Edgar Pangborn by Davy

Edgar Pangborn by Davy

Author:Davy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-08T13:14:53+00:00


14

We set out next morning for that village six miles away near the Northeast Road—Sam, Vilet and I. We reasoned, and Jed agreed, that temporary sinners on a clothes-stealing expedition would need to be able to move fast and with good eyesight. Besides, we needed to have someone minding the cave and watching our gear. Besideser, he’d been working hard since before sun-up praying good luck into a dollar Vilet provided, because he said that if we left a genuine good-luck dollar to pay for the clothes it would cut the sin down to nearly nothing, and so he’d earned his rest.

I’d scouted the village two or three times on my lone. It was a poor grubby thing with a ramshackle stockade closing in twenty or thirty acres, and so little cleared area outside it that I knew the people must live mostly by hunting and fishing, plus maybe a few handcrafts for trade. A carttrack connected it to the Northeast Road, but there was no road on the back-country side. I’d located three outlying houses with fair-sized gardens, two on the northeast side and one by the back gate which probably belonged to the man such villages call the Guide.

We halted on a tree-covered hillside where we could watch that house by the back gate, for it did have an interesting clothesline, and as we watched, a thin wench in a yellow smock came out and added a basketful of things to what was already hanging there.

In a village like that, the Guide counts for more than anyone except the head priest and the mayor. The Guide bosses any work that has to do with the wilderness, arranges any large hunting and fishing parties, usually leading them himself, keeps track of seasonal and weather signs, distributes whatever the group hunting and fishing brings in, and takes a handsome cut of everything. In a mean small village like this he’d be appointed by the head priest and mayor together; in a baronial village—there aren’t many in eastern Moha—he’d be a sales-manager (sometimes called vassal) of the baron himself, and fixed for life. In either case a village Guide is nobody to fool with, and here we were proposing to rob this one’s everloving clothesline.

We watched from our hillside more than half an hour, watching not only the house but a big dog-kennel at the side. After that girl who hung up the clothes went back inside, we didn’t see a soul stirring. Nor a dog. From the nature of a Guide’s job, he’s away from home a good deal. So are his dogs. And on the line was a huge white smock—it would cut up into three or four loinrags. Other stuff too, a smallish yellow smock like the one the girl had been wearing, and a whole bunch of lesser items—towels, brown loinrags. We couldn’t pass it up.

Woodland cover ended a hundred yards from the house and a corn patch began; this was June, the young corn tall enough to conceal a man on all fours.



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