And if Mills found him expendable in his major purpose? What a pity, to dispose of him when he had other delightful uses! Assuming that Chabrier had an escape hatch, he would still be crazy to use it while Mills supported him. "Marengo, would you know in advance if you were about to get the axe?"
Doubting, and hiding that doubt, he nodded in bogus certainty.
"Then leave it to little Evie to find you a bailout procedure."
He had the courage to smile, recalling the ancient bastardized French of airmen. "M'aidez?"
"Yeah; mayday," she agreed, and began to aid him in more carnal ways.
CHAPTER 38
The rawboned stranger swept in on the scruffiest, quietest hovercycle Sandy Grange had ever seen. She noted however that beneath its blotched paint, huge muffler, and dented air-cushion skirts lurked a small turbocharged diesel of the sort that might take a man a hundred klicks on a gallon of fuel. And its pannier tanks were uncommonly large.
She penetrated the man's disguise as easily as she did the machine's. "You were told right, Mr. — uh, Gold," she smiled, shifting her basketful of snap-beans to shake his hand. His fingertips, but not his palms, were callused; and his sunburn said that he had not been outdoors much until the past few days. "How long will you stay?"
He slapped dust from his sweatstained stetson and favored her with an ingratiating grin. It removed any stray doubt as to his real name. "Depends, Miz Grange. I expect to be met here for the next leg of my trip. I detoured around Rocksprings, so don't worry 'bout that. And I brought my own grub."
"But no guitar," she said in mock innocence.
"Now you're funnin' me, ma'am." The grin was suddenly lopsided.
Confidently she led him into the soddy. "Just a little," she admitted, showing him where to wash up and to lay his sleeping bag. "I believe the Scots word for 'golden' is 'ora'. Really, you might've chosen a different alias."
Ora McCarty raised despairing eyes to the roof, sighed, said nothing.
"Besides, I've seen you many times on the holo. How many towns have you passed through on the way here?"
"Not a one, little lady. They said it was either take the outlaw trail or have some work done on my face and, well,—"
"Your face is part of your fortune. I understand, Mr. Me — Gold."
"Aw shoot, you'll razz me hollow at this rate, Miz—"
"It's Sandy, Mr. McCarty. Do you know, you're the third traveler I've had here in a week? I may add another room and hang out a shingle, if this keeps up. Now if you'll excuse me, this garden truck of mine won't jump into the basket by itself."
Presently McCarty emerged, much refreshed, and wandered out to the garden. Soon he found himself picking beans — one to Sandy's four — and laughed with her when she observed, "Someday I'll tell the story of the time a future President helped me pick beans."
"But make that 'candidate,' Sandy. Election is two years off and I'm the darkest horse since Black Beauty. Nobody's afraid of me at the polls."
Sandy stretched the kinks from her back. "Nobody was afraid of W. Lee O'Daniel either — until it was too late." In her passion for books and a Texan's passion for Texas, Sandy had accumulated a fund of trivia which she happily shared with the reverend McCarty. O'Daniel had become famous in the 1930's as a cloyingly countrified guitar plunker, but rode his radio audience into the Governor's mansion in Austin — and then galloped on to Washington as a senator.
McCarty knew his faults. He was politically naive and, though far older than Sandy, found her arguments worrisome. He was a lay preacher, not a Machiavelli. He hadn't sought the Indy vote; accepted his candidacy with reluctance only after slick-talking folks in Ogden raised a campaign fund without his knowledge.
Several Indy candidates had already made their intentions known, though presidential campaigns would not intensify for nearly two years. For McCarty, things had just kind of got out of hand. Still, in face-to-face rallies Ora McCarty could say things he couldn't say on FBN holovision; for example, that a company big enough to hire ten thousand people was also big enough to accept collective bargaining.
That implied unions — a topic on the proscribed list. So far, McCarty's rhetoric was much milder than that of most dissenters.
"I have an idea this fella Albeniz rigged this trip for me to talk to some union folks," he confided as they carried their produce ‘truck' back to the soddy. He was not prepared for her response.
"Albeniz? Lufo Albeniz?"
"I talk too durn much," he gloomed.
"You said what I wanted to hear," she laughed, "but if Lufo arranged it, don't be surprised if you happen across Governor Street."
"That would surprise me, all righty," he chuckled. "I come down here 'cause I was told it might save a lot of trouble, maybe some lives, if I came alone like this."
He paused as Sandy placed fingers in her mouth and blew a long, two-note whistle with a rising terminal inflection. "I'm calling my little sis," she explained. "While you're here she'll have to, ah, tend the stock."
You run cattle hereabouts?"
"We try," she replied vaguely, and with an amusement he could not fathom. In truth, the only way they ran cattle was to run them stampeding, the first time they got downwind of Childe's improbable steed.
Childe drank goat's milk and liked it.
In good time, a scrawny girlchild pelted out of the cedar and oak scrub, moving somewhat warily as she neared the middle-aged stranger with the well-worn clothes and the fresh sunburn. But Sandy had given the 'come alone, OK' whistle and Childe's approach was only her natural shyness. Sandy introduced Childe as mute, and McCarty as 'Gold', giving each a cover story.
"You go tend the animals, hon, but be back by dark if you want supper." The little girl kissed Sandy, made a ragged-skirted curtsy that charmed McCarty and sped off again, a knob-kneed little whirlwind lacking only her attendant dust-devil.
The late-summer sun was touching distant trees as the two adults feasted outside on cornbread, beans, and a hot sauce Sandy labeled Ajuey — pronounced 'aaivizoooey'. McCarty praised each bite as it bit him back, and claimed that his were tears of joy. He had heard of South Texas hot sauce; knew that in time it would lose its erection, and silently prayed God for that time to arrive. Bats could have roosted in his sinuses. When the sun went down, he was sure, he could use his tongue for a flashlight.
When at last his voice lost its castrato timbre, Ora McCarty resumed a previous topic. "Governor Street is a man I mightily admire, Sandy. If he wasn't on the dodge, he'd be the man to beat on the Indy ticket."
Those, Sandy replied, were her own feelings.
"But his hide wouldn't hold shucks if he paraded it in Streamlined America. Young's enemies have a way of wakin' up dead these days," he persisted.
Sandy nodded and took more hot sauce with cool unconcern.
"Anyhow, I just hope I can make it back to Zion — uh, Utah, without makin' Young's hit list. Awright then, I'm nervous," he admitted.
"I would be, too. I'd be scared to run an Indy safehouse even here in Wild Country if I didn't have — friends — to protect me." Her candid eyes, agelessly wise but somehow artless, smiled into his. "I gu'ess we have to decide whether we want security or improvement; and there is no security. So you and I made the same decision, hm?"
"You're a spooky young woman, you know that? Too smart too soon. If I was a young man of courtin'
age, your brains'd run me up a tree."