There was a groan from the audience.
"Our leader, the beloved Cicely Winston-Alright, is dead."
- There were screams of anguish from the crowd, sobs, shouts of disbelief.
"This loving woman, who so loved us and so loved the good earth, was struck down in the prime of her life by a murderer most vicious and foul," Carpathian bellowed.
The crowd surged forward as if physically expressing its anger.
"Who did it? Who? Who?" the crowd screamed.
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"The pig police have not arrested anyone yet, but we know who did it," Carpathian said.
"Who? Who? Who?"
"A lumberjack for Tulsa Torrent. A lumberjack probably insane with guilt from the crazy demands of his job. Or else just one whose palm was greased with blood money."
Remo and Chiun moved closer to the speaker's platform. Ararat Carpathian screamed, "Are we going to let them get away with it?"
The crowd screamed no, no, no, in one long, full-throated yell. Carpathian looked down and below his feet saw Chiun and Remo. He saw Remo smile and raise one finger, pointing it squarely at Carpathian's chest. The man's smile was cold as death.
Carpathian moved back from the microphone. By the time Remo brushed aside the crowd and hopped up onto the platform, Carpathian was gone and nowhere to be seen. Remo turned just as the crowd began charging the speaker's platform, deciding to take out their frustrated anger on their own property.
Remo looked around. He saw Carpathian's back disappearing through the trees across the road. Remo walked through the small glade of trees and into a clearing on the other side. A dozen snowmobiles were parked there. Carpathian was sitting astride one of them, talking to Harvey Quibble, the government inspector.
Remo called out: "A rat."
Carpathian looked around. He saw Remo. Then he seemed to slump forward over the controls of his machine, and the snowmobile jumped into action, driving straight ahead down a snow-covered trail.
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Remo ran off after it. He had almost caught up with Carpathian when the trail made a sharp right-hand turn. Carpathian's snowmobile did not. Instead, it kept going straight ahead, plunging through a dense tangle of low underbrush and then out and over a hundred-foot-high drop-off.
By the time Remo got to him, Ararat Carpathian was little more than a sausage skin filled with once-human jelly. . .
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Company guards and the town police arrived just before the disorderly gang of protesters could turn into a surging mob, and slowly herded them back into the protesters' camping grounds.
Arriving with the police was Roger Stacy, who walked away from the mob scene, went through the thin bank of trees, and entered the clearing where Remo was approaching Harvey Quibble.
Quibble saw Stacy approaching, and he pointed a long, tremulous finger at Remo and squeaked, "He did it again. I saw him with my very own two eyes. This . . . •this ersatz tree inspector chased that poor man over the side of the cliff." As Remo drew near, Quibble drew himself up to his full height. "You, sir, are not merely an ¡incompetent," he said, "you are a mur--derer." He turned to Stacy. "He is, he is," he said.
"Shove it," said Remo.
Stacy looked from Quibble to Remo, from Quibble to Remo, then back to Quibble again.
"I'm sure Mr. O'Sylvan didn't kill anybody," he said. He turned once again to Remo. "Did you?"
Remo said nothing. He saw Chiun approaching from across the road. Behind them, the police were setting up barricades penning in the protesters.
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"See," Quibble said. "What did I tell you? He won't even dialog with us. We have no room on the government team for these kind of people . . . these killers. I don't jzare how much you may miss him, Mr. Stacy, but after I contact Washington tomorrow, this Remo O'Sylvan is going to be off the job." Quibble puffed out his tiny sparrow's chest.
"I told you, shove it," Remo said. "He was dead before I ever reached him."
"How do you know that?" Stacy said.
"I don't believe it," Quibble said.
"He didn't scream," Remo said. "He went ass over teakettle off the edge of a hundred-foot cliff and he didn't scream. He was either dead or unconscious already."
"Oh," said Stacy.
"You can give that lame excuse to the personnel department," Quibble said, "but my report goes in as I saw it."
The federal job inspector and Stacy began a heated argument and Remo, disgusted, walked over to Chiun. The old man was sniffing the air.
"They're using tear gas," Remo said. •
Chiun shook his head. "Not that," he said. "Something else. Something sweet."
As he and Chiun disappeared into the woods, Remo looked back. Stacy and Harvey Quibble were still arguing.
No one challenged Remo and Chiun as they went back to the log cabin. When they went inside, Joey Webb was sitting in front of the fire, reading.
"What happened?" she asked Remo quickly. "Tell me all about it."
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"Nothing happened. Where're the guards that were supposed to be here?"
"I don't know," Joey said. "I didn't see any guards."
"I told that horse's ass Stacy to send guards down here," Remo snarled.
"I'm all right. Stop worrying. What happened up there?"
Remo thought of telling her about Cicely Winston-Alright, about Carpathian, and about Pierre LaRue's death earlier in the night; but he decided not to—the girl had had enough to worry about in the past weeks, and the rush of events of the last twenty-four hours might be enough to snap her spirit, no matter how strong.
"Nothing much happened," Remo repeated as hé walked to the telephone. "A lot of speeches,, yakety-yak, the cops broke up the march, and that was that."