The Last Shot | Page 3

light. Faithful to their
part in refusing to climb, the white posts circled around the spur,
hugging the levels.
In the lap of the spur was La Tir, the old town, and on the other side of
the boundary lay South La Tir, the new town. Through both ran the
dusty ribbon of a road, drawn straight across the plain and over the
glistening thread of a river. On its way to the pass of the Brown range it
skirted the garden of the Gallands, which rose in terraces to a
seventeenth-century house overlooking the old town from its outskirts.
They were such a town, such a road, such a landscape as you may see
on many European frontiers. The Christian people who lived in the
region were like the Christian people you know if you look for the
realities of human nature under the surface differences of language and
habits.
Beyond the house rose the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact. Marta
always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood she had a
way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls were
covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if the
wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning over
the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon as
this, the baron was growing old gracefully, at peace with his enemies.

Centuries older than the speck in the sky was the baron; but the pass
road was many more, countless more, centuries older than he. It had
been a trail for tribes long before Roman legions won a victory in the
pass, which was acclaimed an imperial triumph. To hold the pass was
to hold the range. All the blood shed there would make a red river,
inundating the plain. Marta, a maker of pictures, saw how the legions,
brown, sinewy, lean aliens, looked in their close ranks. They were no
less real to her imagination than the infantry of the last war thirty years
ago, or the Crusaders who came that way, or the baron in person and
his shaggy-bearded, uncouth, ignorant ruffians who were their own
moral law, leaving their stronghold to plunder the people of the fertile
plain of the fruits of their toil.
Stone axe, spear and bow, javelin and broadsword, blunderbuss and
creaking cannon--all the weapons of all stages in the art of war--had
gone trooping past. Now had come the speck in the sky, straight on,
like some projectile born of the ether.
"Beside the old baron, we are parvenus," Marta would say. "And what
a parvenu the baron would have been to the Roman aristocrat!"
"Our family is old enough--none older in the province!" Mrs. Galland
would reply. "Marta, how your mind does wander! I'd get a headache
just contemplating the things you are able to think of in five minutes."
The first Galland had built a house on the land that his king had given
him for one of the most brilliant feats of arms in the history of the pass.
He had the advantage of the baron in that he could read and write,
though with difficulty. Marta had an idea that he was not presentable at
a tea-table; however, he must have been more so than the baron, who,
she guessed, would have grabbed all the cakes on the plate as a sheer
matter of habit in taking what he wanted unless a stronger than he
interfered.
Even the tower, raised to the glory of an older family whose
descendants, if any survived, were unaware of their lineage, had
become known as the Galland tower. The Gallands were rooted in the
soil of the frontier; they were used to having war's hot breath blow past

their door; they were at home in the language and customs of two
peoples; theirs was a peculiar tradition, which Marta had absorbed with
her first breath. Every detail of her circumscribed existence reminded
her that she was a Galland.
Town and plain and range were the first vista of landscape that she had
seen; doubtless they would be the last. Meanwhile, there was the
horizon. She was particularly fond of looking at it. If you are seventeen,
with a fanciful mind, you can find much information not in histories or
encyclopædias or the curricula of schools in the horizon.
There she had learned that the Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb
down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion,
and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins
among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the
pass road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his
upper lip clean