“Not for me,” agreed Thomas. “Well, I guess I had better be on my way before I get you in trouble. Thanks for the breakfast.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s a pleasure to do a favor for a fellow American these days.”
He started off down the road at once, not wishing the kindly rancher to see how thoroughly he had been moved by the picture of his degradation.
The implications of that registration card had shaken his free soul in a fashion that the simple, intellectual knowledge of the defeat of the United States had been unable to do.
He moved slowly for the first two or three days, avoiding the towns until he had gathered sufficient knowledge of the enforced new customs to be able to conduct himself without arousing suspicion. It was urgently desirable that he be able to enter at least one big city in order to snoop around, read the bulletin boards, and find a chance to talk with persons whose occupations permitted them to travel. From a standpoint of personal safety he was quite willing to chance it without an identification card but he remembered clearly a repeated injunction of Ardmore’s “Your paramount duty is to returns Don’t go making a hero of yourself. Don’t take any chance you can avoid and come back!”
Cities would have to wait.
Thomas skirted around towns at night, avoiding patrols as he used to avoid railroad cops. The second night out he found the first of his objectives, a hobos’ jungle. It was just where he had expected to find it, from his recollection of previous trips through the territory.
Nevertheless, he almost missed it, for the inevitable fire was concealed by a jury-rigged oil-can stove, and shielded from chance observation.
He slipped into the circle and sat down without comment, as custom required, and waited for them to look him over.
Presently a voice said plaintively: “It’s Gentleman Jeff. Cripes, Jeff, you gave me a turn. I thought you was a flatface. Whatcha been doin’ with yourself, Jeff?”
“Oh, one thing and another. On the dodge.”
“Who isn’t these days?” the voice returned. “Everywhere you try, those slant-eyes — ” He broke into a string of attributions concerning the progenitors and personal habits of the PanAsians about which he could not possibly have had positive knowledge.
“Stow it, Moe,” another voice commanded. “Tell us the news, Jeff.”
“Sorry,” Thomas refused affably, “but I’ve been up in the hills, kinda keeping out of the army and doing a little fishing.”
“You should have stayed there. Things are bad everywhere. Nobody dares give an unregistered man a day’s work and it takes everything you’ve got just to keep out of the labor camps. It makes the big Red hunt look like a picnic.”
“Tell me about the labor camps,” Thomas suggested. “I might get hungry enough, to try one for a while.” .
“You don’t know. Nobody could get that hungry.” The voice paused, as if the owner were turning the unpleasant subject over in his mind. “Did you know the Seattle Kid?”
“Seem to recall. Little squint-eyed guy, handy with his hands?”
“That’s him. Well, he was in one, maybe a week, and got out. Couldn’t tell us how; his mind was gone. I saw him the night he died. His body was a mass of sores, blood poisoning, I guess.” He paused. then added reflectively: “The smell was pretty bad.”
Thomas wanted to drop the subject but he needed to know more. “Who gets sent to these camps?”
“Any man that isn’t already working at an approved job. Boys from fourteen on up. All that was left alive of the army after we folded up.
Anybody that’s caught without a registration card.”
“That ain’t the half of it,” added Moe. “You should see what they do with unassigned women. Why, a woman was telling me just the other day — a nice old gel; gimme a handout. She was telling me about her niece used to be a schoolteacher, and the flatfaces don’t want any American schools or teachers. When they registered her they — ”
“Shut up, Moe. You talk too much.”
It was disconnected, fragmentary, the more so as he was rarely able to ask direct questions concerning the things he really wanted to know.