"Umm, Kelmer? I think we should go in the house."
He hated to stop. Weldi Lanks kissed very nicely, her lips full and moist and exciting, and his hand had begun to stroke the back of her thigh. But this was not a good place for further developments.
"I suppose you're right," he answered, and got reluctantly up from the narrow wooden bench in the rose arbor. It was dark, really dark, with a thick cloud layer cutting off the stars. The house was a vague something to their left, barely discernible. At least, he thought, the darkness had given them privacy, the most they'd had yet. Even the lookouts in the bell-tower of the village hall, assigned to watch the approaches to the president's house, couldn't see them crossing the lawn, he was sure.
The house was unlit, from this side at least. Maybe they could sit together in the parlor for a while, he thought hopefully; her father was a man who went early to bed and was up with the birds.
They went to the side porch. No uniformed guard was visible by the door but that didn't register with Kelmer. His mind was on Weldi. She wondered though, and looking around, her foot bumped something lying by the stairs, something heavy but yielding. Kelmer heard her gasp.
"What's wrong?" he murmured.
She hissed him silent, then whispered. "I think it's the guard!"
He knelt and groped. It was a man, and his shirt was sticky with blood! "He's dead!" Kelmer whispered.
He found the gun still holstered, and removed it. Then he stood, and setting the safety, shoved the pistol in the back of his belt. "Darling," he whispered, "go around to the front and tell the guard there. If he's—like this one, go to the rose arbor. I'm going inside."
He thought she nodded. At any rate she turned and started round the wraparound porch. He went to the door, then changed his mind. Whoever the intruder was, he was there to kill the president, and he'd have to find his bedroom. Kelmer decided to be there waiting for him. It was a corner room upstairs, with large windows opening onto the roof; Weldi'd given him the tour.
Getting onto the porch railing, Kelmer climbed a scrolled corner post and pulled himself onto the roof as quietly as possible, then began creeping along it toward the president's room. The roof sloped enough to give him nervous stomach, even without the tension inherent in the situation.
When he'd rounded the corner, he could see a faint paleness at the president's window; there was a night light on inside. The window was open but screened. He recalled that the screens downstairs were held at the bottom by a hook. Even the villages were primitive here! With the pistol barrel he poked a hole in the screen, large enough for his finger. Then, disengaging the hook, he opened the screen, and looked in.
There were two windows in the west wall and two in the south. The bed was near the southwest corner, to take advantage of breezes from either direction. The president lay on his side beneath the sheet. Kelmer couldn't hear a thing. Silently he let himself in. His right foot had barely touched the floor when he saw the bedroom door start to open, and froze.
A man stood in the door with a submachine gun. He seemed not to see Kelmer, as if his eyes had found the bed and stopped there. Kelmer stood paralyzed, his pistol untouched in his belt, as the man raised his weapon. There was a boom from the hallway behind him, and the man spun, firing a burst down the hall. For a long frozen second, Kelmer stared, then another boom shocked him out of his momentary paralysis. The would-be assassin pitched forward on his face, and the president, in a nightshirt, was moving to the door with a large pistol in his hand.
It was all over.
Weldi had found the front door unguarded too, but instead of returning to the rose arbor, had slipped inside. She had the advantage of close familiarity with the house, and moved with certainty. In the parlor was a gun cabinet. Groping, she'd found it and taken out the first gun her hands met with, a double-barreled shotgun of about ten gauge. Without even checking to see if it was loaded, she'd crossed the living room to the stairs, and started up. Like Kelmer, she was sure her father was the target of assassins.
It seemed to her she could sense someone in the hall above. She counted the carpeted steps, skipping the one that always squeaked. When she got to the top, she was unsure what to do. Then, at the far end of the hall, her father's door opened, letting faint light out, and not twenty feet in front of her she saw the back of a man who was not her father. She raised the shotgun and pressed on the trigger. Nothing happened. Then she thought, drew a hammer back with an audible click, and pulled again.
The weapon boomed. The man in front of her was the second of two, and the hammer she'd cocked was to the full-choke barrel. A concentrated load of number three shot drove into his chest from behind, killing him instantly. At the same moment, the shotgun's powerful recoil, taking her by surprise, knocked her onto her back.
The man in her father's doorway had turned and fired a burst down the hall, the slugs going above her where she lay. The president had started from his sleep with the sound of the shotgun, and with a single movement snatched up the pistol that lay on his bed table. He'd shot the remaining gunman in the back, through the heart.
There'd been just the two. Weldi had killed one, her father the other. No one had even noticed Kelmer still seated on the windowsill.
He followed the president to the door, where Heber Lanks switched on a light. The corpses lay in the hall, and Weldi was just getting to her feet. The shotgun lay on the floor. Kelmer crowded past the president and threw his arms around the girl, who clung to him shaking.
Downstairs voices were shouting, and lights were turning on. "It's all right," called Heber Lanks. "Everything is all right."
Half an hour later, Kelmer Faronya was trotting down the road toward camp. He had mixed feelings, mostly not good. He'd frozen at the climactic moment. Yet if he hadn't, the gunman would quite possibly have seen him and fired. He'd be dead now. As it was, everything had turned out well.
On the other hand, it seemed to him, his courage had failed utterly.