Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  My just-acquired motor-cycling skill vanished. But I did succeed in bringing my machine to a stop before I had much overshot Keig. And it was because I was some way in advance of the others that I saw clearly why we had halted.

  In the field on the far side of the gate, about twenty yards inwards from the road there was a store dump. The sight was not altogether unusual since in the early days of the fighting the Keepers had often stored supplies of various sorts, and even arms, in such places as this before we had taught them better. But a dump of this sort nowadays was a little out of the ordinary. And there was something a bit different too about the metal canisters it appeared to consist of.

  And then I got it. Napalm. Here, right in front of us were the long black canisters that made up perhaps the whole of Mylchraine’s hoard of napalm. Keig’s reactions, I thought, must be even sharper than I had believed they were for him to have spotted this so quickly.

  Thanks to taking this main-road route which none of us had ever ventured on before, it seemed we had hit on the very place where Mylchraine had stored his napalm since shortly before Calo had brought into play his famous secretly acquired field-gun and had in one blow destroyed his enemy’s air force and all the superiority that it gave.

  And, it came to me then, that this very hoard might well be brought into use again before long, if Calo’s troopers ceased to be an effective fighting force. It can only have been their presence in the island, ranging up and down, that had after all deterred Mylchraine from getting hold of another small fleet of aircraft and setting up a new airfield with all the terrible dominance which that would give him once again.

  I sat astride my still throbbing motor-cycle and peered at the solid wall of black canisters in the field with the palpitating beams of our headlights playing on them, while the autumn night-scents of the surrounding country, the dry odour of cut corn and the tart sweetness of ripening blackberries and over-softened damsons in the hedges beside me gradually mingled with the hot smell of my engine.

  Could we destroy the foul stuff at this moment? No doubt it would burn all right and though it might be pretty difficult to ignite, that should not prove an insuperable obstacle.

  ‘Who’s there? Who’s there, I say?’

  The voice came suddenly from a thicket not far from the gate. It sent the hair pricking on my scalp. There was bound to be a gun behind it.

  ‘Get away,’ Keig called, low and urgent. ‘Get away quick.’

  The throbbing engine of his motor-cycle roared up and, with its back-wheel scuttering the loose surface of the road from underneath it, he swirled round and with gradually gathering speed made off into the dark.

  I gathered my wits about me, twisted the throttle-grip of my own machine hard and bucked suddenly forward. I flung my weight sideways, nearly came off but succeeded somehow in following Keig’s rapidly disappearing rear-light. The others, I realized, were roaring off all round me.

  I do not know, in all the din we made, whether that slow-witted sentry we had eventually aroused, did ever fire a shot at us. He must have been a good deal puzzled by the sudden appearance of so many noisy motor-cycles in the late evening quiet, and if he ever did get round to firing, as he ought to have done, his shots went so wide that none of us were ever aware of them.

  We bucketed on at, if anything, an even faster rate, myself anxiously wondering whether that sentry was even now telling his superiors about us? Did he have a field-telephone in some guard-hut among those bushes? Would the scout-cars come out hunting us after all?

  But it still seemed that they would not. We rode on and on, with still nothing and no one trying to stop us till we reached Calo’s big house, roared up its unblemished drive, burst unceremoniously in and were directed by the scared butler, his striped full-sail waistcoat all unbuttoned, to the Overseer’s office.

  A light was shining through its glass door at the end of a long corridor, and as the noise of our tramping feet echoed from the high ceiling above the outline of a tall figure could be seen advancing as if to come out and then retreating hurriedly.

  Keig turned the door-knob and entered the room.

  Faragher, the sombre-looking Overseer, was standing beside the fireplace of the large dark-furnitured office. In his hands he held a shotgun, pointed towards us at waist height.

  ‘Mr Faragher,’ Keig said, ‘I suppose you’re the one Calo left in charge?’

  ‘I am,’ Faragher replied, still standing with the shotgun pointing unmovingly towards us and a leaning row of big black-bound account books running all along the mantelpiece behind his head.

  His man-in-the-moon face was noticeably weary, I saw, with dark hollows under the eyes, cutting lines drawn from cheekbones to chin and a grey pallor making his jutting black eyebrows look like a pair of party joke-pieces stuck on and forgotten about.

  ‘I said I’d do it,’ he went on, hardly seeming to realize whom he was talking to. ‘And, by God, I’ll go through with it till I hear differently.’

  ‘You’ll not hear from Calo,’ Keig said brutally. ‘He’s a sight too busy going to dances and that away in England.’

  Now Faragher did seem to take in once more whom he was talking to.

  ‘England?’ he said with an uncontrollable jump in his voice. ‘How do you know Mr Calo’s in England? For God’s sake, that’s meant to be a secret between him and me, though I don’t know how the hell I’m expected to keep it so with the weeks going by and the weeks going by.’

  ‘You can tell the whole world now,’ Keig answered. ‘And if you don’t we will. Calo’s finished in Oceana, and I’ve come to pick up the pieces.’

  ‘You’ve what—’

  Faragher took a step forward and I thought the shotgun in his hands was going to blaze out at any instant.

  And then the tip of the barrel drooped a little.

  ‘How the hell can I be expected to go on like this?’ Faragher said, scarcely attempting to check the whine in his tone. ‘I’ve kept this estate the best run in the island for fifteen years, but I can’t add fighting a war to it all now.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Keig said, walking briskly across to a big map-cluttered table that stood against one wall of the room. ‘So just you tell me as quick as you can where these men of Calo’s are and what they’re meant to be doing.’

  ‘Well, damn him,’ Faragher replied. ‘Damn him, that’s all.’

  And he turned wearily, broke open the shotgun, flicked a cartridge from the breech, placed it with trembling fingers on the mantelpiece in front of the lop-sided account books, dropped the gun into a corner and came over to the big square table.

  And in this way Keig, who experienced fear, I knew, at facing shotgun fire, became commander-in-chief of all the forces opposed to Mylchraine.

  But the surprises of that day were not yet over. Keig and the rest of us had been working for about an hour with Faragher, learning all he had to tell us about the location of Calo’s men and their organization, when Francis Crowe, who had just succeeded in getting in touch with Dublin on his battered old transmitter, let out an indignant gasp from down on the floor in the corner where he was kneeling, fat bottom up, tapping earnestly away at his black-knobbed Morse key.

  ‘They’re interrupting,’ he said furiously. ‘They really ought to know better. It’s the first rule—’

  ‘What are they saying?’ Keig broke in.

  Crowe bent forward again in silence and gave his full attention to the dots and dashes as they came to him, noting them down letter by letter with his pencil, beautifully sharpened even in these circumstances. One by one the neat capitals spelled it out.

  ‘URGENT. REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL TO KEIG. SIX, REPEAT SIX, THREE POINT SEVEN HOWITZERS ALREADY DESPATCHED. POSSIBLY ARRIVED CALOESTOWN ABOUT NOON. ACKNOWLEDGE URGENTLY. ENDS.’

  ‘Caloestown,’ I said, when with the word ENDS I dared to speak. ‘You know what that means? Those are howitzers intended for Calo. Cormode’s gone and—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Keig said.
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  He stooped over Francis Crowe still kneeling beside the Morse key.

  ‘Send an acknowledgement,’ he said.

  ‘Right! Anything else?’

  ‘No. We’re going to Caloestown directly. If those guns have come and no one’s told Faragher here, then there’s likely some dirty business going on.’

  He straightened up and turned to Calo’s sombre Overseer, who at once began protesting that he would have told us of the prospect of acquiring howitzers if he had any idea at all that it existed. But Keig cut him short.

  ‘Petrol,’ he said abruptly. ‘Have you got petrol to hand? I doubt if there’s much left in our tanks by now.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve petrol,’ Faragher answered. ‘Mr Calo preferred a horse to his motor-car, but he always saw to it that he could go where he liked as he liked. We’ve petrol in plenty.’

  ‘Good, then show us where you keep it,’ Keig said.

  But half way across to the door he checked himself.

  ‘No. Better than that. Is this motor-car of Calo’s a big one?’

  ‘It’s a Bentley,’ Faragher replied with a touch of venom, evidently gaining some pleasure now from seeing Calo’s possessions despoiled.

  ‘And that’s big?’ Keig asked.

  ‘It’s big and one of the best,’ I put in with a smile.

  Keig turned to me sharply.

  ‘You know how to drive a motor?’ he snapped out.

  ‘Yes. Yes, certainly.’

  ‘Then you’ll get us to Caloestown just as fast as you can. Faragher, you tell us the quickest way.’

  Within five minutes from that moment we had all piled into Calo’s Bentley, a pre-1939 model with a hood that lowered elaborately, and I was driving as fast as I knew how towards Caloestown some ten miles away. And soon I saw the sky ahead palely glowing.

  The lights of the port, I thought.

  And then I thought ‘What nonsense, at this time of night there’ll hardly be a single lamp lit in the whole of a little place like this.’

  But when, half a minute later, we topped the crest of the next hill I saw just why the pale glow was there.

  We had a view right down into the little port with the houses lying in a black mass round the shining octagonal shape of the water of the harbour. And all along the quayside between the houses and the water there were lights. Lights, and the unmistakable shapes of scout-cars. The Keepers’ scout-cars. I counted them rapidly. There were twenty of them, no less. Twenty scout-cars and beside them, now clearly to be identified, six canvas-shrouded shapes. Six 3.7-inch howitzers, beyond doubt.

  With weapons such as these in Mylchraine’s hands, I saw in one sickening dazzle of foresight, our only hope of ever gaining victory would be by matching them with an equal force. And this would elevate the whole struggle within the shortest of periods to an altogether new plane. It would become an affair for big guns. Literally.

  Part Five

  1

  Keig was to produce a counterstroke which in some measure offset the loss of the weapons that should have ended the struggle for us. But at the time we realized we had lost them only the blackest thoughts prevailed. It had needed little working-out to see that, thanks to the terrible bungle that had occurred—we learnt later that the sharp gun-running captain of the freighter realizing there had been a slip-up had contrived to wireless Lesneven and sell his whole cargo to Mylchraine—the odds against us had worsened almost as badly and as abruptly as when the napalm-dropping planes had first appeared.

  Mylchraine with these howitzers to defend Lesneven could use all his scout-cars to gain command of an area of countryside big enough for another airstrip, and then he could buy planes again and put us back where we had been the winter before.

  In the event it proved these darkest prognostications were not justified. Curiously, the capture of the guns caused Mylchraine to make a mistake much like that he had made after our first victory more than two years before when he had withdrawn from the whole north unable to believe that a body of men who could take such a toll of his Keepers was not a great deal more numerous than we then were. Now, finding we had been on the point of obtaining a crushing superiority, he retreated in an almost hysterical panic to concentrate on Lesneven, Portharnel and the railway between them. The scout-cars, far from harassing us more, were actually embedded in the fortified chain he now set up round his heartland and became nothing more than armour-plated pillboxes. More practised commanders have made errors of timidity no less serious, but this action almost undoubtedly cost Mylchraine a few decisive weeks in which he might have finished the war.

  As it was, we caught up in the arms race. The bluntly scathing message Keig sent to Cormode about the lost howitzers—I almost felt sorry for that clever old fence-sitter—was immediately effective. By return there came a brief assurance that a matching number of guns would be purchased at once, signed simply ‘Cormode’.

  Part of Mylchraine’s slowness to take advantage of his luckily gained superiority must too have come from Keig’s counterstroke. This was quite simply the destruction that very night of the secret napalm dump. Mylchraine might have been able to buy more planes quickly, but getting more of this death-dealing stuff would have required a good deal of time.

  And all that we did was to drive there and then in Calo’s Bentley straight back to where we had discovered the dump. We found it guarded by only three men sitting in their hut playing cards. They knew not a thing until Steven Dowan and a couple of the others were standing over them with pistols pointing at their heads while the rest of us tackled the napalm.

  The pod-like canisters appeared in the darkness to be completely sealed, but Keig took his axe to one and with a resounding blow split the metal wide. Then he set alight a piece of petrol-soaked rag I had brought from the Bentley and tossed it on the thick fluid puddling out. It went up with a dense roar of orange flame mounting in thick triangles and turning within moments to oily smoke.

  Once more I saw the sight that had haunted me in dreams during all the past year, Jack Ascough standing on that pillar of uncut rock in the slate quarry, the thin cone of flame that fastened on him, the rifle with which he had punily tried to bring down the circling plane falling away from him like a separate stick of gluey fire. In spite of the heat from the fast-igniting stack of canisters I shivered.

  But as we drove back to Calo’s house at every mile of the way there came from behind us, glinting on the deep-polished wood-work of the Bentley’s fascia, a glow of dark fire.

  That glowing fire proved a good omen: in the days that followed our fortunes bettered like fast-spreading flames. Yet it was an improvement that was earned. Keig worked with an energy comparable only with the way he had once tackled the back-breaking granite blocks of the lighter when he had constructed that hiding-place for the two of us. Now, though, he was tackling not stone blocks but the problems of a staff-officer in integrating Calo’s army with our own and in bringing all our forces to bear against Mylchraine. He succeeded by unflagging commonsense. I saw him as seizing on each difficulty that presented itself like a tireless gorilla seizing on nut after nut—the lift to the jaw, the sharp crack, the husk spat from the meaty kernel.

  Yet there was one problem area he left untackled. This was what might be called the political decision arising from our now being in possession of all but a sixth of the island. The territory needed ruling: Keig just ran it. If he saw something was wrong, he simply said it was to stop. For example, on the occasion of the first of the witch-cult festivals that came in our time, Punky Night on the last day of October, he blankly forbade any public meetings. That alone must have earned him a good measure of stony, silent enmity from the hidebound woldsmen.

  However setbacks here were intangible and our military progress far outweighed them. Indeed, as the year came to an end this received what might be called the ultimate recognition: Cormode and the full Revolutionary Council announced they were coming to establish themselves alongside us.

  So on Chris
tmas Eve we found ourselves waiting on the quayside at Caloestown, with a single lamp breaking the darkness and a whip-like east wind putting down a thin hard layer of snow, as the coaster in which the Council had made the journey over slowly manoevred up. It was Keig and myself alone who waited. He had insisted there was no need for more of us, and I had insisted that he himself had to be there.

  ‘Cormode’s a pretty devious character,’ I remember saying. ‘The sooner you get an idea of what he wants the better.’

  Keig had thought for a moment or two in his usual uncompromising silence. Then he had answered.

  ‘All right.’

  A sailor at the stern of the coaster threw a rope. A local boy, about twelve he must have been, darted from the shelter of a stone bollard and caught the flying end. He wound it round the bollard with the skill of much practice—had he begun at the age of eight?—and the coaster’s engine was abruptly silenced. There was a shout or two as a second rope was sent snaking on to the snow-sprinkled quay and then a couple of deckhands casually thrust out a battered gangplank.

  The wind blew with steady viciousness. We could hear it thrumming now in the little ship’s rigging.

  And at last a narrow metal door opened in her superstructure to show a thin bar of warm light and one by one a number of figures, each lugging one heavy suitcase or two, made their way out on to the deck. I recognized Cormode and others from the Dublin days—old Abraham Skillicorne, looking even at this distance unambiguously miserable, and Willine the poet.

  After a pause to look about them they began to descend the gangway. I glanced at Keig.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  He nodded and marched ahead of me over to the foot of the gangplank, his head with its close-fitting orangey cap hunched between massive shoulders. Just as Cormode stepped down on to the quay, on to Oceanan soil, he came to a halt and gave him one sharp look.