Both the deputies laughed at that, the way you’d think it was a big joke, and at last Mr. Ben laughed, too. Things had turned friendly right about then.
“No, sir, we do thank you," said Mr. Dode Griffith. “We got a couple other things to look into round this here part of the county, so we’ll just go along and look into them. Good day to you, gentlemen."
The two of them walked off and got into their car and backed out and drove off away. Mr. Ben sort of glittered his eyes after them till they’d rolled plumb out of his sight.
“John," he said then, “I’ve got you to thank for how you headed them off from how they was a-nosing round. And you done the thing by a-telling them the truth—it wasn’t no man I shot at, not a sure enough man.”
“Well, not quite the truth," said Warren, like a lawyer in court.
“No, sir, not quite," I agreed him. “I’ve heard say somewhere that a lie told half the truth is ever the blackest of lies. But I reckon it had to be told thataway, friends. This business we’re into here isn’t just ordinary business. Mr. Ben, the Shonokins aren’t true human folks; aren’t men, and if you shot one it wasn’t like to shoot a man.
“I wonder if I hit him hard," said Mr. Ben, like as if he dreamed.
“Hard and plumb center,” I said.
Mr. Ben sort of glowered off into the woods, the eastward way from that strange, straight track.
“The only neighbor I got close enough to hear me when I shoot is that low-flung, common Sim Drogus,” he said. “He ain't got business of his own to tend to, not enough anyways. I'm in a mind to go over talk to him, and I'd be a right unpleasant visitor to his door.”
“Would he even be within earshot, sir?” inquired Warren. “Does he stay home all the time?”
“Near about all the time,” said Mr. Ben. “Sim Drogus has got the first nickel he air earned. Likewise the second and third and hundred and third and all the rest. And he sits round home and counts them nickels, when he ain't a-listening with them long ears of his.” He looked the other way, toward where the Shonokin settlement was. “Whatever the Shonokins might could be up to, yonder,” he said, “I've got it in mind to go see Sim Drogus.”
“We have a few things to talk about right here,” said Warren. “Let's see to them.”
“Well, come on in and youins can tell me what it's all about,” Mr. Ben said. “Anyhow, the sun's all up the sky to where we can take us a little thimbleful of how-come-you so.”
We followed him in through the door. Callie was inside there, where she'd been a-harking at all the talk that had gone on outside. Mr. Ben's rifle leant right beside the one he'd given me.
“Mr. Ben,” I said, “just now I've got the idea we can relax us a trifle bit. The Shonokins aren't apt to push us much by the light of the day-even if there wasn't aught out there on their track to slow them up.”
“What's there?” Mr. Ben wanted to know.
“A dead Shonokin.”
“Oh” he said. "Oh.”
"Let's sit down where we can watch out the window,” I said, "and I'll tell you two-three things I ran into out there.”
He poured us short drinks of blockade and I told about my walk, a-putting in some stuff I hadn't touched on when I told the thing to Warren. I made a point about the dead Shonokin, and how Altic acted scared of it. Warren listened again like as if it was all he had to do in life, and he kept asking me questions. Again and again, he wrote things on paper.
"You tell us again, the way to Immer is straight as a bowstring, and it isn't as much as two miles long in your estimation,” he said at last. "Let me go get a certain book your story keeps bringing to my mind. It's in my luggage.”
He headed up into the loft where Mr. Ben had bedded him down, and came back with the book. It had a green paper over the dark cover of it. He looked at the back and then leafed through.
"Here we are,” he said, with his finger on a page. "A quotation from Eliphas Levi.”
"Elephant who?” said Mr. Ben.
"Eliphas Levi, Daddy,” Callie said the name right. "He was a French scholar more than a hundred years ago. I heard about him when I was at college.”
"His real name was Alphonse Louis Constant,” Warren told us. "Aleister Crowley claimed to be a reincarnation of him. If that's so, Levi's great sense of humor didn’t accomplish the transmigration—Crowley could be awfully pompous and heavy-handed.”
He studied the page. "This is the passage,” he said. "It's translated by A. E. Waite. It's a formula for bringing the dead to life.”
He handed the book to me and pointed the place out. I read the thing out loud:
. . he must retire at a slow pace, and count four thousand five hundred steps in a straight line, which means following a broad road or scaling walls. Having traversed this space, he lies down upon the earth, as if in a coffin, and repeats in lugubrious tones: 'Let the dead rise from their tombs!'”
Warren took the book back and shut it. "That's all,” he said, "except that Levi advises his readers never to try it. Did you hear that it said four thousand five hundred steps?”
"Loud and clear, I did,” allowed Mr. Ben. "What's it signify, son?”
Warren brightened a somewhat when Mr. Ben called him son, and so, I thought, did Callie.
"John, you estimated not quite two miles to that settlement,” said Warren one more time. "We've heard what Eliphas Levi says about a straight walk of four thousand five hundred steps. How long is a step?”
"Different lengths for different folks,” I replied, "but in the army, when they figure out stride scales, they call the average step thirty inches—two and a half feet.”
"Two and a half feet,” said Callie after me. She sat by the table, and she'd taken pencil and paper too. "Let me figure here.”
She scribbled fast, a-sticking out her pink tongue.
"And two and a half feet is thirty inches,” she said. Then she read out loud to us. "Forty-five hundred steps times thirty inches comes to one hundred thirty-five thousand inches.”
Mr. Ben stroked his moustache. "That's a right many inches,” he said.
“Divide by twelve,” went on Callie, “and that makes eleven thousand two-hundred and fifty feet”
Warren took her paper and checked the writing on it. “Correct, Callie, your arithmetic is good,” he said. “And eleven thousand two hundred and fifty feet is—let's see—in miles—”
“I'll figure that, too,” said Callie, her pencil going like the wind. “A mile is five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. Two miles are ten thousand and five hundred sixty feet.” She looked up at us, all round. “That's six hundred and ninety feet more than the forty-five hundred steps. An overage a little longer than the two-twenty stretch at a track meet.”
“By God!” Mr. Ben hit his fist on the arm of his rocking chair. “Then that's how come them to want my land, so's they can make their straight track across my yard and on there beyond.”
“On there beyond?” Warren repeated him.
“By God!” Mr. Ben said again, louder. “That would carry it onto the land of that sorry Sim Drogus. How'd you like to come with me, John, while I go have a little talk with Sim Drogus?”
“Wait a second,” said Warren. “We've got more to say about this straight track of the Shonokins.”
“What more's to say?” Mr. Ben wondered him, and Callie, too, looked at Warren with questioning blue eyes.
“I'm thinking about what's in other books of mine, books I wish I’d brought along,” Warren said. “For instance, Francis Hitching's Earth Magic. Considerations of the ley lines of power, in England and a few in this country.” He was as solemn as a preacher. “They spell it 1-e-y, and that seems to be a word older in England than the Anglo-Saxon.”
“Ley” Callie repeated him. “I’ve read books by Willy Ley, about all sorts of strange things.”
“Willy Ley’s name was German. But ley lines—they seem to have been brought to our attention by Alfred Watkins—are straight lines, straight as if
drawn by surveyors. Like this one from the Immer Settlement to the edge of this place, not quite forty-five hundred steps.” “This is all plumb new to me,” I said. “What’s a ley line supposed to do for a fellow?”
“That’s hard to say,” Warren replied me. “All the discussions of them either want you to swallow all the wonderful theories—there’s another interesting book by Colin and Janet Bord, they call it Mysterious Britain—that seems to think the ley lines can give power to ships from outer space. All sorts of other works sneer at these ideas, say that the lines are straight only by coincidence. But I’d say, that calls for lots and lots of coincidence.”
“You’re a-moving several laps ahead of me, my friend,” said Mr. Ben.
“I just don’t want to miss anything. I’ll try to make it simple. Hitchings gathers all the evidences he can about a ley line as a power line. It runs straight, connecting points of mystic power. He maps one out in England that’s more than three hundred miles long, and it runs through all sorts of mystic sites like the Cerne Abbas Giant—that’s a big figure on a hillside—on through Stonehenge, and beyond to more and more, all the way to England’s eastern coast.” His eyes shone at us; he was excited. “What we have here isn’t anything like that long a line, but it seems to touch some highly interesting things. That’s including the rocking stone that John and I saw—and felt.”
“I don’t get no sense from it,” said Mr. Ben. “Anyhow, I’m a-honing to go talk to Sim Drogus about what he’s a-trying on with me.”
“A straight line has power anywhere,” said Warren. "A race course is fastest when it's straight instead of curved, like the two-twenty stretch Callie mentioned. You know it's true when you drive on a straight road, the sort they have out in Kansas. Before you know it, you're doing ninety, a hundred miles an hour, and here comes the state trooper to slow you down.”
“That's true enough,” put in Callie.
“Maybe it's what you showed us in your book,” I added. “A forty-five hundred stepway could fix things so they could raise their dead.”
“And a very good reason for them, too,” went on Warren. “In any case, I judge the Shonokins want their power track to run on the proper distance right through your land, sir.”
“If they got to have it forty-five hundred steps long, why in the name of all that's pure and holy don't they run it the other way from that there Immer Settlement they've done took over?” Mr. Ben more or less spit out.
“Because they want to use those points of power going this way,” said Callie. “I can see that. The power must start right where they are—”
“You're right, my dear!” broke in Warren, not at all polite, but you should ought to have seen her light up when he called her that. “And what I showed John in Eliphas Levi gives us the clue that John pointed out They're convinced that a long enough straight track might make them able to call up the dead, including that Shonokin who's lying on the way right now.”
“Where he's a-laying, he holds them back,” said Mr. Ben, hard as a flint stone. “John acts like he's sorry for that one, but me, I can't be. Jackson, all this you tell is right interesting. But I'm overdue to visit Sim Drogus. John, I asked you before, how'd you like to come along?”
"If you want me, Mr. Ben.”
"Sure enough I want you. I might could be glad for a witness to whatever happens.”
He got up from where he sat, slow and strong all through himself. His brows dragged themselves together in a frown I’d not have liked to mean me, and his moustache sort of frowned, too. He walked across the room and yanked open a drawer and took out a blue pistol. Callie watched him while he flipped out the cylinder and spun it to check the cartridges in it, then flipped the cylinder back and shoved the pistol down into the waistband of his suntan pants.
"Daddy,” said Callie, in a voice you had to strain your ears for, "do you need a gun to talk to Mr. Drogus?” "Not him, maybe, but I don't know what I'll meet outside my door,” said Mr. Ben. "The way things have gone on today, a man can need something to shoot with, air minute and air step.” He nodded to me. "Come on, John.” He was fierce about it, but, just as he'd said, things had gone on to make a man fierce. He tramped to his door and out of it and down in the yard. I went with him. Together we headed off the other way from the track, a-following that twisty road where Warren had driven us in the night before.
I had me some time to recollect some stuff I'd heard tell about other straight tracks in America—most of them up North, in places like Rhode Island, New Hampshire. Up where, from what I'd gathered from Warren's talk, the Shonokins had mostly been a-showing themselves. Power in tracks like them? It might could be that it was a late thing for the Shonokins to find it out. Maybe if they'd had such power all the way back yonder, they might could have used it to fight off the Indians in those long-ago wars. Maybe. Who knew? Who could know?
The trees looked all right on both sides of our way, not how they'd appeared on the way to Immer Settlement, when you'd swear they were a-lying in wait "How far off is this man's place?" I inquired Mr. Ben.
"Oh, not as much as a quarter mile," he said back. "He's the only neighbor could have heard me shoot." He made a nasty noise in his throat, and spit on the ground as he walked. "John, if that Shonokin I hit is dead the way you say—well, I've allowed maybe I should ought to feel bad, but I don't. Brooke Altic told you the Shonokins ain't true men. To shoot him was more like to shoot a bear that raids a hog lot, or a fox that robs a henhouse."
"There may be a lot in what you say," I told him. I studied a thicket of balsam by the side of the twisty, rutted road. "This Sim Drogus man, does he live by himself? Is he single?"
"He sure enough is. I ain't nair heard tell of the woman who'd take up with such a sorry somebody, even if he does make money by a-lending it out at big interest. Well, maybe one woman that lives by the side of his place, that mean old maid Hazel Techeray. That'd be a double dose of meanness if they was to marry."
We made it round a curve of the road. "Yonder's where he roosts," Mr. Ben said.
A place was cleared off amongst the trees, with grass and red wild flowers on it. Back beyond, there rose a big face of rock, and in the rock was a fold hollowed out, just big enough for a cabin to be set into it. And that was no way as good or honest-looking a cabin as Mr. Ben had. It appeared like to be all patched together from gnarly old logs, with a warped plank roof to it. That roof had mossy green a-grow- ing on it, and the cabin itself was crooked; it sure enough hadn't known the use of a plumb bob when it was built. The glass of the windows was broken and stuffed with rags.
A scrawny dog was in the yard and showed its teeth to us, but didn’t bar us out as Mr. Ben led the way to the door.
Somebody opened that door and stuck half of himself out to blink at us.
“Yes,” Mr. Ben grated his voice. “There you are, Sim Drogus.”
Sim Drogus came out on his wom-down door log. He was just a scrawny little fellow, big only in the ears and the feet. You could have put your thumb and finger round his little cornstalk of a neck. On his face he had a week’s growing of muddy-brown whiskers, and his nose hung down like a broken twig over his slobby mouth. His watery eyes were set so close together that he could near about have looked through a keyhole with both of them at one and the same time. He had on patched shoes and about two and a half dollars worth of old clothes that would have been better off in the washtub.
“Mr. Ben,” he said in a whining voice, and made a shaky smile. “How you come on? Me, I ain’t been so good of late. Kind of ailing.”
“Which I’m sorry to hear that, Sim Drogus,” said Mr. Ben, and he didn’t sound sorry a bit. “Though you might just could wind up worse off air minute now.”
“I do hope and pray not.” Sim Drogus blinked his weepy eyes at me. “I ain’t got in mind I know this here gentleman.”
“My name’s John,” I said.
“John,” Sim Drogus repeated my name. “John. Seems like to me I’ve heard tell of you in these
parts, you and your silver-strung guitar.”
“Sure enough,” put in Mr. Ben, the grate still in his voice. “Likely you heard tell of him from somebody like that sorry Shonokin, Brooke Altic.”
Sim Drogus swallowed. I saw his Adam’s apple make a shiver up and down again. But he didn't say a mumbling word to that.
“All right, the howdies is over and done with,” said Mr. Ben. “Let's us get down to business, and I'll be plain about it.”
“You're always plain and to the point, Mr. Ben,” said Sim Drogus. “How come you come visiting today?”
“I'll tell you for how come,” said Mr. Ben, very soft. “Are you the one that went a-running to them deputy sheriffs and told them there'd been shooting on my place?” “Shooting?” said Sim Drogus, like an echo, and once again his Adam's apple went a-quivering up and down. “Deputy sheriffs, you say? Why, I ain't had no talk with no deputies, not this livelong day.”
“Well, somebody did,” Mr. Ben said back. “And you're the only one lives close enough in to hear to my place.” Sim Drogus blinked and swallowed, pure down scared to death. “Hazel Techeray was over here this morning from yonder where she lives.” He pointed west, with a hand like a dried-out root. “Come to norrate to me about somebody other is a-having his place sold up by his creditors, and might could I be interested to go there, bid on a couple things. Could be I mentioned the sound of shots to her.” “To old Hazel Techeray.” Mr. Ben spit out the name. “She should ought to be named Witch Hazel. She'd cross hell on a rotten foot log to make trouble for me, or air other honest man.”
“Well, I nair told no deputy nothing, no way,” said Sim Drogus.
“I see.” Mr. Ben turned on his heel to go off. “If that's the whole thing you got to tell me,” he said, “I won't use up no more of your valuable time, Sim Drogus. Only I'll tell you, I'll be right obliged to you if you wouldn't make no talk about my doings to old clatter-jaws like Hazel Techeray.”
"Hold up a second,” spoke up Sim Drogus. "Might could be I can put a little business in your way."
Mr. Ben swung back to face him. "What business you wish to do with me?”
Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 02 Page 7
