Ian smiled coldly. “You no longer bother to keep abreast of what’s happening in the station, do you, Emmett? There aren’t going to be any people left in the station or the fort, with the exception of you, your son and Falconer and his family. Why, even your own daughter, the Widow Dundas, has asked if she might accompany us, and I have gladly welcomed her; she’ll travel with Arabella and me until one of my officers gets around to marrying her.”
“But… but… but…” stammered Grant, looking to be on the verge of tears, “but without Clare in the house, who will … will cook for us and … and wash our clothes and make up our beds and dust and … and everything?”
Lindsay snorted in disgust. “Why, Grant, you’ll just have to start caring for yourselves … unless you can cozen Mrs. Falconer or her daughter into keeping you both in the style to which you have become accustomed.”
“But … but … but … Father and I are just too busy running the Station to … to …” sniffled Grant.
“Why you brainless, ball-less young ninny,” snapped Lindsay. “Can’t you understand plain English? There’s not going to be any station to administer. All of the farmers are going with me and the nomads, everyone, excepting only you, your father and the Falconers.”
“But … but … but you … you can’t, Godfather!” Grant sobbed, his tears beginning to come in floods. “Without you to … to take care of us, without the farmers to grow food, without even … even Sister Clare to … to cook and keep the dust out of the house, we’ll… we’ll all die! You … you just owe it to us to stay here and keep us all safe.” He ceased to speak then, giving himself totally over to gasping, shuddering sobs of mindless terror.
“My God, Emmett,” rasped Lindsay, “for all your other faults, you are at least a man. How in the name of all that’s holy did you and Martha Hamilton ever manage to produce a man-shaped thing like this? Get out of my office and out of the fort, and keep out of my affairs, both of you! I’m sick unto death of the sight and the sound of you!”
On the next Sunday following that meeting, the few older people who had attended divine services arose and slowly filed out when the Reverend Gerald Falconer cleared his throat to commence his sermon. Their departures left only the station director, his son and Falconer’s own family, less his eldest daughter, Megan, who had earlier in the week surreptitiously moved into the nomad camp and sent back a note declaring her intention of there remaining and of leaving with the battalion.
What issued from Gerald Falconer’s mouth during the next three-quarters of an hour was not a sermon. He ranted, he raved like a frothing lunatic on the disloyalties of parishioners, children and other relatives. He damned every prairie rover ever born orspawned, laying upon them the full blame for every ill that had afflicted the station in the last fifty years. At last, when he had worked part of the frustration and rage out of himself, he paused for a long moment to catch breath.
Then he bespoke his wife. “You get out of here now, and take the children with you. Have my dinner ready in an hour. I needs must have words with Emmett here.”
For all that Jane Falconer had been Gerald’s wife for over ten years, she still was a young woman—not yet twenty-six—and not even his years of browbeating had worn her down, any more than identical treatment had broken the spirit of his daughter by his deceased first wife. She and Megan had, indeed, thoroughly discussed in secluded whispers the girl’s decision to quit the house of her overbearing father and seek a chance of happiness in the nomad camp. She had thought to remain with the husband whom so many had already deserted, not through any sense of love or duty, but because she had felt pity for him. But after today’s diatribe, she now entertained serious doubts as to his mental and emotional balance and the wisdom of her and her tiny children’s remaining in proximity to him.
She did go home, but she remained only long enough to get together her clothing and that of her children, her Bible and a few especially treasured kitchen utensils. With everything packed in the garden wheelbarrow, her youngest child perched atop the load, she led the other two in the direction of the camp of the nomads.
“It must be done in front of as many of our people as is possible,” averred the Reverend Gerald Falconer. “I leave it to you two as to how to assemble them. Lie, if you must. God will forgive you, for it’s being done in His Holy Name.
“When we have them and him there, I will advance upon him and offer him the silver cross, demand that he hold it in his hand, kiss it and bow knee to me. He will, of course, recoil in horror and loathing from the sacred cross, and that will be your signal, Emmett, You must then bring out the pistol and place that silver bullet as close to his foul heart as you can, praying hard that God Almighty will guide your eye and hand.
“I will not, of course, be bearing any weapons, but Grant will have a rifle, and—”
“But … but Reverend Falconer,” protested Grant MacEvedy anxiously. “I … I don’t know anything about shooting rifles. Besides, the noise is so loud that it gives me headaches for days afterward, sometimes.”
“All right, all right,” snapped Falconer shortly. “Get yourself a hunter’s crossbow, then. That ought to be noiseless and simple enough for even you at the short distance you will be from your father and me. All you have to do is put your bolt in anyone who makes to prevent your father from shooting the Beast. Do you think yourself capable of protecting your own dear father, boy?”
Grant MacEvedy left the chapel meeting and repaired to the empty, echoing, now-dusty house that he shared with his father. MacEvedy pere had, in better times, been a hunter and owned the usual collection of hunting weapons, clothing and equipment.
Grant was not and had never been a hunter. He ate game, just as he ate domestic animals, but he had never even thought of killing his own food, for it was just so terribly messy a job. He had always insisted that his meat of any kind be cooked completely through, for the sight—indeed sometimes even the mere thought—of blood could render his delicate stomach unable to hold food of any type for some little time. Besides, hunting as practiced by fort or station people had always included dogs—before the folk had had to eat them, the cats and even the rats and mice—and close proximity to any furred animal had always set Grant to sneezing, wheezing and coughing, his eyes so red and swollen and teary that he could not see clearly.
Because of Grant’s utter inexperience in the use of and his complete unfamiliarity with the construction and appearance of weapons—to him, all of the prodds and crossbows closely resembled each other—it were perhaps charitable to forgive the born blunderer his grievous error in arming himself for the imminent confrontation into which he had been most unwillingly dragooned.
After all, every person or other living thing that he had ever seen shot at and hit with a fired bullet or a loosed arrow or quarrel bolt or a prodd-pellet had immediately fallen, either dead or mortally wounded. Therefore, the young man had a much-overinflated faith in the never-failing efficacy of all firearms and other missile weapons. He did not for one single minute doubt that immediately his father blasted the holy silver bullet into the breast of the werebeast, Moray, the sinister, unnatural creature would curl up and die, thus proving for once and always to all and sundry of the misled, mutinous people that Director MacEvedy and the Reverend Mr. Falconer had been right all along.
He seriously doubted that he ever would have to actually make use of the heavy, clumsy, terribly dusty weapon he finally chose, but he always had obeyed his father, and his father had instructed him to cooperate in every way with the Reverend Gerald Falconer.
He left the room that housed the director’s modest arsenal with a medium-weight crossbow and a belt pouch of quarrels, just as he had been bidden to do. However, that device which he took for a crossbow, because of very similar shape, was actually a double-stringed prodd or stone-thrower, while the pouch of quarrel shafts—which, of course, he had not bothered to check, nor likely would have known for what differences to look, had he checked—were tipped with smooth, blunt horn heads and were intended for use in a lighter, one-stringed weapon when hunting birds or rabbits.