“Murderer,” said Len, and the word encompassed both Burdette and the judge. His voice broke, rising to a harsh scream. “God-damned yellow-bellied murderer!” He put up his fists and ran toward Burdette, but the line of farmers had begun to move, as though the death of Dulinsky was a signal they had waited for, and Len was caught up in it as in the forefront of a wave. Burdette was gone, and facing him instead was a burly young farmer with a long neck and sloping shoulders and the kind of a mouth that had cried out the accusation against Soames. He carried a length of peeled wood like those used for fence posts, and he brought it down on Len’s head, laughing with a sort of cackling haste, his eyes gleaming with immense excitement. Len fell down. Boots clumped and kicked and stumbled over him and he curled up instinctively with his arms over his head and neck. It had become very dark and the Refuge men were far off behind a wavering veil, but he could see them going, melting away until the road was empty in front of the farmers and there was nothing between them and the town any more. They went on into Refuge in the hot afternoon, raising up the dust again as they moved, and when that settled there was only Len, and Dulinsky’s body lying three or four feet away from him, and Judge Taylor standing still in the middle of the road, just standing and looking at Dulinsky.
13
Len got slowly to his feet. His head hurt and he felt sick, but his compulsion to get away from there was so great that he forced himself to walk in spite of it. He went carefully around Dulinsky, avoiding the dark stains that were in the dust there, and he passed Judge Taylor. They did not speak, nor look at each other. Len went on toward Refuge until just a little bit before the square, where there was an apple orchard beside the road. He turned off among the trees, and when he felt that he was out of sight he sat down in the long grass and put his head between his knees and vomited. An icy coldness came over him, and a shaking. He waited until they passed, and then he got up again and went on, circling west through the trees.
There was a confused noise in the distance, toward the river. A puff of smoke rose in the clear air, and then another, and suddenly there was a dull booming roar and the whole river front seemed to burst into flame and the smoke poured up black and greasy and very thick, lighted on its underside by the kind of flames that come from stored-up barrels of pitch and lamp oil. The streets of the town were choked now with carts and horses and people running. Here and there somebody was helping carry a hurt man. Len avoided them, sticking to the back alleys and the peripheral fields. The smoke came blacker and heavier, rolling over the sky and blotting the sun to an ugly copper color. There were sparks in it now, and bits of flaming stuff tossed up. When he came to a high place, Len could see men on some of the roofs of the houses, and on the church and the town hall, making up bucket lines to wet the buildings down. He could see the waterfront, too. The new warehouse was burning, and the four others that had belonged to Dulinsky, but things had not stopped there. There was a scurrying, a tossing of weapons and a swaying back and forth of little knots of men, and all along the line of docks and warehouses new fires were springing up.
Across the river Shadwell watched but did not stir. The stables of the traders’ compound were blazing when Len came by them. Sparks had fallen in the straw and the hay piles, and other sparks were smoldering on the roofs of the shelters. Len ran into the one he had been occupying and grabbed up his canvas bag and his blanket. When he came out the door he heard men coming and he fled hastily in among the trees at one side. The green leaves were already crisping, and the boughs were shaken by a strange unhealthy wind. A gang of farmers came up from the river. They paused at the edge of the compound, panting, staring about with bright hard eyes. The auction sheds were untouched. One of them, a huge red-bearded man with inflamed cheeks and a roaring voice, pointed to the sheds and bellowed something about money-changers. They made a hungry breathless sound like a pack of dogs after a coon and ran to the long line of sheds, smashing everything they could smash and piling it together and setting fire to it with a torch that one of them was carrying. Then they passed on, kicking over and trampling and breaking down anything in their path. Len thought of Judge Taylor, standing alone in the middle of the road, looking at Dulinsky’s body. He would have a lot of things to look at when this day was over.
He went on cautiously between the trees, edging down to the river through a weird sulphurous twilight. The air was choked with the smells of burning, of pitch and wood and oil and hides. Ash fell like a gray and scorching snow. He could hear the fire bell ringing desperately up in the town, but he could not see much that way because of the smoke and the trees. He came out on the riverbank well below the site of the new warehouse and began to work his way back, looking for Esau.
The whole riverbank as far as he could see ahead of him was a solid mass of flame. The heat had driven everybody away and some of them had come downstream past the wreck of the new warehouse, men with their eyes white and staring in blackened faces, men with burned hands and torn clothing and a look of desperation. Three or four were bent over one who lay on the ground moaning and twisting, and there were others sitting down here and there, as though they had come that far and then quit. Most of them were just standing and watching. One man still carried a bucket half full of water.
Len did not see Esau, and he began to be afraid. He went up to several of the men and asked, but they only shook their heads or did not seem to hear him at all. Finally one of them, a clerk named Watts, who had come to the office frequently on business, said bitterly, “Don’t worry about him. He’s safe if anybody is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean nobody’s seen him since the trouble began. He took off, him and the girl both.”
“Girl?” asked Len, startled out of his resentment at Watts’s tone.
“Judge Taylor’s girl, who else? And where were you, hiding in a hole somewhere? And where’s Dulinsky? I thought that son of a bitch was such a mighty fighter, to hear him tell it.”
“I was up on the north road,” said Len. “And Dulinsky’s dead. So I guess he fought harder than you did.”
A man standing nearby had turned around at the sound of Dulinsky’s name. Under the grime and the soot, the singed hair and the clothing burned partly off him, it was a minute before Len recognized Ames, the warehouse owner who had come down with Dulinsky and the other man that morning to look at the new warehouse and shake his head at Dulinsky’s plea for unity.
“Dead,” said Ames. “Dead, is he?”
“They shot him. A farmer named Burdette.”
“Dead,” said Ames. “I’m sorry. He should have lived. He should have lived long enough for a hanging.” He lifted his hands and shook them at the blaze and smoke. “Look what he’s done to us!”
“He wasn’t alone,” said Watts. “The Colter boys were in with him, from the beginning.”
“If you’d stuck by him this wouldn’t have happened,” Len said. “He asked you, Mr. Ames. You and Whinnery and the others. He asked the whole town. And what happened? You all danced around and cheered last night—yes, you too, Watts, I saw you!—and then you all ran like rabbits at the first smell of trouble. There wasn’t a man of ’em up in the north road that lifted a hand. They left it up to Mike to get killed.”
Len’s voice had got loud and harsh without his realizing it. The men within earshot had closed in to listen.
“It seems to me,” said Ames, “that for a stranger, you take an almighty interest in what we do. Why? What makes you think it’s up to you to try and change things? I worked all my life to build up what I had, and then you come, and Dulinsky——”
He stopped. Tears were running out of his eyes and his mouth trembled like a child’s.
“Yeah,” said Watts. “Why? Where did you come from? Who sent you to call us cowards because we don’t want to break the law?”
Len looked around. There were men on all sides of him now. Their faces were grotesque masks of burns and fury. The smoke rolled in a sooty cloud and the flames
roared softly with a purring sound as they ate the wealth of Refuge. Up in the town the fire bell had stopped ringing.
Somebody spoke the name of Bartorstown, and Len began to laugh.
Watts reached out and cuffed him. “Funny, is it? All right, where did you come from?”
“Piper’s Run, born and raised.”
“Why’d you leave it? Why’d you come here to make trouble?”
“He’s lying,” said another man. “Sure he comes from Bartorstown. They want the cities back.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ames, in a low, still voice. “He was in on it. He helped.” He turned around, his hands moving as though they groped for something. “There ought to be one piece of rope left unburned in Refuge.”
Instantly an eagerness came over the men. “Rope,” said somebody. “Yeah. We’ll find some.” And somebody else said, “Look for the other bastard. We’ll hang them both.” Some of them ran off down the riverbank, and others began to beat the bushes looking for Esau. Watts and two others tackled Len and bore him down, savaging him with their fists and knees. Ames stood by and watched, looking alternately from Len to the fire.
The men came back. They had not found Esau, but they had found a rope, the mooring line of a skiff tied to the bank farther down. Watts and the others hauled Len to his feet. One of the men tied a clumsy slipknot in the rope and made a noose and put it over Len’s head. The rope was damp. It was old and soft and frayed, and it smelled of fish. Len kicked out violently and tore his arms free. They caught him again and hustled him toward the trees, a close-bunched confusion of men lurching along in short erratic bursts of motion with Len struggling in the center, kicking, clawing, banging them with his knees and elbows. And even so, he sensed dimly that it was not men he was fighting at all, but the whole vast soggy smothering continent from sea to sea and from north to south, millions of houses and people and fields and villages all sleeping comfortably and not wanting to be disturbed. The rope was cold and scratchy around his neck, and he was afraid, and he knew he couldn’t fight off the idea, the belief and way of life of which these men were only a tiny, tiny part.
He was very dizzy, from the pounding and the blow on the head he had already had up on the north road, so that he was not sure what happened except that suddenly there seemed to be more men, more bodies around him, more upheaval. He was thrown sharply aside. The hands seemed to have let go of him. He hit a tree trunk and slid down it to the ground. There was a face above him. It had blue eyes and a sandy beard with two wide streaks of gray in it, one at each corner of the mouth. He said to the face, “If there weren’t so many of you I could kill you all.” And it answered him, “You don’t want to kill me, Len. Come on, boy, get up.”
Tears came suddenly into Len’s eyes. “Mr. Hostetter,” he said. “Mr. Hostetter.” He put up his hands and caught hold of him, and it seemed like a long time ago, in another hour of darkness and fear. Hostetter gave him a strong pull up to his feet and jerked the rope from around his neck.
“Run,” he said. “Run like the devil.”
Len ran. There were several other men with Hostetter, and they must have charged in hard with the poles and boat hooks they had, because the Refuge men were pretty well scattered. But they were not going to give Len up without a fight, and the intrusion of Hostetter and his party had convinced them that they were right about Bartorstown. They were determined now to get Hostetter too, shouting and cursing, gathering together again and searching for anything they could use as weapons, stones, fallen branches, clods. Len staggered and stumbled as he went, and Hostetter put a hand under his arm and rushed him along.
“Boat waiting,” he said. “Farther down.”
Things began to fly through the air around them. A stone bounced off Hostetter’s back and he hunched his head down until his broad-brimmed hat seemed to sit flat on his shoulders. They ran in among a grove of trees and out on the other side, and Len stopped suddenly.
“Esau,” he said. “Can’t go without Esau.”
“He’s already aboard,” said Hostetter. “Come on!”
They ran again, across a pasture sloping down to the water’s edge, and the cows went bucketing away with their tails in the air. At the lower end of the pasture was another clump of trees, growing right on the bank, and in their partial concealment a big steam barge was tied up, with a couple of men standing on the deck holding axes, ready to chop the lines free. Smoke began to puff up suddenly from the single low stack, as though a banked fire had been stirred swiftly to life. Len saw Esau hanging over the rail, and there was someone beside him, someone with yellow hair and a long skirt.
There was a board laid from the bank to the rail. They scrambled up over it onto the deck and Hostetter shouted at the men with the axes. Stones were flying again, and Esau caught Amity and hurried her around to the other side of the deckhouse. The axes flashed. There was more shouting, and the Refuge men, with Watts in the lead, rushed right down to the bank and Watts and two others ran out onto the plank. Len did not see Ames among them. The lines parted and went snaking into the water. Hostetter and Len and some others grabbed up long poles and pushed off hard. The plank fell into the water with Watts and the other men that were on it. There was a roar and a clatter from below, the deck shook and sparks burst up through the stack. The barge began to move out into the current. Watts stood waist-deep in the muddy water by the bank and shook his fists at them.
“We know you now!” he shouted, his voice coming thin across the widening gap. “You won’t get away!”
The men on the bank behind him shouted too. Their voices grew fainter but the note of hatred remained in them, and the ugliness in the gestures of their hands. Len looked back at Refuge. They were well out in the river now and he could see past the waterfront. Smoke obscured much of the town, but he could see enough. What Burdette’s farmers had left untouched the spreading fire was taking for its own.
Len sat down on the deck with his back against the house. He put his arms across his knees and laid his head on them and felt an overwhelming desire to cry like a little boy, but he was too tired even to do that. He just sat and tried to make his mind as blank as the rest of him felt. But he could not do it, and over and over he saw Dulinsky stop and fall down slowly into the hot dust of the north road, and he smelled the smell of a great burning, and Burdette’s harsh voice sounded in his ears, saying, “We will have no cities in our midst.”
After a while he became aware that somebody was standing over him. He looked up, and it was Hostetter, holding his hat in his hand and wiping his forehead wearily on his coat sleeve.
“Well, boy,” he said, “you’ve got your wish. You’re on your way to Bartorstown.”
14
It was night, warm and tranquil. There was a moon, lighting the surface of the river and turning the two banks into masses of black shadow. The barge slipped along, chuffing gently as it added a bit to the thrust of the current. There was a lot of cargo on the deck, tied down securely and covered with canvas against the rain. Len had found a place in it. He had slept for a while, and he was sitting now with his back against a bale, watching the river go by.
Hostetter came by, walking slowly along the narrow space left clear on the foredeck, trailing a fragrance of tobacco smoke from an old pipe. He saw Len sitting up, and stopped. “Feel better?”
“I feel sick,” Len said, so viciously that Hostetter knew what he meant. He nodded.
“You know now how I felt the night they killed Bill Soames.”
“Murderers,” said Len. “Cowards. Bastards.” He cursed them until the words choked in his throat. “You should have seen them standing there across the road. And then Burdette shot him. He shot him just the way you’d shoot some vermin you found in the corn.”
“Yes,” said Hostetter slowly, “we’d have had you out of there sooner if you hadn’t gone up after Dulinsky. Poor devil. But I’m not surprised.”
“Couldn’t you have helped him?”
“Us? Y
ou mean Bartorstown?”
“He wanted the same things you want. Growth, progress, intelligence, a future. Couldn’t you have helped?”
There was an edge to Len’s voice, but Hostetter only took the pipe out of his mouth and asked quietly, “How?”
Len thought about that. After a while he said, “I suppose you couldn’t.”
“Not without an army. We don’t have an army, and if we did have we wouldn’t use it. It takes an almighty force to make people change their whole way of thinking and living. We had a force like that just yesterday as time goes for a nation, and we don’t want any more of them.”
“That’s what the judge was afraid of. Change. And he just stood there and watched Dulinsky die.” Len shook his head. “He died for nothing. That’s what he died for, nothing.”
“No,” said Hostetter, “I wouldn’t say that. But it takes more than one Dulinsky. It takes a lot of them, one after the other, in different places——”
“And more Burdettes, and more burnings.”
“Yes. And someday one will come along at the right time, and the change will be made.”
“That’s a lot to look forward to.”
“That’s the way it is. And then all the Dulinskys will become martyrs to a great ideal. In the meantime, you’re disturbers of the peace. And damn it, Len, you know in a way they’re right. They’re comfortable and happy. Who are you—or any of us —to tell them it’s all got to be torn up and changed?”
Len turned and looked at Hostetter in the moonlight. “Is that why you just stand by and watch?”
Hostetter said, with just the faintest note of impatience in his voice, “I don’t think you understand about us yet. We’re not supermen. We’ve got all we can do just to stay alive, without trying to remake a country that doesn’t want to be remade.”
“But how can you say they’re right? Ignorant butchers like Burdette, hypocrites like the judge——”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 53