The Terran lay hoping for the familiar spur of anger to toughen his resolution. But it did not come. It was as if he could feel only one thing now – longing for that pictured land. Yet even if there was no anger to back it, the oath still rested on him and he must do what he had come to Arzor-
Storm had half-forgotten Logan, but now the younger man rose from the chair he had chosen and moved forward to the mural, his eyes on those wind-battered riders. There was a shade of wistfulness in his face, and none could ever doubt his kinship with the men pictured there.
“What was it like?” he asked abruptly. “How did it make a man feel to ride so across that country?” Then he was conscious of the hurt that memory might deal, and a darker flood crept up his clean jawline. He turned his head to the bed, his eyes troubled.
“I left that life,” Storm picked his words with care, “when I was a child. Twice I returned – it was never the same. But it stays, deep in one’s mind it continues to live. The one who painted that – for him it lived. Even here, far across the star lanes, it lived!”
“For her –” Logan corrected softly.
Storm sat up, away from his bolstering pillows. He could not know how stone-hard his face had become. He did not have a chance to voice his question.
Another stood in the doorway, the big man with the compelling blue eyes, the man Storm had come to find and yet did not want to meet. Brad Quade walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at the Terran measuringly. And Storm knew that this was to be the last meeting of all, that in spite of his queer inner reluctance, he must force the issue and be ready to face the consequences.
With some of his old speed of action the Terran’s hand went out, caught at the knife in Logan’s belt, and jerked it free, resting the blade across his knee, its point significantly toward Brad Quade.
Those blue eyes did not change. The settler might have been expecting that very move. Or else he did not understand what it implied. But that Storm did not believe.
He was right! Quade knew – accepted the challenge – or at least recognized the reason for it for the other was speaking:
“If there is steel between us, boy, why did you bring me out of the Nitra camp?”
“A life for a life until our last accounting. You kept the blade out of my back at the Crossing. A warrior of the Dineh pays his debts. I come from Na-Ta-Hay. Upon Na-Ta-Hay and upon his family you have set the dishonour of blood spilled – and other shame –”
Brad Quade did not move, except to step closer to the foot of the bed. When Logan stirred, he signalled with his hand in an imperative order that kept his son where he was.
There is and was no blood spilled between the family of Na-Ta-Hay and me,” he replied deliberately. “And certainly no shame!”
Storm was chilled. He had never believed that Quade would deny his guilt when they at last faced each other. From his first sight of the settler he had granted him the virtue of honesty.
“What of Nahani?” he asked coldly.
“Nahani!” Quade was startled. He leaned forward, his big brown hands grasping the footrail of the bed, breathing a little faster as if he had come running to this meeting. And Storm could not mistake the genuine surprise in his tone.
“Nahani,” repeated the Terran deliberately. Then struck by a possible explanation for the other’s bewilderment, he added:
“Or did you never know the name of the man you killed at Los Gatos –?”
“Los Gatos?” Brad Quade stooped, as if striving to bring his blue eyes on a level with the dark ones Storm raised to meet them. “Who – are – you?” He spaced those words with little breaths between, as if each were forced from him by that sharp point still in Storm’s hold.
“I am Hosteen Storm – Nahani’s son – Na-Ta-Hay’s grandson –”
Brad Quade’s lips moved as if he were trying to shape words, and finally they came:
“But he told us – told Raquel – that you were dead – of fever! She – she had to remember that all the rest of her life! She went back to the mesa for you and Na-Ta-Hay showed her a walled-up cave – said you were buried in it – That nearly killed her, too!” Brad Quade whirled, his broad shoulders undefended to Storm’s attack. He balled his hands into fists, brought them down against the wall as if he were battering something else, a shadow not concrete enough to take the punishment he craved to deal out.
“Blast him! He tortured her on purpose! How could he do that to his own daughter?”
Storm watched that sudden rage die as Quade’s control snapped into place. The fist became a hand again, reached out to touch with delicate tenderness, the edge of the mural.
“How could he do it? Even if he were such a fanatic –” Quade asked again, wonderingly. “Nahani wasn’t killed – at least by me. He died of snake bite. I don’t know what you’ve been told – a twisted story apparently –” He spoke quietly and Storm slumped back against his pillows, his world unsteady. He could not fan dead anger to life. Quade’s sober voice carried too much conviction.
“Nahani was attached to the Survey Service,” Quade said tiredly. He pulled a chair to him, dropped into it, still eyeing Storm with a kind of hungry demand for belief. “I was, too, then. We worked together on several assignments – and our Amerindian background led us to close friendship. There was trouble with the Xik on some of the outer planets and Nahani was captured in one of their sneak raids. He escaped and I went to see him at the base hospital. But they had tried to “condition” him –”
Storm tensed and shivered. Quade, seeing his reaction, nodded.
“Yes, you can understand what that meant. It was bad – he was – changed. The medic thought perhaps something could be done for him on Terra. He was sent home for rehabilitation. But during the first month, he got away from the hospital – disappeared. We learned later that he made his way back to his own home. His wife and son were there, a two-year-old child.
“Outwardly he appeared normal. His wife’s father – Na-Ta-Hay – was one of the irreconcilables who refused to acknowledge any change or need for change in the native way of life. He was fanatic almost past the point of strict sanity. And he welcomed Nahani back as one rescued from the disaster of becoming Terran in place of Dineh. But Raquel, Nahani’s wife, knew that he must have expert help. She got word of his whereabouts to the authorities without her father’s knowledge. I was asked to go with the medic to pick him up because I was on leave and I was his friend – they hoped I could persuade him to come in peaceably for treatment.
“When he discovered we were coming, he went on the run again. Raquel and I followed him into the desert. When we found his hidden camp, he was already dead – of snake bite. And when Raquel returned to her father’s place for her baby, he was like a wild man – he accused her of betraying her husband, of turning traitor to her people, and drove her off with a gun.
“She came to me for help, and with guards we went to get her child – only to be shown a grave, the walled-up cave. Raquel collapsed and was ill for months. Afterwards we were married, I resigned from the service and brought her to my home here, hoping in new surroundings she could forget. I think she was happy – especially after Logan was born. But she only lived four years – And that is the true story!”
The knife lay by itself on the blanket. Storm’s hands were over his eyes, shutting out the room, allowing him to see into a place that was dark and alive with an odd danger he must face by himself, as he faced Bister back at the Peaks.
A blurred column of years stretched out behind him – separating him from that long-ago day when Na-Ta-Hay had impressed his bitter will upon a small awed boy to whom his grandfather was as tall and powerful as one of the fabled Old Ones – between now and the day just after he had landed at the Centre when Na-Ta-Hay’s spirit seemed to spread like a shadow across all his memories and dreams of Terra, his now destroyed homeland. He had clung to that shadow of a man, and to the oath he had given, making them anchors in a reeling world. Storm had fostered a hatred of Quade because he had to have some purpose in life, though even then something deep within him had tried to repudiate it. He saw it all now – so clearly.