“They have some animals tied out in the woods,” said Bronco. “Pack animals, no doubt, to carry those bales and boxes. We could use some animals such as that.”
“We’ll take them along,” said Elmer. “We’ll leave our friends afoot. And another thing—I’m most anxious to look into those bales. There must be something in them they didn’t want to have anybody poking into.”
“Maybe not,” said Bronco. “Maybe they were just spoiling for a fight. Maybe they were just mean and ornery.” :
Chapter 12
But it wasn’t just meanness.
They had reason to want no one knowing what was in the bales and boxes.
The first bale, when we ripped it open, contained metal, crudely cut into plates, apparently with chisels.
Elmer picked up two of the plates and banged them together, “Steel,” he said, “plated with bronze. I wonder where they’d get stuff like this.”
But even before he got through saying it, he knew, and so did I. He looked at me and saw I knew, or guessed, and said, “It’s casket metal, Fletch.”
We stood around and looked at it, with Bronco back of us, looking over our shoulders. Elmer dropped the two pieces he’d been holding.
“I’ll go back and get the tools,” he said, “and we’ll get to work on Bronco. We have to get out of here sooner than I thought.”
We got to work, using the tools that Elmer had taken from the tool shack back at the settlement. One leg we fixed up with little effort, straightening it and hammering it out and slipping it back into place so that it worked as good as new. The second leg gave us some trouble.
“How long do you think this might have been going on?” I asked as we worked. “This robbing of the Cemetery. Certainly Cemetery must know about it.”
“Perhaps they do,” said Elmer, “but what can they do about it and why should they care? If someone wants to do some genteel grave-robbing, what difference does it make? Just so they do it where it doesn’t show too much.”
“But they would surely notice. They keep the Cemetery trimmed and …”
“Where it can be seen,” said Elmer. “I’ll lay you a bet there are places where there is no care at all—places that visitors never are allowed to see.”
“But if someone comes to visit a certain grave?”
“They’d know about it ahead of time. They’d know the names on any Pilgrim passenger list—the names and where the passengers were from. They’d have time to put on a crash program, getting any sector of the Cemetery cleaned up. Or maybe they wouldn’t even have to. Maybe they’d simply switch a few headstones or markers and who would know the difference?”
Cynthia had been cooking at the fire. Now she came over to us. “Could I use this for a minute?” she asked, picking up a pinch bar.
“Sure, we’re through with it,” said Elmer. “We’ve almost got old Bronco here as good as new. What do you want with it?”
“I thought I’d open up one of the boxes.”
“No need to,” Elmer said. “We know what they were carrying. It’ll just be more metal.”
“I don’t care,” said Cynthia. “I would like to see.”
It was growing light. The sun was brightening the eastern sky and would soon be rising. Birds, which had begun their twittering as soon as the darkness of the night had started to fade, now were flying and hopping in the trees. One bird, big and blue and with a topknot, moved nervously about, screeching at us.
“A blue jay,” Elmer said. “Noisy kind of creatures. Remember them of old. Some of the others, too, but not all their names. That one is a robin. Over there a blackbird—a redwing blackbird, I would guess. Cheeky little rascal.”
“Fletcher,” Cynthia said, not speaking very loudly, but her voice sharp and strained.
I had been squatting, watching Elmer put the last touches to straightening out and shaping one of Bronco’s hooves.
“Yes,” I said, “what is it?” not even looking around.
“Please come here,” she said.
I rose and turned around. She had managed to lift one end of a board off the top of a box and had pushed it lip and left it, canted at an angle. She wasn’t looking toward me. She was looking at what the lifting of the board had revealed inside the box, unmoving, as if she had been suddenly hypnotized, unable to take her eyes away from what she saw inside the box.
The sight of her standing in this fashion brought me suddenly alert and in three quick strides, I was beside her.
The first thing that I saw was the exquisitely decorated bottle—tiny, dainty, of what appeared to be jade, but it could not have been jade, for there was painted on it small, delicate figures in black and yellow and dark green, while the bottle itself was an apple green—and nothing in its right mind would go about painting jade. It lay against a china cup, or what appeared to be a china cup, emblazoned in red and blue, and beside the cup a grotesque piece of statuary, rudely carved out of cream-colored stone. Lying half hidden by the statuary was a weirdly decorated jar.
Elmer had come up to us and now he reached out and took the pinch bar away from Cynthia. In two quick motions, he ripped the rest of the boards away. The box was filled with a jumble of jars and bottles, bits of statuary, pieces of china, cunningly shaped bits of metalwork, begemmed belts and bracelets, necklaces of stone, brooches, symbolic pieces (they must have been symbolic pieces, for they made no other sense), boxes of both wood and metal, and many other items.
I picked up one of the symbolic pieces, a many-sided block of some sort of polished stone, with half-obscured etchings on every face of it. I turned it in my hand, looking closely at the engraved symbols presented on each face. It was heavy, as if it might be of metal rather than of stone, although it seemed to have a rocklike texture. I could almost remember, almost be sure, although absolute certainty escaped me. There had been a similar piece, a very similar piece, on the mantel in Thorney’s study, and one night while we had sat there he had taken it up and showed me how it had been used, rolled like a die to decide a course of action to be taken, a divining stone of some sort and very, very ancient and extremely valuable and significant because it was one of the few artifacts that could unmistakably be attributed to a most obscure people on a far-off, obscure planet—a people who had lived there and died or moved away or evolved into something else long before the human race had found the planet vacant and had settled down on it.
“You know what it is, Fletch?” Elmer asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Thorney had one that was almost like it. A very ancient piece. He named the planet and the people, but I can’t recall the names. He was always telling me the planet and the people.”
“The food is hot,” said Cynthia. “Why don’t we eat it now? We can talk about it while we eat.”
I realized, when she spoke of it, that I was ravenous. I had not tasted food since the noon before.
She led the way to the fire and dished up the food from the pan in which she’d heated it. It was a thick, rich soup, almost a stew, with vegetables and chunks of meat in it. In my haste, I burned my mouth with the first spoonful.
Elmer squatted down beside us. He picked up a stick and idly poked the fire.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that we have here some of those missing items that you told me Professor Thorndyke often talked about. Stuff from archaeological sites looted by treasure hunters who spirited all their findings away so they could not be studied, probably to be sold at a later time, at tremendous profit, to collectors.”
“I think you are right,” I said, “and now I think I know where at least some of them are hidden out.”
“In the Cemetery,” Cynthia said.
“Nothing would be simpler,” I said. “A casket would make an excellent hiding place. No one would think of digging it up—no one, that is, other than a gang of outland metal seekers who figured out where they could get good metal at no more than the cost of a little work.”
“It would have been the metal at
first,” said Cynthia, “and then one day they found a casket that held no body, but was filled with treasure. Maybe there was a way in which the graves that held the treasure would be marked. Perhaps a simple little design you would never see unless you knew where to look on the tombstone or the marker.”
“They wouldn’t have found that mark to start with,” said Elmer. “It might have taken them quite a while to get it figured out.”
“They probably had a long time to get it figured out,” said Cynthia. “These ghouls of ours may have been at this metal business for hundreds of years.”
“There may have been no mark,” I said.
“Why, there must have been,” said Cynthia. “How else would they know where to dig?”
“How about someone in the Cemetery working with them? Some insider who would know which graves to dig?”
“You are both forgetting something,” Elmer said. “Maybe our ghoulish friends aren’t really interested in those trinkets in the boxes …”
“But they took them,” Cynthia said. “Sure, they’d take them. They may be interesting and amusing. They might even have some trade value. But it seems to me it is the metal they really would be after. Metal, after all these years, would be hard to come by. At first it could be picked up in the cities, but after a time much of the cities—metal would be badly corroded and you’d have to mine for it. But in the Cemetery there is more recent metal, perhaps much better metal. The artifacts they find in some of the graves have value for us because we have been told by Professor Thorndyke they are significant, but I doubt they have value for these robbers. Toys for the children, geegaws for the women, perhaps minor trading stock—but it’s the metal they are after.”
“This business explains one thing,” I said. “It sheds some light on why Cemetery wants to keep control of visitors. They wouldn’t want to take a chance of someone finding out about the artifacts.”
“It’s not illegal,” Cynthia said.
“No, of course it’s not. The archaeologists have tried for years to get legislation halting the trade in artifacts, but they’ve been unable to.”
“It’s sneaky, though,” said Elmer, “and unprincipled. It’s an underhanded business. If it should leak out, it might do much to tarnish Cemetery’s shiny reputation.”
“But they let us go,” said Cynthia.
“There wasn’t much at the moment they could have done about it,” I said. “There was no way they could stop us.”
“They did something later,” said Elmer. “They tried to blow up Bronco.”
Cynthia said, “If they’d destroyed Bronco, they figured we would get discouraged …”
“I think that is right,” I said. “Although we can’t be absolutely sure about the bomb.”
“We can be fairly sure,” said Elmer.
“There’s one thing about it I don’t like,” I said. “Without half trying, we’ve managed to make enemies of everyone we’ve met. There is Cemetery and now this band of ghouls, and I would suppose the people back at the settlement do not think too kindly of us. Because of us they lost some haystacks and a barn and maybe some of them may have been hurt and …”
“They brought it on themselves,” said Elmer.
“That won’t stop them blaming us.”
“I suppose it won’t,” said Elmer.
“I think we should get out of here,” I said.
“You and Miss Cynthia need some sleep.”
I looked across the fire at her. “We can stay awake for a few hours more,” I said. She nodded bleakly at me.
“We’ll take along the horses,” Elmer said. “That will slow them up. We can get their stuff loaded up …”
“Why bother with it,” I said. “Leave it here. It does us no good. What could we do with it?”
“Why, sure,” said Elmer. “Why couldn’t I have thought of that? When they come back they’ll have to leave some men to guard it and that splits up their force.”
“They’ll follow us,” said Cynthia. “They have to have those horses.”
“Sure they will,” said Elmer, “and when they finally find the horses, if they ever do, we’ll be miles away and out of reach.”
Bronco spoke, for the first time. “But the human two. They cannot go minus sleep. They cannot go for hours.”
“We’ll figure something out,” said Elmer. “Let’s get going.”
“About the census-taker and the ghosts?” asked Cynthia, asking, so far as I could see, without any reason.
“Let’s not worry about the ghosts,” I said.
She’d asked the same question once before. It was just like a woman. Get into some sort of trouble and they’ll come up with the silly questions.
Chapter 13
I woke and it was night, but immediately I remembered what had happened and where we were. I raised up to a sitting position and to one side of me saw the dark form that was Cynthia. She was still asleep. Just a few hours more, I thought, and Elmer and Bronco would be back and we could be on our way. It had been all damn foolishness, I told myself. We could have kept on with them. I had been sleepy, certainly, and riding a horse for the first time in my life had not been an easy chore, but I could have managed. Cynthia had been played out, but we could have strapped her onto Bronco so that if she fell asleep she would not have fallen off, but Elmer had insisted on leaving us behind while he and Bronco shagged the horses deep into the mountains that loomed ahead of us.
“There can’t nothing happen,” he had said. “This cave is comfortable and well hidden and by the time you’ve had some sack time we’ll be back again. There is nothing to it.”
I blamed myself. I should not have let him talk us into it. I didn’t like it, I told myself. We should have stayed together. No matter what had happened, we should have stayed together.
A shadow stirred near the mouth of the cave and a soft voice said, “Friend, please do not make an outcry. There is nothing you must fear.”
I came surging to my feet, the hair prickling at the nape of my neck. “Who the hell are you?” I shouted.
“Softly, softly, softly,” said the voice, softly. “There are those who must not hear.”
Cynthia screamed.
“Shut up!” I yelled at her.
“You must be quiet,” said the lurker in the shadows. “You do not recognize me, but I saw you at the dance.”
Cynthia, on the verge of another scream, caught her breath and gulped. “It’s the census-taker,” she said. “What does he want here?”
“I come, fair one,” said the census-taker, “to warn you of great danger.”
“You would,” I said, but I did not say it loudly, for all this business of his about talking softly and not making any outcry had sunken into me.
“The wolves,” he said. “The metal wolves have been set upon your trail.”
“What can we do about it?”
“You stay very quiet,” said the census-taker, “and hope that they pass by.”
“Where are all your pals?” I asked.
“They are around somewhere. They are often with me. They hide when they first meet people. They are a little shy. If they like you they’ll come out.”
“They weren’t shy at the dance the other night,” said Cynthia.
“They were among old friends. They had been there before.”
“You said something about wolves,” I reminded him. “Metal wolves, I think.”
“If you’ll come most softly to the entrance, I think that you might see them. But please to be most quiet.”
Cynthia was close beside me and I put out my hand to her and she grabbed it and hung on tight.
“Metal wolves,” she said.
“Robots, more than likely.” I don’t know why I was so calm about it. Stupidity, I guess. In the last two days we had encountered so many screwy things that metal wolves, at first, didn’t seem too bad. Just sort of commonplace.
Outside the cave mouth the moon lighted up the landscape. The trees stood out al
most as plain as if it had been day and in between them ran little grassy places dotted with boulders. It was wild, rough country and, somehow, it sent a shiver through me.
We crouched just inside the entrance and there was not a thing to see, just the trees and the grassy patches and the boulders and beyond them the dark lift of hills fearsome in their darkness.
“I don’t …” Cynthia began, but the census-taker clucked at her and she said no more.
We crouched, the two of us, hand in hand, and it seemed a silly business. There was nothing stirring; not even the trees, for there was no wind.
Then there was a movement in the shadow underneath a tree and a moment later the thing that had made the movement trotted out into the open. It glittered in the moonlight and it had about it a sense of fiendish strength and ferocity. It was the size of a calf, perhaps, although because of the moonlight and the distance, the size was hard to judge. It was lithe and quick, with a nervousness about it, stepping high and daintily, but there was in its metal body a feel of power that could be perceived even from some hundreds of feet away. It quartered nervously about, as if it might be seeking out a scent and for a moment it switched about and stared directly at us—stared and seemed to strain toward us, as if someone might have held it on a leash and it yearned to break away.
Then it turned and took up its running back and forth and all at once there were three instead of one of them—slipping through the moonlight, running in the woods.
One of them, as it turned toward us in its running, opened its mouth, or what would have been its mouth had it been a biologic creature, exposing a seried rank of metal teeth. When it shut its mouth, the clash of the teeth coming back together came clear to us, crouching in the cave.
Cynthia was pressing close against me and I disengaged my hand from hers, put my arm about her and held her very close, not thinking of her, I am sure, as a woman in that moment, but as another human being, another thing of flesh and blood that metal teeth could rend. Clutching one another, we watched the wolves, seeking, running—I got the impression they were slavering—and, somehow the idea crept into my mind that they knew we were nearby and were seeking us.