Kisêyiniw was in the barn when Dar came thundering up atop his father’s best horse, spraying lather across the small courtyard.
The old man had already drawn breath to scold the boy about such poor treatment of a fine animal when Dar blurted from the saddle, “Pop says I’m supposed to find Avery Tall Pines and tell him that Marty Palin needs him quick!”
Kisêyiniw’s face went white and he froze solid, but only for an instant. In the next, he was all motion and moving away fast.
“First off, cool that damn’ horse down,” he called over his shoulder as he ran for the back wall of a barn that butted up against the slope behind his house. “Get that saddle off, rub him down, and water him like you know what you’re doin’.
“Once you’re done with that, there’s a big canvas bag in my bedroom closet “Grab it and bring it out here!” He didn’t even ask why Dar’s father had summoned him.
Dar leapt from the saddle and tugged on the reins of the weary animal, forcing it along at a measured pace that clawed at the boy’s nerves. But it had to be done, he knew, lest the animal become overheated and potentially ruined.
He was quivering with impatience as he wiped foam from the gelding’s coat. He didn’t bother with the curry comb, though. He was in too much of a hurry. Pop would have to settle for chewing him out later.
He found the bag readily enough. It was huge! More like a floppy steamer trunk than a bag. And heavy — it must have weighed a hundred pounds or more. It clanked metallically when he moved it, struggling to maneuver the long, wide, reinforced carrying strap over his shoulder. His gait was comical as he hobbled at his best speed back out into the yard, half dragging the ungainly package.
Kisêyiniw was working at the back wall of the barn with a sledge, bashing a great, gaping hole in the wall.
“Here!” Dar called.
“Good,” Kisêyiniw paused just long enough to turn. “In my workshop, behind the big gas saw, there’s a rolling box, you know the one?”
“The red one? Yeah!”
“Bring it here!”
Dar was off. Kisêyiniw wasn’t to be seen when he’d returned with the big box, but he could hear him. He moved tentatively into the barn, almost afraid of what he’d find. There seemed to be another room behind the back wall. A secret room! Just like in the movie serials!
“Kisê– uh, Mr. Tall Pines?”
“Might just as well call me Avery.” the old man’s voice came from the darkness. “Now that the cat’s outta the bag. Hell, kid, why not just call me Av — that’s what yer granddaddy always called me.”
Av? The surprises were coming so fast and hard that Dar felt as though his whole world were coming apart at the roots. Wait—! “You knew my granddad?” he gasped.
“I should smile,” the old man was wheeling a curious and streamlined contraption out through the shattered wall. “I was to yer grandpappy like you are to me. Taught me everything I knew.”
Dar was starting to get a bit dizzy and his stomach felt sick. Kis— Av— Av had known his grandfather. Had been his student. Was there anything in his life that was truly as he’d always believed it to be?
“What’s that all about?” he asked pointing as Av finished maneuvering the gleaming motorcycle through the rent and fully into the barn. “I didn’t even know you had one of those things.”
Av smiled wide, the expression changing his face completely, crinkling the corners of his eyes and making him seem almost jolly. He seemed to have shed twenty years over the course of a few heartbeats.
“This here’s a nineteen and thirty-three Indian Chief,” he told the boy. “Indian Blue and Chinese Red, with custom bronze pinstriping that I hadda pay extry for. She’s got a upgraded nineteen and thirty-five model, seventy-four cubic inch Y motor that’s had a leetle mite o’ work done to it, and a four speed trans-a-mission.
“Give her a good road she’ll just about outrun one of them Boeing high wing monoplanes.
“Only where in hell would I ride it on this podunk island?” he asked rhetorically. “There ain’t a paved road within a thousand miles. No point in leaving it out in th’ open, right?
“Now stuff that canvas sack in the sidecar,” his face was all business again, “and be quick about it.”
Dar complied, struggling to fit the ungainly package into the narrow compartment, not understanding the old man’s intent. If there was no place to ride it....
“Make sure to leave yourself some room to sit,” Av cautioned.
“What?” he asked, heart pounding. “You mean I’m gonna ride in it? I though you said—”
Av turned from the big rolling cabinet and shot him a stern look. “Well you ain’t ridin’ that poor hoss anywhere before he cools down, and you ain’t got time to walk back.”
Dar nodded, holding his tongue and swallowing hard. The Indian looked almost as dangerous as the gleam that had come to Av’s eyes when he was talking about it.
“Here, now,” Av was holding something out behind him as he rummaged around in the big cabinet. “There’s a couple of leather valises in that locker back against the far wall next to the farrier’s box. Fetch ‘em and start loading this stuff inside.
“Hold on,” he turned back to Dar. “Before we get any farther into this, what’d I teach you about what you carry into battle?”
“Only what you need for the mission,” Dar answered without hesitation. “Don’t weigh yourself down, because whatever you haul in, you’ll have to carry it back out, and maybe some mission objectives or such as well, and by then you’ll be tired, and maybe hurt.”
“Exactly,” Av nodded. “And what did I tell you about going into a fight blind?”
“Don’t do it?”
Av had to chuckle at that. “If it can be helped,” he finished. “Never if you can help it. But if you have to? If there’s no other way?”
“That you never know what you’ll need until you need it,” Dar recited. “So you make your best guess and tough it through.”
“Good. Now go!”
“Say,” he added to Dar’s retreating back. “You still got your granddaddy’s old pistol?”
Dar was already halfway to the locker at this point. He didn’t pause, though he wondered how the old man had known about the gun. He’d never once mentioned it, he was certain.
“Sure!” He called back. It’s safe in my sock drawer, why? I haven’t seen any sort of ammunition that’d fit in it in my whole life.”
Av laughed out loud. “Sonny, me lad,” he told the boy, “that is about to change.”
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Now Dar did pause, his hand nearly on the handle of the locker. “What? You mean they still make it?”
Av laughed harder. “Still make it? Kid, they make it by the ton. You just don’t see much of it out here in the lost Limey hollers where they’re still gettin’ the hang of breech loadin’ Enfields an’ smokeless powder.”
Dar was having some difficulty cataloging this new, non-dour version of his mentor. After his first instant of shock, the old man seemed almost gleeful at the prospect of going up against the pirates.
Back with the valise, Dar eyed the object in the old man’s hand dubiously. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked cautiously.
“It is, and take it,” Av’s voice went stern. “And no more lip outta you, boy — there ain’t time. If yer father said to hurry — say,” he turned to stare over his shoulder, “what exactly is this all about, anyway?”
Dar remembered suddenly that he hadn’t told Av anything beyond the need to come quick. “Pirates attacked Northridge last night and killed the constables with a cannon this morning when they went out to see what had happened!” he said breathlessly.
Clearly, it took Av a second to digest the unlikelihood of the statement. “Pirates.”
“Air pirates!” Dar clarified. “With a two hundred foot airship! Old man Entigh figures there must be a passel of ‘em.”
Av stared at him for a long moment before turning back to the rolling cabinet to fish out some more hand grenades. He was muttering something to himself, but Dar couldn’t make it out.
There followed fully three dozen squat box magazines that looked awfully familiar in an unfamiliar sort of way, with the hollowed out heads of strange-looking, partially jacketed projectiles peeking out the top. Express bullets, they called them. Tear a man up something awful, Av had always insisted. Dar was wondering if he was getting ready to test the provenance of those statements.
A dozen of the much longer Thompson magazines, also loaded, also carrying express bullets, five boxes of shotgun shells and two of some sort of large caliber rifle ammunition. A box of the peculiar, skinny rounds that Av’s old Russian revolver used followed those.
Not knowing exactly what he’d be going up against, Av was obviously swinging the loop of his preparations pretty wide.
The second valise was already getting heavy when Av produced the big round cans. Dar knew what those were for.
“You’re really going to war, aren’t you?” he asked hushed, the excitement of the moment fading with the full realization of what was happening.
“You just now figured that out?” Av snapped. “And what’s this you crap, white man? You don’t think you’re not going too? Tonto don’t go nowhere ‘thout the Lone Ranger, Boy.”
“Me?” Dar asked, shocked. He really hadn’t given it a moment’s thought up until just this minute.
“What in hell do you think I’ve been training you for all these last ten years?” the old man demanded. “You think I got nothing better to do with a decade of my valuable time than mess around teaching you sh– stuff you ain’t gonna use? You think that was all fun an’ games?”
“But Pop—”
“Pop nothing!” Av pressed, handing the Lewis gun magazines over to be stuffed into the large valise. “You’re a man grown and whether you know it or not, you’ve had more military training than three-quarters of the officers either your father or I ever served under. And without a lot of that backwash them poor sons got saddled with while they was learnin’. You’ll do fine.”
Dar hoped he was right. For the moment, though, he was too busy trying to re-swallow his stomach to hope it out loud. Wait — his father? “My father?” he asked disbelievingly. “But Pop’s never served! He hates the military and anything to do with it! He’s a dedicated anti-war—”
Av snorted derisively. “And you think he was always like that?” he asked with a sneer. “Not even hardly!
“He just got tired,” he added, almost to himself. “And he met your mother.
“Now you go around to the fuel shed and get some gas for this ol’ girl,” he ordered as he finished tying the second valise behind the seat of the big motorcycle. “Get it outta the blue barrel. And mind the paint on that Indian, you hear? I gotta get outta these farmer duds.”
Dar was just finishing up when Av reentered the barn, and this was still a different Av than any of those he’d seen before. He was wearing tall, laced boots with side flaps and buckles over the uppers, baggy khaki pants, and a long brown leather coat with giant lapels and epaulets, belted at the waist. It bulged in ways that hinted at items worn beneath it. He had a leather pilot’s cap on his head that sported attached goggles, though he had the goggles up on his forehead. All he lacked for being a movie poster was the pencil mustache, a cigarette holder, and the wing of a P40 to lean on.
“Get on in yonder and change into your trainin’ clothes,” Av told him. Can’t have you runnin’ into the fray wearin’ farm shoes.”
Dar nodded and raced past him. He figured he knew what the old man meant. One day, perhaps a year gone, a strange little man had been sitting in the great room, drinking coffee with Ki— with Av when Dar had arrived for his lessons. There had followed some strange goings on and measuring of Dar’s feet and the man had excused himself without ever having given even a name.
About a week later, Dar had arrived for another lesson to find two pairs of boots suspiciously like those Av now wore waiting for him. For which the old man had insisted he pay the goodly sum of fifteen pounds sterling. Each! Nearly a month’s pay.
But the boots had stood his training in much better stead than the ill-fitting clod hoppers that he normally wore, though he dare not wear them anywhere his father might see.
He was still shrugging into the olive twill jacket he wore while out stalking when he arrived back in the barn and noticed what Av was holding. Another brown leather coat was draped over his arm, and in his free hand was a mess of straps and buckles that included somewhere in their mass a pair of pistol holsters. And in one of them, his grandfather’s pistol.
“Hey,” he scowled. “How’d you get that?”
“Relax kid,” Av told him, holding his arm out for Dar to take the holsters. “That’s not the one from your sock drawer.”
Dar didn’t quite believe him. He looked from the old man to the holsters and back, sliding the big, square handgun clear of the spring-clipped pocket and peering closely down at it, noting that there was a magazine in the well. He buttoned the mag out and made sure the chamber was clear before continuing his examination.
It was exactly the same. It had to be— he rolled it over in his hand and saw the scar along the right grip panel. His pistol had no such scar. And this scar was old, brown with age. But in all other respects, it was the same pistol, with the same deeply blued, gold engraved slide and the same carved ivory grips with the same rampant, stylized wolves on them. He looked back up at the old man in puzzlement.
“Yes, Dar,” the old man smiled. “There’s two of ‘em — a matched set, with consecutive serial numbers direct from Colt’s factory custom shop back before you was born or your daddy winked at his first girl. What’s more, there’s a matching ‘03 pocket .32 that goes with ‘em. But for that one, you’ll have to wait.”
Dar thumbed the top cartridge out of the loaded magazine and took his first close up look at a .45 Automatic Colt’s Pistol round — what was commonly called a .45ACP. “This looks almost like what the Thompsons use,” he said. “Or Colonel Gracie’s .455 Webley automatic.”
“That’s right,” Av confirmed. “They made the .45 Remington-Thompsons just a little mite longer so’s they wouldn’t chamber in regular pistols and risk ‘em blowin’ up in your hand, and the Webleys was long to begin with.
“But right now,” he gestured with the arm holding the coat, “we’re kind of in a rush.”
“Oh! Right!” Dar mentally kicked himself for forgetting the urgency of the moment. There were just too many revelations coming too quickly for him to process all at once without the occasional skip. He felt like a Victrola that was being played atop a running horse.
He slipped the round back in the magazine, the magazine back into the butt of the pistol, and the pistol back into the holster. Then he held the whole mess up, trying to sort out the workings of it.
“It’s a double rig,” Av supplied. “You wear it like a vest with the pistols muzzle down under your arms. Mind you don’t tangle the cross straps in back or you’ll end up with a blister you won’t believe. Those straps on the bottoms of the holsters go through your belt—” he tilted his head critically, eyeing Dar’s suspenders. “When you get a belt.”
Dar shouldered awkwardly into the holster, the weight of the heavy pistol feeling strange against his ribs.
Av handed over the coat, very much like the one he was wearing, and as well worn, with darker patches in the leather here and there where insignia might have been removed. Dar shrugged it on and was surprised at how well it fit. The last thing Av handed him was a sweat-stained match for his own headgear, goggles and all. Dar pulled it down over his head without asking any of the questions that were burning up through his guts.
Av straddled the motorcycle as Dar was squirming into the confined space of the sidecar, gauging his chances of getting out of this without compounding his bruise count by a factor that would stretch his math skills beyond comfort.
The old man reached down and opened the fuel petcock, gave the hand throttle a quick crank to prime the twin cylinders, adjusted the spark arrester with a practiced left hand, and shoved down hard on the kick-start. Nothing. Bringing the spark arrester and fuel back, he cycled the kick-start slowly twice before snapping it down hard once again.
This time the engine fired, sputtered once or twice as Av found the timing with the arrester, and then steadied into a powerful lope.
Av sat there for a minute or two, smiling like a kid at Christmas as the big engine warmed up. Then he lowered his goggles, mashed down on the clutch and reached down with his right hand to shift the four speed transmission into first. With the barest happy glance at his passenger, he eased the clutch out and the big blue and red beast rolled forward.
With a whoop that made Dar jump, Av cranked the throttle hard, causing the cycle to leap forward with a roar. He was in second gear and Pop’s prize gelding was racing away across the courtyard trailing the frayed stub of his tie rope by the time they’d left the yard.