Milo himself spent many a long hour conferring with Ian Lindsay and Emmett MacEvedy, endeavoring to convince them of the futility, the suicidal folly of remaining at the station and attempting to derive sustenance from played-out land for so many people. Ian seemed to be wavering toward Milo’s side of the argument, but MacEvedy was adamantly opposed to leaving, and each time Lindsay made a favorable mention of departure, the director was quick to point out that it was the inherent duty of Lindsay and his men to remain and defend the station. The parson, Gerald Falconer, who sat in on a few of the discussions, seemed unequivocally a MacEvedy man. Arabella Lindsay, however, and every one of Ian’s officers eagerly favored a mass departure from the station and its barely productive farms for a freer-sounding life out on the grasslands.
Milo saw his plans and arguments stonewalled at almost every turn by the strangely hostile MacEvedy and the even more hostile Reverend Gerald Falconer, He was become so frustrated as to almost be ready to seek those two men out on some dark night in some deserted place and throttle them with his own two bare hands.
Very frequently, Milo was forced to carry on two conversations at one time—his oral one, of course, and a silent telepathic “conversation” with Arabella Lindsay, who, while at least quite interested in the affairs under discussion by Milo, her father, MacEvedy and whoever else chanced to be present at any particular time, was even more avid for bits and pieces of assorted knowledge concerning aspects of the lives of the nomads on prairies and plains.
She did not even have to be present for him to suddenly feel the peculiar mental tickling that told him that her mind was now there, in the atrium of his own, with another question or five. Not always questions, though; sometimes she imparted information to him.
“Milo,” she beamed to him early on a Monday morning, “the Reverend Mr. Falconer said terrible things about you in his sermon yesterday, Father probably won’t tell you, so I suppose that I must. After all, we are friends now, you and I, and that’s what friends are for: to guard each other’s backs. Is that not so?”
In his two-plus centuries of life, Milo had but infrequently run across any “man of God” of any stripe, creed or persuasion that he had been able to like trust or even respect; all seemed to have imbibed greed, backbiting and hypocrisy with the milk of whatever creatures bore and nurtured them. Ever since their initial meeting, he had known that Gerald Falconer heartily disliked him for some reason that the man had never bothered to bring out into the open and discuss; Milo judged him to be not the sort of man who willingly discussed any matter openly unless he was dead certain, to start, that he had the unquestioned upper hand.
He replied, “I know his kind, of old, Arabella. What did he have to say about me?”
“He started out by criticizing poor Father most cruelly,” was her answer. “His scriptural text had been the story of Job, and he compared Father to Job, saying that Job had had great faith in God and that Father’s faith had obviously been scant, since it had evaporated under mild adversity.”
“Mild adversity?” Milo mentally snorted. “Mild adversity is it, now? By Sun and Wind, the man’s clearly either a madman or he totally lacks the wits to come in out of the rain! A good half of the station people have died in the last four years of either malnourishment or the plethora of diseases associated with it, most of your crops in this same time have been stunted, blighted or completely nonexistent, your herds have been either eaten or lifted by the rovers, and your leaders have had to strip this place of all luxuries or treasures and of many necessary items of equipment, armor and weapons to barter to the traders for a pittance of food. If these sufferings and privations are to this Gerald Falconer merely ‘mild adversity,’ I’d truly hate to see what he would characterize as strong adversity, Arabella.”
“What he said of you was worse, Milo, far, far worse. His hatred of you, whatever spawned it, seems to be really and truly depthless.”
“Well,” he prodded, “just what choice cesspit dredgings did the mealymouthed bastard decide applied to me?”
“He declared that the devil can quote Scripture when it is to hell’s benefit, then he carried on for some time about how mere mortal men can, under great stress and especially when possessed of little or deficient faith, succumb to Satanic wiles. He went on to say that you, Milo Moray, are without doubt a disciple of Satan, that you bear the mark of the beast, that—although you go about on two legs and project the appearance of being a man—you are a beast yourself, an evil, hell-spawned, bestial creature of the sort who dwelt amongst men of old, before men were taught by the humble servants of Christ how to detect them, drive them out and kill them—witches, vampires, ghouls and werewolves, all immune to the sharp steel or lead bullets that would take the lives of mortal men.”
“Oho,” Milo silently crowed. “Emmett MacEvedy apparently forgot his oaths to your father and me as soon as he and his superstitious mind and his loose, flapping tongue had exited that office. That must be why this Falconer seemed to hate me from the moment of our first meeting, why he wears that big silver pectoral cross constantly and never misses an opportunity to wave the thing around, mostly near to me. I’d wondered about him and what I took to be his idiosyncrasies, Arabella, but I’ve never been able to read his mind, or MacEvedy’s either. I think that both of them are just adept enough at telepathy to have developed natural shields.
“And anent that matter, Arabella, just how many of the folk of the station here are possessed of your telepathic abilities? Do you know?”
“Well, there’s Capull … but he’s not a person, of course.”
“If this Capull is not a person, Arabella,” inquired Milo, “then what is he?”
“Why, he’s a stallion, a Thoroughbred stallion, my father’s charger and my best friend.”
“And he is telepathic? You can actually converse with him, a horse?” Milo was stunned.
“Of course I can,” she replied matter-of-factly. “And with a number of the other horses, too, though not as well as with dear Capull. I was chatting with that big white stallion on whom you first rode into the fort when I was found and summoned up to my father’s office to try to read your thoughts and so determine if the words you spoke were truth.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” thought Milo. “Why did I never think of trying to communicate telepathically with any of my mounts? If I did, and if the horse was a cooperative sort, I’d need no bridle at all and could keep both hands free for my weapons or whatever. Nor would there be any need to hobble or picket such a horse, either—you could simply beam your command for him to come to you whenever you were ready for him. Son of a bitch, the things I’ve learned at this place!”
To Arabella, he beamed, “Do you think … Could you teach me how to bespeak this Capull and, perhaps, some of my own horses?”
“Certainly I can,” was her quick, self-assured reply. “Your mind is much stronger than is mine in this matter of mind speaking to mind, anyway. Furthermore, I have found myself able to bespeak over half of the horses I have met in your camp already, so there is no reason why you should not be able to so do, whenever you wish.”
Then, in a bare twinkling, her mind imparted to his the tiny change of direction necessary to reach the minds of equines. It was so simple, yet it was something of which he would never have thought on his own, he realized and admitted.
“But Milo, this matter of telepathy aside, you must be most wary of Reverend Mr. Falconer, and of Director MacEvedy and his son, Grant. They all hate you and will use any means at their disposal to poison the minds of our people against you and to see you and all your people either killed or driven away, back out onto the prairie, whence you all came.”