Chapter III: Part 3

In a lull Bidgrass shouted to Morgan, "That's costing them more than they have to give, over there. Listen. Can you hear it?"

"Yes, Father in Hatred," Morgan said. "They will break soon."

"Yes, when Arscoate lays the fire mist. They will come through here. I have one charge left."

"I have two, Father in Hatred. Change packs with me."

Cole found his voice and his senses once more.

"I must find a weapon! Grandfather, give me your flame pistol!"

"Soon, lad. Soon now. Let the power take you," the old man soothed.

Stompers streamed over the moor again and the fighting flared up. The war song beat against the man's ears so that he drew the girl nearer and shook the thigh bone. Blaster fire flickered out altogether and the red blooming of flame pistols weakened. But more and more stompers streamed past without attacking. Then the man saw fire mist plume lazily in the east, point after point coalescing all along the forest edge.

"Now!" shouted a great voice beside him. "Now, lad!"

It was old Bidgrass, striding out like a giant, blaster leveled in its carrying harness.

The shout released Cole and he saw it far off, coming down the scrap rubble to the moor. Huger than any, white crest thirty feet above the ground, Grandfather Stomper. The war song roared insanely over the moor. Hoggy Darn gleamed heart-midst of the three lady moons.

The grim old man aimed and fired. The great bird-shape staggered and came on, left wing trailing. The old man waited until it was nearly on top of him and fired again. The stomper jerked its head and the bolt shattered the great tripart beak but did not kill it. With the right mitten-wing it reached down and swung its adversary twenty feet up, held him and haggled at him with its stumps of beak.

The old man's free right arm flailed wildly. Cole beat the stomper's leg with the thigh bone and howled in hatred. Then he saw the flame pistol lying where it had fallen from the holster. He picked it up, but the power was on him again and he did not use it. He hurled the thigh bone at the stomper's head, diverting it for a second, and tossed the pistol to old Bidgrass. He knew they could not fail.

The old man caught the pistol. When the great head swung back he held the muzzle against the tri-corn eye and fired. Red plasma-jet burned into the brain behind it. The stomper bounded once in the air, dropped its slayer, ran three steps and collapsed.

The stomper song changed suddenly. It became a mournful lament, a dying into grieving subsonics. Cole knew that note. He had heard it from the stompers in the stone-floored pen when the butchers were hacking off their heads. He knew that Grandfather Stomper was dead forever, after seven hundred years of war.

Flyers crossed above, blasters were still at work across the ridge, but the war was ended. The power, whatever that sense of exalted unreality might be, left Cole; and he felt naked and ridiculous and wondered what he was doing there. Then he saw the girl bending above Garth Bidgrass and regained control of himself.

The strong old man was smiling wearily.

"We've won the war, lad," he said. "The next task is yours."

"I'll help you," Cole said.

"You'll lead. Oh, I'll live, but not for long. Centuries ago, lad, there was a prophecy, and until tonight people like myself and Arscoate thought it was only poetry, however literally Morgan and the other ex-wilds took it."

"What was it?"

"It foretells that on the night Grandfather Stomper shall die the new Grandfather Man will come naked out of the forest with his beautiful wife and armed with a thigh bone, and that he will lead us in the even greater task of reclamation that comes after. _Your_ ritual title of address is 'Father in Love,' lad, and I'm just a broken old man now. Take up the burden."

Cole's throat swelled, choking speech for a moment.

"I can start," he said.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Night of Hoggy Darn, by Richard McKenna