Now the rain came down without a letup, driven by the wind. At intervals it turned to ice and rattled in the branches of the trees. Then it would turn to rain again and the rain, it seemed to me, was colder than the ice.
We walked forever and then I found that we were no longer on a ridge, but were slanting down a slope. We reached a creek and found a narrow place where we could jump across it and started clambering up the opposite slope. Suddenly the ground leveled off beneath my feet and I heard the census-taker saying, 'This is far enough.'
As soon as I heard those words I let my legs buckle under me and sat down on solid rock. For a moment I paid no attention to where we were. It was quite enough that there was no longer any need to move. But gradually I became aware of what was going on.
We had stopped, I saw, on abroad, flat shelf of rock that extended out in front of a huge rock shelter. The roof of the shelter, some thirty feet or more above the shelf, flared back to form a deep niche in the face of a jutting cliff. The slab of rock extending out from the cliff ran back into the shelter, forming a level floor of stone. A few feet downward from the shelf, the creek flowed down the valley, forming little pools and rapids, pinching down, then broadening out, a little mountain stream that was in a hurry, foaming in the rapids and then resting in the pools before it took another plunge. Beyond the stream the hill rose steeply to the ridgetop along which we'd come.
'Here we are,' said the census-taker in a happy, chirpy voice. 'Snug against the night and weather. We will build a fire and catch some trout out of the stream and wish the wolf ill luck in his trailing.'
'The wolf?' said Cynthia. 'There were three wolves to start with. What happened to the other two?'
'I have intelligence,' said the census-taker, 'that but one remains. It seems the others met with awkward accidents.'
Chapter 15
Beyond the shelter's mouth the storm raged in the night. The fire gave light and warmth and our clothes at last were dry and there had been, as the census-taker had said, fish to be gotten in the brook, beautiful speckled trout that had made a welcome break from the gook we had been eating out of cans and a vast improvement over jerky.
We were not the first to use the shelter. Our fire had been built on a blackened circle on the stone, where the fires of earlier years (although how long ago there was no way of knowing) had chipped and flaked the surface of the rock. Along the broad expanse of stone were several other similarly blackened areas, half camouflaged by a scattering of blown autumn leaves.
In a pile of leaves, wedged and caught far back in the rocky cleft, where the roof plunged down to meet the floor, Cynthia had found another evidence of human occupancy-a metal rod some four feet long, an inch in diameter, and touched only here and there with rust.
I sat beside the fire, staring at the flames, thinking back along the trail and trying to figure out how such well-laid plans as ours could have gone so utterly astray. The answer was, of course, that Cemetery had been responsible, although perhaps not responsible for our meeting with the band of grave robbers. We had simply stumbled onto them.
I tried to figure exactly where we stood and it seemed, as I thought about it, we did not stand well at all. We had been harried from the settlement and we had been split up and Cynthia and I had fallen into the hands of an enigmatic being that might be little better than a madman.
Now there was the wolf-one wolf if what the census-taker said was right. There was no doubt in my mind what had happened to the other two. They had caught up with Elmer and the Bronco and that had been a great mistake for them. But while Elmer had been dismantling two of them, the third one had escaped and probably even now was upon our trail-if there were a trail to follow. We had gone along high, barren ridges, with a strong wind blowing to wipe away our scent. Now, with the breaking of the storm, there might be no trail at all to follow.
'Fletch,' said Cynthia, 'what are you thinking of?'
'I am wondering,' I said, 'where Elmer and Bronco might be at this moment.'
'They're on their way back to the cave,' she said. 'They will find the note.'
'Sure,' I said, 'the note. A lot of good the note will do. We are traveling northwest, it said. If you don't catch up with us before we reach there, you'll find us on the Ohio River. Do you realize how much land may lie northwest before you reach the river and how big that river is?'
'It was the best that we could do,' she said, rather angrily.
'We shall, in the morning,' said the census-taker, 'build a fire, high upon a ridge, to make a signal. We will guide them to us.'
'Them,' I said, 'and everyone else in sight, perhaps even including the wolf. Or is it still three wolves?'
'It is only one,' said the census-taker, 'and one wolf would not be so brave. Wolves are brave only when in packs.'
'I don't think,' I said, 'I would care to meet even one, lone, cowardly wolf.'
'There are few of them now,' said the census-taker. 'They have not been loosed to hunt for years. The long years of confinement may have taken a lot of the sharpness from them.'
'What I want to know,' I said, 'is how it took Cemetery so long to send them out against us. They could have turned them loose the minute that we left.'
'Undoubtedly,' said the census-taker, 'they had to send for them. I don't know where they are kept, but doubtless at some distance.'
The wind went whooping down the valley that lay in front of us and a sheet of rain came hissing into the mouth of the cave to spatter on the rock just beyond the fire.
'Where are all your pals?' I asked. 'Where are all the shades?'
'On a night like this,' said the census-taker, 'they have far-ranging business.'
I didn't ask what kind of business. I didn't want to know.
'I don't know about the rest of you,' said Cynthia, 'but I'm going to roll up in my blanket and try to get some sleep.'
'Both of you might as well,' said the census-taker. 'It has been a long, hard day. I will keep the watch. I almost never sleep.'
'You never sleep,' I said, 'and you almost never eat. The wind doesn't blow that robe of yours. Just what the hell are you?'
He didn't answer. I knew he wouldn't answer.
The last thing that I saw before I went to sleep was the census-taker sitting a short distance from the fire, a rigid upright figure that had a strange resemblance to a cone resting on its base.
I woke cold. The fire had gone out and beyond the cave mouth dawn was breaking. The storm had stopped and what I could see of the sky was clear.
And there, on the rock shelf that extended out in front of the cave, sat a metal wolf. He was hunkered on his haunches and he was looking straight at me and from his steel jaws dangled the limp form of a rabbit.
I sat up rapidly, the blanket falling from me, putting out my hand to find a stick of firewood, although what good a stick of wood would have done against a monster such as that I had no idea. But in grasping for the stick, I found something else. I wasn't looking where I was reaching out because I didn't dare take my eyes off the wolf. But when my fingers touched it, I knew what I had-the four-foot metal rod that Cynthia had unearthed from beneath the pile of leaves. I wrapped my fingers around it with something like a prayer of thankfulness and got carefully to my feet, holding the rod so tight that the grip was painful.
The wolf made no move toward me; it just stayed sitting there, with that silly rabbit hanging from its jaws. I had forgotten that it had a tail, but now its tail began to beat, very gently, very slowly upon the slab of rock, for all the world like the tail-beating of a dog that was glad to see someone.
I looked around quickly. The census-taker was nowhere to be seen, but Cynthia was sitting upright in her blanket and her eyes were the size of saucers. She didn't notice that I was looking at her; she had her eyes fastened on the wolf.
I took a step sidewise to get around the fire and as I did I lifted the metal rod to a ready position. If I could get in just one lucky lick, I thought, upon that ugly head when it came at me, I stood at least some chance.
