motion, he frowned more deeply, the lines in his red brow bunched
together like rolls in corrugated sheet metal.
“Such a nice man.” Alex put the car in gear and got out of there.
When they were on the turnpike going west again, Colin suddenly laughed
aloud.
“What’s so funny?” Alex asked. He was shivering inside, angry with
Chet out of proportion to what the man had done. indeed, the man had
done nothing except reveal a rather quiet prejudice.
“When he said you looked twenty-one, I thought he was going to call you
Chief like up “Rim he did me,” Colin said. “That would have been
good.”
“Oh, sure! That would have been just hysterical.”
Colin shrugged. “You thought it was funny when he called me Chief.”
As Doyle’s anger and fear settled, he realized that his own reaction to
the attendant’s unvoiced hatred was only a milder version of that
overreaction which Colin had shown to the man’s friendly small talk. Had
the boy seen through Chet’s original folksy persona to the not-so-folksy
core? Or had he just been his usual shy self? It really did not
matter. Whatever the case, the fact remained that an injustice had been
done both of them. “I apologize, Colin. I should never have approved
of the condescending tone he used with you.”
“He treated me like I was a child.”
“It’s a natural trap for adults to fall into,” Alex said. “But it isn’t
right. Are you going to accept my apology?”
Colin was especially serious, sitting straight and stiff, for this was
the first time an adult had asked his forgiveness. “I accept,” he said
soberly. Then his gamin face broke into a wide smile. “But I still
wish that he had called you Chief just like he did me.
. . .
Thick pines and black-trunked elms crowded against the sides of the road
now, swaying gently in the spring wind.
The highway rose nearly a mile. At the crest it did not slope down
again but continued across a flat table of land toward another gradual
slope a mile away. The forest still loomed up, the tall sentinel pines
in grand array, the sprawling elms like generals inspecting the troops.
Halfway along this flat stretch, on the right, was a picnic and rest
area. The brush had been cleared from beneath the trees. A few wooden
tables-anchored to concrete stanchions to guard against theft-and
several trash baskets were fixed at intervals under the scattered pines.
A sign announced public rest rooms.
At this hour of the morning there was no one at the picnic tables.
However, at the far western end of the miniature park, stopped in the
exit lane and waiting to pull back onto the pike, was the delivery van.
automover CONE-WAY MOVE-IT-YOURSELF CONVENIENCE!
It was unquestionably the same van.
“There he is again! ” Colin said, pressing his nose against the window
as they swept past the van at seventy miles an hour. “It really is
him!”
Doyle looked in the rear-view mirror and watched the delivery van pull
onto the main road. it accelerated rapidly. In three or four minutes
it caught up with them, settling in a quarter of a mile behind, pacing
them as it had before.
Doyle knew that it was just coincidence. There was no reality in
Colin’s game. It was as much make-believe as all the games he had
played with the boy in the past. No one in the world had a grudge
against them. No one in the world had a reason to follow them with
sinister intent. Coincidence . . .
Nevertheless, a chill lay the length of his back, a crust of imaginary
ice.
Two George Leland handled the rented twenty-foot Chevrolet van as if
he werepushing a baby carriage, not even rattling the furniture and
household goods which were packed into the cargo space behind the front
seat. The land whizzed past, and the road rumbled underneath, and
Leland was in command of it all.
He had grown up with trucks and other big machines, and he had a special
talent for making them perform as they had been built to perform. On
the farm near Lancaster, he had driven a hay truck by the time he was