They set the body down. Mike and Mitzi and Cinderella began digging; the
others scattered to hunt for stones. Coming up behind them, George Lunt
took off his beret and stood holding it in both hands; he bowed his head
as the grass-wrapped body was placed in the little grave and covered.
Then, when the cairn was finished, he replaced it, drew his pistol and
checked the chamber.
"That does it, Jack," he said. "I am now going to arrest Leonard Kellogg
for the murder of a sapient being."
VIII
Jack Holloway had been out on bail before, but never for quite so much. It
was almost worth it, though, to see Leslie Coombes's eyes widen and
Mohammed Ali O'Brien's jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones,
blazing with the heat of the day and of his body, on George Lunt's
magisterial bench and invited George to pick out twenty-five thousand
sols' worth. Especially after the production Coombes had made of posting
Kellogg's bail with one of those precertified Company checks.
He looked at the whisky bottle in his hand, and then reached into the
cupboard for another one. One for Gus Brannhard, and one for the rest of
them. There was a widespread belief that that was why Gustavus Adolphus
Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out here in the boondocks of a
boondock planet, defending gun fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It
wasn't. Nobody on Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn't whisky.
Whisky was only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory
of the reason.
He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none too ample
for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face
masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush
jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn
undershirt over a shag of gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of
his shorts and the tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were
covered with hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was
on his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had taken
instantly to Gus. Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.
"Aaaah!" he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were placed beside him. "Been
staying alive for hours hoping for this."
"Well, don't let any of the kids get at it. Little Fuzzy trying to smoke
pipes is bad enough; I don't want any dipsos in the family, too."
Gus filled the glass. To be on the safe side, he promptly emptied it into
himself.
"You got a nice family, Jack. Make a wonderful impression in court--as
long as Baby doesn't try to sit on the judge's head. Any jury that sees
them and hears that Ortheris girl's story will acquit you from the box,
with a vote of censure for not shooting Kellogg, too."
"I'm not worried about that. What I want is Kellogg convicted."
"You better worry, Jack," Rainsford said. "You saw the combination against
us at the hearing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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