Free Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer SSC by John the Balladeer (v1.1)

didn't know the rest of the charm.
                 "The
night's black before dawn," Mr. Loden was saying. "I'll make my fire.
When I've done what I'll do I can step over your dead body, and Vandy's
mine."
                "Don't you fear
Washington?" I asked him, and my left fingertips were in my dungaree
pocket.
                 "Will
he come from where he is? He's
forgotten me."
                 "Where
he is, he remembers you," I allowed.
                 He
was on his knee. His blade point scratched a circle around him on the ground of
the dooryard. The circle held him and the paper with my picture. Then he took a
sack from his coat pocket, and poured powder into the scratched circle. He
stood up, and golden-brown fire jumped around him.
                 "Now
we begin," he told me.
                 He
sketched in the air with his blade. He put his boottoe on my picture. He looked
into the golden-brown fire.
                 "I
made my wish before this," he spaced out the words. "I make it now.
There was no day when I did not see my wish fulfilled." His eyes shone,
paler than the fire. "No son to follow John. No daughter to mourn him."
                 My
fingers in my pocket touched something round and thin. The quarter he'd been
scared by, that Mr. Tewk Millen made me take back.
                 He
spoke names I didn't like to hear. "Haade," he said. "Mikaded.
Rakeben. Rika. Tasarith. Modeca."
                 My
hand worried out and in it the quarter.
                 "Tuth,"
Mr. Loden said. "Tumch. Here with this image I slay—"
                 I
lifted my hand, my left hand, three niches and flung the quarter. My heart went
rotten with sick despair, for it didn't hit him—it fell into the fire—
                 And
then up shot white smoke in one place, like a steam-puff from an engine, and
the fire had died around everywhere else. Mr. Loden stopped his spellspeaking
and wavered back. I saw the glow of his goggling eyes and of his teeth in his
open mouth.
                 Where
the steamy smoke had puffed, it made a shape, taller than a man. Taller than
Mr. Loden or me, anyway. Wide shouldered, long legged, with a dark tail coat
and high boots and hair tied back of its head. It turned, and I saw the big,
big nose to its face—
                 "King
Washington!" screamed Mr. Loden, and tried to stab.
                 But
a long hand like a tongs caught his wrist, and I heard the bones break like
sticks, and Mr. Loden whinnied like a horse that's been hurt. That was the grip
of the man who'd been America 's strongest, who could jump twenty-four
feet broad or throw a dollar across the Rappahannock or wrestle down his biggest soldier.
                 The
other hand came across, flat and stiff, to strike. It sounded like a door
slamming in a high wind, and Mr. Loden never needed to be hit the second time.
His head sagged over sidewise, and when the grip left his broken wrist he fell
at the booted feet.
                 I
sat up, and stood up. The big nose turned to me just a second. The head nodded.
Friendly. Then it was gone back into steam, into nothing.
                 I'd
been right. Where George Washington had been, he'd remembered Mr. Loden. And
the silver quarter, with his picture on it had struck the fire just when Mr.
Loden was conjuring with a picture that he was making real. And there happened
what happened.
                 A
pale streak went up the black sky for the first dawn. There was no fire left
and no quarter, just a spatter of melted silver. And there was no Mr. Loden,
only a mouldy little heap like a rotten stump or a hummock of loam or what
might be left of a man that death had caught up with after two hundred years. I
picked up his iron blade and broke it on my knee and flung it away into the
trees. I picked up the paper with my