Universe Twister - Keith Laumer [178]
"Ha!" he growled; in the moonlight his teeth flashed white in a wide and unfriendly grin. "Threw you out, deed she? Eet feegures. And now I feex you, permanently." Borako jerked the knife from his belt, whetted it on a hairy forearm, advancing toward Lafayette.
"Look here, Borako," Lafayette said, edging sideways. "I bounced you on your head once today; am I going to have to do it again?"
"Last time you treecked me," Borako snarled. "Theese time I've got a few freends along to referee." As he spoke, three large men materialized from the deep shadows behind him.
"Well, now that you have a foursome, you can play a few holes of golf," Lafayette snapped. As he spoke, the door of the wagon rattled; a sharp, furious shriek sounded, followed by the pounding of irate feminine fists on the panels.
"Hey—what deed you do to her?" Borako grunted.
"Nothing," Lafayette said. "That's what she's mad about."
As his cohorts rushed to the locked door, Borako uttered a roar and charged. Lafayette feinted, ducked aside and thrust out a foot, hooked Borako's ankle. The Wayfarer plunged headfirst into a wagon wheel, wedging his head firmly between the big wooden spokes.
The other three men were fully occupied in impeding each other's efforts to unbar the door. Lafayette faded back between wagons, turned, and sprinted for the shelter of the deep forest.
Chapter Three
1
For half an hour, the sounds of men beating the brush waxed and waned around O'Leary where he lay facedown in the concealment of what he had belatedly realized was a patch of berry bramble. At length the activity dwindled, a last voice called a final curse. Silence fell. Lafayette crawled forth, dusted himself off, wincing at the impressive variety of aches and pains he had acquired thus far in the night's adventures. He groped inside his coat; the Mark III was still in place. He scanned the dark slope below. Terraced formations of crumbling rock strata led precariously downward.
He started down, keeping his eyes carefully averted from the vista of black treetops beneath him. It was a stiff twenty-minute climb to a wide ledge where he flopped down to rest.
"Out of condition," he told himself disgustedly. "Lying around the palace with no more exercise than a set of lawn tennis now and then is making an old man of me. When I get back, I'll have to start a regimen of dieting and regular workouts. I'll jog early in the morning—say ten laps around the gardens while the dew is still on the roses—then a nice light breakfast—no champagne for a while—then a light workout on the weights before lunch . . ." He paused, hearing a faint sound in the underbrush. A hunting cat? Or Borako and his men, still on the prowl . . .
Lafayette got to his feet, resumed his cautious descent. The moon went behind a cloud. In pitch darkness, his feet groped for purchase. A rock moved underfoot; he slid, caught at wiry roots, slithered down a sudden steep declivity, fetched up with a painful thump while small stones rattled down around him.
For a moment he lay still, listening for alarums and excursions from above. Except for a high, faint humming as of a trapped insect, the night silence was unbroken.
Lafayette got cautiously to his feet. Inches from the spot where he had fallen, the ledge dropped vertically away; a yard or so on either side of him it curved back in to meet the cliff face.
"Nice going, O'Leary; you've got yourself trapped like a mouse in a wastebasket."
His eyes, accustoming themselves to the darkness, were caught by a faint hint of light emanating from a vertical cleft in the rock face, two feet to the right of the ledge. He leaned out, peered into a narrow, shadowy passage cutting back into the rock, barely visible in the pale glow from an unseen source.
There might be room to