The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (14 page)

             
"It was a babble of voices and like a dream. I sat down, staring stupidly and holding Betty against my heart until I realized a man was pulling at my knees and talking insistently. I began to wake up then, and looking down, recognized the minister I had seen the previous day. I could not remember his name but I handed Betty down to him when he asked, as obediently as a child.

             
" 'She saved me, you know,' I said brightly. 'She left them and saved me. But the Dead Horse got her. That was too much, you see. She was only a girl, couldn't fight
that.
You do see, don't you?' This is what I am told I said at any rate, by Mr. Andrews, the Episcopal minister of the little Church of the Redeemer. But that was later. I remember none of it.

             
"When I woke, in the spare bed of the rectory the next day, I found Andrews sitting silently by my bed. He was looking at my bare breast on which lay the little Celtic cross. He was fully
dressed, tired and unshaven and he reeked of smoke, like a dead fireplace, still full of coals and wood ash.

             
"Before I could speak, he asked me a question. 'Did she, the young lady, I mean, give you that?'

             
" 'Yes,' I said. 'It may have saved me. Where is she?'

             
" 'Downstairs, in my late wife's room. I intend to give her Christian burial, which I never would have dreamed possible. But she has been saved to us.'

             
" 'What about the rest of that crowd?' I said. 'Can nothing be done?'

             
"He looked calmly at me. 'They are all dead. We have been planning this for three years. That Hell spawn have ruled this part of the country since the Revolution. Governors, senators, generals, all
Waldrons
, and everyone else afraid to say a word.' He paused. 'Even the young children were not saved. Old and young, they are in that place behind the house. We took nothing from the house but your clothes. The hill folk who live to the west came down on them just before dawn, as we came up. Now there is a great burning; the house, the groves, everything. The State Police are coming but several bridges are out for some reason, and they will be quite a time.' He fell silent, but his eyes gleamed. The prophets of Israel were not all dead.

             
"Well, I said a last goodbye to Betty and went back to Washington. The police never knew I was there at all, and I was apparently as shocked as anyone to hear that a large gang of bootleggers and Chicago gangsters had wiped out one of America's first families and gotten away clean without being captured. It was a six-day sensation and then everyone forgot it. I still have the little cross, you know, and that's all."

             
We sat silent, all brooding over this extraordinary tale. Like all of the Brigadier's tales, it seemed too fantastic for human credibility and yet—and
yet.

             
The younger member who had spoken earlier could not resist one question, despite Ffellowes' pre-story ban on such things.

             
"Well, Sir," he now said. "Why this means that one of the oldest royal families in the world, far more ancient than King Arthur's, say, is only recently extinct. That's absolutely amazing!"

             
Ffellowes looked up from his concentration on the rug and seemed to fix his gaze on the young man. To my amazement he did not become irritated. In fact, he was quite calm.

             
"Possibly, possibly," he said, "but of course they all appear to have been Irish or at least Celts of some sort or other. I have always considered their reliability open to considerable doubt."

-

             
I started the discussion by accident. A national magazine recently had carried some color photographs of an alleged giant, ape-like creature said to be living in the California mountains. This intrigued me, and I mentioned that I would like to go and look for the beast and wished I were younger.

             
We were sitting over coffee at the club's big table, four or five of use, and Ffellowes, out retired British brigadier, was one.

             
"Like that coelacanth fish off East Africa," said somebody. A survivor from earlier times, perhaps, like a live Pithecanthropus or even a Neanderthal man."

             
"Probably a lot of nonsense or else a crude publicity stunt," said someone else. "You've traveled a lot, General Ffellowes, what do you think?"

             
" 'Brigadier', please, not 'General'," said Ffellowes absently. "Our generals begin with major general. A lot of nonsense? I saw the pictures and they looked extremely convincing to me. I must say. But I don't think I want to look for the thing, not myself. If it
is
a survivor, a sort of leftover, as it were, why I would leave it quite to itself, or themselves properly speaking. There must be more than one, if they do exist, you know."

             
He looked vacant, his red, clean-shaven face smooth as a boy's, his eyes focused on nothing as he stared over our heads.

             
I scented a story. The vacant look and musing manner had always preceded one of Ffellowes incredible tales in the past, and I felt sure there was something similar on his mind now. Several others, who had heard him in the past, also looked alert. None of us dared speak, because Ffellowes is moody. Usually you can let well enough alone and he'll talk by himself, but if someone says something at the wrong moment, he simply shuts up. We waited.

             
"If my geological knowledge is not too dated," he said, still looking at the mantelpiece, "these man-apes and hairy giants once existed in the Pleistocene epoch, about a million years ago, and may still be with us. Why not, indeed? A million years is nothing in terms of the Earth's history."

             
Mason Williams had been sitting glaring at Ffellowes since he first spoke. Williams disliked him, and the British in general, but he couldn't seem to stay away from him, either. Now he had to say something.

             
"A million years ago there was only the beginning of intelligence, pal. That's a mighty long time and it's how long it took to develop
us,
from whatever ancestor you pick."

             
Exactly what his point was, I don't really know. He'd just been looking for something to argue with Ffellowes about, and this was the first statement he could pounce on.

             
Ffellowes stared coldly at Williams, and I knew it was touch and go. He'd either clam up or be irritated enough to go on talking. But we were lucky.

             
"Intelligence, according to a number of experts in the field of evolution, a study, Williams, somewhat removed from stock-broking, may well be an accident. That Pleistocene or Pliocene, or even earlier still, hominids of some sort achieved it could very well be ascribed to luck. Circumstances in one place loading the dice, so to speak, in terms of the right animal, the right climate, the right
impetus.'''
He fell silent again.

             
Williams opened his mouth, but what he was about to say will remain unknown, because Ffellowes started talking, steadily and precisely, in a way which permitted no interruption, at least not by anyone of Williams' caliber.

             
"I rather imagine none of you know the Hadhramaut, do you? I thought not. Well, it's the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, the area the British just abandoned when we left Aden last month. If you go from the Aden area east, you run through a lot of what were called 'associated states'; and finally, a little more than halfway, on a map, across the Arabian peninsula, you hit Oman, a sort of dreary, fringe state which borders Saudi Arabia on the southeast, cutting it off from the sea. Now that we're gone, I rather imagine that the Saudis will do something about Oman. They could use a seaport on the Indian Ocean. But that's by the way.

             
"A most unpleasant country to travel in, the Hadhramaut, unless one is, or appears to be, a part of the scenery
and
very well armed in addition. Two people simply aren't enough, or weren't in 1924.

             
"A Sudanese Arab named Moussa wad
Helu
and I were moving east along the coast, quite near the Oman border and hoping we'd get out alive. I'd been sent to get some information on a reputed Mahdi, a prophet, who was going to expel the British from that part of the world, and I'd got myself rumbled. You'd say 'blown' now I think.

             
"Old Moussa, who was an awfully sound chap, one of our best men in the area, volunteered to get me out, before the Mahdi's boys did me in, that is. We left a ghastly hole called
Hauf
on the run, with the opposition firing badly aimed Lewis guns at our backs. We had two fairish camels and a limited amount of food and water, plus one rifle, two pistols and an assortment of knives. I was rigged out as an Arab but couldn't have fooled anyone. I speak Arabic but appearances are against me. I'd been hiding, lying low inland collecting information when the balloon went up.

             
"We knew the local Mahdi's people would be after us like a shot, and we only had one ace in the hole. This was a big torch, a flashlight, for signaling a motor torpedo boat the Navy had in the area. We'd got a last message off on my wireless set before we destroyed it, and we could only hope the boat would be cruising along looking for us where it was supposed to be.

             
"We rode all through the night, along the low dunes behind the beach. It was cool and lovely, but we knew what the next day would be like.

             
"In the dawn light the ocean stretched like a sheet of pink glass on our right. There was a
narrow stretch of pebbly beach, about a quarter mile of exposed coral reef, because the tide was out, and then the empty, motionless sea.

             
"We rode on all through the burning hot day, hoarding our water and not talking. The vague rendezvous with the
MTB
was about fifty miles ahead, and we knew the local bad types were sure to be not too far behind.

             
"Lovely scenery if one had the time to enjoy it, really. I saw a flock of large black and white birds, not gulls or terns, but something else, standing on the reef at one point. That was all that moved until about noon. Then I pulled up my '
oont
' with a jolt. There were five blackish, hunched figures way out on an outcrop of coral, scrabbling about in the shallow water.

             
" 'Only dwellers of the tide, S'ayyid,' said Moussa, also reining up. 'They are dwarfs, harmless, not even able to kill. They eat all the dirt cast up by the sea, shells and seaweed, dead fish also. They are no danger to anyone.'

             
" 'Are they then
Bedawi
(Arabs)?' I asked.

             
"He looked disgusted, his narrow, sun-blackened face wrinkled in contempt. 'They are barely human. They have no house, nothing. God never sent the Prophet, blessed be His Name, to speak to such as they. But they are very old. They have always been here.'

             
"This was apparently all he cared to say, and we moved off again. I looked back at the strange little shapes and wished I knew more about them.

             
"At dusk we stopped. The straight shore had sloped in a little, and some sort of seep had brought enough water to form a small bog at the entrance of a shallow gully. It was a nasty, evil-smelling place, but the camels needed rest and so did we. Also, and this was even more important, the camels could drink the brackish, scummy water of the seep and allow us to save our
waterskins
.

             
"The mosquitoes were particularly bad, so we tethered the animals in the gully and climbed to its western edge to both rest and keep watch. I noticed Moussa seemed a bit edgy, constantly glancing about, you know, and I finally asked him if he had heard or seen anything that disturbed him. He'd been quite relaxed earlier in the afternoon and had even said we had a good lead on the opposition, so this change in attitude got the wind up a bit for me.