“Good luck to you, good woman, and to your husband, who should begin soon to exhibit a salubrious response to the most noteworthy liquid. Give him a spoonful a day followed by a piece of bread and you will find yourself gazing in wonder upon the medical miracle of the age. And now if you will excuse me, there are others who have need of my services, access to which I am sure you would not wish to deny them.”
“No, sir, no! And thank you, Doctor, thank you!” She clutched his hand and, much to his disgust, began to kiss it effusively. He drew it back with as much decorum as he could muster.
“A woman ought to consider carefully what she’s kissin’.”
The deep voice boomed out of the shadows, and a man rode into view from behind Ramses’s wagon. He was enormous, as was the preposterous mongrel of a steed he bestrode. For an instant Ramses panicked. Then he saw that the man was an utter stranger to him, and he relaxed.
The rider wore thick buckskins and showed salty black hair that hung to his shoulders. An incipient conflagration in his beard would’ve died for lack of oxygen, so thick were the bristles. His eyes were the color of obsidian and darker than a moonless night.
He dismounted from the ridiculous stallion and lumbered over. A huge hand reached toward the woman, and she flinched instinctively.
“May I see that, ma’am?” His voice turned gentle as a cooing babe’s.
“What…what for, sir?”
“I am by nature an inquisitive man, mother. I’d have a look to satisfy my curiosity.” He squinted at Dr. Ramses. “Surely, sir, as a man of learning, you’ve no objection.”
Ramses hesitated, then stiffened. “I, sir? Why should I have any objection? But you delay this poor soul’s treatment.” He indicated the wagon and its pitiful human cargo.
“Not fer long, I reckon.” He reached out and plucked the bottle from the woman’s uncertain fingers.
Ramses had to repress a grin. If this stranger had been the aforementioned local physician, there might have been trouble, but there was nothing to fear from a gargantuan bumpkin like this. He watched amusedly as the giant opened the bottle and sniffed at the contents.
His smile vanished when the mountain man swallowed the oily contents in a single gulp.
The old woman let out a cry and, astonishingly, threw herself at the giant. She hardly came up to his waist, but that didn’t stop her from flailing away at him with her tiny fists. She might as well have been trying to reduce Gibraltar to dust.
Gently the giant settled her. A thick finger wiped at her tears. “Easy, mother.” He tossed the empty bottle to Ramses, who caught it reflexively. “There weren’t nothin’ in that bottle that could’ve helped your man.”
“Now, sir,” declared Ramses, a fount of mock outrage, “I really must protest! If you were a man of science, I might accept—”
The huge form turned to him. “Listen well, ‘Doctor.’ I am Mad Amos Malone, and I am a man of many things. But what is in any event called fer here ain’t science.” He jabbed a huge forefinger toward the buckboard. “That man there is dying, and he needs somethin’ rather stronger than what you’re offerin’ him. He wants to live, and I aim to help him.”
“You, sir?” It was growing dark rapidly. Night fell quickly on the open plains. “How might you intend to do that?”
“By helpin’ these folks t’ help themselves.” He smiled reassuringly at the old woman, white teeth gleaming from within the depths of the beard. “You just calm yourself, mother, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Ramses thought to depart. There was nothing for him here but a distraught old woman and a man crazy from too much time in the wilderness. But Ramses was curious, and he already had the woman’s dollar. Maybe the mountain man was some sort of competitor. If he had something worthy to sell, they might, as any two men engaged in the same trade were occasionally wont to do, strike a bargain. The doctor was ever ready and willing to improve his inventory.
To his disappointment, the mountain man returned from fumbling with his saddlebags with nothing but an old wooden cup. It was scratched and chipped and appeared to have been carved out of a single piece of some light-colored hardwood. It had a thick brim and was in appearance nothing remarkable.
He offered it to the old woman, whose tears were drying on her cheeks. “Here, mother. Use this to give your man a drink of water.” He gestured toward the town pump, which sat in a small Spanish-style square in the center of the street.
“Water?” She blinked in bewilderment. “What good will water do my Emmitt? He needs doctorin’. He needs this man’s medicine.” She indicated Ramses, who smiled condescendingly.
Malone spoke solemnly. “Let him drink from that old cup, mother, and if it don’t help your husband, I’ll buy you another bottle of this gentleman’s brew myself.” Whereupon he produced from a pocket a shiny gold piece. Not U.S. issue but a disk slick with age and worn by time. Ramses’s eyes widened as he recognized the ornate cross and Spanish lettering on the visible side. In his whole life he’d seen only a single piece of eight. It had belonged to a New Orleans gambler. What the mountain man flashed was worth rather more than a dollar. Ramses was glad he’d trusted his instincts and stayed.
“Sir, you are as noble as you are curious.”
The giant’s eyes seemed to disappear beneath overhanging thick black brows that drew down like a miniature portcullis. “Don’t be too sure o’ that, friend.” It was not a threat, but neither did the big man’s tone inspire Ramses to move nearer the speaker.
Unsteady and bewildered, the woman shuffled to the well. The men heard the pump handle creak, heard the attendant splash of water. She made her slow way back to them and, after eyeing the giant blankly, climbed with surprising agility into the back of the wagon. There she dubiously but lovingly tipped the wooden lip of the cup to her husband’s parted lips.
“Here now, darlin’. You got to drink, even if it is just water. You got to, so’s this man’ll buy us another bottle of the doctor’s medicine.”
The dying old man wheezed and tried but failed to lift his head. Some kind of unvoiced communication passed between them, as it can only between two people who have been married so long that the two have become one. She spilled the water into his mouth, and he gagged, choking, the liquid running out over his parted, chapped lips and down his furrowed cheek. Ramses suppressed a smile. A pitiful exhibition but one that, given the circumstances, he was quite willing to endure. In the giant’s fingers the piece of eight shimmered in the fading light.
The old rancher coughed again. A second time. Then he sat up. Not bolt upright, as if hit by lightning, or shakily, as if at any moment he might collapse again. Just steady and confident-like. His wife’s eyes grew wide, while Ramses’s arguably exceeded them in diameter.
With profound deliberation the old man turned to his wife and put his arms around her. The tears streaming down his face started to dissolve the coagulated blood. “Sorry, woman,” he was mumbling. “Sorry to make you worry like thet.”
“Oh, Emmitt, Emmitt!” She sat back from him, crying and smiling and half laughing all at once. “You gonna listen to me now and git yourself a hand to do the heavy work?”
“Reckon I ain’t got much choice.” The rancher climbed effortlessly to his feet and extended a hand down toward the beaming giant and the flabbergasted Ramses. “Mighty grateful to you, mister.”
The mountain man nodded as he shook the proffered hand. “Glad to be o’ service, sir. I could sense you were a good man, and I could see how serious you wanted to live.”
“It weren’t fer myself. Heck, I done had a decent life. But the woman, it would’ve gone hard on her. This way I got a little time to make some better plans.”
“It’s good fer a man to have plans, Emmitt,” the giant said.
Leaping lithely from the buckboard, the rancher loosened the reins from the hitching rail,
climbed back aboard, and lifted his startled wife into the seat alongside him. She almost forgot to hand the cup back to Malone, following which her husband chucked the reins. Jerking forward, the buckboard rattled up the dirt road that led out of town, kicking up dust as it passed the seeping pump.
Ramses had forgotten all about the piece of eight. His attention was now riveted on the old wooden cup. “Might I have a look at that vessel, sir?”
“Don’t see why not.” The giant handed it over. Ramses scrutinized it as minutely as he’d ever inspected a suspect coin, turning it over and over in his fingers, feeling the scars in the old wood, lifting it to smell of the interior. It reeked of old rooms, and dampness, and something he couldn’t quite place. Some fragrance of a faraway land and perhaps also a distant time.
With utmost reluctance he passed it back. “What potion did you have in that, sir, that brought that man back from the dead? For the country of the dead was surely where he was headed. I saw his skull. It was well stove in, and his brains were glistening in the sunlight.”
“ ’Tweren’t no potion.” The mountain man walked back to his lunatic steed and casually returned the cup to the unsecured saddlebag whence it had come. “That man wanted to live. Out o’ love for another. That right there’s a mighty powerful medicine. Mighty powerful. Didn’t need but a little nudge to help it along.”
“Yes, of course.” Then it was no potion, Ramses thought furiously, but the cup itself, the cup! “Might I ask where you acquired that vessel?”
“What, the grail? Won it off the Shemad Bey, pasha of Tripoli, durin’ a game o’ chess we played anon my last sojourn along the Barbary Coast. After he’d turned it over, the old pasha confessed to me that it had been stolen many times afore comin’ his way. So I didn’t see the harm in relievin’ him of its possession. I reckon it’s better off in my care than his, anyways.” He pulled the straps of the saddlebag through both buckles and notched them tight.
“Your pardon, sir,” said Ramses, “but did you say ‘grail’?”
“That’s right. Belonged long time ago to a feller name of Emmanuel. Took his last swallow from it, I believe.”
“You are jesting with me, sir.”
“Nope.” The giant walked down the street, his mount trailing alongside with a notable air of equine indifference. “When I jest, I laugh, and when I laugh, rivers bubble and mountains shake. You don’t see no rivers bubblin’ or mountains shakin’ hereabouts now, do you?”
“Sir, we stand in the plains of the Missouri. There are no mountains hereabouts, and the nearest river is the Meramec, some twenty miles to the south.”
“Why, ’tis right you are. I reckon you’ll just have to take my word for it, then.”
“Sir, would you consider selling that gr—that drinking vessel? I will make you a fine offer for it, in gold.”
“ ’Tain’t fer sale, friend. Fer one thing, I got plenty o’ gold. Fer t’ other, it wouldn’t work for you nohows.”
“And why not?”
“The grail, see, it don’t do nothin’ by itself. It’s just a cup, an ordinary drinkin’ cup. It’s what’s in the heart and the soul of whomever’s drinkin’ from it that makes a difference. Most times it don’t make no difference. Sometimes it do. I was glad it did tonight, but you kin never be sure.” He halted, and Ramses saw they were standing outside the blacksmith shop and stable.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, friend, I’ve been three days and nights on the back of this lamentable alibi of a horse, and I’ve a might o’ sleepin’ to catch up on.” With that he turned and entered the stable. Emerging a few minutes later, he strode off down the street toward the town’s single hotel, from whose attached saloon could imprecisely be heard the brittle jollities of a banjo player in shifty voice.
Ramses was left standing solitaire in the starlight, thinking hard. The giant would be a bad man to cross, he ruminated. He’d seen the heavy Sharps rifle protruding from its scabbard on the side of the saddle. But the Promethean rustic had neglected even to lock the stable! And Ramses had taken careful notice of the fact that there were no locks on the saddlebags, not even a knot. Just a couple of straps on each one.
But Ramses was no simpleton. He returned to his wagon and mounted the seat, chucking the reins and making as much noise as possible on his ostentatious way out of town. The mountain man had refused to sell him the cup, and that was that, and like the honest soul that he was, he was moving placidly on.
A mile out of town he set up a hasty camp by the bank of a running stream, tethering one of his horses to a convenient cottonwood while hoping there were no acquisitive Indians or white men about. He made and drank some strong coffee, considered the night sounds and the stars, and round about three A.M. saddled up his other animal and rode quietly back into town.
The wooden buildings were shadowy now, the two saloons as silent as the distant church that dominated the far end of the main street. Dismounting outside the stable, he kept a wary eye on the distant hotel. The door hardly creaked as he edged it aside just enough to slip through. His excitement rose as through the dim light he saw that the mountain man’s animal stood where he’d left it in the farthest stall.
Ramses could move fast when he needed to, whether running from irate fathers or from authorized representatives of the law. He moved fast now, the straw hissing under his feet as he hurried to the far end of the building. The dozing horses and one mule ignored him.
Lifting the stall door as he opened it so the hinges wouldn’t creak, he stepped inside. Facing him, the improbably large quadruped filled the smelly enclosure from wall to wall. At the back of the stall, the saddlebags lay draped across a pile composed of saddle and tack.
Turning sideways, he attempted to slip between the animal’s mass and the unyielding stall panels.
“C’mon there, boy. Give us a little room. Move on over just a bit, won’t you?”
Swinging its mottled face to cast a skewed eye at him, the ludicrous creature emitted a soft snort and promptly lowered its head to begin cropping at the straw underhoof.
“Come on, damn you!” Ramses put both hands on the animal’s flank and shoved, bracing himself against the wall and putting all his weight into the effort. He might as well have been trying to convert a reluctant Jesuit.
Breathing hard, Ramses deposed on the four-legged barricade to his intent a few choice nonmedical terms. He bent and passed through the slats of the stall wall into the vacant stall next to it, then carefully slipped in again near the rear, taking care to keep an eye on the horse’s oversized rear hooves. It continued to ignore him, wholly intent on the available fodder.
The saddlebag’s straps yielded easily to his deft fingers. He’d filch the cup and be clean out of the county before morning.
Lifting the nap, he dug around inside until his hand closed over the unyielding wooden cylinder. Extracting his prize, he held it up to the available light. In the moonlight it was outstanding in its ordinariness, and for an instant he wondered if there were more than one of the vessels. That was absurd, he knew. There was only one of what he sought. Only one in all the world, and now it was his, his!
He turned it in his fingers, letting the moonlight play across the bowl and rim. So plain, he mused. So utterly unremarkable. It was slightly bigger than he remembered it, but then, his first and only previous view had been clouded by astonishment and the realization of inherent possibilities.
His gaze narrowed. There was a hint of movement within the vessel. Lingering water or possibly some more viscous liquid.
Something crept out of the bowl to wrap itself around his left wrist.
Startled, he inhaled sharply. At the sound of his soft gasp, the horse looked back wearily. Then it delivered itself of a decidedly disinterested whinny and returned to its browsing.
A panicked Ramses tried to shake loose of the cup. He flung his hand about wil
dly and banged the vessel against the back of the stall. But the old wood was tough, and the sinuous band around his wrist was like a steel cable. It was gray in hue and ichorous and glacier-wet. As Ramses fought to extricate himself, it began to snake farther up his arm. With his free hand he fumbled frantically for the derringer he kept always in his right shirt pocket. While he did so, he made rapid breathing sounds, like a dog after a long run, as he struggled to scream but failed.
Before his wide, disbelieving eyes a second serpentine coil emerged from the interior of the cup to wrap itself around his head, blocking one of his eyes. It was cold and slick, cold as ice. The tip forced itself past his clamped lips and down his throat. He started to gag.
Tilted toward him, the depths of the cup revealed a pair of eyes. They were about the size and shape of a sparrow’s eggs, bright red with little black pupils centered on fiery crimson. Of any face they might front there was no sign. As he goggled madly two more emerged below the first pair.
Then he saw that all four were part of the same countenance, which he finally got a good look at. He did scream then, but the sound was muffled by the tentacle swelling inside his throat, and no one heard.
In the stalls across the way two dray animals, a mare and a gelding, looked on motionlessly. Well, they were not quite motionless. Both were trembling violently, and sweat was pouring down their withers.
The mountain man’s steed munched straw while ignoring the flailing, thrashing man who occasionally bounced off his hindquarters and legs.
More tentacles erupted from the abyssal depths of the cup, far more than it should have been able to hold. They lashed and bound the softly screaming, utterly desperate Mohet Ramses before they began to retract, dragging the unfortunate doctor with them. As he didn’t fit inside the bowl of the vessel nearly as efficiently, there ensued a great many cracking and rending noises as he was pulled in, until only his spasmodically kicking legs were visible protruding beyond the smooth rim. Finally they, too, vanished, and lastly his fine handmade shoes, and then he was all gone.
Mad Amos Malone Page 16
