Lindsay shook his head. “Not necessarily, Emmett. You’ll still have the fort, the rifles, the catapults, the spear-throwers, and you’ll have the artillery pieces.”
“None of which the most of the station people know much of anything about the use of,” lamented MacEvedy. “It has always been and it still is your duty to protect us and the station, we are farmers, not fighters, and it has always been so.”
“Then it’s now far past time that you all stood up on your hind legs and began to do your own fighting, Emmett. You and the others who want to stay can be taught the fundamentals of the uses of the firearms and the tension-torsion weapons by the time the rest of us are ready to leave with the tribe.”
“But … but it is not our place,” began MacEvedy. “We are all peaceable, peace-loving farmers, we—”
“Yes, peaceable and peace-loving,” Lindsay interrupted him scornfully, “just so long as you had, as you always have had, a group of poor sods to do your fighting for you, save you all from risking your precious necks in war, even while you despised and loathed these men of war, these men whom you have ¦always considered to be your moral inferiors.
“No, don’t try to deny it. Emmett. I’ve known just how you and most of the station personnel felt about us of the battalion for all of my life. My father knew it, too, and my grandfather, and his sire, the first colonel of the battalion to serve with it here at MacEvedy Station. But serve on in spite of it they did. It was their duty and they felt bound by their oaths to the government and the army.”
“Just so!” said MacEvedy. “They were honorable men, but you …”
“But I, Emmett, do not any longer feel myself bound by oaths sworn by my father’s father’s father to a government, an army, a nation that ceased to exist some century or more ago.”
MacEvedy sneered. “You have only the word of that unnatural devil spawn Moray for that last. What makes you believe him, anyway?”
“It just stands to reason, man, or are you too blind and hidebound to see it? What responsible government of any kind would set a station and troops to guard it up here and then just ignore it and them for more than a hundred years? Moray attests that he was living when Ottawa was vaporized by one of those hellish weapons that they used in warfare in olden times. Why, Moray says that—”
“Moray says this, Moray says that,” snapped MacEvedy, mocking Lindsay’s speaking voice. “I think that that Satan’s imp has gone far toward robbing you of your immortal soul, Ian Lindsay. That’s what I think!”
“Emmett,” asked Lindsay in a serious tone, “what ever led you to the belief that Milo Moray is an evil demon of some ilk? Such maunderings sound less like you than like that power-mad fool Gerald Falconer.”
“Sweet Jesus, Ian,” expostulated MacEvedy. “You saw and heard all that I did. He freely admits to having no reverence for the Lord God Jehovah, seems vastly pleased that this tribe of his are pagans, worshiping the sun and the moon and the wind. And you saw, as I did, the eerie, evil occurrences when your daughter shot him in the chest with your own service revolver. Do you not recall what she gave as her reason for fetching the gun and making an earnest effort to kill him, Ian?
“She said that her God-given mind-reading talent had caused her to sense that his mind was unnatural, inhuman, not the mind of a mortal man with an immortal soul. She—”
“Arabella said nothing of the sort, Emmett,” said Lindsay. “I think you must have a very selective, inventive memory. But go on with it, get it all out. What else is your ‘evidence’ that Milo Moray is the devil’s disciple?”
Looking a bit abashed, MacEvedy said, “Well, he may not be exactly that, he may simply be a werewolf or a vampire, but both kinds of monsters are servants of Satan.
“You must recall all the horror that ensued after she shot him, put a bullet right through his chest, which would have been the certain death of any natural man. As you may remember, I once used a .380 to dispatch a wounded wild boar, when we were hunting together. I know well what those bullets can wreak on the flesh of natural creatures of God’s world.
“But he not only did not die, Ian, we all of us watched while that grievous wound first ceased to bleed, then began to close up and heal itself. Gerald only confirmed to me what I knew as I watched the impossible happen: no one but Satan, the Fallen Angel, could have been responsible, so it must have been Satan who sent Milo Moray here to tempt us, to delude us, to steal away our souls and lead us all down to the fiery pits of the deepest, infernal regions of hell.”
Lindsay shook his head slowly. “It seems that I learn more about you with every passing day, Emmett, and most of what I’ve been recently learning is to your detriment, lowering even farther my opinion of you. Emmett, Gerald Falconer is a superstitious fool, a hypocrite, a type of man whom his father or his grandfather would disown. You must, deep down inside you, be every bit as superstitious as is he—otherwise you wouldn’t listen to his dredged-up horror stories and hoary legends.
“Hell, man, all of us heard those tales when we were children, and they scared us, as those who told them meant them to do, but when we began to grow up, we began to realize just what those old tales were and they ceased to scare us … most of us. Look, you say that Moray might be a vampire, a bloodsucking living corpse, but think back on those particular tales, Emmett. Vampires have to, it’s said, move about only by night because sunlight will kill them. How many days has Moray walked and ridden and stood about this fort and station under the glaring sun, do you think? Did he shrivel up and die? Not hardly, Emmett.
“You attest that there can be but one evil reason for Moray’s being the most singular type of man that he most assuredly is: namely, that only Satan could have gifted him with the unheard-of physical properties that he owns. But Emmett, Emmett, both you and Falconer have clear forgot that there is One more powerful even than Satan. I am firmly convinced that for all his different and seemingly unreligious ways, Moray has been touched by God. The Scriptures tell us that ‘the Lord moves in wondrous ways, His wonders to perform,’ and I believe that Moray is one of those wonders of God, just as I believe that his arrival here, in our time of darkest trouble and deepest despair, was another such Wonder.”
“I knew in advance that you would fail,” said Gerald Falconer. “The devilish beast has too far cozened Colonel Lindsay for your poor powers to counteract. But I have here that which will truly slay the beast, send him back to his hellish master in the pit.”
Opening a small box of carven cedarwood, the preacher took from it a polished brass pistol cartridge. Where the dull gray lead bullet should have been there now was the gleam of burnished silver. Moreover, the nose of the bullet had been carefully made flat and a cross had been deeply inscribed thereon.
“I pored over the ancient books, that my memories might be exact, before I cast this bullet and put it in the case over as much powder as it would hold. A bullet of pure silver marked with a cross is sovereign against witch, warlock, vampire or werewolf.
“This cartridge will fit your revolver—your son fetched me the case from your home, so I know. It is your duty as station director and your honor as a true, God-fearing, Christian man to put paid to the beast, to kill this Satanic thing who calls himself Milo Moray.”