Now I had spent a good many years around actors, and damned good ones at that. This Skagarach was an actor from the word go, but I believed that I was a better one. So I said carelessly, "Can you tell what I'm thinking?" and allowed my face to assume the tiniest lines of worry, the smallest indications of fear possible to the facial muscles. Skagarach said immediately, "You're fretting over your wife."
It was a good guess. He knew his book of reactions and signs inside and out. The only trouble was that I had at that moment been concentrating intently on a chocolate milk shake and a cheeseburger. I had even been saying the words over in my mind. So I knew that he had been trying to convince me of the truth of a lie, and that was another flake of hope for me.
It was a good thing for me that I had those few minute hopes. They were all I had.
CHAPTER V
In the late dusk of evening the car pulled off the road and rattled over a field full of boulders and stopped at the top of a high cliff overlooking the sea. We all got out and stretched our cramped legs. Bill Cuff walked along the edge of the foreland until he came to a trace of path. He called to us and we followed him down the nearly-sheer face of the promontory, myself trying not to look at the dark foam spattered sea so far beneath our feet.
At the base of the promontory was a beach. It had looked tiny from above; I found that it was large, for the ocean had long ago hollowed out a great cavelike place in the rock, and the beach ran back under the land for several hundred feet. There were dim blue searchlights set up at intervals, which would not have been seen from any distance; no ship would come closer than a mile to the coast here, and so the presence of Old Companions in the cavern would be kept secret.
Old Companions....
Great God! What a horde swarmed in that hidden hole, across that rock-canopied beach! There were about two hundred of them. The majority were duplicates, in breadth of frame and depth of chest, of Trutch and Vance. The faces were handsome or ugly, grotesque or plain, yet all held the concentrated savagery of my four escorts. Many had arms longer than normal. Some were so deformed that their gait as they crossed the sand on various errands was almost that of an ape that swings along on its knuckles. Again, several were tall and personable, like Bill Cuff.
They were all dressed darkly, in gray broadcloth or black wool jackets, crepe-soled shoes, no ties and no hats evident. Some of them were carrying things—submachine guns, handguns, even hand grenades—from broken crates to the six big boats that lined the water's edge. Others were giving orders in voices that were almost without exception gruff and barking. And everywhere I looked I caught the stare of gray eyes: eyes that took the blue glow of the searchlights and threw it back condensed and changed, so that from many dark faces there gleamed at me thin ovals of orange and crimson and green luminescence.