"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

grandpa of them all! The smell of it, the smell of it! Men, men, bust your
noses on that smell!"
"Twenty-five kilograms of gun-powder," announced Adrian Sweetsong.
"That's as close as we could figure it. Twenty-five kilos delivered and
accepted. We record it."
"When you going to start, fellows, when you going to start?" the
Duke asked the three new men in excitement, getting the idea. "How soon you
he ready to start?" asked the Duke and the Sky and the Wideman and the Cloud
and the Lob, all going for it avidly.
"Should he the first bunch of hunters here in the morning," said
Adrian Sweetsong.
"Too long to wait," the Lob protested. "You three? How about you?.
"We three will begin stalking and pot-shotting in a very few
minutes," said the Adrian, "just as soon as we can get title to this place
from the reluctant mayor. We suggest you deploy your forces outside in the
corridors. When we come out of this room we will come out rough, and it's
rough animals we want to meet with."
"Rough it will be," said the Cloud. "Colts, colts, you carry this
stuff out to our place again just as soon as they have recorded it. Men, we
will have some sport! We will show these sports some sport!"
"But this cannot be, even in a nightmare," Mayor John protested.
"You three pale-browns are not Wappingers or Manahattas, and we are not
Dutch."
"I'm a Choctaw," said Freddy Flatfish. "Dennis Halftown is a
Shawnee. Adrian Sweetsong is an Osage. But we inherit. I have drawn up a
legal brief to prove it. And you are double-Dutch if you don't accept. Awk,
blew half my shoulder off! Those animals are jumping the gun. Now I know how
the expression started. They really know how to handle those blunderbusses."
Freddy Flatfish had been shot by a blunderbuss blast from the
corridor and was bleeding badly. So they hurried it along, anxious to close
the bargain and get the hunting season started.
"Bring them in fast, boys. Set them down till they are accepted and
recorded. Then take them out again to your place," Adrian Sweetsong ordered.
And the rough colts brought in a variety of boxes and packages.
"Ten shirts, accepted and recorded," Adrian Sweetsong announced,
hurriedly now. "Thirty pair socks, accepted and recorded. One hundred
bullets, accepted and recorded. Forty kettles, accepted and recorded. One
brass frying-pan, accepted and recorded."
And at the recording of the brass frying-pan, the leg-piercing pin
was withdrawn from the leg of Mayor John and all his shackles fell off. The
psychic-coded lock of his shackles had opened. He had finished his job and
was released. He had disposed of the island in equity. He had gotten Fair
Value for it, or Value Justified, or at least Original Value from Original
Entailment. And it sufficed.
Mayor John was free. He started to run from the room, fell down on
his crippled leg, and arose and ran once more. And was caught in a
blunderbuss blast.
And then the great hunt began. The three members of the Midlands Gun
and Rod Club had most sophisticated weapons. They were canny and smooth.
This was the dangerous big-game hunt they had always dreamed of. And their