The Disappearing Dwarf (12 page)

‘Well,’ Miles said, lighting his pipe and sipping at his brandy, ‘we’ve five miles to go by the light of the moon, lads. Drink up.’

But Gump was asleep in his chair and the Professor, although he appeared to be puffing his pipe, kept jerking awake every moment or so, then nodding off again, his pipe balancing there out of good nature more than anything else. Though Jonathan was awake, the food and the ale and the brandy played on him in such a way that the idea of walking anywhere was laughable. Tomorrow would be full of walking; tonight would be full of sleeping. The thought that their laziness might ruin their chance of finding the Squire never occurred to him; if it had, it’s doubtful that it would have done much to clear away the late evening muddle. In truth, the brandy had carried with it a certain optimism. For the first time since he’d known the nature of the Squire’s disappearance, Jonathan felt as if the magical land of Balumnia wasn’t so big after all – not half so big that it could hope to hide the likes of the Squire. So, all in all, five miles one way or the other was very likely immaterial.

Shortly before ten the company filed upstairs and collapsed onto feather beds where they slept like halibut until well after sunup the next morning.

A certain pall of doubt rose with the sun and somehow chased away the previous night’s glow of optimism. Jonathan allowed himself, only moments after he woke up, to regret not only the miles that the company hadn’t traveled the night before, but to consider the long miles they’d have to travel to catch up. He wondered how many miles a party of men and linkmen and a dog
could
travel on foot in one day. At least twenty-five, maybe thirty. That quantity seemed enormous and affected him badly. Then, sitting heaped on the edge of his bed and looking down at Ahab on the floor below, he began to daydream about Twombly Town and his front porch and about the strawberries that would be big and ripe that very day. All of that thinking and wondering and daydreaming began to give him a major case of the pip. But then it struck him, as it often did five minutes after he’d waked up of a morning, that it was foolhardy to think about anything that early, either of the day ahead or of the previous evening. Such thoughts are
bound
to give you the pip. It was probably a physical or chemical law and could be found in one of the Professor’s scientific manuals. So Jonathan began to whistle the lively tune to ‘Up at Pinky Winky’s’ instead as he pulled on his boots. Ahab opened one eye and stared at him. He had a look about him that seemed to suggest that Jonathan could have chosen to whistle something else, or, perhaps, not to whistle at all. Then it became clear to Ahab that it was a new day and that they were off on an adventure. He stretched once or twice there atop his rug and hurried over to the door. They found the Professor and Bufo in the hallway. Miles and Gump were already downstairs watching the innkeeper cook bacon and eggs.

Miles’ hair was plastered down atop his head, he having already been at the pump, and he was smiling into a cup of coffee. Gump winked at Jonathan and Bufo covertly as they shuffled up, eyeing the coffee pot on the stove.

‘Lot of travelers pass through here, I don’t doubt,’ Gump began.

‘Like birds,’ the innkeeper replied.

Gump nodded. Jonathan wondered just how the travelers resembled birds. Perhaps in quantity. To Gump it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Get many odd ones?’

The innkeeper stared at him in amazement. ‘We don’t get much of anything else.’ Then he looked at Miles in his shiny, salmon-colored robe and back at Bufo and Gump who, waist high and with their pointed cloth caps, might easily be construed to be odd. ‘Lot of odd ones,’ he repeated. ‘Batches of’em.’

Gump nodded again. Jonathan could see where the conversation was heading. Gump was quite clearly playing the detective and was trying to draw the innkeeper out, inconspicuously. ‘Bet you’ve had some fat ones come through here,’ Gump went on, squinting and taking a sip of coffee. Jonathan looked at Miles, who seemed to be choking on something, a reaction, no doubt, to Gump’s subtlety.

‘Fat ones?’ repeated the innkeeper who, unfortunately, was round as a tub. ‘What are you talking about? Don’t make light with me, sir!’ he said, flourishing his spatula.

‘Not a bit,’ Gump assured the man, strangely surprised at his reaction. ‘You misunderstand me. We saw a man up the road. Amazing man. Big as a cartwheel. Walked rather like a cartwheel might, too, if it had legs. Sort of a rotating walk, if you follow me. Looked like he’d been heaped into his clothes with a shovel. And he had an amazing head. Pointed, it was, with tremendous cheeks. And you couldn’t much make out his legs at all. They had more of the look of tree trunks about them than anything else. He had a trick that he did with loaves of bread. He’d eat a hole in the center and shove one up over each wrist so as to take a bite out of them as he swung his arms when he walked.’

The innkeeper served up the bacon and turned to Gump, a look of suspicion in his eye. ‘And you accuse me of doing business with this tremendous pinhead?’

‘He was no pinhead.’ Gump stoutly defended the Squire. ‘I just thought maybe he’d come through here. That’s all.’

‘Why didn’t you just up and ask him? Loaves of bread over his wrists! What’s your game, anyway? Who put you up to this?’

‘Put me up?’ Gump asked, surprised again.

‘Was it Sikorsky?’ the innkeeper demanded. ‘What’s he about? Tremendous pinheads indeed! I’ll pinhead him. You tell Sikorsky …’

‘I don’t even know Sikorsky,’ Gump protested. ‘I was just shooting the breeze. We met this jolly sort of a fat bogger up the road and …’

‘Up what road?’ the innkeeper cut in, getting his own back.

‘Why, back aways.’

‘Last night you said you came down off the meadows,’ the innkeeper said shrewdly. ‘Now you want me to believe there’s a fat man’s convention up there? A pinhead gathering? This smells of Sikorsky. You tell him to keep his filthy plots to himself. Tell him that Layton Snade isn’t a man to be trifled with and that he can take his precious fat man and go to the devil with him!’ He slammed his palm against the stovetop with a tremendous clang that prompted the appearance of his wife from the back of the inn.

‘What’s all that banging?’ she asked.

‘It’s Sikorsky,’ the innkeeper said. ‘He’s sent this lot of roughnecks over with a pack of lies. This one’s babbling about fat men. Seems to think we have more than our share!’

‘Oh he does, does he!’ the woman shouted. The response seemed to Jonathan to be fairly odd, and he suspected that the coherence of the conversation was declining. The innkeeper was working himself up into a rage. He began hacking at the eggs atop the griddle with his spatula, breaking and scattering the things until they didn’t look much like eggs any more.

‘We’d better report to Sikorsky,’ Jonathan said, ending any possibility of straightening things out. He regretted his words almost as soon as he uttered them.

The innkeeper fell to cursing Sikorsky and Gump and pinheads and Jonathan and just about everything else that was handy. The upshot of the incident was that the five of them were given what is commonly called ‘the bum’s rush’, and they found themselves trudging along the road without having had a chance at the ill-used bacon and eggs. Jonathan was sorry he’d spoken up. It had cost him a breakfast, and, on reflection, he realized that the innkeeper wasn’t at all a bad sort. Neither was this chap Sikorsky, for all he knew. It had been a bad morning altogether.

Bufo was in an absolute rage over the whole episode. ‘What was the reason for all that blather about meeting a fat man up the road?’ he demanded of Gump.

‘I was feeling him out,’ Gump answered weakly. ‘We’ve got to find out about the Squire don’t we?’

‘Why didn’t you just bloody well ask him about the Squire, then? Do you suppose the Squire might have been there in disguise? “We met this jolly fat sort of a bogger up the road,” ’ Bufo said, mimicking Gump’s high, tinkling voice. ‘You’re a fine detective. Got us pitched out before breakfast!’

Gump started to reply, then began to sulk instead. Miles, however, came to his rescue. ‘Gump was right. We shouldn’t let on that we’re after the Squire. The less said the better.’

‘Howso?’ asked Bufo, still mad. ‘If you want to know where a man is, you’d best up and ask. I’ve never seen any good come from so much beating about the bush.’

‘Under other circumstances I’d be inclined to agree. But we’d be safest to lay low for a bit, if you follow me.’

‘Incognito,’ the Professor added helpfully.

‘Exactly,’ Miles said. ‘We fancy ourselves the hounds, gentlemen, but we might be mistaken. Where the Dwarf is concerned we’d best assume nothing and reveal even less.’

All of that cheered Gump up some because he took it as approval of his detective methods. It didn’t satisfy Bufo much at all; the only thing that could have done that would have been a plate of rashers and eggs. Their situation for the most part confounded Jonathan, who hated to think that even in Balumnia they’d be under the shadow of Selznak the Dwarf. He’d rather hoped that if they met up with the Dwarf in their pursuit of the Squire, they’d just tweak his nose and be on their way. Miles, clearly, didn’t think anything of the sort.

They bought a basket of fruit, a loaf of bread and a bit of cheese at a farmhouse, and the food pretty much restored them. The river along the road had grown and in places was more than a stone’s throw across. They passed several log chutes that ran down out of the steep forested bank opposite, and watched as great logs slid out of the mouths of the chutes and into the river, bobbing away downstream on the current. The ringing of axes echoed down from the hillside, but nothing could be seen of the men who wielded them.

‘Do you suppose this is a tributary to a bigger river?’ the Professor asked.

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ Miles said.

‘It’s a big river we’re looking for, isn’t it?’ Jonathan was thinking of the treasure map. ‘Maybe this one runs down into the one we want. A fellow could hook up a few of those logs and make a bit of a raft. We’ve done it before. We could float down to the big river.’

‘What big river?’ Bufo asked. ‘I haven’t heard anything about any big river.’

‘The Tweet River,’ Jonathan told him. ‘There’s a city on the mouth of the Tweet called Landsend. We rather thought we’d look for the Squire there.’

‘Did w?’ Bufo sounded surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Because of the treasure.’ Jonathan anticipated Gump’s and Bufo’s likely response to the news that they had a line on a hoard of pirate treasure.

‘Treasure!’ Gump shouted.

‘That’s right,’ the Professor said.

‘We have this map,’ Jonathan put in. Then he and the Professor let both the linkmen in on the treasure secret.

‘So it’s share and share alike,’ the Professor said finally.

‘And a share for the Squire,’ Jonathan added.

‘And a share for Ahab!’ shouted Gump.

Ahab danced about when he heard his name added to the list of shareholders. Gump found a stick on the road and threw it as hard as he could in front of them. Ahab, not usually much good when it came to stick-chasing, was struck with Gump’s enthusiasm and dashed away up the road to where it lay.

But when he got up to the spot, there was no stick to be seen. A cat sat in its place, smack in the center of the road. It was a black cat, black as midnight, and it looked at Ahab as if it didn’t much care whether he stopped to chat or went on about his business. It didn’t appear to be a friendly cat. Ahab’s treasure enthusiasm seemed to melt away, and he trotted back to where Jonathan and the others were coming along. There was something about the cat that Jonathan didn’t fancy – something that wasn’t quite right. Its eyes, perhaps, looked a bit too human. Then again perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps it was a trick of the sunshine, No one spoke as they filed past the creature, nor did they look back until they were fifty yards or so up the road. It was probably a matter of superstition.

Gump was the first to take a quick look over his shoulder, and almost as soon as he did he shouted, ‘Hey!’ He came to an abrupt halt. The others stopped too. An old bent woman stood where the cat had been, watching the five of them while leaning on a stick. It seemed to grow uncommonly chilly all of a sudden, even though the sun still shone as brightly in the cloudless sky. For a moment Jonathan imagined that he heard faint laughter, something like the clatter of falling icicles, drift past him on the breeze.

The Professor scratched his chin. ‘She must have been in the bushes or something.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jonathan said, a bit less sure of himself. Gump and Bufo seemed to be of a like mind, and they didn’t waste any time setting out anew, along with the Professor. Twenty steps farther they realized that Miles wasn’t following, and they stopped and turned around. There stood Miles, watching. A hundred yards down the road was the figure of the old woman, hunching along, shrinking in the distance.

‘She moves quicker than you’d think,’Jonathan observed when Miles caught up to them.

‘Uncommonly so,’ Miles agreed.

‘I hope she stops at the inn,’ Bufo said. ‘She’s got Sikorsky written all over her.’

Gump laughed a little, probably happy that Bufo had relaxed a bit about getting pitched out of the inn. Nobody laughed much though. They walked on in silence for a ways, convincing themselves that old women were a common enough thing to come upon in any land, Balumnia included. It seemed to Jonathan that perhaps they were a bit overcommon.