He could not say why-except to point out that the communists and other
revolutionary forces had long been looking for excuses to act-but he
knew it to be true.
He thought about Pulham, latest victim of these changes, and he fisted
both big hands.
it was political. Sooner or later they would get the bastards.
WEDNESDAY, 7:00 A.M, to THURSDAY, 7:00 A.M Seven The morning held the
threat of rain. Gently undulating fields of tender new wheat shoots
touched the far horizons, a green carpet under the low gray ceiling of
fast-moving clouds. Here and there on the maddeningly level land,
enormous concrete grain elevators thrust up like gigantic lightning rods
to test the mettle of the pending storm.
Colin liked it. He kept pointing to the grain elevators and to the
occasional skeletal oil derricks which stood like prison watchtowers in
the distance. “It’s great, isn’t it?”
“This land’s every bit as flat as that back in Indiana and Missouri,”
Doyle said.
“But there’s history here.” Today the boy was wearing a red-and-black
Frankenstein T-shirt. It had pulled up out of his corduroy trousers,
but he paid it no attention now.
“History?” Doyle asked.
“Haven’t you ever heard of the Old Chisholm Trail? Or the Santa Fe
Trail? All the famous Old West towns are here,” the boy said, excited
about it. “You have Abilene and’ Fort Riley, Fort Scott, Pawnee Rock,
Wichita, Dodge City, and the old Boot Hill.”
“I didn’t know you were a cowboy-movie fan,” Doyle said.
“I’m not, that much. But it’s still exciting.” Alex looked at the great
plains and tried to picture them as they had once been: shifting sands,
dust, cactus, a stark and foreboding landscape that had barely been
touched by man. Yes, once it must have been a romantic place.
“There were Indian wars here,” Colin said. “And John Brown caused a
small civil war in Kansas back in 1856, when he and his boys killed five
slave owners at Pottawatomie Creek. ”
“Bet you can’t say that five times, fast.”
“A dollar?” Colin asked.
“You’re on.”
“Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie!”
he said, breathless at the end of it. “You owe me a buck.”
“Put it on my tab,” Doyle said. He felt loose and easy and good
again, now that the trip was turning out to be what they had planned.
“You know who else came from Kansas?”
“Who? ”
“Carry Nation,” Colin said, giggling. “The woman who went around
breaking up saloons with an ax.”
They passed another grain elevator sitting at the end of a long,
straight blacktop road.
“Where did you learn all this? ” Doyle asked.
“Just picked it up,” Colin said. “Bits and pieces from here and there.”
Now and then they passed fields which were standing idle, rich brown
patches of land like neatly opened tablecloths. in one of these, a
fifty-foot-high whirlwind gathered dust in a compact column of whining
spring air.
“This is also where Dorothy lived,” Colin said, watching the whirlwind.
“Dorothy who?”
“The girl in The Wizard of Oz. Remember how she got carried to oz by a
tremendous tornado?”
Alex was about to answer when he was startled by the brash roar of an
automobile horn immediately behind them. He looked in the mirror-and
sucked air between his teeth when he saw the Chevrolet van. It was
no more than six feet from their rear bumper. The unseen driver was
pounding the palm of his hand into the horn ring: beep, beep, beep,
beep, beep, beeeeeep!
Doyle looked at the speedometer, saw that they were doing better than
seventy. If he had been so surprised by the horn that he had stomped
the brake pedal, the Chevrolet would have run right over them.
And they would all be dead.
“Stupid sonofabitch,” he said.
Beep, beeeeeeep, beeeeeep . . .
“Is it him?” Colin asked.
“Yes. ” The van moved up, so close now that Doyle could not even see
its bumper or the bottom third of its grill.
“Why’s he blowing his horn?” Colin asked.
“I don’t know . . . I guess-to make sure we know he’s back.”
Eight The van’s horn played a monotonous dirge.
“Do you think he wants you to stop?