He managed to say, very sincerely, “I’m sorry, Shep.”
His knees were shaking and his heart was pounding, but it Was only adrenalin. With an unclouded mind he knew what torment had driven this placid hulk to rage: Incessant, relentless, nagging self-doubt. Where leisure is compulsory, how do you tell the burning drive to create from its sterile twin, named “puttering?” You can’t. Posterity can; but only posterity. And you won’t be there to know. And the self-doubt must remain forever unresolved, forever choked down and forever rising again.
And when, unexpectedly, it leaps forth it burns like acid.
Norvell told the big man steadily, “I woi^t say that again. I won’t even think it. Not because you scared mVbat because I know it isn’t true.” He hesitated. “I—I used to think I was a kind of artist myself. I know what you go through.”
Shep grumbled, “Bligh, you’re just beginning to find out what you go through—but I’m sorry I blew my top.”
“Forget it.” They walked on.
Shep said at last, “Here’s where we get some more supplies.” The place was one of the inevitable picture-window, fieldstone-chimney ruins, but with a fenced-in yard. The gate had a lock on it. Shep kicked the gate down, tearing out the hinges and the staples of the hasp.
Norvell said, “Hey!”
“We do this my way. Hey, Stearns!”
Stearns was a grim, gray man. He threaded his way to them around stacks of plastic fittings, guttering, and miscellaneous. “Hello, Shep,” he said flatly. “What do you want?”
Shep said, “I don’t have my notebook with me, but I guess 111 remember it all. You hijacked repair materials that a couple of friends of mine got through legitimate black-market channels. I want them back. With interest.”
“Still on the protection kick, Shep?” the man asked. His voice was ugly. “If you had any sense you’d come in with me.”
“I don’t work for anybody, Stearns. I do favors for a few friends, they do favors for me. Trot out your team, Titan of Industry.”
Shep, so lightning-fast to resent the slur himself, was insensitive enough to use it on others. With the same results.
Stearns’s face went pasty with rage and Norvell knew what was coming next—unless he moved fast. “Stearns!” he yelled, and used the moment’s delay to draw the pistol that Virginia had ordered him to cany. Stearns’s hand stopped at his lapel and slowly, unwillingly, dropped to his side.
Shep gave Norvell a quick, approving glance. “Trot out your team, Stearns,” he ordered.
Stearns didn’t look away from the gun in Norvell’s hand. “Chris! Willie!” he yelled. “Get the truck.”
The truck was a two-wheeler stake job with one starved-
looking teen-ager pulling between poles and another pushing against a canvas breast-band. Walking Stearns before him, Shep ordered him to pick up this or that article of building material and put it on the track. He filled the truck, topped the load with a rusty pick and shovel from a tool shed, and told Chris and Willie, “Roll it, kids. It won’t be far.”
Norvell didn’t pocket his gun until they had put three blocks between themselves and Stearns’s final malevolent glare.
There were two stops before they headed for Nbrvell’s home. At each of them a part of the supplies were unloaded, to the tearful thanks of sober-looking citizens who had thought them gone forever, and with them the months of accumulation, gambling, and wangling that had earned them in the first place.
Norvell, eyeing the heaving, panting teen-agers, suggested uneasily, “Let’s give them a hand with the truck.”
But Shep shook his head. “We might get jumped. Our job is convoying.”
There was no trouble. The kids rolled the cart to the door of Norvell’s house and unloaded the firewood and building materials, stacking them neatly on the shredded broadloom that covered the floor of the sunken living room.
Virginia cast an appraising eye over the neat heaps, weighing, planning. “No tar paper, linoleum, anything like that?”
Shep guffawed. “No diamonds, either,” he told her. “You think your roof is the only one that leaks? You’re lucky— you got two finished floors. Let the top one get soaked. You’ll be all right down here.”