Donald Hamilton: The Removers

"Yeah, funny," I said, and grinned.

I mean, we'd been through it all before. It wasn't the first passionate moment in our lives that had been interrupted in this manner-in fact, I sometimes used to wonder how any parents ever managed to achieve more than one child. Somehow, after the first one, at the critical moment there's always a small voice outside the bedroom door telling you to come quick, the cat has just had kittens, the dog has just had pups, cc there's a large brown bug in the bathtub.

My truck was standing in the yard when we rode up. Beth glanced at it with a kind of nostalgia.

"I see the wheels haven't fallen off it yet," she said.

"Best damn car I ever had," I said. "I don't see your station wagon around."

"It needed a grease job, so Larry took it to town this morning," she said. "He'll be back soon. I want you to meet him."

"Sure," I said.

"I really do," she said. "I think you'll like each other." My friend, the young rifleman, came around a corner to take the horses. The boys, who'd reached the ranch well ahead of us, were all over him, telling him he had to come meet their real daddy. He was good with them, I saw, in that tolerant, mildly dictatorial way that, coming from someone they respect, someone three times their own age but still not too old to be approachable, goes down well with youngsters. He put them to work, giving them each a horse to lead away and unsaddle, and reminding them not to neglect their own mounts.

Beth said, "Peter, could you ask Clara to get the baby up and dress her? She's had a long enough nap, and I'm sure her father would like to see her."

"Yes, ma'am," young Logan said, and went off.

Beth watched him go. "He's a nice boy," she said. "I suppose it's hardly to be expected that he should be enthusiastic about me. A bomb killed his mother in London during the war. After a lot of knocking around here and there, Larry brought the boy to this country. There were only the two of them for years. Of course, Peter was away at school a good deal of the time, but still, there's a kind of special relationship between a widowed man and an only son… And then I came along, with three children! Naturally he can't help considering us as rivals. It speaks a lot for his character and training that he can be as nice to us as he is." She shook her head, dismissing the subject. "Well, I'm going to take a shower. Come on and I'll show you to your room, first." She hesitated. "Matt."

"Yes."

"It was a mistake. Let's not repeat it."

"If you say so," I said politely.

She said, "It would be all wrong and… and kind of complicated and unpleasant, wouldn't it? I don't know what I was thinking of. I…" She drew a long breath. "Anyway, here comes Larry."

A car that I recognized was coming up the road to the ranch. She walked quickly towards the front of the house to meet it. I saw her pause briefly as she realized that the driver was not alone.

I saw a funny, hard look that I didn't recognize come to her face. Then she was going forward again, but not as rapidly as before. I held back, since it seemed advisable to give her time to prepare her new husband for my presence. When I approached, she was talking to him at the side of the station wagon; but it wasn't Lawrence Logan who caught and held my attention first. It was the young girl who'd got out of the car on the other side, and the dog this girl had with her.

Of the two, the dog was slightly more spectacular. I'd seen red-haired girls before, but this was the first gray Afghan hound I'd met. It's not a breed with which I'm really familiar-not many people are-and the few specimens I'd encountered previously had all been brown or tan. This one was a silvery, bluish gray. Like all Afghans, it was short-haired along the back and long-haired down the legs so that, lean and bony, it looked rather like a greyhound with shaggy cowboy chaps on. It had a long, narrow, inbred head and big pleading brown eyes; and when I first saw it, it was protesting against something by standing erect on its hind legs, waving its woolly forepaws skyward, as tall as the girl on the other end of the leash.

She wasn't exactly inconspicuous herself, since her hair was that wonderful reddish-golden color that I doubt any woman ever grew naturally, but who cares? It was done up kind of casually about her head, with a loose swirl in back secured by a few pins that didn't look very trustworthy. She was quite young, not tall, but well developed or, as the saying goes, stacked. In other words, except for a trim little waist and neat small wrists and ankles, she wasn't skinny anywhere.

She was wearing sandals that would have looked swell on a Florida beach but seemed slightly impractical on a Nevada ranch; and emerald-green, skin-tight pants, the narrow kind that terminate about six inches above the ankles. You could hardly call them slacks since they didn't have any. Above them, she wore a kind of thin, loose jacket adorned with a wild, Japanese-looking print, predominantly the same bright shade of green as the pants. It was quite a costume. It seemed a pity for her to waste it on us mountain folks. In Bermuda, it would have gone over big.

What with Beth and Logan to think about, and the exotic dog putting on its standing-bear act, and the boys coming racing from the corral to admire it, and the other attributes of the girl to consider, I hope I may be excused for not paying immediate attention to her face-besides, it was partly turned away from me, as she tried to calm her panicky, rearing pet. She got it back to earth, but it wasn't happy, and it stood there trembling with its long, snaky tail tucked between its legs-something I never like to see in a dog, nor am I very fond of these narrow-headed animals, in any case. Selective breeding is all very well, but you ought to leave room for a few brains.

"Matt," Beth was saying now, coming towards me, "I want you to meet my… my husband. Larry, this is Matt Helm."

The moment was upon us, and it was no time to be staring at stray young females or their unlikely-looking dogs. Logan was standing in front of me. He was pretty much as Mac had described him, a spare, sinewy man in khakis, very English, with a bushy, sandy moustache and sharp blue eyes under sandy brows and lashes. He was older than I'd expected him to be, however: somewhere in his forties. I should have been ready for that after learning that he had a son over twenty. The British don't go in for child marriages much.

He held out his hand. It wasn't a sign of friendship, or even a gesture of peace; it was just a gentleman greeting a guest in the proper manner, regardless of possible personal differences.

"I have," he said, "heard quite a bit about you, Mr. Helm."

"Yes," I said. "Probably you'd have preferred to hear less."

After a moment, he smiled. "Quite," he said.

We'd made contact, at least. It seemed as if we might get around to understanding each other, with a little effort on both sides. We studied each other briefly, standing there, and I knew what Mac had meant when he said this man looked as if he might be able to take care of himself. It wasn't a look, as much as a smell or an aura. I tried to tell myself I was imagining things, or that if I wasn't, it was just that at some time Logan had been in somebody's army and had fought somebody's war, like most men of his generation and mine. But there are lots of men who've worn uniforms and fought battles and got nothing much out of it but a few unpleasant memories and an allergy towards military discipline. He wasn't one of those.

He started to speak, but Beth grabbed his arm. "Is that animal safe?" she asked, pointing to the dog, now fiat on the ground like a bearskin rug, its head between its paws, obviously suffering agonies of shyness, while the two boys scratched and petted and stroked it, and asked questions of its owner.