Nathan looked at the driver, who nodded.
“I demand that you take me back home.”
“I decline your demand. Anything else?”
“I demand to know what’s in this stew.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It has an odd texture.”
“It’s made from the standard animals. You’re just picky.”
“What’s this piece?”
“Hold it up to the light of the fire.”
Nathan held his spoon closer to the flames.
“It’s beef.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s not the part of the cow you would normally eat, but I promise you, it’s cow. And I recommend that you eat your fill, because your personality has fallen out of favor with me, and I may stop feeding you at any time without notice.”
“You’re a terrible man,” said Nathan.
“I never said I wasn’t. Go ahead, think back through our conversations and try to recall an instance where I said otherwise. I’ll wait.”
Three separate plans of action occurred to Nathan. In the first, he hurled his bowl of stew directly into Kleft’s face, and then ran from the coach as quickly as possible. At the end of this scenario, the driver shot Nathan in the back, so he decided that it was a poor plan.
In the second plan of action, he flung the bowl of stew at the driver instead. This plan assumed that only the driver was carrying a weapon, meaning that it would be a spectacular failure if it turned out that Kleft was also in possession of a gun, or a knife suitable for throwing, or a dart, or a medium-sized rock, or even a bowl of stew that could be thrown in the same manner as the bowl Nathan had thrown at the driver. Since Kleft was obviously holding a bowl of stew, the second plan of action was also rejected as inadequate.
In the third plan of action, Nathan threw no bowls of stew at anybody, got back into the coach, and waited for a much better opportunity to escape. This struck Nathan as the wisest of the three.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you. But only because I don’t want to get shot. Otherwise I’d run right home. And I’m not going to eat any more of this stew. And…and…and…” Nathan searched for the best word. “…Hades!”
“It’s not a swear when you say it as Hades. Stupid boy.”
“Then…buttocks!”
“It’s not obscene when you use the proper scientific term for something. Stupid, stupid boy.”
“Guts!”
“Guts? Are you drunk?”
“Feces!”
“Did you learn nothing from my previous comment about scientific terms? However, if the next words out of your mouth are anything but ‘Thank you for the stew,’ I will treat them as if you uttered the most lightning-attracting blasphemy imaginable, and you will find yourself shot.”
Nathan did not want to find himself shot. But he also did not want Kleft to think his spirit was broken. “Thank you for the damn stew.”
“I almost admire that,” said Kleft.
They finished their meal and resumed their journey. Kleft continued to write in his book, occasionally looking up and studying Nathan, as if acquiring details for his narrative. Nathan went back and forth between thinking that he should suddenly leap from the coach, and thinking that he should not suddenly leap from the coach.
Scarcely an hour after their stop, the coach stopped again. Kleft sighed with frustration and closed his book. “Those horses had better not be fatigued already,” he said. “I could run longer than that, and I’m the sort of gentleman who would sit in a coach and let horses do all the work!”
“It’s not that,” said the driver.
“Then what?”
“Robbers.”
FOURTEEN
“Come out of there with your hands in the air,” said a voice that was squeakier than what Nathan would have expected from a robber.
“Not just in the air, but without weapons,” said a second voice.
“Right,” said the first voice. “Don’t hold weapons in the air.”
Kleft gestured for Nathan to follow, and got out of the coach. The robbers were unshaven, dirty men in torn clothing, each of whom held a large knife.
“What do you miscreants want?” asked Kleft. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re somebody traveling in a coach on a lonely road after dark,” said the first robber. “Therefore, you are prey.”
“My name is Professor Kleft. I command great respect amongst those civilized enough to know who deserves respect. I am happy to forgive you this transgression and allow you to wander off in whatever direction your loathsome forms wish to go, but if you do not retreat I promise you will both lie dead at my feet.”
The first robber grinned, revealing black gums and rotten teeth. “That’s quite a promise. Now give me all of your money before I cut you into a series of long, thin strips.”
“Let me explain to you, through an anecdote, how little your threat scares me. When I was a child, barely older than the boy next to me, my father and I rode in a coach, much like this one. It was a pleasant, calm journey, until the driver stopped the horses, even though we’d given the horses a rest barely an hour ago. We—”
“Is this going to be a long story?” asked the second robber.
“Extremely long. And if you continue to interrupt, I shall tell it at a slower rate. We got out of the coach, only to see a pair of robbers—”
“I have no interest in your anecdote,” said the first robber. “Give us your money and whatever valuables you have concealed in there.”
“—only to see a pair of robbers waiting for us outside. Their hair glistened with the shine of being unwashed, and the horses batted their tails to and fro, trying to wave away the stench as if shooing away flies.”
“Are your ears merely decorative? We do not care! Not a whit! Not a speck! Not a pinch! Your anecdote is of no interest to us, and I swear to you, if you don’t stop I will twist the knife each time I plunge it into your body, rather than merely withdrawing it before I stab again.”
“My father refused to give these robbers any of his money and began to tell them about the origin of his lack of fear,” Kleft continued. “And we watched happily as his driver, producing a gun from inside of his coat, shot both of the robbers dead while they were distracted by his meaningless anecdote.”
“We don’t care! How many times must we repeat this? This is easily in the top five stories of which I’ve had the least amount of interest, and yet you continue to share it, despite our threats upon your life. You’ve now vexed me so intensely that even if you do stop reciting the tale, I’m going to kill you. And then I’m going to kill your driver, and then I’m going to kill the boy. All because you wouldn’t stop telling that story. Three deaths when there might have been zero.”
“Well, there would’ve been at least one,” said the second robber.
“That’s true, that’s true. We are sociopaths, after all. But still, had you not wasted our time with that pointless—”
Nathan had never seen a bullet strike somebody in the forehead before, nor had he seen their brains exit from the back of their skull at such an accelerated rate. He’d actually thought the process would look more like when somebody jumped into a swimming pool, where the water splashed outward, but instead it looked as if standing behind the first robber would have posed the greatest risk of getting splashed.
“You killed him!” the second robber screamed. “You’ve created orphans of his nine children! You’ve made a widow of his wife, who hasn’t got the looks to ever find another husband to care for her! And in his spare time he was on the verge of finally discovering a cure for—”