“Now you be warned, Gregory,” the farmer repeated. “You be off my land by noon by the sun, and that mare of yours, or I ont answer for it.” He marched out into the pale sunshine, and Neckland followed.
Nancy and Gregory stood staring at each other. He took her hands, and they were cold.
“You believe what I was saying, Nancy?”
“Is that why the food did at one point taste bad to us, and then soon tasted well enough again?”
“It can only have been that at that time your systems were not fully adjusted to the poison. Now they are. You’re being fed up, Nancy, just like the livestockI’m sure of it! I fear for you, darling love, I fear so much. What are we to do? Come back to Cottersall with me! Mrs. Fenn has another fine little drawing room upstairs that I’m sure she would rent.”
“Now you’re talking nonsense, Greg! How can I? What would people say? No, you go away for now and let the tempest of Father’s wrath abate, and if you could come back tomorrow, you will find he will be milder for sure, because I plan to wait on him tonight and talk to him about you. Why, he’s half daft with grief and doesn’t know what he says.”
“All right, my darling. But stay inside as much as you can.
The Aurigans have not come indoors yet, as far as we know, and it may be safer here. And lock all the doors and put the shutters over the windows before you go to bed. And get your father to take that shotgun of his upstairs with him.”
The evenings were lengthening with confidence towards summer now, and Bruce Fox arrived home before sunset. As he jumped from his bicycle this evening, he found his friend Gregory impatiently awaiting him.
They went indoors together, and while Fox ate a large tea, Gregory told him what had been happening at the farm that day.
“You’re in trouble,” Fox said. “Look, tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll skip church and come out with you. You need help.”
“Joseph may shoot me. He’ll be certain to if I bring along a stranger. You can help me tonight by telling me where I can purchase a young dog straightaway to protect Nancy.”
“Nonsense, I’m coming with you. I can’t bear hearing all this at secondhand anyhow. We’ll pick up a pup in any eventthe blacksmith has a litter to be rid of. Have you got any plan of action?”
“Plan? No, not really.”
“You must have a plan. Grendon doesn’t scare too easily, does he?”
“I imagine he’s scared well enough. Nancy says he’s scared.
He just isn’t imaginative enough to see what he can do but carry on working as hard as possible.”
“Look, I know these farmers. They won’t believe anything till you rub their noses in it. What we must do is show him an Aurigan.”
“Oh, splendid, Bruce! And how do you catch one?”
“You trap one.”
“Don’t forget they’re invisiblehey, Bruce, yes, by Jove, you’re right! I’ve the very idea! Look, we’ve nothing more to worry about if we can trap one. We can trap the lot, however many there are, and we can kill the little horrors when we have trapped them.”
Fox grinned over the top of a chunk of cherry cake. “We’re agreed, I suppose, that these Aurigans aren’t socialist Utopians any longer?”
~
It helped a great deal, Gregory thought, to be able to visualize roughly what the alien life form looked like. The volume on serpents had been a happy find, for not only did it give an idea of how the Aurigans must be able to digest their prey so rapidly”a kind of soup or broth”but presumably it gave a clue to their appearance. To live in a space machine, they would probably be fairly small, and they seemed to be semi-aquatic. It all went to make up a picture of a strange being: skin perhaps scaled like a fish, great flipper feet like a frog, barrel-like diminutive stature, and a tiny he’ad with two great fangs in the jaw. There was no doubt but that the invisibility cloaked a really ugly-looking dwarf!