Neither Mr Oakenhurst nor Mrs O’Dowd could follow his reasoning.
‘You have a great admiration for this Mr Minct,’ said Sam Oakenhurst.
‘He’s my hero,’ admitted Captain Ornate with a confiding gesture.
Now the Indian Carly O’Dowd had identified as Rodrigo Heat divorced himself from the game and moved heavily over the floor to stand beside an empty chair next to Captain Ornate.
Sam Oakenhurst received the impression that the masked man had sent Heat to him. The Indian’s massive head inclined towards the seat but his eyes were on Carly O’Dowd. ‘You have a high price, lady, but that don’t scare me.’
Sam Oakenhurst knew only one way of responding to such boorishness and his words were out before he had properly calculated the situation. He said evenly that if Mr Heat pursued that thread of conversation he would be obliged to invite the Indian outside to the place familiarly known as - and here he looked to Captain Ornate to tell him the name again ...
‘Bloody Glade,’ said Roy Ornate, still benign. ‘But we discourage its use. This M&E is better than my own.’ He was trying a mixture, he said, recommended by Paul Minct. He displayed a garish package: Meng & Ecker’s Brandy Flake.
‘Bloody Glade,’ said Mr Oakenhurst, ‘and settle the matter alia gentilhombres.’
Whereupon Mr Heat laughed open-mouthed and asked what was wrong with his conversation.
Understanding, now, that he was being provoked, Sam Oakenhurst could only continue. His honour gave him no choice. ‘It demeans a lady,’ he explained.
Mr Heat continued to laugh and asked where the lady in question happened to be, which led to a silence falling in the room, since Mr Oakenhurst’s principles, if not his courage, were shared by the majority of the floor’s diamentes brutos.
‘Very well,’ said Mr Oakenhurst after a moment. ‘I will meet you in the usual circumstances,’ and as if he had settled some minor matter he turned back to signal the surly whitey for more drinks and enquire of Carly O’Dowd how her brother was doing in the Border Army. ‘Ain’t they romantic, Carly? I heard they’re winning big new tracts of restabilized up above Kansas.’
‘You’re a man after my own heart, sir,’ suddenly says Captain Ornate, puffing on his churchwarden’s. ‘Would you care for a dip from my special mixture?’ He reached into his coat.
‘Give him my Meng & Ecker’s, Captain Ornate.’
Paul Minct’s cruel voice chilled the house into irredeemable silence.
‘Give Mr Oakenhurst a dip of my own ope and ask him if, at his convenience, he would come to join me later for a chat. It’s rare to meet an equal, these days. One grows so starved of intellectual cut and thrust.’
8. GRACIAS NADA MAS
‘CABALLERO AND MUKHAMIR, you may be, Mr Oakenhurst, of the highest principles and most excellent suba’, but Captain Ornate allows no desafio aboard The Whole Hog and so your affair must be abandoned until such time you are both ashore. Those are Captain Ornate’s rules.’ Paul Minct speaks with a certain weariness.
Sam Oakenhurst now understands that he has been tested and that his honour is not at issue. He shrugs the matter off.
They sit together in the snug in the back shadows, a candle burning on the table giving unsteady life to Paul Minct’s geographic mask.
Mr Oakenhurst finds himself reading the fragments of words - ELMONTE, OLA, AX WELL HOU, CRISCO, CASTRO, ONT MAID, OHNSONS WAX and others - remembering his childhood when such brands were vital and had complex and casual meaning to everyone. The world’s realities changed, he thinks, long before the advent of the Fault. The Fault is perhaps the result of that change, not the cause. He cannot give his entire attention to Paul Minct’s words. The man disturbs and fascinates him. He gathers Paul Minct respects him, which is why he has been taken aside like this and not admonished in public, and he is relieved. But he knows he could never trust the enmascaro. Paul Minct could change his mood at a moment’s notice and casually kill him. Sam Oakenhurst is close to admitting he made a mistake. He should have found the nerve to stick it out at Ambry’s until the stem-wheeler came by. His self-disgust only serves to fuel his discomfort. He wishes the enmascaro would leave him alone, but already guesses Mr Minct plans somehow to use him.
(Paul Minct had been a blankey-chaser in the old days, Carly O’Dowd said. Mr Minct had gone after bounty boys, always willing to take a dead-or-alive. One day he had crossed the big bridge into Louisiana with six red scalps on his belt, all that was mortal of the Kennedy pack which ran wild for a while up near Texarcana and announced they’d founded a “white republic”. Captain Ornate retired. Mrs O’ Dowd called for more drinks. ‘Paul Minct’s a man who gets what or who he wants, one way or another,’ she said. ‘He was Peabody’s main chaser. He hates whiteys with a passion and would wipe them all out if he could. He loathes them so bad some of us think maybe he’s a blankey himself, or anyway a breed, who was fortunate enough to be burned in a fire - like the blankey who went to hell, got burned black and thought he’d gotten to heaven! Loosen up, Sam. Nothing much ever happens on The Whole Hog.’)
‘I was in a bad fire or two in my time, Mr Oakenhurst.’ Paul Minct fingers the tufts of hair on his skull. ‘You should hear my wife complain. But someone has to bring home the bacon. We’re the chaps who have to get out there in the world, eh? Nobody will do it for us. We are never allowed nor encouraged to the best. That’s the shame of it. We must seek the best for ourselves. It is what drives us, I suspect. Almost secretly. Will you be joining our little pasatiempo? You’d be very welcome.’
When Mr Oakenhurst accepts the veiled order with the same grace with which it is given, one of Paul Minct’s unsightly hands reaches into his and welcomes him to the school.
(‘He told me he had been in and out of the Fault five times. He says he knows secret trails which only he had the courage to discover. It is true that in the main he has no fear.’
‘Does he fear anything, Carly?’
‘Something. I don’t know. Is there a jugador brave enough to find out?’) Paul Minct offers his own pouch. ‘A cut above the Brandy Rake. It’s M&E’s Number Three. They’ll try to tell you it’s extinct, but they’re still making it down in Mexico.’
Against his better judgement, Sam Oakenhurst fills his long-stemmed pipe.
‘Señor Heat is an old colleague of mine. ‘ Paul Minct receives the ope again and puts it away. ‘Volatile and blunt, as you know, and a little uncouth, but one of the world’s great people He discovered the factory. The last Meng & Ecker’s is in a place called Wadi-al-Hara, the River of Stones, in Arabic. The Indian dialects give it a similar name. Guadalajara, the Spanish say. Mr Heat made his second fortune bringing it back. This stuff’s what the old days were about, Mr Oakenhurst. Not much of a vice compared to some we hear of. That’s what I remind my wife. She’s overly worried. My health. That’s women for you, isn’t it? My health, as a matter of fact, has never been better. But there you are. Now, Mr Oakenhurst, I know your credentials and I must say I’m impressed. How would you like to come in on a small venture I’m organizing?’