“Can I stay awhile longer, Dad?” asked Dean, who was on hands and knees, burrowing through the pile of dirt and sawdust under the shelves and tables.
“Five minutes is all. Five minutes.”
“Doc and I have found something,” J.B. called. “If I can remember how to put it all together.”
“I think that my chemistry might come in handy for once,” Doc said. “I sat in those desks for interminable hours on sunny afternoons when I would rather have been out throwing the pigskin. The utter tedium of science. Volumes of given gases and total internal reflection and osmosis and litmus paper and the lime-water equation. Seems so much wasteful gibberish to me now. Except that I think John Barrymore is on to something. Something that would take the leering smiles off the faces of those ghastly slavers!”
“What is it?” Ryan asked.
J.B. waved a hand at him. “You go on outside, Ryan. We need to find bags to hold some of this stuff.”
“And a strong sealed container to put it in after we’ve mixed it,” Doc added.
“Long as we don’t blow our own fool heads off.” J.B. and Doc both cackled together at whatever it was that they were planning to try.
Ryan smiled at their enthusiasm, wondering what piece of arcane lore the Armorer had stumbled on, knowing from long friendship with J.B. that it was unlikely to be a waste of time.
The air outside struck at him like a moist blanket, and he whistled through his teeth. Mildred was right behind him. “Turkish-bath time, Ryan,” she said.
Krysty was sitting with Jak and Rain Flower a few yards away from the building, leaning against a tumbled concrete pillbox at the side of a dark swamp.
“Where’re the others, lover?”
“Dean’s nosing to see if he can discover some long-lost weapon that hasn’t rotted to rust.”
Mildred wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. “And John and Doc are playing at being little boys again. Discovered some big-deal secret.”
“No ghosts?” the young native woman stammered. “You see there is no ghosts?”
“Nothing,” Ryan replied. “Few folks that caught the last train west, close on a century gone.” He saw the expression of bewilderment on the woman’s face and explained. “Means some dead bodies. Gone to meet their gods, I guess.”
“We should go back to village.”
Jak stood. “Once agree. Been here long enough. Nothing to do or see.”
Behind them, Doc and J.B. appeared from the wrecked entrance to the building. Both carried burlap bags that seemed to weigh heavy. The Armorer also carried a plastic bin, about three feet high and eighteen inches across.
“Got what you wanted?” Ryan asked.
J.B. nodded, grinning broadly, his fedora pushed back on his forehead. “Course, most of this stuff is likely way past its use-by date.”
“Only about a century,” Doc agreed, also grinning. “Still, plenty of chemicals retain their qualities for a good long time, if they’re stored in sealed units like most of these were.”
“What are you going to make?” Ryan asked. “My guess is that it’ll either explode or flame. Or both. Can’t imagine you, J.B., wasting time on anything else.”
The Armorer rubbed the side of his nose in a secretive gesture. “Like Trader used to say, Ryan, patience is the greatest virtue.”
“Yeah. Also used to say that a man who waited was a man who likely got himself chilled.”
“Where’s Dean?” Krysty asked.
“Inside,” Ryan said.
Doc rested the bags in the grass. “Last time I saw the young imp he was burrowing under piles of rotted axes beneath one of the benches. I think that he was hoping to come upon Flint’s treasure.”
“Who Flint?” Jak said. “One of slavers?”
Doc smiled at the young man. “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Master Lauren. The black spot. Cheese and Ben Gunn. Long John and the barrel of apples. The good ship Hispaniola .” He contorted his face into an actor’s mask. “Them as dies’ll be the lucky ones, Squire Trelawney. Right, Jim lad. Blind Pew going down screaming under the hooves of the revenue men.”
He stopped as he realized that everyone but Mildred was looking at him as though he’d totally lost his mind.