“After that, Father was cool and proper to Emmett in public, but it was long and long before he deigned even to receive him again in his private office, and never, since that night, has he been in our home at the fort. They only reached something faintly resembling their old relationship when first the fort and the station came under siege of the prairie rovers.”
Milo had deliberately connived to keep Chief Gus Scott out of the discussions conducted within the fort, fearing the sure consequences of putting a hot-headed and openly pugnacious man of Chief Scott’s water in close proximity to such troublemakers as Emmett MacEvedy and Gerald Falconer. Solemnly, he had entrusted Scott with the full responsibility for all the hunting parties.
“You know this country hereabouts far better than do my own hunters, Chief Gus, so you’re much more valuable to us all out here than you might be inside the fort yonder. Never you fear—when the time comes, you’ll get to meet Chief Ian and all the others.”
As the people of the station and the fort became stronger and more active, they flocked out into the camps pitched under their walls, mingling freely with the folk who dwelt in those camps. Moreover, the continued rantings of Falconer seemed to be accomplishing nothing among the most of his flock, as Milo was never ill-treated or openly avoided by any of the folk of station and fort, save members of the immediate families of his two bitter enemies—the director and the preacher.
The painfully neat parlor of Gerald Falconer’s small parsonage was the usual meeting place for him, the director and Grant MacEvedy, it being the one location in which they could be relatively certain, if they kept their voices low-pitched, of not being overheard by any who might bear their words back to Ian Lindsay. Earlier on, it had appeared that they three might have had a good chance to sway the outcome, to make sure that Lindsay and his battalion would all remain here in the place of their births and not go traipsing off into the unknown wilderness in company with a Satanic man-beast and his godless host of minions. But now it appeared that all of their words had been wasted, for not only the two Lindsays—father and daughter—and their soldiers but all the people of the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station acted willing—nay, avid—to desert the ancient buildings and fields and the safe, secure life that they and their fathers before them had always known. So the mood in the parsonage parlor was unrelievedly glum on this day, as gloomy as the cloudy, drizzly day itself.
In the not too distant past, Gerald Falconer had deferred to Emmett MacEvedy at their rare private meetings in an almost abject manner—installing the director in the only armchair, personally serving him with mint tea and the finest his parsonage otherwise had to offer, seldom speaking unless asked for a reply. But things had changed drastically in the space of the last year. Since the distasteful affair of the stolen and hoarded stores had so disastrously come to light and general knowledge and caused general respect for MacEvedy, personally, to drop to nil, the parson had taken to treating the director as he treated most of the rest of his flock.
On this day, Falconer occupied the old cracked-leather armchair, while Emmett and his son perched before him on armless, backless wooden stools. A pot of mint tea steamed softly on the table, but there was only one cup in the room, that one cradled in the hands of Falconer, while cakes and sweetmeats were long since become a thing of the dead past.
Grant MacEvedy was suffering from a cold, sniffling and snuffling constantly, perpetually dabbing at his sore, fiery-red nose with a stained and sodden handkerchief. The sallow, soft-handed young man had been born a few centuries too late. Although he was an excellent administrator, he detested all physical aspects of actual farming—the dirt, the heat or the cold, the physically taxing hard work, the dealing with smelly and potentially dangerous animals of the likes of horses and cattle.
He had been sickly from birth, and a brace of doting parents had kept him ever close to home and out of the rough, rowdy games played by his peers. Now an adult, he still cleaved as closely as conditions would permit to his office and his home, spending an absolute minimum of time out of doors. The hair of dogs, the fur of cats, the feathers of birds all had never failed to set him to coughing and sneezing, so he never had had any kind or description of pet and now he feared and hated all animals, although he strove mightily to mask these emotions whenever he was forced to be around the farmers and their beasts.
He had completely missed inheritance of his father’s big-boned, powerful physique. He was of less than average height, with a sallow skin that sunburned very easily, muddy-brown eyes that were positioned too close together and teeth that crowded haphazardly in his two-small jaws. His hands and feet were small and slender, butter-soft and usually ink-stained. In better times, he had been pudgy and paunchy, but now he was become as emaciated as the rest of the people. His rat-brown hair was thin, lank and lifeless, and even now, in his mid-twenties, his beard growth was at best sparse and patchy, and his only body hair sprouted in his crotch and armpits.
Unlike all of his peers, who had wed in their late teens or early twenties, Grant—rendered painfully shy by his overly sheltered childhood and youth—had never married, continuing to live on with his father and his elder, widowed and biddable sister, Clare Dundas, whom his father had forbidden to remarry after their mother died of pneumonia.
Annoyed by the young man’s snifflings, Falconer set down his teacup and snapped, “Either blow your nose or get out of here, Grant—preferably the latter. You’re about as much good to me and your father as you have ever been to us or to anyone else, as much an asset as teats on a boar hog.
“The decision has been made, anyway. You know your duties and responsibilities, or you should. All that is now left to do is for me and your father to work out the details. So get you home and nurse your cold, but just remember all you have been told and be sure to be where I told you to be when I told you to be there.”
There was, in Falconer’s mind, no need to tell the awkward and ill-countenanced young man to keep his mouth shut anent the plans for the demise of the chief instigator of what he and MacEvedy saw as all their present and possibly future trouble—Milo Moray. The preacher well knew that Grant would not babble to friends, for he never had had one and those who worked with him in the station offices were, at the very best, cool and correct in all their dealings with their disgraced and despised superior-by-inheritance.
“If you and your people all want to stay despite everything, dammit,” Colonel Ian Lindsay had declared, “then you and they can bloody well squat here until hell freezes over, Emmett, but my people are all going away with Moray and his tribe … and to be completely candid, not a few station personnel have come to me and certain of my officers begging to be allowed to come away with us, rather than stay here and keep trying to wrest a bare living out of this contrary acreage.”
“Who?” snappedMacEvedy. “Who were the traitors, the turncoats?”
Lindsay shrugged. “Only most of your really intelligent, innovative and far-sighted types, those who have outgrown the fetters of now-senseless tradition and know they can live the better without either being forced willy-nilly into the molds of their ancestors or being constantly hectored and bullied by the man who now seems to command both you and the station, Gerald Falconer. And you can save your breath in this matter; I’ll give you no names, not one, and that’s the end of it, Emmett!”
“Then you relinquish your honor as well as, as easily as, you forsake your home, your birthplace, do you, Ian Lindsay?” MacEvedy said bitterly. “It was—it is!—your sworn duty to protect me and my station and its people with your battalion, until such a time as some responsible person rescinds the orders originally given your great-grandfather. If you and the battalion do not stay, neither can I and the station people stay safely, and you well know that as fact. Your departure would condemn us all to death, soon or late, at the bloody hands of the rovers.”