He produced a laugh, a sort of choked grunt.
‘I suppose you never thought I’d be scared,’ he said. ‘I suppose you thought the sight of something like Boddaugh’s face there would never do anything to me at all.’
I had not thought he could be scared, of course. I had expected to be frightened myself and very often was, and I always did my best to hide it knowing that it was a not very effective best. But Keig? That inexpressive face, could it often have been concealing feelings like mine all this time?
I felt a rush of pity, pure pity.
‘I’ll keep a watch on Gilhast,’ I said. ‘Lie here quietly. The others’ll be out soon. We’ll get him.’
‘He’ll be beyond us inside five minutes more,’ Keig answered.
I could hear the sound of despair in every syllable.
Then, beside me on the wet slimy earth, I saw his right hand slowly releasing its grip on the grasses. It was being forced to relax. And when at last it was lying quite flat, palm down, Keig spoke again.
‘Get round to the left there,’ he said in a curious sort of hollow voice. ‘Keep down but go as quick as you can. And come at him from behind. Don’t shoot till you’re well there. Go now.’
‘And you?’ I said.
‘I’ll see he doesn’t move from where he is,’ Keig answered.
He reached down for the revolver at his belt. I was torn in two ways. Half of me wanted to say to Keig that I was not going to go. Half of me knew that if Gilhast was not to escape, leaving us with the mangled body of Pat Boddaugh, then he had to be stopped at once.
‘Quick, man.’
Keig’s bark, or rather his forced imitation of his usual bark, sent me on my way, knees and elbows working hard scuttering along the low shelf of grey lichen-spattered rock we had been hiding behind, round to where there was a fold in the ground and the possibility of getting behind the tall grass-headed boulder where Gilhast lurked.
I should think it took me in fact something over ten minutes before I had worked my way round to the spot from which I caught my first glimpse of the brigand. During that period he had fired three shots. Each time I had frozen stiff, thinking of Keig and the terrible effect the swishing whistle of the heavy pellets must be having on his mind racked as it was with the vision of Pat Boddaugh’s mutilated face. And after each shot I had more than half expected, too, to hear Gilhast, somewhere out of sight from me, utter some thick cry of triumph at having scored a hit.
But the sound of the shot died away on each occasion and nothing followed, and I began once more my laborious approach, desperate to hurry, determined to make no sound that would give away my presence and make Keig’s vigil worthless after all.
And in the end that is just what I did do. Looking back afterwards, I recognized that the incident was only debatably my fault. But at the time, just after I had got Gilhast in view and had begun creeping to within revolver range, when I accidentally sent that one loose piece of flat stone clattering down the noisy sloping rock surface, I cursed myself as bitterly as if I had shot Keig with my own hands.
I say I cursed myself, but that was a little later. At the instant the flat stone made its fiendishly noisy descent all I thought of was flinging myself down and rolling over and over to avoid the whole fusillade of shots which Gilhast began to loose off at me. Two and two they came from his double-barrelled gun, with only the shortest of pauses for reloading between each quick double crack.
I do not know what made the man shoot so furiously at me when earlier he had been content to crouch in the cover of his tall tufty-headed boulder and shoot only when he saw something move. Perhaps he had counted on never being outflanked and the sudden sound from behind had sent him into a panic. But whatever the reason he must have fired eighteen or twenty shots while I lay in comparative safety in a cranny between two rock slabs and cursed myself for messing things up at the one time when Keig had really needed help.
Then the shots stopped. I lay for half a minute or more expecting the next pair at any second, but when they still failed to materialize I slowly raised my head.
An extraordinary sight met my eyes. There below me in the shadow of the big ungainly grass-crowned boulder a savage wrestling bout was taking place. A wrestling bout between Gilhast and Keig.
What exactly had happened I could not work out, though it was clear that while Gilhast’s attention had been directed towards me Keig must have come up in silence among the broken rocks at the other side of the big boulder. He had evidently needed to get very close before getting Gilhast in sight and at the last moment the brigand had swung round. He had not succeeded in shooting, that was plain. The double-barrelled gun lay under the wrestlers’ feet. But equally Gilhast had contrived to prevent Keig using his revolver when he had lost his own weapon. He had succeeded in getting him in a great bear-hug with Keig’s gun-arm pinioned.
I went bounding down towards the two of them as they stood swaying and heaving, each trying to throw the other. Three or four yards away I stopped. I had my own revolver in my hand and once more I slipped off the safety-catch. But I did not dare shoot. The two of them were so closely locked together and so apt every few seconds suddenly to switch positions as they heaved and strained that I could not be certain of hitting one and not the other.
And besides, I felt somehow that perhaps I ought to stay a mere spectator to the fight, that it was a man-to-man encounter in which I should leave Keig to beat his opponent and regain thereby the confidence that he had so unexpectedly showed himself bereft of back under Gilhast’s fire. And I did not doubt, well matched though the pair of them were, with the bear-like Gilhast probably the only man I ever saw in the island as physically strong as Keig, that it would be Keig who was the victor.
For minute after minute the silent struggle went on, with Keig’s arm still jammed between the two straining bodies. Every now and again there would come the sudden flurry of movement, a whirl of stamping legs and then a new locked stance. I suppose both men must, with these various changes of position, have realized that I was there watching them, and I hoped Keig would feel encouraged and perhaps Gilhast would experience an uneasiness that would just undo him.
But I was quite unprepared for the effect my presence did actually have.
It all happened within five seconds. The two big men, Keig the shorter but barrel broad, Gilhast a good six foot six in height and with an immense reach in his arms, swayed and wrestled there beside the tall head-shaped rock with its absurd fringe of grass hair, their faces pouring sweat and no sound coming from them beyond the occasional grunt of effort. And then suddenly Keig let himself be lifted clean off the ground. Gilhast gave a short ‘Ha’ of triumph and swinging round like a hammer-tosser at last flung Keig away from him. As he did so the disputed revolver clattered on to a rocky surface a couple of yards distant. Gilhast had only to dart forward and seize it.
But as Keig had been released from his grasp he had shouted. Only three words. Yet utterly effective.
‘Shoot, Quine, shoot.’
The sound had galvanized me. I scarcely needed to raise my pistol I was so near. I tugged at the trigger abominably, but I was too close to miss. Gilhast’s bear-like figure, which had already launched itself forward on to Keig’s gun, jerked spasmodically and, as I fired a second shot, his knees buckled and he fell writhing sideways.
I stood looking down at him, the first man that to my certain knowledge I had actually killed. And then I turned to Keig.
‘You let him throw you deliberately,’ I said, like an accusing schoolboy.
‘Aye,’ he answered. ‘He had to be finished, and that was the best way.’
4
So we made our way back to our headquarters in the beech-wood, leaving the body of Pat Boddaugh buried under a thin layer of rocks up on the mountainside near Gilhast’s cave. For all the decisive way Gilhast had been dealt with, we were a weary and depressed group as we picked our way through the wolds on our scratch collection of horses. A piece of encouraging news was to gre
et us on our arrival, but without its stimulus nothing but black thoughts occupied us.
My thoughts were perhaps blacker than anyone’s since in the glimpse I had had of the inner Keig I had more ground than the others for disquiet.
I had seen Keig afraid. Here was a new consideration in our whole struggle. If in some crisis ahead he was going to be struck into similar inaction again, what desperate consequences might it not have on our fortunes, depending as they did so much on him? And then a yet worse thought came to me. Though none of us ever exactly boasted of being overcome at times by sheer fright, we all knew, I think, that in varying degrees each of us had been good and scared. But Keig, by his nature, was barred from this unspoken freemasonry. What effect was that having on a mind already bent on a lonely voyage of its own?
How fervently I wished at that moment that, after his sharp victory over Gilhast, Keig had wandered apart from the rest of us as he had done in the old days and indulged in one of those extraordinary axe displays. And to think I had looked on them as a sign of a mind becoming too centred on its own affairs. I would have given almost anything now to have had that reassurance that Keig was still human enough to experience mere vanity.
But what went on behind that broad inexpressive face was now once more locked up from me. Keig, jogging along by my side on the sturdiest of our horses, a great shaggy-hooved plough animal, said not a word.
I tried to put myself in a better frame of mind with a sober summing-up of what we had achieved in the twelve hours since we had set out on our punitive expedition. First, Francis Crowe had been rescued. And then, we had dealt firmly and quickly with a decided menace. If the people of the wolds, never perfectly open or friendly to us, were to be made to realize that there was a difference between those who wore our orange-red wool cap and the miscellaneous outlaws who were equally the Keepers’ enemies, then we could hardly have found a better way of demonstrating it. The news of what had happened to Gilhast, as well known as any of the brigands, would spread fast enough. I would see to that myself. And this was almost certain to curb any other lawless men.
Only Keig and Calo would then be left fighting Mylchraine.
My hard-won optimism melted. Calo. Calo, ensconced in Lesneven. There was a very different proposition from Gilhast. The latter Keig had dealt with easily enough simply by superior strength and cunning. But these would not even scratch Calo. And the only confrontation we had had with him so far, our humbling visit to that big house of his, did not auger well for any other approach. Was Keig going to have to accept him then, acknowledge him as leader of the fight against Mylchraine, a man little better than Mylchraine himself? It looked as if it might be so.
No sooner had we arrived back in our strip of secure beech-wood, however, than we were told that Calo and his troopers were no longer in Lesneven. They had left, indeed, as dusk fell the night before. They were, I saw looking back, sensible to have done so: they could never have held a town of something like fifty thousand people with just eighty men, especially as by no means all its inhabitants were opposed to Mylchraine. Whiskey and witchcraft saw to that.
And though, I suppose, those of us round Keig ought to have regretted that Mylchraine now had his capital intact again, I do not think there was a single one of us who was not cheered by the news that Calo had not been so clever after all.
Yet during the month that followed, a long idyllic September with the branches of the trees drooping low under their undisturbed burden of summer dust and the little tents of stooked corn gradually spreading across the cut fields one by one, the brown-jacketed troopers went on scooping up their share of victories. And each such item, on Keig’s express instructions, I would dutifully include in my news-sheet in the hope that we were gradually instilling into the slow and stubborn people of the wolds the idea that Mylchraine’s days were numbered.
But in fact privately I was beginning to harbour doubts myself about just how numbered those days might be. Calo and his men were ranging here and there with something like impunity, true. But were they ever really going to capture and hold Lesneven? It was almost certainly a task well beyond their strength.
And we ourselves were doing no better. With each passing week it became clearer and clearer that Lesneven was not going to be taken without much heavier arms than we possessed. Keig had begun once more to make requests for, not only anti-tank weapons, but for field-guns to Peter Cormode—never slow to inform us about the large sums that were coming in from Americans impressed by the exploits of Marcus Calo, ‘last of the cavalrymen’—but there was little sign in the endlessly tapped Morse messages from Dublin that Cormode had much intention of complying.
And then one day I had a little piece of luck which was to make an altogether disproportionate difference to our fortunes.
We had moved into yet another headquarters—still not being beyond the reach of a well-planned attack, though this was the most southerly point we had yet occupied.
We had picked a hawking-lodge on the edge of the mountains and we had waited to make use of it till its owner, obviously a stubborn adherent of things as they used to be, had finished his customary month’s hawking there. Our scouts had watched him day by day, and at last one afternoon he had gone.
As we forced the door of the little granite building—locked so carefully not an hour before—and walked in, my small stroke of luck came. There lying on the bare table of the empty living-room was a scatter of newish-looking magazines. I scooped them up. It had been months and months since I had read anything at all and, though these did not look exactly promising as reading-matter, being mostly the classier kind of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ periodical, I thought they might all the same while away a few hours of the long waiting that was the form our war so often took at this time, waiting to hear whether an ambush had been successful, waiting while a laborious reconnaissance was conducted, waiting for the enemy to make an expected counter-move this way or that.
I did not succeed in getting a look at my booty for a couple of hours. There was a certain amount of settling in to be done and a new edition of my news-sheet to be messily and purply reproduced to the extent of fifty copies, destined to go grubbily from hand to hand round the whole island filling some of the more obvious gaps in the heavy columns of the Oceana Messenger and gradually, we hoped, re-educating the people Mylchraine kept ignorant.
But when at last I idly opened the first of my pile of treasure trove—they still had about them just a little of that wonderful magaziney smell—the very first thing my eye alighted on was a picture taken at some Hunt Ball some six weeks earlier in distant England. And there, large as life, though not mentioned in the caption’s evocative prose about ‘the Hon. Mrs That sharing a joke with Lord This at Mrs T’Other’s table at...’, there was the likeness of none other than Marcus Calo himself.
I sat on the bare bedstead in the room I had been working in and looked and looked in delighted amazement. So the last of the cavalrymen had been leading his all-conquering troopers from the safety of the English hunting countryside from shortly after the day of his famous entry into Lesneven.
I jumped up and ran down to Keig. I felt he should be first to share the big joke.
Rough humour, however, proved to be far from Keig’s reaction to my little piece of information. He took the folded-back magazine from me and studied the picture and its curious caption with just the same intentness I had once seen him giving to the writings of Karl von Clausewitz in the grey public library in Pearse Street, Dublin.
Then he pronounced his verdict.
‘So that’s the end of Marcus Calo. I never thought he’d last.’
And it was only then that I saw it, saw beyond what I had thought of as a good blackish joke to the truth of the matter: that Keig had won his contest against Calo. He had won it not in the dramatic manner he had dealt with Gilhast, but by pitting his own endurance in the long struggle with our truly formidable enemy against the flashier qualities of the gambling estate-owne
r. The stronger man had carried it off.
And nor was this my only miscalculation.
‘Go and find Crowe,’ Keig said sharply now. ‘Tell him he’s to get that wireless of his working at once. He’s to get on to Cormode and tell him what this book is and the date of it and where to look for the picture.’
He thrust the magazine—the ‘book’ as he had called it—back into my hands.
‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I’ve often suspected Cormode’s been thinking of sending guns to Calo. This’ll put a stop to that.’
‘It certainly will,’ I said with relish.
‘And then,’ Keig continued, ignoring my intervention, ‘tell Crowe to pack up his set and be ready to move in an hour.’
‘To move? But we’ve only just—’
‘We’re going down to Calo’s. If he’s been gone out of the island these six weeks, those men of his’ll be all through-others. And should Mylchraine get to find that out any time, he’ll be down into them in five minutes.’
So it was just like that that we set out something over an hour later, as the earlier dusk of September was deepening into night, to visit once again Calo’s big house in the far south of the island.
But this time we went by motor-cycle, a small column of us on commandeered machines, recklessly squandering what little petrol we had been able to lay our hands on and even, on Keig’s unexpected orders, using lights and keeping to the main roads.
It was an almost dream-like sensation as the countryside went hurtling by in the blaze of our headlamps, drystone walls, hedges at their full autumnal height, the stumps of the many felled oaks constantly showing up in great white rounds. And, adding to the oddness, not a soul challenged us, not a Keeper on his motor-cycle, not a scout-car.
It was only when we were something over half-way that the one incident that marked the journey occurred. It happened with startling abruptness.
We were riding bunched together along a straight stretch and in the massed light of all our headlamps we saw well ahead that the road took a right-angled turn and that a field-gate lay in our direct path. Then Keig on the leading machine suddenly waved his arm up and down and brought us to a sharp halt.
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