Valentine decided there was still a chance at bluff. "No, we have to whittle."
Five minutes later, but with over an hour of daylight left, Valentine stepped out of the door with the three rifles in his arms. He inflated his lungs, threw out his chest, and let loose with a high-pitched shriek. The three Black Feathers startled at the cry, which didn't seem to echo off the hills so much as pass through them.
"Come and get your guns," Valentine called hoarsely, advancing a cautious pair of steps away from the door. His holster was empty; Harper covered him from behind with the revolver.
"You made the smart move, son," Mr. Mind said, trying to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. The three rode forward to claim the repeaters.
Valentine carefully placed them on the ground and stepped back.
The older man dismounted, covered by the guns of his younger relations. He knelt to pick up one of the guns. "So, there are only three of you. I thought so. These are mighty fine-"
He made a surprised choking sound and pulled his hands away from the rifle as if it were a rattlesnake shaking its tail.
Carved into the stock of each rifle was a small insigne, a reversed swastika identical to the one Valentine had seen on the canoe and discussed with the researcher at the Miskatonic.
He looked up at Valentine, lips trembling. "Where'd you get these?" he asked.
"Our Masters gave them to us. Their mark is on the saddles, as well. I even have a tattoo. We're scouting for them, you see. Eight of them moving west as we speak. So take them, but we'll have them back by morning. In good condition, too: They'll only be dropped once."
"Now, son, we had no knowing you had anything to do with the Twisted Cross. Hell, we're no enemies of yours. You might say we're on your side. Just this spring we caught a Cat out of the Ozarks. Real little spitfire; the boys ganged her, and we cut her throat, of course. You can ask Lord Melok-iz-Kur, in Rockford. We pay for what we take there with good silver, turned in runners even."
Valentine smiled. "It seems we've just had a misunderstanding here. No one was hurt, no one need know, Mr.-"
"It's Black Craig Lorraine, sir. At your service. If there's anything we can do to help you along, anything at all..." The Black Feather was almost groveling.
"Come to think of it..." Valentine mused.
Valentine returned to the house, holding the rifles. "He folded." Harper handed the pistol back.
"Eh?" said Gonzalez.
"They're letting us go. In fact, they're giving us some supplies. Problem is, they're cannibals, so I had to promise them Gonzalez, since he's the plumpest of us."
"Bad joke, Val," Gonzalez said. "That was a joke, right?"
That night the Wolves rode north with guns, horses, and a new shoe on the spare horse. They were also weighed down by bags of corn, grain, and food from the supplies of the Black Feathers.
"Jesus, Lieutenant," Harper said, voice tinged with admiration. "When you did that Reaper scream, I about crapped my pants. You could have warned us."
One of the Black Feathers, part of the dispersing ring to the north, waved in a friendly fashion. Gonzalez eyed him warily.
"That was a joke, right, Lieutenant?"
attlefield, August of the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: Burned-out motors and wagons fill the streets of Hazlett, Missouri. Some of the brick buildings still stand, but of the wooden houses only stone chimneys remain, standing as monuments to the homes that had been.
A few soldiers still poke and rake among the sooty ruins, their smoldering houses finally quenched by the morning's downpour. The salvaged Grog weaponry and equipment lay in three heaps: destroyed, repairable, and intact. Expert scroungers added to this mechanical triage as they gleaned further material from the surrounding woods and the road back to Cairo, Illinois.
The only bodies in evidence lay in neat, unshrouded rows lined up outside a wooden barn a half-mile outside the town proper, conveniently close to a water spring. The maimed and wounded inside, groaning their agony out on pallets, old doors, and even hay bales, envied the corpses now past all suffering. Two-man teams of battlefield surgeons, faces gray with fatigue and smocks brown with hundreds of bloodstains, fought exhaustion and sepsis.
The gravediggers adhered to their own priorities. The first day after the battle, they put to rest the dead of Southern Command: Bears, Wolves, Guards, and Militia. The second day, the dead Quislings were buried in a long common grave, dug by the prisoners spared after the fall of Hazlett. Finally on this day, the third after the battle, the gravediggers set alight a great pyre of Grogs, who shared the flame with putrefying dead horses, oxen, and mules inside a ring of firewood. Exhausted from the labor of dragging the bigger corpses out of sight and smell, the officer in charge decided to rest his detail before attending to the row of this morning's bodies outside the field hospital. The doctors couldn't save everyone.
Thus the miasma of burned flesh introduced Lt. David Valentine to the tableau of a battlefield. Three companies of Wolves, including Zulu, marched up from reserve near the southern border. Sent to help deal with the incursion, they arrived too late to do anything but shake their heads at the destruction of the little town and join in the services held over the bodies of the slain.
Chuckwagon tales told by the survivors of the Battle of Hazlett described a push into the valuable mining towns of the area from the tip of Illinois. The Quislings and Grogs made a fortress of the little crossroads town, and only a concentration of every available Bear in eastern Missouri backed up by Wolves and a Guard regiment forced them out again. It might have been worse, but Valentine learned that a company of Wolves had ambushed reinforcements at the Mississippi, sacrificing themselves to keep the road to Hazlett closed. Out of a hundred Wolves, a bare sixteen now licked their wounds on the banks of the WhitewaterRiver.
It was this destruction of Foxtrot Company that led Captain LeHavre, the senior Wolf officer in the area, to call Valentine into his tepee one afternoon. Zulu Company was preparing to return below the state line again, as an incursion in the northeast might mean an even larger one in the southwest.
Valentine wondered, as he answered the summons that afternoon, what the news would be. LeHavre always hit his officers, whenever possible, with bitter medicine early in the morning and saved the sugar for evenings. So an afternoon conference might be a trail-mix assortment of sweet and sour.