and sent Len and Esau down to stoke again. The barge went boiling downstream, her paddles lashing up the spray. It got stiller yet, and hotter, until it seemed the world would have to burst with it, and then the first crackings and rumblings of that bursting made themselves heard over the scrape of the shovels and the clang of the fire door. Finally Sam put his head down the ladder and shouted to Charlie to let off and bank up. Drenched and reeling, Len and Esau emerged into a portentous twilight, with the sky drawn down over the country like a black cowl. They were tied up now in midstream in the lee of an island, and the north bank rose up in a protecting bluff.
“Here she comes,” said Hostetter.
They ducked for the shelter of the house. The wind hit first, laying the trees over and turning up the lighter sides of their leaves. Then the rain came, riding the wind in a white smother that blotted everything from sight, and it was mixed with leaves and twigs and flying branches. After that was the lightning, and the thunder, and the cracking of trees, and then after a long time only the rain was left, pouring down straight and heavy as though it was tipped out of a bucket. They went out on deck and made sure everything was fast, shivering in the new chill, and then took turns sleeping. The rain slacked and almost stopped, and then came on again with a new storm, and during his watch Len could see lightning flaring all along the horizon as the squalls danced on the forward edge of the cool air mass moving down from the north. About midnight, through diminished rain and distant thunder, Len heard a new sound, and knew that it was the river rising.
They started on again in a clear bright dawn, with a fine breeze blowing and a sky like scoured porcelain dotted with white clouds, and only the torn branches of the trees and the river water roiled with mud and debris were left to show the wildness of the night. Half a mile below where Kovacs had tied up they passed a towboat and a string of barges, tossed up all along the south bank, and below that again a mile or two was a trader’s boat sunk in the shallows where she had run onto a snag.
That was the beginning of a long journey, and a long strange period for Len that had the quality of a dream. They followed the Ohio to its mouth and turned north into the Mississippi. They were breasting the current now, beating a slow and careful way up a channel that switched constantly back and forth between the banks, so that the barge seemed always to be about to run onto the land beside some whitewashed marker. They used up the coal, and took on wood at a station on the Illinois side, and beat on again to the mouth of the Missouri, and after that for days they wallowed their way up the chutes of the Big Muddy. Mostly it was hot. There were storms, and rain, and around the middle of August there came a few nights cold enough to hint of fall. Sometimes the wind blew so hard against them they had to tie up and wait, and watch the down-river traffic go past them flying. Sometimes after a rain the water would rise and run so fast that they could make no headway, and then it would fall just as quickly and show them too late how the treacherous channel had shifted, and they would have to work the barge painfully and with much labor and swearing off the sand bar where she had stuck fast. The muddy water fouled the boiler, and they had to stop and clean it, and other times they had to stop for more wood. And Esau grumbled, “This is a hell of a way for Bartorstown men to travel.”
“Esau,” said Hostetter, “I’ll tell you. If we had planes we’d be glad to fly them. But we don’t have planes, and this is better than walking—as you will find out.”
“Do we have much farther to go?” asked Len.
Hostetter made a pushing movement with his head against the west. “Clear to the Rockies.”
“How much longer?”
“Another month. Maybe more if we run into trouble. Maybe less if we don’t.”
“And you won’t tell us what it’s like?” asked Esau. “What it’s really like, the way it looks, how it is to live there.”
But Hostetter only said curtly, “You’ll find out when you get there.”
He refused to talk to them about Bartorstown. He made that one statement about Piper’s Run being a pleasanter place, and then he would not say any more. Neither would the other men. No matter how the question was phrased, how subtly the conversation was twisted around to trap them, they would not talk about Bartorstown. And Len realized that it was because they were afraid to.
“You’re afraid we might give it away,” he said to Hostetter. And then, not in any spirit of reproach but merely as a statement of fact, “I guess you don’t trust us yet.”
“It isn’t a question of trust. It’s just that no Bartorstown man ever talks about it, and you ought to know better than to ask.”
“I’m sorry,” said Len. “It’s just that we’ve thought about it so long. I guess we’ve got a lot to learn.”
“Quite a lot,” said Hostetter thoughtfully. “It won’t be easy, either. So many things will jar against every belief you’ve grown up with, and I don’t care how you scoff at it, some of it sticks to you.”
“That won’t bother me,” said Esau.
“No,” said Hostetter, “I doubt if it will. But Len’s different.”
“How different?” demanded Len, bristling a bit.
“Esau plays it all by ear,” said Hostetter. “You worry.” Later, when Esau was gone, he put his hand on Len’s shoulder and smiled, giving him a close, deep look at the same time, and Len smiled back and said, “There’s times when you make me think an awful lot of Pa.”
“I don’t mind,” said Hostetter. “I don’t mind at all.”
17
The character of the country changed. The green rolling forest land flattened out and thinned away, and the sky became an enormous thing, stretched incredibly across a gray-green plain, that seemed to go on and on over the rim of the world, drawing a man’s gaze into its emptiness until his eyes ached with it, and until he searched hungrily for a tree or even a high bush to break the blank horizon. There were prosperous villages along the river, and Hostetter said it was good farming country in spite of how it looked, but Len hated the flat monotony of it, after the lush valleys he was used to. At night, though, there was a grandeur to it, a feeling of windy vastness all ablaze with more stars than Len had ever seen before.
“It takes a while to get used to it,” Hostetter said. “But it has its own beauty. Most places do, if you don’t shut your eyes and your mind against it. That’s why I’m sorry I made that crack about Bartorstown.”
“You meant it, though,” said Len. “You know what I think? I think you’re sorry you’re going back.”
“Change is always a sorry thing,” said Hostetter.
“You get used to doing things in a certain way, and it’s always a wrench to break it up.”
A thought came to Len which had curiously enough never come to him before. He asked, “Do you have a family in Bartorstown?”
Hostetter shook his head. “I’ve always had too much of a roving foot. Never wanted any ties to it.”
They both, unconsciously, looked forward along the deck to where Esau sat with Amity.
“And they’re so easy to get,” said Hostetter.
There was something possessive in Amity’s posture, in the way her head was bent toward Esau and the way her hand rested on his. She was getting plump, and her mouth was petulant, and she was taking her approaching, if still distant, motherhood very seriously. Len shivered, remembering the rose arbor.
“Yes,” said Hostetter, chuckling. “I agree. But you’ve got to admit they sort of deserve each other.”
“I just can’t figure Esau as a father, somehow.”
“You might be surprised,” said Hostetter. “And besides, she’ll keep him in line. Don’t be too toplofty, boy. Your time will come.”
“Not if I know it first,” said Len.
Hostetter chuckled again.
The barge thrashed its way on toward the mouth of the Platte. Len worked and ate and slept, and between times he thought. Something had been taken away from him, and after a while he realized what it was and why its going made him unhappy. It was the picture of Bartorstown he had carried with him, the vision he had followed all the long way from home. That was gone now, and in its place was only a little collection of facts and a blank waiting to be filled in. Bartorstown—a pre-war, top-secret military installation for some kind of research, named for Henry Waltham Barter, the Secretary of Defense who had it built—was undergoing a painful translation from
