AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Stuck remained at the Gunslinger winter camp. Where Mrs. O'Coombe went, so did he, a hulking shadow. At the moment he sat pillowed between Longshot's thighs as she rubbed oil into his scalp and massaged his temples, looking like a monkey grooming her mate.
"What's that all about?" Duvalier asked Valentine.
"Bears get twitchy if they don't let off steam somehow. That's how brawls start: Bears with nothing to use as a way to vent."
"Like chopping wood?" Duvalier asked.
Valentine stared at her. He'd never thought of it beyond satisfying exercise.
"You sure you don't want to come up to the peace conference?" he asked.
Duvalier poked him with her elbow. "Snore. There's an interesting craft market in Danville, they say. Maybe I'll visit that. I picked up some real gold braid in Indiana. I'll skip a few days of you making goggle eyes at your bowlegged worm rider."
Valentine decided not to ask how she'd acquired the braid. "I'm not sure how to make 'goggle eyes,' " Valentine said, and then regretted it instantly. A lot of times Duvalier said nonsensical stuff just to provoke him.
"You know, Val, you're just a big plaything to her. A doll with really nice hair and a dick."
"What a shame I missed Christmas morning."
"That's it. I am coming along, if only to keep you from embarrassing us."
The banks of the Kentucky were thickly wooded at the slight bulge that passed for a lake designated as the border between Gunslinger and Coonskin territory. Behind the banks were the river-cut hills, scarred with limestone cuts and patched with tufts of wood like an old man's hairline.
They could see on the other side of the river the observation positions of what was presumably the Coonskin force, no doubt here to safeguard their own negotiators.
Valentine's binoculars weren't much better than his eyes at that distance, but with the help of one of the A-o-K's telescopes, he could get a look at individual figures. He recognized the dark battle dress and red dagger sheaths of the Moondaggers.
"The Coonskins have formally united the Moondaggers," Brother Mark said. "May they live to see the error of their ways and have regret come to wisdom."
Frat took a long look at the foes he'd heard so much about. "Religious nuts, huh?"
"If you call worshipping Kurians a religion," Valentine said. Frat turned the eyepiece over to Boelnitz. He turned the knob back and forth, sweeping across the camp, and then made a few notes in his leather journal.
"Some of 'em like the lifestyle, I guess," the Gunslinger observer said. "No tobacco, booze, or red meat but all the wives you want."
"They've been calling themselves the Kentucky Loyal Host lately," a Gunslinger in an officer's slouch hat said.
"Fancy-sounding word for 'traitor,' " Silvertip observed.
Their long search ended in a matter-of-fact fashion. Valentine and Frat were escorted to Corporal Rockaway, raised O'Coombe, where he was setting up mortar positions on the hillside above the river.
"Your boy Rockaway-or O'Coombe, or whatever his name is-he's involved in this. He may be on one leg and be wearing a diaper, but he's a heck of a fire director and trainer for our captured Moondagger artillery," one of Tikka's captains said as he walked them along the ridgeline.
And making a bad job of it, too, to Valentine's mind. The artillery's position could be observed from across the river.
Valentine remembered Rockaway as soon as he saw the face, but there had been changes. He limped worse than Valentine and seemed to have lost weight everywhere but his midsection. He was a rather plain-looking, freckled young man with sandy hair and a delicate chin like his mother's. He seemed lost in the big service jacket the A-o-K wore, but he still had his Southern Command helmet. Valentine was surprised someone hadn't talked him out of it when he was left behind. Javelin ran short on helmets long before they hit Evansville.
"Did you pick out these emplacements?" Valentine asked as others kept trotting up to Corporal Rockaway for instructions.
"Orders," Corporal Rockaway said. He had some of his mother's Texas accent too. "We're supposed to show our teeth so there won't be any funny business like at Utrecht. Hey, Doc. What the heck are you doing all this way?" O'Coombe's doctor stepped forward. "We've come a long way to bring you home. I'm glad to see you well. When we'd heard-"
Rockaway smiled, which much improved his face. "Hell, Doc, well's a relative term. You put my first diaper on me, and I'm here to tell, I'm back in diapers now and will be for the rest of my life. Some emergency patching to the digestive tract, they said. And I have to drink lots of water to help things along. But I can still fight; I just leak a little doing it. I like fighting these Moondagger sons of bitches. If everything-Well, tell Mom not to worry."
"You can tell her yourself when this is done. She's back with the Gunslinger camp," Valentine said.
"She came all this way too? Devoted of her. When the news came about my older brothers, she just tightened up her mouth and hung black crepe around their pictures and made big donations in their names to the Rear Guard Fund."
Valentine had no business getting involved in family dynamics. He jerked his chin at Frat, and they excused themselves.
