Quick of both mind and action and no stranger to wounds, Ian Lindsay tore a slicker from its wall hook behind his desk and, striding quickly to the side of the stricken man, wrapped it firmly around his body, sealing both the entrance and the exit wounds, mildly surprised at the paucity of blood from them, the near lack of air bubbles in that blood and the calm of the victim.
“Emmett? Damn your arse, Emmett, look at me, not at him! Go reassure those people in the hallway before they break my door down. Then send a runner to fetch Dr. MacConochie and tell him to come up here prepared to treat an air-sucking chest wound. D’youhear me, damn you? Then do it!”
“No, wait, Colonel, Mr. MacEvedy,” said Milo in as strong a voice as he could just then muster up. “Do not call anyone else in here, not for a while. But I would appreciate it mightily if one of you would make sure that revolver is out of reach of Mistress Arabella yonder. Her bullet didn’t really injure me, but it hurt—hurts!—like blue blazes.”
Not until he had stripped off his hide vest and his bloody, twice-holed shirt and exposed to three pairs of wondering, wide-staring eyes the rapidly closing, bluish-rimmed holes in his chest and back, however, would any of them credit the fact that he was not speaking to them out of an understandable stare of wound-induced shock, that he really was not in imminent danger of death. Arabella Lindsay just continued to stare at him after that, her heart-shaped face expressing nothing of her thoughts. Emmett MacEvedy stared at the floor, looking up now and again, mumbling incomprehensible things to himself and cracking the knuckles of his knotted, workworn farmer’s hands.
Colonel Lindsay, too, stared long and hard at his guest, at the revolver now on the desk before him and at the splintered backrest of the side chair. Then he visibly shook himself and cleared his throat before softly saying, “Mr. Moray … if that is really your name … what are you? Are you a man, a human man? There are old, very old stories, fright tales, of manlike things, evil creatures who can’t be killed by steel or lead. I had never before put any more credence in them than I did in the old tales of flying horses, dragons and such obvious fabrications … not until a few moments ago, that is.
“I repeat, sir, what are you? And what are your intentions with regard to me, Emmett and our people?”
Milo pulled his shirt back over his head and began to tuck its long tails back under his belt and trousers as he replied. “Insofar as I know, Colonel, I am a human man, just like you. I am considerably older than any other man I’ve recently met, and I happen to be, as you have just witnessed, very difficult to kill, although I experience just as much pain as would any other human so wounded.”
“How old … just how old are you, Mr. Moray?” asked Colonel Lindsay, his firm voice cracking a bit with the strain.
“Something over two hundred years, Colonel,” Milo replied, adding, “I was nearly a hundred years old at the time of the War, and I looked then just as I do today; for some reason, I don’t age, you see. Don’t ask me to explain it, sir, any of it, for I can’t; nor could the few carefully selected doctors and scientists I took into my confidence in the last few years before the War. All that any of them were able to come up with were things that I already knew—that I don’t die of deadly wounds and, rather, seem to regenerate tissue very fast, that my teeth are of an exceeding hardness and are replaced within a few weeks if I do lose one or more, that I appear to be a man in his middle to late thirties and never age beyond that appearance, and that I am gifted with a very strong telepathic ability. I also seem to be immune to all the diseases to which I ever have to my knowledge been exposed, though I do come down with the occasional mild and short-lived head cold. Once I lost two fingers in a war, and they grew back within a couple of weeks; on another occasion, I had an eye gouged and deliberately punctured by enemies who had captured me. It grew back to full vision within a week.
“But Colonel, you have my word of honor that I am nothing more than a human man, a bit extraordinary in some respects, I freely admit, but still just a man. That you may find it possible to believe me, despite your understandable doubts, I now am going to lower my mindshield, that your telepathic daughter may enter my mind and testify to you the verity of all that I’ve said here.”
Within seconds, Arabella had done that for which she had originally been summoned by her father. She solemnly assured him and Emmett MacEvedy that Milo Moray had imparted to them the full truth, as he knew it, adding that she could discern no malice or ill intent toward any of them—even toward her, who had endeavored to kill him short minutes before—in his mind.
Ian Lindsay sat back in his chair and whistled softly. “Mr. Moray, I know not what to say, what even to think. This entire business is far outside my experience or those of my predecessors, I am certain. You make claim to mortality, yet you freely admit to being of an impossible age and I have just seen not only you survive a fatal bullet wound, but the very wounds, themselves, close up of their own accord. Who has ever seen the like in a mere man?
“Yet you seem a man of honor, and you swear upon that selfsame honor that all you have told me of yourself is no less than true. Further, I have the testimony of my daughter and her unusual talents to back up your oaths, and she never has been proved in error in her reading of others’ minds.
“Therefore, Mr. Moray, I can only conclude that you are what you say, a human man, for all that my senses and logic assure me that you must be superhuman, at the very least. I am a religious man, Mr. Moray, and firmly convinced that God has a purpose, a plan in all that He does. We here at MacEvedy Station are in dire straits, as you have guessed, besieged and unable to work our fields, much of our livestock lifted by the prairie rovers, our people all ill and almost starving. I believe that the Lord God tested Emmett and me to our utmost capacities, planning from the start to send us you in our hour of darkest need. You may not even know it, Mr. Moray, but I have faith that you are our God-sent savior.”
With his tribe of clansfolk camped in and about MacEvedy Station, Milo and a few of his warriors, all heavily armed, rode out to the camp of Chief Gus Scott, Milo grim with purpose. They were received with warmth by the chief and his tribesfolk, and all invited to share food. While the rest ate and fraternized, Milo closeted with the chief in that worthy’s otherwise unoccupied tent.
Gus Scott, smiling broadly, unstoppered a stone jug, splashed generous measures of trader whiskey into two battered metal mugs and handed one to Milo, then clanked the side of his against Milo’s in ancient ritual before drinking.
Handling his half-emptied mug, Scott remarked, “Damn if you ain’t a pure whiz, Chief Milo, no shit a-tall, neither. I’ve come for to like you a lot, and so it pained me some to think the end of the fine feast what you and yourn throwed would most likely be the lastest time I’d set eyes to you with the wind and blood still running in you; I’d of laid damn near anything I’s got thet them bastids would’ve blowed you to hell afore you’d got anywheres near to thet goddam fort. Me and some of my boys, we all watched you ride down there from way off. Damn, but you looked smart on thet big ol’ white horse-as straight up in the saddle as the pole of thet white flag you was. When them bugtits come out and led you th’ough them gates and then closed ’em ahint you, I figgered sure thet none of us would ever clap eyes onto you again in this here life. Yet here you sits with me, big and sassy as ever. How the hell did you cozen your way out’n thet damn fort, Chief Milo?”