediately. Nuts ... plain nuts. I'm gibbering ... why? God, Corny ... For God's sake, help me ... help me!
"Naturally, Naomi...." Holy cats, this can't be me talking, "I'll ... I'll do ... the honorable thing...."
With a lithe bound she came to her feet. "Never mind. I realize you're being just so damned noble that it's leaking out of your ears. Honorable thing ... I never heard that phrase so filthied up in my life." She stole a glance at the boy who was watching them with wide eyes and dropped her voice to a cold calm level. "Get out, Douglas, and don't bother to come back."
"Look Naomi, this is all wrong. I'm all off my nut, please let me...."
"I said get out, or shall I call the Negroes and have you put off the place?"
He turned like a dead man still walking and carefully avoided the child, stumbled out into the hallway and thence to the porch. As he went down the steps he heard the lad say in a clear voice. "Mommy, where's my daddy going?"
How he found the horse and by what route the animal led him so unerringly to the highway and a tavern he never knew but when next he consciously lived, the horse had stopped and was drinking out of an old beer cooler tbat had been placed beneath the eaves of the tavern. Out front there was a bright hemisphere where the neon revealed the garish cheapness of the place.
He dismounted slowly and ran his fingers through his hair unconsciously. He tied the horse carelessly to a leg of the abandoned cooler and walked stiffly around the corner and into the place.
At the right was a bar with not a single bottle of whiskey in evidence. In front of the bar were double lines of tables and further out was a dance floor with a juke box and a line of booths along the wall. They were partially filled with patrons as were the tables. At the bar six men drank beer and highballs. All this he saw and yet did not see. He walked to the bar and said, "Whiskey."
A pimply faced boy looked at him sourly. "How?"
"Straight."
"How much."
"Just put a bottle and glass up here and I'll take care of that item," snarled Douglas hitting the bar so hard that beer and drinks jumped and sloshed the whole length of the rickety contrivance. There was also a four foot split in the cheap veneer that hadn't been there before.
A thick shouldered man hitched up his pants and walked importantly around to him. Marshal was written all over him from his carefully pressed khakies to the heavy gun he wore openly.
"Lookin' for trouble, stranger?"
Douglas turned and glared at him. "No Willie. I'm looking for a drink that you get paid money to see doesn't ever show up around here. What's your rake off?"
Bill Albertson was noted for few things but looming large among them was his totally unreasonable hatred for the nickname "Willie," his ruthlessness as marshal of Cedarville, and the fact that he had been a good football player in his day and thrown out of every college he had ever attended. In fact, it had been this same man who had, as a boy, tripped Douglas in the first fight with Greg Noble.
"Douglas Glencairn." The marshal grinned and whipped his revolver from its holster and slammed Douglas across the forehead cutting him cruelly with the sight.
"I'm not acquainted with any fatted calves, Doug," said Albertson; still grinning, "so don't feel bad if I don't barbecue any for you. You had that coming for a long time."
"That wouldn't sound good in court, Bill," said a man standing nearby.
"It won't be said in court," said the marshal, wiping the barrel of the weapon on a bar rag, watching Douglas out of the corner of his eye. Douglas clung to the bar and fought the blood from his eyes and the dizziness from his head. Partially successful, he facsed Albertson again. "That's one for you, Willie."
"Want another?" flamed the marshal, turning purple. "You know damned well not to ever call me that."
Douglas managed a grim smile. He felt better now and his Scots blood was rising in boiling leaps. "You got another, Willie?"
Albertson became affable again. "Sure ... where'd you like it...."
The crash sounded so unlike fist meeting flesh that the onlookers gawked stupidly. Albertson caught midway through the act of drawing his gun, did not have a chance to avoid the awful left that swung short-armed like a piston and smashed him full in the mouth. On the floor he twitched spasmodically and rubbed his face gently in the spreading pool of blood. His teeth being bucked, had cut cleanly through both lips and now shattered like stumps of glass, they glittered in the rosy light mingled with pulped flesh.
Jock Ogilvie, Alicia's father, a silent taciturn on-looked until now caught Douglas by the arm.
"Coom on, laddie," he said gently. "He's oot lik' a licht and when he cooms too there'll be trooble. I'll tak' ye hame."
"I've got a horse," said Douglas dully allowing himself to be led from the tavern.
Old Jock looked at the horse and grunted. "Put the reins ower the hoorn o' the soddle and he'll make it back. We'd better let Doc Sheimer look at that hond and head."
Douglas looked at the hand. It was cut badly but he ddin't think any bones were broken. "It's all right."
"Tisna any sooch. Do ye no' ken a mon's teeth are worse'n a rattler's?"
They woke up the old doctor who grumbled sourly, cleaned the wound thoroughly, dressed it and gave him a shot of penicillin and one of tetnus antitoxin.
Duncan Glencairn flew into such a towering rage when he learned of Douglas' trouble that his red hair stood on end and his fury vented itself vocally in a thunder of Gaelic oaths that rang from the ceiling like pistol shots. Calming somewhat when Dcuglas showed him the injured hand and described the results of the blow, he stormed out of the dining room and sat fuming on the front verandah until joined by Douglas and Mary.
"What happened son?" asked his mother quietly. "All of it."
"I went to Aunt Daisy's after you all went to bed. She told me more about Naomi and curiosity was eating me up. I had to go over there. I botched everything ... I don't know what was the matter with me. I couldn't see anything in its proper perspective. I was tongue tied and couldn't think straight. She's so cool and calm now ... sort of self sufficient ... I don't know...." He passed a trembling hand over his face.
"Should ha' told him lik' I said a' the time," snarled Duncan. " 'Twas too much o' a shock after a' these years. How is the bairn, laddie?"
Douglas sighed wretchedly. "Cutest little fellow I ever saw. Dad, I can't stand this ... something will break ... I know it will."
His mother considered him through calm but troubled eyes. "Son, what is the matter? You were never like this."
"He'l lik' his Da'," growled Duncan. " 'Twas you and not me wha' tooken the last step. I could break a mon's back but I couldna pop the question."
Mary smiled and a light sprang up in her eyes but she did not speak her mind. She sat back and the smile widened. "That is certainly the truth. If I ever saw a floundering horse in a bog you were certainly one. I had to take over or we'd never have made it."
"Why," asked Douglas, "did she go back home? Why didn't she stay on here?"
"Because the child is independent and proud. She was afraid her presence might reflect on Mary or maybe the boys wouldna understand what with a talk that went on."
"And she went back with the child ... all alone and stayed by herself in that old house...?"
"Her Negroes are devoted to her and she has all the help she needs," said Mary.
"But Mom ... Good God, no company...."
"No company? Why the Ogilvies are daft aboot the laddie," snorted Duncan. "Almost every Sunday we go ower and spend the afternoon."
"And your father," put in Mary, "is over there three or four times a week taking the child riding and the like. She is being watched, son. She's had eyes on her ever since you left."
"I'm glad," he almost whispered. "I didn't know ... but she has no life ... she never did. After that trouble at school she was a sort of outcast. That's why she thought so much of me. I didn't look down on her or think she was dirty or sinful or anything like that."
"She's had enough stones cast at her," said his mother. "What exactly did you say, Douglas, that made her ask you to leave?"
He slapped himself smartly against the side of the head in acute remorse, "i uttered a ridiculous platitude about doing the honorable thing and before that I guess I must have seemed skeptical that the boy was mine. I didn't mean it, mind you. I just made an exclamation over the fact ... I can see how it sounded to her and I can't blame her a bit."
"Ye reacted accordin' to the morals o' the times," put in Duncan, "and I sairtainly would a thocht better o' ye than that. The lassie is as guid as gold, she loves the bairn and she has made a guid mother for him. Wha's i' the past is gone. What she micht a been isna a feeg to wha' she is the noo. Ye crawled me proper when I made a slichting remark aboot her and I agreed wi' ye that I had spoken oot o' turn. Wha' happened to ye're sense of square play, to ye're flair for lookin' behind the tree to see wha's there before ye speak?"
"The boy did the best he could, Duncan," said Mary smartly. "Now don't you worry, son. Wait until you're better set here at home. Get out and see to the cows and sheep. Ride over the place and see what's to be done." Her eyes softened. "It seems you're the only one to be laird here, Douglas. Duncan will go in the Air Force. He loves flying. Jock will be an engineer, no doubt, so there's no one but you."
Douglas felt a sense of blessed relief. "I'll stay, Mom. TAe way I feel I never want to leave again."
An hour later Mary left in the family car on what she called a shopping tour but she did not shop. Instead she went directly to the Noble home, tooted her horn and got out. Douglas came rushing to meet her, falling and skinning his knee on the brick walk but he forced back tears and limped on to meet her. "It didn't hurt Gramma," he said stoutly, blinking at the tears that persisted in coming.
"Of course it didn't," she soothed as she bent and kissed him several times.
"Did you bring me anything," he asked scrubbing beneath his nose with a wrist.
"I certainly did, or rather Daisy sent them. Molasses cookies. A whole sack full of them."
"Can I have some ... I mean after dinner."
They walked toward the house being intercepted by Naomi in shorts and halter, her hands encased in heavy gloves. "Hello, Mother," she said, genuinely glad to see the older woman. They kissed and went on in the house leaving Douglas to munch a cookie that had been a concession designed to keep him on the front porch.
When they were seated in the dining room being served cups of hot coffee Mary asked. "Was it very bad, my dear?"
Naomi stiffened and looked incredulously at her. "I've said for a long time that you and Pop were the most wonderful pepole I ever knew. Now it's like having to say it all over again. He's your son and yet you're willing to hear my side of it."
Mary smiled knowingly. "I hope I don't remind you of the woman who said that if her children had any faults she'd be the first to see them." She sighed and her eyes caressed the younger woman affectionately. "Naomi, you're pretty headstrong. It started as a defensive measure and you have ceased needing it as such but it has become a habit. No one knows better than I what a state Douglas is in. I won't excuse it but I'd like to try to explain it. May I?"
A quick freshet of tears leaped into the girl's eyes. "You know, you may. You're making me wonder if I didn't act badly myself."
"I think you both did the best you could. I'm not going to paint the misery and loneliness of my boy in sympathetic colors because you most certainly had your share of it and you lacked his means of running away from your troubles. I would like to say that both of you were starved to death for each other. Five years is a long time to yearn, my aear, and you and Douglas are not what we mean when we speak of normal or usual. Neither of you are normal nor are you usual. Consequently, being supercharged with that amount of ache and pain you both are so capable of producing within yourselves, is it strange that he was a little off balance and is it strange that you were also, both of you hypersensitive and emotional the way you are? I tbink that time placed restraint on you both and neither of you ever looked at restraint with anything but a sort of animal growl. You, I think, growled louder and not without reason. My grandson has changed you, Naomi. He hasn't had a chance to change his father. He's the restraint and cruelly put but not cruelly intended he was in the way last night. You felt his presence and it kept you balanced. He felt it through you and was confused. If you both could have rushed into each other's arms, kised like the starvelings you were and are, sank to the floor probably and wept over each other, carsesed and later probably...." Mary's eyes went up and held those of the girl. "We know these things darling, so there's no need to be reluctant about it now. That was exactly what you and he needed last night. It should have started eagerly and naturally and it should have ended when an ending was indicated. Then there'd have been none of this. No harsh words to recall, no blundermg to curse. You both have had all the heartache due you. Let's not have anv more."
Naomi was weeping unashamedly. "Why ... Oh why couldn't you have been my mother...." She bent her head over on the table and the storm fore itself gradually out. Mary went around and Dut her arms around the shuddering pirl. "My child ... T am vour mother. I'm just a little late arriving. Now dry your eyes and let's talk about something pleasant."
Douglas came in and stared at his mother almost resentfully. "You cried last night and now you're crying again. You always tell me to hush and go to sleep."
Naomi laughed at him through her tears. "I'm crying now because I'm happy."
He shook his head and stalked on through the dining room to the kitchen muttering, "I sure hope I don't grow up too fast."
"Now," said Mary in a low voice, "what are we going to do?"
Naomi sighed tremulously. "I'll listen, Mother.
I don't have anything to offer."
Mary frowned and thought for a moment. "Well, you did give him a rather healthy brush off and I not only know his pride but I know your's. This thing will have to sort of happen. Have you any dependable boy friends?"
"You should know better than that. There's one and I wouldn't spit on him."
"Well, restrain yourself. We might need him for jealousy bait."
"Oh, Lord ... isn't there some other way?"
"Off hand I can't think of any. We'll have to sting him into action and if I know my men there's nothing like another man to make them forget their precious pride."
Naomi shuddered. "Well, maybe I could pull it but ... She grimaced and shrugged. "Right now I think we should just let the fires die out and everybody get sane and set."
"I agree to that but while it's happening suppose you encourage this man just a little and be seen with him, maybe ... just so the word can get around."
Douglas was dog tired. That morning with the help of Tiny Bloodworth, a big Negro helper, he had branded twenty-three claves and deprived seven of their masculinity. After dinner they had driven the whole herd to the creek pasture and had tried to bring back a small herd of Brahmas for tasking and examination, screw worms being bad at the time. The Brahmas, however, had other ideas and as the sun was dipping lower toward the horizon and the horses tired Douglas gave up the chase.
"Let the devils go, Tiny," he said reining in his lathered horse.
"We can get 'em tomorrow." said Tiny agreeably. "Them things sure is wild."
"They aren't handled enough. They ought to be salted oftener and driven if for no other reason to get them used to people. How long have they been in this pasture?"
"Nearly about a year. Mr. Duncan put 'em here and said to leave 'em. He got tired of their wild ways."
"Well, I'm tired too so we'll just run the truck over here one day and load them up and sell 'em. I'll take a milder sort of cow for mine."
"Me, too. I likes them whitefaces."
They let their horses walk along slowly because both were big men and the horses had been ridden hard.
"I hear tell," began Tiny cautiously, "that you put one of Mr. Albertson, that there marshal in town."
"Yeah."
"They say he's up and around now with some new teeth."
"Unh hunh."
"Better watch out for him, he's mean. I recollect one time he got hold of me in town and mighty near beat my head off with that pistol he carries."
"What for?" asked Douglas harshly. Tiny was a happy inoffensive Negro with a deep profound pride and Douglas knew the beating must have been hard for him to take since he could have torn Bill Albertson limb from limb.
"I rode into town one Saturday on Mr. Duncan's blue stud and Mr. Albertson was in front of the hardware store struttin' around like a rooster. He asked me if I had stole the horse and I told him Mr. Duncan told me I could ride the horse. Then I spoke again when I shudda kept my big mouth shut. I said I hadn't took to horse thievin' so far. That made him mad and he asked me who I thought I was gettin' smart with and I didn't say nothin' else and that made him madder, so he drawed that big gun and knocked me off the sidewalk."
"What did Dad say?" asked Douglas, white around the mouth.
"He didn't say nothin' 'cause I didn't tell him."
"For gosh sake, why not?"
"It would caused a lotta trouble. You knows Mr. Duncan when he gets his dander up. Mr. Duncan ain't in the mood for trouble now neither. He ain't been since you left. He been drinkin' more'n usual."
"You mean he still is?"
"Well, maybe not now since you come home but right up till they heard from you, he was."
Douglas gripped the tree of the saddle hard and breathed deeply. "I don't want any trouble with Willie because of Dad but if that bastard crosses me again I'm going to beat his brains out."
Tiny laughed deep in his chest. "I sure would like to be there and see it. I ain't never wanted to get my hands on a white man like I do him."
"Not you, Tiny. It'd get you into trouble."
"Yes sir. I knows that but sometime I wants to get hold of him so bad I think it would be worth the trouble."
"Leave him to me. I'll take care of him." That night old Dr. Sheimer droped by and panted up the walk to the verandah where they all sat. He was fat, bald, chronically weary, and somewhat short of wind. "Evenin' Duncan, Douglas. Evenin' Mary. "Coom in Doctor." boomed Duncan. He got up and shook hands with the old man.
"How's the hand and head," asked the doctor as he shook hands with Douglas. "Doing fine now, thanks to you."
"Mary ... when are you going to get sick? Damndest healthiest woman I ever seen."
"Your fault," she said with a smile. "You always treated me so perfectly."
"Nuts." grumbled the doctor as he sat in a rocker. "Doctors don't do anything but manipulate the body. If it's a good body the manipulation succeeds. If it isn't the patient dies ... Say...." He thrust a finger at Douglas. "You didn't tell me you busted your fist on Bill Albertson."
Douglas grinned. "You didn't ask me."
"Ummm, 'at's right I didn't. Well, he's cussin'n a blue streak past his new teeth and swearing he'll get you. Thought I might tell you so you could be on your guard. He's not above framing you and shooting you in the back which he'll call prisoner trying to escape. He's done it before."
"Why," asked Duncan harshly, "do they poot a mon lik' him in a peace officer's job?"
Sheimer shrugged eloquently. "Machine politics, Duncan ... and a lot of people that will always be impressed by machine lies and bragging.
Sheimer looked at Douglas. "Thing is, I don't want to see my boy here get mucked up with the bastard ... Excuse me Mary."
"He willna seek a meeting nor will he run fra' one."
"In that case," sighed the doctor, "I see my work is cut out for me. Well, I'll be going along. Just wanted to drop in and let you know that the devil was abroad."
"Wait," said Mary getting up. "I want to send Molly some butter and a couple of chickens."
Sheimer sat down again his face split with a smile. "I'll wait ... if it means I get some of your butter."
He massaged his face and cut his eyes at Douglas. "Seems I heard something about Bill sparkin' that daughter of Cyrus Noble's. Thought the gal'd have more sense."
A scalding wave of fury roared over Douglas and left him parboiled. "Is that talk or do you know it?" He had half risen from his chair, his big body tense and hard.
"Sit down, boy. It may be talk. He's been tryin' to go with her but she wouldn't never see him. I heard talk at the barber shop that he had been seen with her ... just a few days after he got his teeth. Could be a tale."
Douglas sank back into the chair and massaged the back of his neck. In his stomach there were rank upon rank of lumps, all seeming to pull in opposite directions and in his heart was a bitter fierce ache. If Naomi went out with Bill Albertson ... I wonder what Tosavo and Eki are arguing about right now ... He stopped, appalled at his thoughts. He was ready to flee again, to race madly in any direction just to escape a situation that had grown intolerable. He got up and walked out into the yard forcing his muscles to relax only to have them tense up again when he thought about something else. He had to move, to walk ... anything to provide action, so he headed toward Aunt Daisy's house again.
"So." she finished, "look to me like you gettin' yo'self all stirred up fer nuthin. What if she is went with him? He's a man, ain't he? And she's a woman, ain't she? And you let yo'self get run off"
"You can't argy with no woman," snorted Eli, spitting into the yard.
"I just can't spe what she could see in him, though." persisted Doudas.
"What if she was doin' it just to get your dander up." asked Aunt Daisy, slyly.
"Er ... what? You mean to make me jealous? What would she do that for when she ran me off?"
Eli closed one eye owlishly. " 'Pears to me like you was powerful easy to run off."
Douglas sighed and leaned back in the chair. "Hell I don't know nothing," he complained bitterly.
"Well, better late than never," quoth Eli looking out into the night. "What?"'
"I didn't never 'spect to hear you admit you didn't know nuthin'."
"You shut yo' mouth and let that boy alone," scolded Aunt Daisy.
"Want me to saddle your hoss," asked Eli with a grin.
Douglas shook his head and got up. "I guess I'll go to bed." He walked off the porch leaving Aunt Daisy shaking her head dolefully and Eli, his gums pressed tightly together, apparently lost in deep thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bill Albertson had bragged too much, as had others before him but he had the advantage of having a district judge for a friend. This friend summoned him peremptorily to his chambers one day and handed out some friendly advice in a manner that might or might not have seemed friendly.
"What," asked the bald, sad faced old man, "is all this noise I hear about what you're going to do to Douglas Glencairn on sight?"
Albertson shrugged haughtily. "Think I'm gonna let a son of a bitch like that get away with busting me in the mouth? What'd happen to my prestige around here?"
"Prestige?" The judge mouthed the word. "What prestige?"
Albertson stirred uncomfortably and shifted his bulk in the chair. "Well ... I got a reputation to uphold." His eyes swept the judge's face but didn't stoo. "Ain't I"
"The only reason I asked you here," stated the judge with insulting flatness, "is to inform you that you are a member of an organization of which I'm ... ah ... in which I'm interested. You rode into a manufactured office because it was my ... our pleasure that you do so. We have no intention of allowing you, a minor cog in the works, quite minor, in fact, to wreck the machinery by displaying a depth of asaninity which you have achieved in a time which would seem far too short unless you gave it your full attention. Allow me to say that you have already received your degree in folly. It is to our interest that you do not display it too freely."
Albertson flushed red. "What the hell are you gabbing about?"
"Excuse me," said the judge sarcastically. "I spoke as I would to a man of ordinary intelligence. I forgot for a moment that you are a moron."
Albertson's face went from red to purple. "All right. I'm a moron. Now what are you tryin' to say?"
"I'm trying to say," replied the judge acidly, "that if Douglas Glencairn met you walking down Maine street, pulled a gun and blasted a hole in you the size of a muskmellon I doubt if the grand jury would find a true bill. If they did this court could never get a conviction."
Albertson paled so rapidly that his face was left looking like dirty milk. "You mean he could kill me and get away with it?"
"I'm surprised that a man who is a law officer could be so intellectually stagnant.
"Well, I ain't no lawyer."
"You," remarked the judge pungently, "ain't no law officer, eitheij It is entirely possible that you have talked too much already. I know these Scotsmen around here. They're hard working, hard drinking, honest, law abiding citizens. Some of them are quite successful. Old Duncan Glencairn could buy you and sell you a dozen times and take a loss every time ... naturally. If he got it into his hard Caledonian head that you had lived long enough he'd probably beat your brains out with a wagon tongue. I have no reason to suspect his son of being a ninnv. Neither, I think, do you and since you've already talked yourself into a soot which I do not envy you, I'd suggest that you lay low for a while and keep your great ugly mouth shut."
"I can take him and I'm going to take his girl, too," said Albertson sullenly.
The judge cackled rustily. "What kind of flowers do you like?"
"What?"
"Get out," suggested the judge, softly. "One word, however, before you go. As of this minute you are on your own ... and I do mean your own. Now get out of here and let me think how I can keep these Scotsmen from getting their wrath directed in our direction. I prefer them as friends."
"I ain't going to take this layin' down," snorted Albertson belligerently as he stood up.
The judge's pale eyes looked at him dispassionately. "Barring unforseen accidents I think that is exactly the way you will take it. It is not considered proper to stand a corpse on its head. Good day ... Willie."
Albertson's hand flashed to his gun and then fell away ... slowly.
The judge nodded slowly. "Exactly. I'm afraid I don't stand impressed with your bargain basement melodramatics, neither will Glencairn ... I fear ... I mean, I hope."
It might be said with some truth that Bill Albertson, after his session with the Judge Gates went somewhat mad. Instead of taking the judge's advice he did quite the opposite and in addition began to drink heavily. When mildly intoxicated he was the merry swain and harried Naomi so incessantly that she lost her temper one night and told him off in round numbers and sent him packing.
Later that night and much drunker but still in possession of his balance and faculties Bill was telling people at Tot's Tavern just what he thought of Scotchmen in general and the Glencairn Clan in particular. He related in great detail what he would do to Douglas on sight and loudly announced his intention to marry his girl. This announcement had the effect of sobering him somewhat because it reminded him of his recent scorching by Naomi ... and unaccountably he fell silent and bent morosely to his drinking.
At this point Angus MacAdams, son of a neighbor of the Glencairn's came in and was speedily if not acurately informed of what had been going on. He was younger than Douglas but they were distantly related and he had always looked up to his cousin. He was on leave from the Marines who were making good use of his two hundred and twenty pounds of beef and bone running boots through Camp Pendleton at Oceanside, California.
He knitted his thick brows fiercely and pulled on his prominent nose. "Damned glaggy ... going to put the blast on Doug, hunh?"
With a smooth motion he was on his feet and shaking the frame building at every step he walked to the bar. He dropped a fist the size of a cream churn shatteringly on the flimsy plywood and glared down at the marshal. "Hear you've been spouting off at the mush about what all you gonna do to Douglas Glencairn."
"What's it to you?" snarled Albertson giving himself gun room.
"Nothing," said the big man agreeably. "Since he's not here I thought you might like to work out on a relative."
"That's not a bad idea," snapped Albertson drawing his gun. It proved to be of little use to him, however, because it was hardly clear of the holster before Angus had ripped it from his grip with such irresistable force that half his hand seemed to go with it and blood dripped from a brutalized fingernail.
"Still want to work out on a relative now that your hardware is missing?" inquired Angus gently.
Albertson stood stiffly and said nothing so Angus broke the gun, extracted the cartridge and handed him the weapon. "When you draw that thing again," he said in a hard voice, "you better bring it out smoking."
"I'll remember," said Albertson tightly, his face still chalky.
"Oh, by the way," said Angus casually, grinning at the interested crowd. "What's this about you taking Doug's girl?"
"That's what I said."
"Why isn't she here with you now?"
"I ... haven't had time to go get her."
"Bet you five bucks you can't get her here by this time next week."
"I'll take that bet."
Later in the phone booth Albertson was talking to Naomi, striving to keep the tremors from his voice. "I think you better change your mind and come down here to the Tavern."
"Why?"
He lowered his voice. "Can't tell you over the phone but it's got to do with Doug."
He savored the pause at the other end, then she said. "I can't come. My car won't start."
"I'll come get you in fifteen minutes."
She was dressed in a pal elavender pique, starpless dress which fitted in a manner that caused a collective gasp to go up as she walked into the Tavern with him. Angus caught his breath harshly then walked over to the booth they had taken. "Here's your five, bub. I'll be wondering how you did it."
As he walked away Naomi clenched him with her violet eyes, smouldreing with rage. "So you're stooping to cheap tricks. I always thought you were a dog, Bill Albertson, now I know it."
"Aw ... you wouldn't get mad at a little joke would you?"
"Joke ... I thought you were being awfully mysterious for some reason. Now you can take me home."
"Not yet honey-bunch. Let's have a few drinks." Since the situation, she felt was securely grasped in her hands and since it did have its amusing side she relaxed a little and allowed him to buy her a Tom Collins.
For himself he had nearly a gill straight which he downed immediately and chased with ice water. After that he became amorous and possessive, brushing off her repeated requests to be taken home.
Angus MacAdam seeing the developments got up and went to the phone booth. "Better come over here Doug," he advised. "I can see a nasty situation brewing and you better come heeled. I could throw the son of a bitch out of the place but that wouldn't settle anything. He's got Naomi here ... got her by a trick I'd guess and now he's getting tighter and she's getting scared."
Douglas cursed. "Keep an eye on them will you, Angus? I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Douglas hung up the receiver and stood still for a moment then he went into his father's room and came back with a huge Frontier model Colt and buckled it around his waist.
When Douglas Glencairn stepped through the door of the Tavern a growing hush fell upon the place which seemed to echo from the flimsy walls until at last there was no one speaking, and Albertson's voice rang harshly on the quiet. "I'm takin' him," he roared, not having noticed the silence and having talked against the noise of the crowd his voice was still pitched defensively loud, "then I'm takin' you. What you need is a real man, not a suck-titty bastard like Glencairn who ain't good for nuthin' but to father bastards and then...." It finally reached his whiskey fogged brain and he faced about his chin dropping like a dead man's, his face losing its ruddy hue with a rush.
"Stand up Willie." The silence was deepened and all that could be heard was Albertson's rattling breath.
I said stand up Willie."
Albertson's hands began to tremble so violently that they beat a tatoo on the table and he pressed them to the plastic surface. "My gun ain't ... loaded," he managed to get out. "Lemme load it...."
"That's all right, Willie," boomed Angus Mac-Adam and walking over, slipped the gun from the holster and loaded the five cartridges into the chamber and snapped it home. Then he stuck it back in the holster. "Wouldn't want you to overexert yourself," said Angus with a grin as he walked away.
Albertson's face was white now, ghastly in the artificial light.
Naomi stood also and said, "Please Douglas ... for my sake, don't shoot him."
"Get out of the way," he told her tonelessly, "and try not to get yourself in an uproar because your boyfriend either goes out of here on a slab or on his hands and knees. It's all the same to me."
She sank into the adjoining booth, her eyes deep with concern and hurt.
"All right, Willie," the voice rang again, sharper and more whiplash than before. "Go get it."
Albertson found his voice at last although it didn't sound too rich. "I'm ... the law here ... Doug ... I can't go in for ... gunplay." Sweat glistened on the chalky planes of his face and his lips seemed almost too stiff to use.
Douglas jerked his thumb toward the freshly healed scars on his forehead. "Didn't think about that not too long ago did you? I'll give you five seconds to get that gun out or crawl out of here on your hands and knees."
As he spoke a drably dressed old man with a bald head and sad face walked quietly in and hooked his elbows over the bar, watching with detached interest. It was Judge Gates. "I will probably go down in history as a prophet," he said quietly, his eyes on the stricken sweat streaked face of Albertson.
With a groan that tore its way from his very soul Albertson dropped forward on his hands and knees. With a bound Angus MacAdam leaped toward him and snatched the gun from the holster. "If you're too yellow to use it the weight might prove too much for you," he said brightly bringing the weapon down with all his strength on the back of a booth. The gun flew apart and cartridges scattered all over the dance floor.
Slowly, his face twisted into a mask of humiliation cut deeply with fear William Albertson, former tough, started his crawl.
"Don't make him do it Douglas, begged Naomi from the booth where her face glowed whitely in the dim light.
His face twisted as he looked at her. "I'm touched," he stated with metallic flatness and Naomi flenched as though he had struck her.
On across the dance floor the whipped man crawled until he was opposite Judge Gates. "I warned you not to tangle with these Scotsmen," said Gates softly.
At the top of the steps Albertson paused and with a full legged kick Douglas sent him sprawling in the gravel outside the Tavern. He drew his gun then and stepped out. "In your car fast, Willie and the further you go the better I'll like it. On your way."
After Albertson had been seen on his way Douglas beckoned to Angus who came over to him. "I want to thank you. He might have made it tough for her if I hadn't gotten here."
Angus shook his sandy head. "No, I'd have seen to that but just the same I'm glad you came. You weren't too easy on her yourself."
"Would you have been?'"
Angus shrugged. "No ... under the circumstances I don't suppose I would."
"Does she have a way home?"
"Yep."
"Who?"
"Me. I'll see her home."
"Thanks ... Come over some day before you go back. We'll have to have a session "
"Sure will. You go on home. I'll take care of everything at this end."
"Thanks a lot Angus. You're a good guy."
"Nuts. You'd have done the same thing for me."
"That's right, I certainly would have."
Douglas and Duncan rode in silence for a while then Duncan said, "I think ye was summat harsh wi' the lassie."
"Sorry."
The rest of the way home was passed in silence, neither of them speaking as they went to their respective rooms.
Mary was sitting on his bed when Douglas opened the door. "Mom ... why aren't you in bed?"
"I just wanted to see if you would make it back alive. I have some slight concern you know."
"I'm sorry about that. I didn't want it any more than you did but there are some things that have to be done."
"Did you kill him?"
"No, I made him walk on his hands and knees out of the place."
"He'll be a worse enemy now, Douglas."
"Maybe."' Then he told her everything including his harsh words to Naomi.
"I'm sorry about that," she said quietly. "The idea was mine, you know."
He jerked erect. "What idea?"
"Albertson. I suggested that she go out with someone to bring you to your senses, didn't know he was the one she meant when she said she had a boy friend that she wouldn't spit on but that he might just come in handy."
Douglas quivered from the shock of her words. "Well, I guess I've done it now." He held his head up and looked blindly at the wall. "I don't think I can stand it."
"What do you mean son?"
"I'm afraid I must hit the trail again. Everything's haywire here."
Mary stood up wtih the spring to be expected from a much younger woman. "You'll do no such thing."
He recoiled never having heard his mother use such a tone. "But...."
"But nothing. You're my son but I feel it necessary to remind you that you have a son too.
Douglas slumped, dulled, emotion wasted, groggy, his heart one vast ache and his brain an empty space from which came nothing. "You're right. I won't run ... I'll stay." His head went up and the bleak loneliness in his eyes made his mother gasp. "I'll stav as long as I can." She went to him and held his head to her busom for a moment Duncan eyed his son for a moment then he too walked over to him and gripped one shoulder with a hard powerful hand. "Guid nicht, laddie."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Naomi accepted Angus' offer to escort her home because she had no choice. She didn't know him well, but he was the son of a good family and she knew he was related to Douglas. If she expected him to chat companionably on the way she was disappointed because he held to granite jawed silence that all but unnerved her.
As they pulled into the drive leading to her house she turned and said. "I'm going to thank you, Angus, because you were kind enough to bring me home but I don't suppose there's any doubt as to what you think of me."
His blue eves were as hard as ice. "You seem to have it all figured out. If it suits you that way I won't argue with you."
"I suppose you know you haven't said anything."
"Am I supposed to?"
"Angus, have I done anything to you?"
"Yes."
"In what way?"
"You're making it pretty tough on a guy I happen to think a lot of.
"You were there. He won five bucks on it ... you saw me pay him off."
She seemed to shrink under the lash of his words as they stopped at the front gate. He got out, went around the car and opened the door for her. For a moment she did not move then she gave him a hand that was ice cold and he helped her from the car.
"I can see, I think, how it must have seemed to you."
Angus grunted. "The way it seemed to me is relatively unimportant. Unless you're dumber than you look you must know what it looked like to him."
No!
Sav Naomi, hows to make us a pot of coffee?"
"I'd love to ... Mary Ann is still here with Douglas. I'll get her to make it for us."
Twenty minutes later they were seated in the dining room with its vague odors suggestive of past meals.
"Sillv things fall almost accidently in the wav of understanding," she remarked stirring her coffee absently. "I don't suppose Douglas intended to make me angrv and hurt but...." She shrugged. "When you've been hurt as much as I have you get to expect it from the oddest sources. Anyway what's done is done. I don't know what I could do and I'm a woman. I can't see myself getting on a horse and riding pell mell across the woods to beg him to take me back."
The big man's' eyes were no longer hard. "Both of you sound like a couple of stumbling school kids rather than mature intelligent people. I'm supposed to be dumb because I like the Marine Corps, but I'm not that dumb. Want me to tell you a very hard truth?"
"By all means."
"If I hadn't promised Colonel Badger that I'd come back after my leave was over and run the Corps for him I'd stay here and run Doug a race he'd never forget."
She laughed and it was a good sound. She relaxed and made a moue at him. "I haven't felt like laughing in a long time, Angus. I'll always remember you for that."
"Be careful. I might wire the Colonel to merge with the Army because I'm staying."
"I'm serious. I think I could like you an awful lot. I want to and I'll always remember how kind you are. Some lucky woman is waiting and probably doesn't know it."
He lit a cigarette. "Now I'll tell you something. Doug can no more stay away from you than I could in his shoes.
"There are two things you should know," she said, accepting a cigarette from him. "I want you to know them because you've been sweet and now more than ever I'm anxious that you think well of me."
"Don't strain yourself," he said grinning. "If I thought any more of you than I do I know I'd wire the Colonel."
"I'm serious. Bill got me then tonight because he hinted that something had happened to Douglas. He had been here earlier and I told him once and for all not to come back. Another thing, I asked Douglas not to kill him because it wasn't worth all the trouble it could have caused. I asked him not to make Bill crawl out because now Doug really has an enemy."
Angus nodded and stood up. "You come clean all the way. I'm sorry I was such a dope and something tells me Doug is too. Goodnight kid and keep your chest out...." He halted a little confused but she laughed aloud. "That, my boy, is something I can do without half trying."
He swept her with an appreciative glance. "Are you tellin' me?"
When Douglas got home from the Bramah pasture he found Angus waiting for him on the porch talking to Duncan. "What cat ate you then decided you might be poison."
Douglas grinned weakly and dropped into a rocker. "Boy, don't helckle me. I feel like a god strong soap bubble explosion would blow my brains out."
"What brains?" asked Angus offensively.
"Okay ... what about a drink?"
"Don't run the glass over and spill any. I'm a large man and you remember it."
Douglas came back with twin drinks, both designed for big men. "Excuse me Dad, I forgot to ask if you wanted one."
"Tis my whuskey, too," replied his father. "I'll hae one joost afore supper and anither one afore bed."
'Doug" said Angus hesitantly, "I'd like to talk about Naomi."
"I figured you came here to talk about that and I'm willing. I've got to talk to someone and since you've dealt yourself a hand in this it might as well be you."
"Oke ... talk away."
"That's a lot of help. I don't even know what I want to say."
"Well, let me give you a start. You did a fast burn the other night when you saw her with Willie, right?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"Aye, plenty. Thing is, he got her there on a ruse. She told me about it and he did bet me five bucks he could get her out. She had already told him off earleir in the evening. He told her some story involving you and she fell for it. Then he wouldn't take her home. That's when I called you.
Douglas sat a little straighter. "Well, I'm glad to hear it."
"Thought you would be. You'll be glad to hear too, that she didn't want you to kill him on your account not Willie's. She didn't want you to make him crawl because she knew you'd be making a real enemy for yourself."
A small light seemed to warm Douglas in the middle of his ache. "Yes," he said, "I'm glad to know that."
"She still loves you, sucker, but if you sit around here moping like this there's no telling what will happen. One damn sure thing. She isn't comin' to you."
"No ... I guess she wouldn't. She's proud."
"Well, no one could call what you have pride," retorted Angus sarcastically.
Douglas nodded. "I guess that was one thing that held King back."
"Who's he?"
"A guy I knew in Africa. He has a situation that had some similar circumstances ... in a manner of speaking. I ran the show for him and he made it."
"And now, to be original, you can't see the woods for the trees."
"I guess so ... I don't know, Angus. I don't seem to know anything."
"I gotta be moving. I got a date with a chick and I've named my car Mayflower for tonight."
Douglas grinned weakly. "Another original. Thanks anyway, fella. I appreciate it."
Douglas sat on the veranda and drank, refusing supper and Aunt Daisy took the news home with her.
Eli sat on his porch for thirty minutes his gums massaging each other in meditation then without a word he got up and put on his hat.
"Where are you goin'?"
"Some place." he said placidly. "I'll be back."
"You better," 'she advised acidly. Twenty minutes later Eli appeared on the walk and stopped at the steps. His arms were folded and his face stern as he looked at the three people on the veranda.
"Uh, oh," said Duncan with a smile. "Eli's got the bad eye oot for somebody."
"It's fer that boy o' yourn," the old man bit out. "Come out here, boy, and lemme tell you sumpn."
Douglas, with a number of drinks under his belt and feeling considerably better for reason of an anesthetized conscience, walked to the gate at Eli's insistance. "What is it, Eli?"
"That li'l chile o' yourn wants to see his daddy."
"What the hell are you talking about?" asked Douglas startled.
"You heard me. I say he want to see his daddy."
"How do you know?"
"Never mind how I knows. I'm older'n you and I always did have more sense. I got your horse here all saddled and ready to go."
"I'll have to bathe...."
"Go on and bath off. Shave, too. I'll be here waitin'."
Eli was whistling as he climbed the hill to his hcuse. He had seen Douglas off and was proud of himself. He stopped as the sound of thudding hoof's came to his ears.
"Who that?" he called to the bulky shadow that approached.
"Me, Tiny. Mr. Douglas at the house, ain't he?"
"No. he ain't'. I done sent him over to Miss Naomi's house."
Tin y uttered a vile word and wheeling his lathered horse about disappeared into the night, the hoofbeats ringing sharply in the night air.
Eli stared at the spot where he disappeared and shook his head. "Mus' got a wolf on his tail."
Douglas reined sharply at the little neck of woods bordering the Noble plantation as a dark speeding figure dashed by on a straining horse. It disappeared and he scratched his head "Damn fool," he muttered.
No one had seen Bill Albertson for several days and everyone knew why ... even Albertson himself. His worth as a peace officer was ruined forever and he had already made plans to leave the town, a move that occasioned him few regrets since he hadn't been born there and had no ties. There was, however, one thing he had to do before he left and he had ben attempting it nightly. He had sent his colored house boy, one Jefferson Davis Poole, to town for gun oil and had spent most of the afternoon polishing a .30-30 lever action carbine. This fact, Jefferson Davis duly reported to his uncle Tiny Bloodworth, the news sending the big man into a fury of action the first move of which was to send his nephew packing, carrying with him a threat that practically curdled his blood ... if he ever breathed a word of the matter to anyone.
When Bill Albertson pulled his dingy coupe off the main highway into a narrow woods road near the Noble residence he was not unobserved. Tiny, having reconnoitered saw that the spot had been occupied before and his blood ran cold. Had Douglas planned the visit or had the man been watching the house, hoping? Tiny thanked every spirit he could think of that Jefferson Davis had lucked on the bit of news and that Douglas hadn't made a sudden decision to pay the girl a visit. His first impulse had been to warn Douglas, but when he found that he had already left for the Noble home he was badly frightened and so rode blindly as fast as his horse could go, hoping to be in time and didn't see Douglas when he passed him.
Upon arrival at the car and seeing that it was empty a cold sweat beaded his black brow and he wiped it away with trembling hands.
Mentally he went over the terrain that separated the car from the Noble house, retraced himself and repeated the operation. His diaphargm snapped suddenly taut and tying his horse to a sapling he took off toward the house at a dog trot. There was one place that might hide a possible assassin and that was a clump of fig and wild olive trees not forty yards from the Noble's front door. These shrubs and trees covered what had been an old house site so no one had disturbed them. From this vantage a man might have a perfect shot at some one entering the Noble's front door, especially if the hall light was on.
He slowed and made a careful examination of the small clump of brush, brambles and trees, his nose sniffing at the breeze finally catching the pungent odor of fresh cigarette smoke. Like a bird dog the big Negro traced the smell down stepping as lightly as a cat, his breath seeping gently in and out. The stars glittered brightly and his keen eyes finally spotted the man by the momentary glow of the cigarette. With infinite care Tiny climbed to the top of a sizable iron-rock boulder that stood at the edge of the brush and stood slowly to his full height. For a moment he stared then made out, almost beneath him, the dim figure of a man lying prone in the grass. The barrel of the rifle glinting softly as it rested on the top of another iron rock, smaller than the one upon which Tiny stood.
Satisfied now and calm with the vast patience of his race, Tiny squatted on the rock and waited. He was not afraid he might be seen because Albertson was obviously interested in the house and nothing else.
The watchers did not have long to wait. In less than five minutes the form of a horse and rider passed between them and the lighted windows of the house. Grass and twigs sent out the alarm as Albertson changed positions and Douglas, silhoueted momentarily against the lighted windows went up the path the hammer of the carbine clucked back. Rising silently to his feet Tiny launched himself out and down, crushing the man into the ground. The weapon clattered against a stone as it flew from the owner's grasp and the cry that rose in Albertson's throat was shut off by an iron grip that seemed to crush the cartilage in his throat. He was a powerful man but in Tiny's hands he was a babe and the struggle was short and deadly. Tiny released him finally and muttered. "What you done to me, that's one thing. What you wanted to do to my white folks, that's another thing." Milking his memory further he searched for and located an old well that the brush had served as a barrier to stray calves and other animals, pulled a great deal of branches from it and heaved the body headlong into its dark depths. It rattled against the sides for what to Tiny seemed a long time and the dull thud of it stopping barely reached his ears. He carefully replaced the brush and standing back wiped the sweat from his broad face.
"Spiders go to work and spin your web," he said pleadingly and with a final glance at the well he turned and slowly made his way back to his horse.
When Douglas knocked on the front door of the Noble home his insides turned to water although they had been fortified with an authoritative amount of whiskey. Adrenalin leaped into his veins and his whole body seemed to contract into one great spasm of trepidation. He knocked, loudly it seemed to him but he heard no answering movement in the house. He repeated the knock and still no response, so he opened the door and walked into the hall. The bedroom door to the left stood open and walking into the tunnel of golden light he found himself staring into the face of his son. The little fellow stood before the dead and screened fireplace and looked straight at him unblinkingly.
"Hello," said the youngster, holding out his bedraggled little dog. "Know what his name is?"
Douglas made a queer noise in his throat and shook his head.
"Name's Buster," he said. "What's your name?"
"Douglas." It was a trembling croak. "That's my name too ... Oh I remember, you're my daddy."
Father and son looked at each other for a moment then a shy smile crept over the lad's face.
"Mamma used to talk about you all the time."
"She did? What did she say?"
"Oh ... that you were the biggest, strongest, bravest man in the world and that I should love you a lot."
Douglas impelled by some power not his own moved toward the boy on stiff legs then he knelt before him. "And do you love your daddy a lot?"
Young Douglas frowned and considered the question for a moment. "Well, I guess so. Mamma said I oughta."
"Then...." Tears overflowed his eyes and he fought down the racketing slam of emotion that almost bowled him over. " ... do you think ... you could give Daddy ... a good tight hug?"
The little fellow smiled. "Sure," and dropping Buster to the carpet he ran to his father and hugged him tightly around the neck.
Forcibly he refrained from squeezing the boy too hard because his impulse was to hold him as tightly as he could.
Finally he pushed away from Douglas, his eyes questioning. "Say, you're crying."
Douglas nodded dumbly and allowed his palm to touch lithe fine skin of his son's face.
"Are you happy like Mamma was when she and Grandma had a talk not long ago or are you sad?"
"I don't think I've even been any happier," said Douglas profoundly.
Young Douglas nodded gravely. "When Mamma cried I thought it was sorta funny but it looks like growned men cry too."
"They do, Douglas, when they can't help it."
"Mamma's in the kitchen talking to Dolly and Ella, will you help me put on my pajamas? I've bathed already."
"Sure ... I'll help you. Where are your pajamas?"
"Right here." He leaped to a chair and held up thin two piece pajamas, then tossed them to his father, skidded his only garment, a pair of jockey shorts, from his small waist and threw them in the chair.
"I can undress all right," he said, "but I'm not too good at dressing."
After considerable fumbling Douglas managed to get the pajamas in place then he said. "Well, there you are, all ready for bed."
The boy picked up his dog and regarded his father through grave eyes for a moment. "Mamma usually rocks me a while before I go upstairs. She doesn't really rock me to sleep ... just rocks me ... Then I po upstairs by myself and go to bed."
"By yourself?"
"Sure. Mamma said I had to be brave like you."
Douglas almost suffocated by the blinding blood that roared in his head had an absurd desire to laugh Instead he reached out his arms. "Come on. I'll rock you some."
Grinning happily the boy clambered into Douglas' lap, straddled him and with a sigh of contentment put his head on his father's chest, his arms about his waist and relaxed.
Douglas rocked slowly, wishing he had the nerve to attempt a lullaby but the choking in his throat which seemed to be allied with the tears that trickled down his cheeks prevented any such act.
"Hello Douglas."
He started, caught himself and sank back as young Douglas sat up and faced the door leading into the hall. "Hi Mamma. Daddy came while you were gone and he put my pajamas on me and rocked me."
"That's nice. Did you all have a nice talk?"
"Yas'm. We talked ... I reckon I'd better go on to bed...."
"Yes, darling. You played hard today and you want to show Daddy what a big man you are."
"Okay." He bounced down, clambered back, kissed Douglas noisily on the mouth, slid down again, kissed his mother and walked to the door. There he paused and looked back frowning.
"You won't go away again will you ... like you did the first time you came?"
"No, son. I won't go away again...." His suffering eyes sought Naomi's for confirmation.
"He'll be around Doug. Run along to bed."
Silence fell between them and Douglas writhed with discomfort.
"I watched for a long time before I came in," she said softly.
"You ... you watched?"
"Yes. I heard your knock."
"Naomi...."
She dropped to the floor and clutched his knees, her eyes glistening like wet amethysts. "No ... No ... Don't try to say it. There's nothing we have to talk over Douglas, not if we let our hearts speak. We got off wrong when you came back but we're still meshed ... like we were that first time. I know we are."
His gasp, the incredible ease with which he lifted her from the floor to his lap spoke of the unbearable pain that was at last being eased After a time their lips met, brought together by a power outside themselves, a power that has performed such miracles since the dawn of time.
She was dressed in the bronze satin housecoat again and the warm suppleness of her body came to his senses blanketed somewhat by the soft cloth but as of old it retained the power to blast him out of stupidification which it had initiated.
She sat up. her tawny hair tumbling in profusion, giving him a flash-back to the old Naomi, she of the flaming belligerent spirit, she of the indomitable courage, holding herself aloof and un-conquered when society had branded her. Now, branded worse, it was still there although time and understanding had mellowed it somewhat.
She got up and walking to the door, closed it, then came back to him. "Douglas, there's only one thing I want to know and please tell me the truth. Do you still love me?"
"Do you believe that I ever did?"
"Yes. your father sold me you said no one would have to make you marry me, that you'd do it without being forced into it."
He nodded slowly, wondering how he could show her his heart. "I was only a boy then ... and I loved you with every atom of my soul. I'm a man now and I'm wiser. I can't find any words to describe how I love you." He stood up and approaching her caught her face with his hands. "Where's your woman's intuition? Can't you see, darling?"
Her gasp was quick and eloquent as was the embrace that brought them close. She whispered in his ear. "Do you know what I want Douglas, what I've wanted all these years?"
"I think I do...."
"I think you do too." She stepped back and catching the zipper of the house coat she ripped it downward to the hem, stood up and let it cascade with soft silken hiss to a pile at her feet, emerging from its rich folds all golden tan, white and rose, her breasts undefiled by the exigencies of child bearing, still provocatively lifted yet bearing the richer contours of maturity.
"And this," he whispered hoarsely, "is what I worshipped and dreamed of througb the years I was gone," as he had on that long gone day he fell to his knees and embraced her, massaging the soft plane of her stomach with his face drinking in the unearthly perfection of her skin and chilling to the bone at the expectant motions the act set up in her restless body.
Later, held tightly in his arms she shuddered as though in the throes of a chill. He caressed her face and disengaged her teeth where they had pinioned her lower lip. "What's the matter, darling?"
"It's ... almost more than I can stand, Doug. It's been so long and now I have you." She wept hard for a moment then put her wet face against his chest. "It was hard ... hard. Getting bigger and bigger each day, then people began to whisper, then talk out aloud. Then your father came ... He had heard how Greg was. I'll never forget that day. He came, hitched his horse to the fence and walked in. I don't think Robert the Bruce could have walked prouder ... his big head held like a lion.
"Greg met him and asked him what the hell he wanted. Grandpop knocked him sprawling with one sweep of his arm and said. Nowt from ye, ye muck puppy and the next time ye see me coomin' get ye far awa' lest I brucken ye're neck! Then be came on in. He had tears in his eyes and he was embarrassed. He said, Lassie, 'tis breaking my heart, many's the things. The boy we love is gone and we ken nowt o' his whereabouts. Ye're in a condeetion which hae made a woman lose her head but yours ye've kept. Ye're carryin' the child of my boy. Come to our house so Mary and me can watch ye and see ye're tooken care of. I'm a rough mon and ken little o' pretty speech. I've told ye why I came and I hae nowt else to say. I hope ye can see it my wa'."
She clutched Douglas for a moment. "He didn't know anything of pretty speeches and it was the most wonderful speech I have ever heard, delivered by a hard proud man who saw a duty and was bound to carry it out."
"The most wonderful man in the world," said Douglas with trembling voice. "A hard man, true, and yet I have found that it takes a hard man to know how to be really soft ... and when."
She shuddered and her body, eager and refreshed possessed him again. "Aye," she said, her breath coming in gasps " ... and wben."
Two Letters
Mr. Cornwall King Nairobi, Kenya British East Africa
Dear Sir:
Your name was given me by a friend as being a hunter of reknown and I am writing to see if I may engage your services. I now have a wife and a five year old son which I will want to bring with me. Please quote me prices and give any other information you may deem pertinent to an extended hunt into the interior. Yours truly Douglas Glencairn, Route No. 4 Cedarville, Mississippi
Mr. Douglas Glencairn Route No. 4 Cedarville, Mississippi
Dear Sir:
Re your inquiry of the seventeenth I beg to inform you that your cash being filthy capitalistic money from the U.S. is no good in Kenya. I shall be glad, as will my wife Medussa King and a son yet unborn (whose first name will be Douglas) to see that your hunt is a success and will even provide quarters for as long as you desire to stay. You see nothing is too good for the customer. Heeding the possible outburst of Scotch pride with which you may be swollen I might mention that I have long considered a trek into the wilds of Mississippi and should I be so fortunate to find a guide who can lead me to that last outpost, Cedarville, I shall return the imposition. Let such matters as money remain unspoken and get the hell on over here before Tosavo warts the ears off me wanting to know when Douglisi is coming. Sincerely, Corny
