Not surprisingly, the man behind the bar recovered fastest. "What'll it be, gents?" he asked.
Harris was seldom at a loss when it came to his personal comforts. "Ham sandwich and a mug of beer, if you please."
"That sounds good," Audubon said. "The same for me, if you'd be so kind."
"Half an eagle for both of you together," the proprietor said. Some of the regulars grinned. Even without those tell-tale smiles, Audubon would have known he was being gouged. But he paid without complaint. He could afford it, and he'd be asking questions later on, and priming the pump with more silver. He wanted the locals to see he could be openhanded.
The beer was… beer. The sandwiches, by contrast, were prodigies: great slabs of tender, flavorful ham on fresh-baked bread, enlivened by spicy mustard and pickles all but jumping with dill and garlic and something else, something earthy—an At-lantean spice?
Audubon hadn't come close to finishing his —he had to chew slowly—when the man behind the bar said, "Don't see too many strangers here." Several locals—big, stocky, bearded fellows in homespun —nodded. So did Audubon, politely. The tap-man went on, "Mind if I ask what you're doing passing through?"
"I am John James Audubon," Audubon said, and waited to see if anyone knew his name. Most places, he would have had no doubt. In Bideford… well, who could say?
"The painter fella," one of the regulars said.
"That's right." Audubon smiled, more relieved than he wanted to show. "The painter fella." He repeated the words even though they grated. If the locals understood he was a prominent person, they were less likely to rob him and Harris for the fun of it. He introduced his friend.
"Well, what are you doing here in Bideford?" the proprietor asked again.
"Passing through, as you said," Audubon replied. "I'm hoping to paint honkers." This country was almost isolated enough to give him hope of finding some here — not quite, but almost.
"Honkers?" Two or three men said it as the same time. A heartbeat later, they all laughed. One said, "Ain't seen any of them big fowl round these parts since Hector was a pup."
"That's right," someone else said. Solemn nods filled the saloon.
"It's a shame, too," another man said. "My granddad used to say they was easy to kill, and right good eatin'. Lots of meat on 'em, too." That had to be why no honkers lived near Bideford these days, but the local seemed ignorant of cause and effect.
"If you know of any place where they might dwell, I'd be pleased to pay for the information." Audubon tapped a pouch on his belt. Coins clinked sweetly. "You'd help my work, and you'd advance the cause of science."
"Half now," the practical Harris added, "and half on the way back if we find what we're looking for. Maybe a bonus, too, if the tip's good enough."
A nice ploy, Audubon thought. I have to remember that one. The locals put their heads together. One of the older men, his beard streaked with gray, spoke up: "Well, I don't know anything for sure, mind, but I was out hunting a few years back and ran into this fellow from Thetford." He knew where Thetford was, but Audubon didn't. A few questions established that it lay to the northeast. The Bideford man continued, "We got to gabbing, and he said he saw some a few years before that, off the other side of his town. Can't swear he wasn't lyin', mind, but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about."
Harris looked a question towards Audubon. The artist nodded. Harris gave the Bideford man a silver eagle. "Let me have your name, sir," Harris said. "If the tip proves good, and if we don't pass this way again on our return journey, we will make good on the rest of the reward."
"Much obliged, sir," the man said. "I'm Lehonti Kent." He carefully spelled it out for Harris, who wrote it down in one of his notebooks.
"What can you tell me about the House of Universal Devotion?" Audubon asked.
That got him more than he'd bargained for. Suddenly everyone, even the most standoffish locals, wanted to talk at once. He gathered that the church preached the innate divinity of every human being and the possibility of transcending mere mankind —as long as you followed the preachings of the man the locals called the Reverend, with a very audible capital R. Universal Devotion to the Reverend, he thought. It all seemed to him the rankest, blackest heresy, but the men of Bideford swore by it.
"Plenty of Devotees" —another obvious capital letter—"in Thetford and other places like that," Lehonti Kent said. He plainly had only the vaguest idea of places more than a couple of days' travel from his home village.
"Isn't that interesting?" Audubon said: one of the few phrases polite almost anywhere.
Because the Bidefordites wanted to preach to them, he and Harris couldn't get away from the saloon for a couple of hours. "Well, well," Harris said as they rode away. "Wasn't that interesting?" He freighted the word with enough sarcasm to sink a ship twice the size of the Maid of Orleans.
Audubon's head was still spinning. The Reverend seemed to have invented a whole new prehistory for Atlantis and Terranova, one that had little to do with anything Audubon thought he'd learned. He wondered if he'd be able to keep it straight enough to get it down in his diary. The Devotees seemed nearly as superstitious to him as the wild red Terranovan tribes—and they should have known better, while the savages were honestly ignorant. Even so, he said, "If Lehonti—what a name! — Kent gave us a true lead, I don't mind the time we spent… too much."
Thetford proved a bigger village than Bideford. It also boasted a House of Universal Devotion, though it had a Methodist church as well. A crudely painted sign in front of the House said, THE REVEREND PREACHES SUNDAY!! Two exclamation points would have warned Audubon away even if he'd never passed through Bideford.
He did ask after honkers in Thetford. No one with whom he talked claimed to have seen one, but a couple of men did say some people from the town had seen them once upon a time. Harris doled out more silver, but it spurred neither memory nor imagination.
"Well, we would have come this way anyhow," Audubon said as they went on riding northeast. The Green Ridge Mountains climbed higher in the sky now, dominating the eastern horizon. Peering ahead with a spyglass, Audubon saw countless dark valleys half hidden by the pines and cycads that gave the mountains their name. Anything could live there… couldn't it? He had to believe it could. "We have a little more hope now," he added, as much to himself as to Harris.
"Hope is good," his friend said. "Honkers would be better."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before the ferns and cycads by the side of the road quivered… and a stag bounded across. Audubon started to raise his shotgun, but stopped with the motion not even well begun. For one thing, the beast was gone. For another, the gun was charged with bird-shot, which would only have stung it.
"Sic transit gloria honkeris." Harris said.
"Honkeris?" But Audubon held up a hand before Harris could speak. "Yes, honker would be a third-declension noun, wouldn't it?"
Little by little, the country rose toward the mountains. Cycads thinned out in the woods; more varieties of pines and spruces and redwoods took their places. The ferns in the undergrowth seemed different, too. As settlements thinned out, so did splashes of color from exotic flowers. The very air seemed different: mistier, moister, full of curious, spicy scents the nose would not meet anywhere else in the world. It felt as if the smells of another time were wafting past the travelers.