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Deathlands - Time Nomads
The Trader smiled and wiped dust off his face. "Slow it down, friend, slow it
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down. Just want to know how my war captain passed a few hours in the middle of
a strange ville."
"I passed them, Trader, if that's okay with you. Fireblast! What's the
questions for?"
The Trader's smile disappeared like the shroud of dew on a summer meadow.
"Just want to be sure I left a man in charge of the war wags, Ryan. Not some
green kid that'll go sniffing around the skirts of the baron's slut!"
Ryan blinked, trying to clear the crimson mist that had suddenly drifted
across his vision and clenched his fists at his side.
"Not fucking fair," he said, keeping his voice pitched low so that the whole
crew wouldn't hear their quarrel.
"No?"
"No! Sure I went with her. Dark night, Trader! She has to be the most
beautiful woman I ever seen in my life."
"Won't argue with you there, son. But that doesn't change the fact. You were
gone for three close on four hours."
The fog of anger began to fade. Ryan swallowed hard, recognizing the
inevitable truth that Trader was right. He shouldn't have left the wags like
that. Nothing had gone wrong, but that could be put down to luck, not
judgment.
Finally, slowly, he nodded. "Guess that's right," he admitted.
The Trader's smile flooded back, like sunlight filling a dark valley.
"Sure it is." He moved closer. "Ryan, you're a good man. Why d'you think
you're my right hand when there's older, more experienced men and women in the
crews? Because you're the best I ever saw. But that don't mean you're real
perfect."
"You made the point," Ryan said eager now to get away.
"You want to fuck anything that moves, then you go do it. Your cock'll rot
off, but that falls into the area of being your business. You risk my wags or
my people, and then it falls into being my business. I know you know that,
Ryan. But I gotta say it when I see it. That's all."
Within a day or so there was a far more serious problem to be confronted.
Despite Baron Alias Carson's repeated promises, there was still no sign of the
gas supplies. The Trader, accompanied by J.B. and Ryan, demanded a meeting
with the baron, who saw them in his council room, with Ferryman at his side
and a half dozen well-armed sec-men positioned casually around the room.
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Deathlands - Time Nomads
Carson, as ever, was wearing a conservative suit of 1980s cut, and in his
buttonhole was a tiny pink flower.
He noticed their eyes go to the small adornment and touched it with a lazy
hand. "Guess I'm sentimental after all. Five years t'the day that my first
wife, Consuela, went off on the last train west. Sorry business, that was."
Ryan had immediately been aware that the room smelled heavy from drinking, and
Carson's speech was a little more slurred than usual.
"Little bit of Mex in Consuela. Pretty as a doll. But she was kind of crazed.
Too much tequila and not enough control. Got me riled once about my shooting,
she did."
Ferryman coughed. "You want to talk about that, Baron?"
"Why not?"
"Times past. Not worth remembering, Baron. What happened five years back it
happened. Weren't nobody's fault."
"Sure, sure, sure." He sighed. "But I've started this so I'd been drinking
some. Don't hardly touch a bottle now. She pushed me. Kept damned pushing at
me. Put a glass jug of red wine on her head and stood out that door. Dared me
to shoot it off her head. Dared me."
One of the first things that Ryan had noticed about the baron was that he
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didn't seem to sport a blaster. It wasn't unique in his experience, but it was
unusual for the baron of a frontier ville like Towse.
"Had an Astra .44 Magnum in those days. Good with it, wasn't I, Ferryman?
Yeah, I was good with it. I
sat here and I drew down on her. On my wife. And what happened, Ferryman? Tell
the outlanders. Tell
Trader."
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