5
"Good heavens, I must have slept all morning! What time is it, please, Sir Knight?"
Sir Howard glanced at his wrist, then remembered that his watch was under his gauntlet and vambrace. It was a good watch, and the knight's economical soul would have squirmed at the idea of wearing it outside when there was a prospect of a fight. He got up and looked at the clock built into the pommel of his saddle. "Eleven-thirty," he announced. "Sleep well?"
"Like a top. I suppose your friend hasn't appeared yet?"
Sir Howard looked through the pines at the gently rolling, sandy landscape. Nothing moved in it save an occasional bird. "No," he replied, "but that doesn't mean anything. We're to wait till dark. If he doesn't show up by then we'll move on to—wherever we're going."
The girl was looking, too. "I see you picked a place without a house in sight for your rendezvous. I . . . uh . . . don't suppose there's anything to eat, is there?"
"Nope; and I feel as though I could eat a horse and chase the driver. We'll just have to wait."
She looked at the ground. "I don't mean to look a gift rescuer in the mouth, if you know what I mean . . . but . . . I don't suppose you'd want to tell me your real name?"
Sir Howard came to with a snort. "My real . . . how the devil did you know?"
"I hope you don't mind, but in the sunlight you can see that that trademark's been painted on over another one. Even with all that blood on your suit."
Sir Howard grinned broadly. "The gore of miscreants is more beautiful than a sunset, as it says in a book somewhere. I'll make you an offer: I'll tell you my real name if you'll tell me yours!"
It was the girl's turn to start, deny, and interrogate. "Simple, my dear young lady. You say you're Mary Clark, but you have the letters SM embroidered on your blouse, and an S on your handkerchief. Fair enough, huh?"
"Oh, very well, my name is Sara Waite Mitten. Now how about yours, smarty?"
"You've heard of the Poughkeepsie Van Slycks?" Sir Howard gave a precis of his position in that noble family. As he was doing so, Paul Jones ambled over and poked the girl with his nose. She started to scratch his forehead, but jerked her hand away. "What's his name?" she asked. The knight told her.
"Where did you get it?"
"Oh, I don't know; it's been a name for horses in our family for a long time. I suppose there was a man by that name once; an important man, that is."
"Yes," she said, "there was. He was a romantic sort of man, just the sort that would have gone around rescuing maidens from captivity, if there'd been any maidens in captivity. He had a sense of humor, too. Once when the ship he commanded was being chased by an enemy, he kept his ship just out of range, so that the broadsides from the enemy's guns fell just short. Jones posted a man in the stern of his ship with orders to return each broadside with one musket shot. A musket was a kind of light gun they had in those days."
"He sounds like a good guy. Was he handsome, too?"
"Well"—the girl cocked her head to one side—"that depends on the point of view. If you consider apes handsome, Paul Jones was undoubtedly good-looking. By the way, I notice that your Paul Jones' coloring comes off when you rub him." She held up a paint-smeared hand. The gelding had no desire to be scratched or petted; he was hoping for sugar. As none was forthcoming, he walked off. Sally Mitten continued: "When I first met you, I decided you were just a big, active young man with no particular talents except for chopping up people you didn't like. But the whole way the rescue was planned, and your noticing the initials on my clothes, seem to show real intelligence."
"Thanks. My family never credited me with much brains, but maybe I'll disappoint them yet. It just occurred to me that I needn't have told you who I was; I could have explained the trademark by saying I'd bought this suit secondhand."
"But you'd hardly have repainted your horse, even if he was secondhand, also, would you?"
"Say, you're the damnedest young person. No matter what I say you go me one better." He thought a minute, and asked, "How long were you in Kelly's castle?"
"Three days."
Three days, eh? A lot could happen in that time. But if she wasn't going to tell him about it of her own accord, he certainly wasn't going to ask her. The question was, in fact, never referred to by either again.
"And where," asked Sir Howard, "did you get all that information about Paul Jones, and the times when men had guns, and so forth?"
"Out of books, mostly."
"Books, huh? I didn't know there were books on those things, unless the hoppers have some. Speaking of the devil—"
He tilted his head back to watch a flying machine snore overhead and dwindle to a mote in the cloudless sky. There was the sound of a quickly indrawn breath beside him. He turned to the girl. Her voice was low and intensely serious. "Sir Howard, you've done me a great service, and you want to help me out, don't you? Well, whatever happens, I don't want to fall into their hands. I'd rather go back to Kelly's castle."
"But what—" He stopped. She seemed genuinely frightened. She hadn't been at all frightened of Kelly, he thought; merely angry and contemptuous.
"You don't have to worry about me," he reassured her. "I don't like them, either." He told her about his brother. "And now," he said, "I'm going to catch a couple of hours' sleep. Wake me if anybody comes in sight."
It seemed to him that he had hardly found a comfortable position before his shoulder was being shaken. "Wake up!" she said, "Wake . . . up . . . oh, confound you, wake . . . up!"
"Haas?" he mumbled, blinking.
"No, one of them. I shook you and shook you—"
He got up so suddenly that he almost upset her. His sleepiness was as though it had never been.
The sun was low in the sky. Over the sand and grass a two-wheeled vehicle was approaching the group of pines. Sir Howard glanced at Paul Jones, nibbling contentedly at the tops of timothy weeds. "No use trying to run," he said. "It would see us, and those cycles can go like a lightning flash late for a date. Three or four times as fast as a horse, anyway. We'll have to bluff it out. Maybe it doesn't want us, really."
The vehicle headed straight into the pines and purred to a stop, remaining upright on its two wheels. The rounded lucite top opened, and a hopper got out unhurriedly. The two human beings saluted. They became aware of the faint cheesy odor of the thing.
"You are Sir William Scranton," it chirped.
Sir Howard saw no reason for denying such a flat statement. "Yes, your excellency."
"You killed Warren Kelly last night."
"No, your excellency." The beady black eyes under the leather helmet seemed to bore into him. The pointed face carried no message of emotion. The ratlike whiskers quivered as they always did.
"Do not contradict, Man. It is known that you did."
Sir Howard's mouth was dry, and his bones seemed to have turned to jelly. He who had been in six pitched battles without turning a hair, and who had snatched a robber chief's captive out from under his nose, was frightened. The hopper's clawed hand rested casually on the butt of a small gun in a belt holster. Sir Howard, like most human beings of his time, was terrified of guns. He had no idea of how they worked. A hopper pointed a harmless-looking tool at you, and there was a flash and a small thunderclap, and you were dead with a neat hole the size of your thumb in your plate. That was all. Resistance to creatures commanding such powers was hopeless. And where resistance is hopeless, courage is so rare as to lay the possessor thereof open to the charge of having a screw loose.
He tried another tack. "I should have said, your excellency, that I do not remember killing Kelly. Besides, the killing of a man is not against the higher law." (He meant hopper law.)
That seemed to stop the hopper. "No," it squeaked. "But it is inconvenient that you should have killed Kelly." It paused, as if trying to think up an excuse for making an arrest. "You lied when you said that you did not kill Kelly. And the higher law is what we say it is." A little breeze made the pines whisper. Sir Howard, chilled, felt that Death was moving among them, chuckling.
The hopper continued: "Something is wrong here. We must investigate you and your accomplice." Sir Howard, out of the corner of his eye, saw that Sally Mitten's lips were pressed together in a thin red line.
"Show me your travel permit, Man."
Sir Howard's heart seemed likely to burst his ribs at each beat. He walked over to Paul Jones and opened a pocket in the saddle stuffed with papers. He thumbed through them, and selected a tourist-agency circular advertising the virtues of the Thousand Islands. This he handed the hopper.
The creature bent over the paper. The knight's sword whirled and flashed with a wht of cloven air. There was a meaty chug.
Sir Howard leaned on his sword, waiting for the roaring in his ears to cease. He knew that he had come as near to fainting as he ever had in his life. A few feet away lay the hopper's head, the beady eyes staring blankly. The rest of the hopper lay at his feet, its limbs jerking slightly, pushing the sand up into little piles with its hands and feet. Blue- green blood spread out in a widening pool. A few pine needles gyrated slowly on its surface.
The girl's eyes were round. "What . . . what'll we do now?" she asked. It was barely more than a whisper.
"I don't know. I don't know. I never heard of anything like this before." He took his fascinated gaze away from the cadaver, to look over the dunes. "Look, there's Haas!" His blood began to run warm again. The foreigner might not be able to help much, but he'd be company.
The Westerner rode up jauntily, his chaps flapping against Queenie's flanks. He called: "Hiya, folks! Had the devil's own time gettin' rid of those lobsters, you call 'em. I had to drown—" He stopped as he saw the hopper, and gave a long whistle. "Well . . . I . . . never. Say, boy, I thought maybe you had nerve, but I never heard of nobody doing that. Maybe you'd like to try something safe, like wrassling a grizzly, or tying a knot in a piece of lightning?" He smiled uneasily.
"I had to," said Sir Howard. His composure was restored by the Westerner's awe. He'd mounted the wild stallion of revolt, and there was nothing to do but ride it with what aplomb he could muster. "He asked to see my permit, and I'd have been arrested for trade-mark infringement or something." He introduced Sally Mitten, and gave a resume of events.
"We've got to get rid of it, quickly," the girl broke in. "When they're out patrolling the way this one was, they report to their station by radio every hour or so. When this one fails to report, the others will start a search for it."
"How will they do that, miss?" asked Haas.
"They'll make a big circle around the place it last reported from, and close in, meanwhile keeping the area under observation from the air."
"Sounds sensible. From what you tell me, this one was on an official mission or something, so his buddies'll have an idea where he was about the time he got whittled. So we'll be inside the circle. How'll we get rid of him? If we just buried him—"
"They might use dogs to locate it," said the girl.
"Well, now if we could sink him in the river or something. This Hans Creek yonder ain't deep enough."
Sir Howard was frowning at one of the large-scale maps he had bought in Amsterdam the previous evening. "The Sacandaga Reservoir is over across those hills," he said, pointing north.
"No," said Sally Mitten. "We've got to get rid of its cycle, too. You couldn't get it over Maxon Ridge. I know: put it in Round Lake. That's just out of sight east of here."
"Say, miss, do you carry a map of this whole country around in your head?" inquired Haas quizzically.
"I've lived near here most of my life. We'll put some clean sand and pine needles on the blood spots. And Sir Howard, you'll want to clean your sword blade at the first opportunity."
"Your little lady's okay, How," said Haas, dismounting. "Only she ain't so little, at that. Fall to, folks. You take his head—I mean his arms; the head comes separate. Don't get any of that blue stuff on you. In we go! It's nice these things stand up on their two wheels even when they ain't moving; it'll make it easy to push."
"Punch some holes in the lucite," said Sally Mitten. "That'll let the vehicle sink more quickly."
"Danged if she doesn't think of everything," said Haas, getting to work with his knife on the thin cowling. He grinned. "How, I'd sure like to hear the other hoppers, if they do find him, trying to figure out what happened to him. If I could understand their canary talk, that is. Say, miss, you got any ideas how to get out of this circle if they start looking before we get away? And which way had we ought to go?"
"I'll show you, Mr. Haas. I think I know how it can be done. And if you desperate characters want to hide out, come with me. I know just the place. We'll have to hurry. Oh, you didn't bring any food with you, did you? I couldn't have eaten anything a few minutes ago, but I'm hungry again, now that it is out of sight. And I imagine Sir Howard is, also."
"Danged if I didn't forget. I stopped on the way and got some hot dogs. I figured you might be kinda hollow by now." He produced a couple of Cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. "They'll be kinda dry. But for flavor you might put on a little of that blood How's got on his armor."
The girl looked at the splotches on the suit. Sir Howard, grinning, wiped some of the sticky, almost-dry redness off and put his finger in his mouth. Sally Mitten gulped, looked as though she were going to gag. But she grimly followed suit. "I'll show you humorists!" Her expression changed ludicrously. "Strawberry jam!" Haas dodged, chortling, as her fist swept past his nose.