“Oh, shut up,” said Hostetter. He sounded tired now, all of a sudden, and impatient, and he spoke to Esau the way a man speaks to an annoying child. Esau shut up. Hostetter glanced at Len. Len did not turn or lift his head. He was still staring down into the bottom of the canyon.
There was a town there. Seen from this height and angle it was mostly a collection of roofs, clustered along the sides of a stream bed where some cottonwoods grew. They were ordinary roofs of ordinary little houses such as Len had been used to seeing all his life, and he thought that many of the houses were made of logs, or slab. At the north end of the canyon was a small dam with a patch of blue water behind it. Beside the dam, straggling up a slope, there were a couple of high, queer-looking buildings. Close by them rails ran up and down the slope, leading from a hole in the cliff to a dump of broken rock. There were tiny cars on the rails. At the foot of the slope were several more buildings, low and flat ones this time, with a curving top. They were a rusty color. From the other side of the dam a short road led to another hole in the cliff, but there were no rails or cars or anything connected with this one, and rocks had rolled down across the road.
Len could see people moving around. Smoke came from some of the chimneys. A team of tiny mules brought a string of tiny cars down the rails on the slope, and the carts were dumped. After a minute or two the sound drifted up to him, faint and thin like an echo.
He turned and looked at Hostetter.
“Fall Creek,” said Hostetter. “It’s a mining town. Silver. Not very high-grade ore, but good enough and a lot of it. We still take it out. There’s no secret about Fall Creek, never has been.” He swept his hand out in a brief, curt gesture. “We live here.”
Len said slowly ,“But it isn’t Bartorstown.”
“No. That’s kind of a wrong name, anyway. It isn’t really a town at all.”
Even more slowly, Len said, “Pa told me there was no such place. He told me it was only a state of mind.”
“Your Pa was wrong. There is such a place, and it’s real. Real enough to keep hundreds of people working for it all their lives.”
“But where?” said Esau furiously. “Where?”
“You’ve waited this long. You can wait a few hours longer.”
They went on, down the steep road. The shadow of the mountain widened and filled the canyon, and began to flow up the eastern wall to meet them. Farther down, on the breast of an old fall, a stand of pines caught the light and turned a harsh green, too bright against the red and ochers of the rock.
Len said, “Fall Creek is just another town.”
“You can’t get clear out of the world,” Hostetter said. “You can’t now and you couldn’t then. The houses are built of logs and slab because we had to build them out of what there was. Originally Fall Creek had electricity because it was the fashion then. Now it isn’t the fashion, so we don’t have it. Main thing is to look like everybody else, and then they don’t notice you.”
“But a real secret place,” said Len. “A place nobody knew about.” He frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “A place you don’t dare let anybody know about now— and yet you just live openly in a town, with a road to it, and strangers come and go.”
“When you start barring people out they know you have something to hide. Fall Creek was built first. It was built quite openly. What few people there were in this Godforsaken part of the country got used to it, got used to the trucks and a particular kind of plane going to and from it. It was only a mining town. Bartorstown was built later, behind the cover of Fall Creek, and nobody ever suspected it.”
Len thought that over. Then he asked, “Didn’t they even guess it when all the new people started coming in?”
“The world was full of refugees, and thousands of them headed for places just like this, as far back in the hills as they could get.”
The shadow reached up and they went into it, and it was twilight. Lamps were being lit in the town. They were just lamps, such as were lit in Piper’s Run, or Refuge, or a thousand other towns. The road flattened out. The mules were tired, but they pricked their long ears forward and swung along fast, and the drivers yelled and made their whips crack like rifle shots. There was quite a crowd waiting for them under the cottonwoods, lanterns burning, women calling out to their men on the wagons, children running up and down and shouting. They did not look any different from any other people Len had seen in this part of the country. They wore the same kinds of clothes, and their manners were the same. Hostetter said again, as though he knew what Len was thinking, “You have to live in the world. You can’t get away from it.”
Len said with a quiet bitterness, “There isn’t even as much here as we had in Piper’s Run. No farms, no food, nothing but rocks all around. Why do people stay here?”
“They have a reason.”
“It must be a mighty damn big one,” retorted Len, in a tone that said he did not believe in anything any more.
Hostetter did not answer.
The wagons stopped. The drivers got down and everybody that was riding got out, Esau lifting down a pale and rumpled Amity, who stared about her distrustfully. Boys and young men ran up and took the mules and led them away with the wagons. There were a terrible lot of strange faces, and after a while Len realized that they were nearly all staring at him and Esau. They hung together instinctively, close to Hostetter. Hostetter was craning his head around, yelling for Wepplo, and the old man came up grinning, with his arm around a girl. She was kind of a small girl, with dark hair and snapping dark eyes like Wepplo’s, and a face that was perhaps a little too sharp and determined. She wore a shirt with the neck open and the sleeves rolled up, and a skirt that came down just over the tops of a pair of soft high boots. She looked first at Amity, and then at Esau, and then at Len. She looked the longest at Len, and her eyes were not at all shy about meeting his.
“My granddaughter,” said Wepplo, as though she was made of pure gold. “Joan. Mrs. Esau Colter, Mr. Esau Colter, Mr. Len Colter.”
“Joan,” said Hostetter, “will you take Mrs. Colter with you for a while?”
“Sure,” said Joan, rather sulkily. Amity hung onto Esau and started a protest, but Hostetter shut her up.
“Nobody’s going to bite you. Go along, and Esau will come as soon as he can.”
Amity went, reluctantly, leaning on the dark girl’s shoulder. She looked as big as a house, and not from the baby, either, which was still a long way off. The dark girl gave Len a sly laughing glance and then disappeared in the crowd. Hostetter nodded to Wepplo and hitched up his pants and said to Len and Esau, “All right, come on.”
They followed him, and all along the way people stared at them and talked, not in an unfriendly way, but as though Len and Esau were of tremendous interest to them. Len said, “They don’t seem to be very used to strangers.”
“Not strangers coming to live with them. Anyway, they’ve been hearing about you two for a long time. They’re curious.”
“Hostetter’s boys,” said Len, and grinned for the first time in two days.
Hostetter grinned too. He led them down a dark lane between scattered houses to where a fairly large frame house with a porch across its front was set on a slope, higher than the others and facing the mine. The clapboards were old and weathered, and the porch had been shored up underneath with logs.
“This was built for the mine superintendent,” said Hostetter. “Sherman lives in it now.”
“Sherman is the boss?” asked Esau.
“Of a lot of things, yes. There’s Gutierrez and Erdmann, too. They have the say about other things.”
“But Sherman let us come,” said Len.
“He had to talk to the others. They all had to agree to that.”
There was lamplight in the house. They went up the steps onto the porch, and the door opened before Hostetter could knock on it. A tall thin gray-haired woman with a pleasant face stood in the doorway, smiling and holding out her arms to Hostetter. He said, “Hello, Mary,” and she said, “Ed! Welcome home!” and kissed him on the cheek. “Well,” said Hostetter. “It’s been a long time.”
“Eleven, no, twelve years,” said Mary. “It’s good to have you back.”
She looked at Len and Esau.
