The Reefs of Earth by R. A. Lafferty

Author:R. A. Lafferty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

If Sheriff Tolliver Train couldn’t find the children, and if Mr. Crocker couldn’t find tem with his bloodhounds, it still didn’t mean that they couldn’t be found. Crocker would rather the children should be lost forever, but he couldn’t have them popping up unexpectedly; he had to know where they were before he would know where he was. Crocker now used another sort of bloodhounds. He hired blackbirders or impressors for a dollar a day to find them. And the impressors found them on the third or fourth day.

The blackbirders were children of Lost Haven. Children? They were as big as horses; some of them were eleven years old. They were led by two really big boys with shotguns. They beat the woods and prowled the streams, and quartered and back-traced, and really searched systematically. They also employed hunch and imagination. These had been their own woods and streams before the Dulantys had intruded, and they’d show those wogs who was tops at this game.

The two big eleven-year-old boys were Baxter Bushyhead and Little Sad Sam Jones (the son of Sad Sam Jones himself). They had one middle-sized boy with them when the struck the true trail and came onto the Dulantys.

IT happened that the Dulantys had been night-owling it around and in Misu Mound the night before, and now they were sleeping up in the daytime. Even their watch, Dorothy, had gone to sleep.

The impressors worked it perfect, and they had the drop on them: two leveled shotguns trained on them before they knew what had happened, and a little carbine thing held by the middle-sized boy, Harold Harvestman, who was as spindly as one.

The Dulantys were shamed to be taken like that, and they had to stall while the little wheels in their heads whirled and meshed.

“We got you cold,” Baxter Bushyhead shouted. “Come on shore and start marching.”

“We get a nine dollar bonus!” Little Sad Sam Jones whooped. “That’s a wooly bunch of money. And Baxter and me each get twice as much as Harold because we’re leaders. I’d like to know how much that’ll get me.”

“Three dollar and sixty cents,” Peter said, watching for a break in their front. “But if you know Harold off in the water and hold him under while he drowns you’ll each get four dollars and a half. I’ll watch your guns for you while you do it.”

“Ah, we hadn’t better, he’s my cousin,” Baxter said. “All right now, you kids, com eon shore and start marching. We’ll blast you to pieces if you don’t get to moving right now.”

“What a pity you’re imperfect,” Helen said, looking steadily to Baxter Bushyhead.

“What do you mean, imperfect?” Baxter wanted to know.

“I was thinking of your skull,” Helen explained. “It’s misshapen. It’s a lot of work to prepare a skull, and yours won’t be a prime one when we’ve finished with it. It’ll have some interesting contours, but there’s too many things against it. Was your head always funny-shaped like that?”

“Say, where do you get those skulls?” Baxter snapped at the bait.

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