"Oh, yeah. The one you said they abandoned?"
"Yes. The owner died, and nobody else came along before all the machinery rusted. It's quite something to see. An enterprising man could still do something with it if he could put up the money to buy it. There's nothing wrong with the rock there." Vic had never heard himself sound calmer.
Vic turned off the East Lyme road into a dirt road, and then at a certain place, invisible until one was upon it, he turned into a rutty, single-lane road so nearly overgrown with young trees and hushes that he could hear them brush the sides of his car as they I moved through.
"This is one place you don't want to meet somebody else head on," Vic said, and Cameron laughed as if it were terribly funny. "That was a great evening last night," Vic went on. "You've got to come again soon."
"You're the damnedest hospitable people I ever met," Cameron said, shaking his head and laughing with boorish self-consciousness.
"Here we are," Vic said."You've got to get out to see it properly."
Vic had stopped the car in a small area between the edge of the woods and the abyss of the quarry. They got out, and Roger hopped out with them. The quarry spread before them and below them, an impressive excavation of some quarter of a mile in length and somewhat half that in depth. At the very bottom of it lay a lake of water, shallower on their left where fragments of rock had slid down the nearly white rock cliff into the water, but deep to their right where the neat excavations of the engineers had removed the limestone in right-angled blocks, like giant steps, and where the water lapped only a few feet over some blocks and became black with depth just beyond. Here and there on the perimeter of the quarry stood stiff, rusted cranes at various angles as if the work men had simply stopped one day at quitting time and not come back.
"Sa-a-ay!" Cameron said, putting his hands on his hips and surveying it. "That's pretty colossal! I had no idea it was this big."
"Yep," Vic said, moving off toward the right a little, and closer to the edge. The puppy followed him. "Plenty of stone left, don't you think?"
"Sure looks like it!" Cameron was going closer to the edge himself now.
The place where they were standing was where Vic and Melinda and Trixie had come in the past to picnic, and Vic told Cameron so, but he did not add that they had stopped coming because it was too nerve-racking to keep watching to see that Trixie did not go too near the edge.
"It's a good place for swimming, too, down there," Vic said "You can get down to the water by a little path." He strolled away from the edge.
"Say, I bet Ferris would've liked this color," Cameron said "He's complaining because the stone we've got's too white."
Vic picked up a jagged, off-white rock about the size of his head as if to examine it. Then he drew his arm back and threw it, aiming at Cameron's head, just as Cameron turned toward him.
Cameron had time to duck a fraction, and the rock glanced off the top of his head, but it staggered him back a little, nearer the Cameron glowered at him like a bewildered bull, and Vic—in what seemed to take him a whole minute—picked up another rock twice the size of the other, and running with it a step or two, launched it at Cameron. It caught Cameron in the thighs, and there was a quick flail of arms, a bellowing half scream, half roar, whose pitch changed as Cameron dropped downward. Vic went to a lie edge, in time to see Cameron bounce off the steep slope very near the bottom of the cliff and roll noiselessly onto the stone flat. There was no sound then, except for the dwindling trickle of little stones that were following Cameron's path downward. Then the puppy gave an excited yip, and turning, Vic saw Roger with his forelegs down and his rear end up, ready to play with him.
Vic glanced around the rim of the quarry, at every edge of trees, then down at the shallow end of the lake, where sometimes he had seen a pair of small boys or a wandering man. There was no one around now. He went to his car for a rope. He thought there was a rope in the trunk compartment.
There wasn't, and he realized that it had been months since the rope had been there and that he had used it for something that Trixie had wanted. He debated a coil of heavy twine versus one of his snow chains, and took a snow chain.
Then he hurried along the edge of the quarry toward the path he knew. The path was steep and sometimes he slid a yard almost straight down, catching onto a tough little bush to slow himself, but he was not really hurrying, he felt, and he took the time to look back to see if Roger was making it all right. Once Roger hesitated and whimpered at a steep spot, and Vic reached back and put a hand under his chest and lifted him down.
Cameron was lying on his back with one arm over his head, a position he might have assumed while sleeping. His big square face was obscured by blood, and there were wide patches of blood on his shirt under the unbuttoned tweed jacket. Vic looked around fur a suitable rock. There were rocks galore to choose from. He hose one shaped rather like a flattened horse's head,
