Now Kickaha understood why Wergenget was the chief.
The graybeard stopped his beast, which trembled violently, its upper lip drawn back, its eyes rotating. Kickaha shouted at him and pointed at the corpse. Wergenget nodded that he understood. He lifted up the girl and placed her on the saddle before him. Kickaha fully expected him to take off then. Why shoud he risk his life and the child’s for a stranger?
But Wergenget controlled the hikwu until Kickaha could get up behind the chief. Then he turned it and let it go, and the beast was not at all reluctant. Though burdened with the three, it made speed. Presently, they were in the pass. Here there was no rain; the thunder and the lightning boomed and exploded but at a safe distance away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WERGENGET HANDED THE child to its weeping wailing mother. The father kissed his daughter, too, but his expression was hangdog. He was ashamed because he had allowed his fear to overcome him.
“We stay here until the Lord is through rampaging,” the chief said.
Kickaha slid off the animal. Wergenget followed him. For a moment Kickaha thought about snatching the knife from the chiefs belt. With it he could flee into a storm where no man dared venture. And he could lose himself in the forest. If he escaped being struck by lightning, he would be so far away the tribe would never find him.
But there was more to his decision not to run for it just now.
The truth was that he didn’t want to be alone.
Much of his life, he’d been a loner. Yet he was neither asocial nor antisocial. He’d had no trouble mixing with his playmates, the neighboring farmers’ children, when he was a child nor with his peers at the country schoolhouse and community high school.
Because of his intense curiosity, athletic abilities, and linguistic ability, he’d been both popular and a leader. But he was a voracious reader, and, quite often, when he had a choice between recreation with others or reading, he decided on the latter. His time was limited because a farmer’s son was kept very busy. Also, he studied hard to get good grades in school. Even at a young age he’d decided he didn’t want to be a farmer. He had dreams of traveling to exotic places, of becoming a zoologist or curator of a natural history museum and going to those fabulous places, deepest Africa or South America or Malaya. But that required a Ph.D. and to get that he’d have to have high grades through high school and college. Besides, he liked to learn.
So he read everything he could get his hands on.
His schoolmates had kidded him about “always having his nose stuck in a book.” Not nastily and not too jeeringly, since they respected his quick temper and quicker fists. But they did not comprehend his lust for learning.
An outsider, observing him from the ages of seventeen through twenty-two, would not have known that he was often with his peers but not of them. They would have seen a star athlete and superior student who palled around with the roughest, raced around the country roads on a motorcycle, tumbled many girls in the hay, literally, got disgustingly drunk, and once was jailed for running a police roadblock. His parents had been mortified, his mother weeping, his father raging. That he had escaped from jail just to show how easy it was and then voluntarily returned to it had upset them even more.
His male peers thought this was admirable and amusing, his female peers found it fascinating though scarey, and his teachers thought it alarming. The judge, who found him reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in his cell, decided that he was just a high-spirited youth with much potentiality who’d fallen among evil companions. The charges were dropped, but Paul was put on unofficial probation by the judge. The young man gave his word that he would behave as a decent respectable citizen should-during the probation period, anyway-and he had kept his word.
Paul seldom left the farm during the probation period. He didn’t want to be tempted into evil by those companions whose evil had mostly come from their willingness to follow him into it. Besides, his parents had been hurt enough. He worked, studied, and sometimes hunted in the woods. He didn’t mind being alone for long periods. He threw himself into solitariness with the same zest he threw himself into companionship.