Upsetting the Balance

“I know.” Nordenskold wore a small, precise gray mustache-too small and precise to fluff out when he sighed. “Captain, we’ll do the best we can under the circumstances: we’ll harass, we’ll counterattack when we can…” He sighed again. “Take away the Army guff, and a lot of us are going to get killed trying to hold them back. Any further questions, Auerbach?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Rance answered. Nordenskold had been more forthright than he’d expected. Things weren’t good, and they weren’t likely to get better any time soon. He’d known that, but having his superior come right out and say it made it feel as real and immediate as a kick in the teeth.

“Dismissed, then,” the colonel said. His desk was piled high with papers, some of them reports and notes handwritten on the backs of old bank forms. He bent to them once more before Auerbach was out of the office.

Without electric lights, the room where First National Bank customers would have stood was dark and gloomy. Rance blinked several times when he went out into the bright sunshine of the street. Then he blinked again, and touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger in what was more a polite gesture than a salute. “Hello, Miss Penny. How are you today?”

“I’m all right, I suppose,” Penny Summers answered indifferently. She’d been like that ever since Auerbach had brought her back to Lamar from Lakin, Kansas. Nothing seemed to matter much to her. He understood that; watching your father smashed to cat meat right before your eyes was plenty to leave you stunned for a while.

“You look mighty nice,” he offered gallantly. She was a nice-looking girl, true, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her face still had a wounded look to it and, like a lot of faces in Lamar, was none too clean. She still wore the overalls she’d had on when she and her father decided to pitch in and help the cavalry against the Lizards in Lakin. Under them she had on a man’s shirt that had seen better years-maybe better decades-and was also several sizes too big for her.

She shrugged, not because she didn’t believe him, he judged, but because she didn’t care one way or the other.

He tried again: “The folks you’re staying with here, are they treating you okay?”

“I guess so,” she said, still so flat that he started to give up hope of bringing her back into full contact with the world. But then her voice picked up a little as she went on, “Mr. Purdy, he tried peekin’ at me when I got undressed one night, but I told him I was your girlfriend and you’d whale the stuffing out of him if he ever did it again.”

“I ought to whale the stuffing out of him for doing it once,” Auerbach growled; he had definite, even vehement, notions about what you should and shouldn’t do. Taking advantage of somebody you were supposed to be helping fell with a thud into the second category.

“I told him I’d tell his wife on him, too,” Penny said. Was that amusement in her voice? Auerbach wasn’t sure, but it was something, and he hadn’t heard anything there since the Lizard plane swooped low over her father.

He decided to risk laughing. “That was a good idea,” he said. Then he asked, “Why did you say you were my girlfriend? Not that I wouldn’t like it if it were so, mind you, but-”

“On account of Mr. Purdy knows you brought me here, and he knows you’re half his age and twice his size,” Penny Summers answered. If she noticed the last sentence he’d politely tacked on, she didn’t show it.

He sighed. He wished he could do something for her, but had no idea what that something might be. When he said good-bye, Penny only nodded and went on down the street. He didn’t think she was going anywhere in particular, just wandering around-maybe she and the Purdys got on one another’s nerves in ways other than the one she’d mentioned, too.

He turned a corner and headed for the stables (funny to think of towns having stables again; they’d been going out of business since about the time he was born) to see to his horse: if you didn’t worry about your animal before you worried about yourself, you didn’t belong in the cavalry.

Somebody sang out, “Hello, Captain Rance, sir!”

Auerbach whirled. Only one person called him Captain Rance. To his men, he was Captain Auerbach. To his friends, he was just Rance-or rather, he’d been just Rance; the people he’d called friends were a lot of duty stations away from Lamar, Colorado. Sure enough, there stood Rachel Hines, grinning at him. He grinned back. “Hello yourself.”

Where Penny, weighed down by her father’s death, had withdrawn into herself since she came to Lamar, Rachel had blossomed. She was still wearing the dress in which she’d come to town, and it wasn’t any too clean, but she wore it with a flair Penny had forgotten-if she’d ever known it. From God knows where, Rachel had managed to come by makeup which highlighted her blond good looks. And, perhaps for no better reason than to keep life interesting, she still had her.22 slung over a shoulder.