Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [179]
“We aren’t friends.”
“Your associates. I wonder, though, why you have come and why you stay.”
“I’m done with the bush. That’s all.”
“This place is not so good for a man such as yourself. There is only trouble for you here.”
Luke Honey smiled wryly. “Oh, you think I’ve gone native.”
“Not at all. I doubt you get along with anyone.”
“I’ll be leaving soon.” Luke Honey touched the paper in his pocket. “For the States. I suppose your customers will finally have some peace.”
They finished their drinks and sat in silence. When it became dark, Clerk Galtero rose and went about lighting the lamps. Luke Honey climbed the stairs to his stifling room. He lay sweating on the bed and dreamed of his brother Michael, as he had for six nights running. The next morning, he arranged for transportation to the coast. Three days later he was aboard a cargo plane bound for Morocco. Following Morocco there would be ships and trains until he eventually stood again on American soil after half a lifetime. Meanwhile, he looked out the tiny window. The plains slowly disappeared in the red haze of the rim of the earth.
LUKE HONEY AND his party arrived at the lodge not long before dark. They’d come in two cars, and the staff earned its keep transferring the mountain of bags and steamer trunks indoors before the storm broadsided the valley. Lightning sizzled from the vast snout of fast-approaching purple-black clouds. Thunder growled. A rising breeze plucked leaves from the treetops. Luke Honey leaned against a marble colonnade and smoked a cigarette, personal luggage stacked neatly at his side. He disliked trusting his rifles and knives to bellhops and porters.
The Black Ram Lodge towered above a lightly wooded hillside overlooking Olde Towne. The lodge and its town lay in the folds of Ransom Hollow, separated from the lights of Seattle by miles of dirt road and forested hills. “Backward country,” one of the men had called it during the long drive. Luke Honey rode with the Brits Bullard and Wesley. They’d shared a flask of brandy while the car left the lowlands and climbed toward the mountains, passing small, quaint townships and ramshackle farms tenanted by sober yeoman folk. Wesley and Bullard snickered like a pair of itinerant knights at the potato pickers in filthy motley, bowed to their labor in dark, muddy fields. Luke Honey didn’t share the mirth. He’d seen enough bloody peasant revolts to know better. He knew also that fine cars and carriages, horses and guns, the gloss of their own pale skin, cursed them with a false sense of well-being, of safety. He’d removed a bullet from his pocket. The bullet was made for a buffalo gun and it was large. He’d turned it over in his fingers and stared out the window without speaking again.
After supper, Dr. Landscomb and Mr. Liam Welloc, coproprietors of the lodge, entertained the small group of far-flung travelers who’d come for the annual hunt. Servants lighted a fire in the hearth, and the eight gentlemen settled into grand oversized chairs. The parlor was a dramatic landscape of marble statuary and massive bookshelves, stuffed and mounted heads of ferocious exotic beasts, liquor cabinets, and a pair of billiard tables. Rain and wind hammered the windows. Lights flickered dangerously, promising a rustic evening of candlelight and kerosene lamps.
The assembly was supremely merry when the tale-telling began.
“We were in Mexico,” Lord Bullard said. Lord Bullard hailed from Essex; he was a decorated former officer in the Queen’s Royal Lancers who’d fought briefly in the Boer War, but had done most of his time pacifying the “wogs” in the Punjab. Apparently his family was enormously wealthy in lands and titles, and these days he traveled to the exclusion of all else.