"I'm afraid Miss Simmons is unobtainable, sir," said the butler. "She and Mr. Simmons are in the paddock—if you wouldn't mind going out to join them, sir."
"All right," said Craig, and rose.
"Would you like to leave your umbrella, sir?"
"No," said Craig. "Just the briefcase."
He'd grown very fond of his umbrella.
"Very good, sir. This way, sir," the butler said. His face was quite expressionless, but Craig had the uneasy feeling that deep inside, where no one could reach him, the butler was laughing.
He led Craig into another room, with French windows opening on to a lawn and beyond the lawn a rose garden. Beyond the rose garden, he learned, was the paddock. Craig stepped out on to the lawn, and heard the windows click shut behind him. His feet moved soundlessly on the grass, and then he was enfolded in a great tunnel of roses, hundreds, thousands of them wreathed and entwined seven feet in the air, small and heavily scented, while great bush roses sprang from the ground to meet them, their beauty powerful, even arrogant. It was a set for a film by some clever Frenchman, and Craig detested it. It was like the flowers themselves, too slick, too contrived.
At the end of the garden was a brick wall, pierced by a latched door. Craig opened it and stepped into the paddock, shutting the door behind him. The paddock was L-shaped, and Craig found himself in the shorter arm of the L, his view of what lay around the corner obscured by the garden wall. He walked across the foot-high grass, and realized at once that the umbrella had been a mistake. So, for that matter, had the bowler. They didn't belong. No wonder the butler had been laughing where no one could hear him. Then he heard it. A rhythmic, loping sound, horses on heavy grass held to a hand gallop and cutting across that the sharper, more staccato noise of another heavy beast running. Craig looked for cover and there was none, and behind him only an un-climbable wall. Already he knew what he was going to face, and he had no time to prepare. It shot round the corner of the paddock in a great swerve of concentrated power, cat-footed for all its size. A Hereford bull, half a ton on the hoof and fighting mad, its black hide shining as if it had been rubbed with oil, its horns ivory bright, questing for a target. Craig stood very still. The bull slowed to a walk and sniffed the breeze, the horns slowly turned to hold him in their splayed-vee shape. Then to Craig's astonishment a cowboy cantered around the corner, a cowboy that Remington might have painted, with plains shirt, ten-gallon hat, neckerchief, jeans tucked in Mexican boots, and a Colt .45 in a holster. He was riding a palomino and swinging a rope. As Craig watched the rope's loop spun out, seeking the bull's horns. It missed, and the rope smacked the bull's face. Without warning, with seemingly no instant between the cautious walk and incredible speed, the bull put its head down and went for Craig.
To run was to invite being maimed at least; to stand, unless one had taken lessons from El Cor-dobes, was to die. Craig compromised by scrambling quickly to one side, then lashed out with the weapon of ultimate respectability, the umbrella, as the Hereford thundered past, aiming for the eyes, but the brute hooked with its horns and Craig felt as if he had been holding an umbrella that had been struck by a train. His arm seemed to vibrate in its socket and the umbrella, now V-shaped, spun in the air like a boomerang, then stuck point down in the grass as the bull skidded, swerved neatly, and came in again, and again Craig swerved aside. This time as it charged he snatched the bowler from his head, and the man on the palomino, who had been laughing, suddenly gasped aloud, for at the next charge of the bull Craig ran to meet it, swerved again, and struck with the bowler hat's hard edge. It spun up into the air, then impaled itself in ruin on the bull's right horn. The Hereford bellowed in agony, and the man on the palomino kneed the horse into action, rode up, and threw his rope. He was joined from nowhere by other cowboys, gaudy as butterflies. This time the rope flew accurately, settled round the small wicked horns, and the Hereford, still bellowing, was still. He'd been through it all before.
Craig walked to the angle of the L-shaped paddock, and found himself in what looked to be a film set. Ranch house, hardware store, and smithy, raised boardwalk, hitching rail, the Last Chance Saloon, sheriffs office, livery stable, even a Wells Fargo stage, with four horses poled up and a man riding shotgun. He was in the middle of a TV series, three-dimensional, life-size. Craig began to realize what a multi-millionaire meant when he described his hobbies as various.
He leaned against a hitching rail, and the quar-terhorse tethered to it snorted, being in character. He discovered he was shaking. To a man on a horse, his encounter with the Hereford must have had a Keystone Cops quality; for him, on foot, it had held nothing but terror and, as always, terror had generated rage so that inevitably he had chosen to attack rather than submit, opting for astronomic odds rather than no odds at all, and again it had worked, because his speed and skill were as perfect as a human being's can be. But each time might be the last time, and his body shook with the knowledge of it. He began to breathe consciously, deliberately, in and out, timing his rhythm, so that when he heard the clop-clop of hooves on the dusty main street, he was relaxed, easy, and wary as a cat at Cruft's.
The group coming toward him might have been coming to rob the Dodge City bank. The man on the palomino came first, and near him was a slighter figure in a buffalo coat and white Stetson. Behind them more gaudy cowboys, among them a Mexican vaquero, his high-crowned hat slung back to his shoulders, his clothes and saddle glinting with jangling silver. The cowboy in the buffalo coat kneed the pony into a trot and swung up to him. The pony circled daintily, and Craig leaned back on the rail and looked up.
"Why howdy, Miss Jane," he said.
The girl looked down at him and marveled. All her life she had been told of the advantage of looking down on horseback at the peasantry. It was obvious that Craig had never shared her lessons. He looked as relaxed, as easy, as when he had given her dinner in Keswick. His mahogany-colored hair was unruffled; his shoes still shone; his pale eyes told her nothing at all. He filled her with a terror she still found quite delicious.
"I-I hope you're all right," she said.
"I'm fine," said Craig. "How's the bull?"
The man on the palomino came up in time to hear it, and laughed aloud.
"Daddy," said Jane, "this is Mr. Craig."
Simmons swung down from his horse and ground-tied it to the manner born. He strode over to Craig and held out his hand. Craig took it, and sensed the power in the man. Simmons was tall and lean and deadly, and Craig knew it at once.
"Welcome to the Lazy J," said Simmons. "The bull has a black eye but he'll live."
"That's nice," said Craig.
"I think so," Simmons said. "I paid five thousand pounds for him when he was a calf. Come and have a drink."
They walked down the boardwalk to the Last Chance, the batwing doors swung, and once again Craig found himself completely at home in surroundings that had been familiar since he'd first gone to the movies: the long bar, a barman with a Texan longhorn mustache, nude pictures behind the bar, and above them the mirror that reflected a roomful of rickety tables and chairs, a worn piano, and a tiny stage. At one of the tables a dude gambler dealt himself poker hands to keep in practice; at the piano the perfesser banged out a honky-tonk blues that suggested he had finished his musical education in a whorehouse—Mahogany Hall, New Orleans, say, about 1892.