“Hope they’re not infected,” she said.
“Have a good bath when we get to the ville tomorrow. Baron Sharpe’ll be pleased and make you all welcome. But all of those dead.”
“Five dead and one living’s a lot better than six dead,” Ryan pointed out.
“Specially when I’m the one living. Look, I’m Sec man Joshua Morgan. And I haven’t thanked you yet.”
Mildred looked at Ryan, addressing the sec man. “No trouble. Some things a man just doesn’t ride around,” she said.
Chapter Eighteen
“The interesting thing is what the dogs did during the night,” Doc said.
“The dogs didn’t do nothing,” Dean replied, puzzled.
“Anything,” Krysty corrected automatically. “The dogs didn’t do anything.”
“Precisely.” Doc grinned, looking self-satisfied. Mildred wagged a finger at him. “I know what you’re talking about, this time, Doc. Just for once. It’s a sort of quote from that detective. Sherlock Holmes.”
“Oh, I had hardly anticipated anyone recognizing. I had the privilege of meeting with the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, during my visit to London. A striking and intelligent young man. I felt he would go far.” Doc smiled, shaking his head reminiscently. “It was my belief that Artie modeled his greatest creation on your humble servant.”
Mildred laughed. “Only person I know that might have been modeled on you was Baron Munchausen, the greatest liar in all history.”
Joshua Morgan was up and about, looking pale and frail in his borrowed stickie rags. “Did you say something about dogs in the night?” he asked.
“Just a small jest, friend,” Doc replied. “In point of established fact, I did hear the dogs in the night. Perhaps wolves or unusually large and fierce coyotes. From the munching and crunching I would doubt if there is much remaining of the bodies we dragged out into the brush.”
He was right. When they all went out into bright sunshine, there was only some black, dried blood and a few gnawed and splintered bones. A track through the dense undergrowth showed where the predators had dragged away the raggled corpses to mangle them at their leisure.
“I wish we could have carried the bodies of my two colleagues back to the village,” Morgan said.
“They were past caring about it.” Ryan looked at the sec man. “We could have tried to bury them, then your baron night have sent out another hunting party to retrieve them and have them interred in the ville.”
Morgan sniffed, his fingers brushing over the myriad small scars on his face. “No.” He sighed. “My lord, the baron, isn’t a man given to warmth and caring. But he is a good man for all that,” he hastily added.
“For all that, and all that,” Doc chanted. “He’s a good man, for all that.”
“You honing my blade, Doc?”
“Am I teasing you? My dear fellow, nothing was further from my mind.”
“You know where we are now?” Ryan asked, pointing to the glint of water through a grove of elms.
Morgan nodded. “It must be Lake Potomac. Think so. They brought us some way south and east.”
“How far to the ville?”
“Eight or nine miles is my guess.”
“Then we’ll get started. Everyone about ready?”
Dean tugged his father’s sleeve. “Can I keep the Uzi for a while, Dad?”
Emma had given back the handblaster, to the boy’s disappointment.
“No. Hi-Power’s real good for you. You’re used to it by now, Dean.”
“Oh.” He shuffled his feet in the dirt.
“And don’t whine.”
“Sorry, Dad.”
Ryan looked up at the sky. There were a few wispy clouds riding high, over toward the distant Lantic. The air was fresher and cooler than it had been.
He had told Joshua Morgan a little about themselves, falling back on the usual story that they were travelers whose wag had suffered terminal breakdown a couple of days earlier. Ryan mentioned the fracas in the Lincoln Inn, though he chose to play down their part in the mayhem. And he kept Emma’s mutie gifts totally to himself.
He also managed to have a quiet word with the woman before Morgan had awakened.
“From what we learned back in Green Hill, Baron Sharpe has some sort of zoo. Mutie animals. Strong possibility also two-legged muties.”