Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin into the
morning sunlight, lacing his trousers, with his hunting shirt
thrown over his bare shoulders. He found, without much surprise,
that his father had also slept late. Verner Hughes was just
beginning to shave.
Inside the kitchen, his mother and the girls were clattering pots
and skillets.
Outside the kitchen door, his younger brother, Hector, was
noisily chopping wood.
Going through the door, he filled another of the light-metal
basins with hot water, found his razor, and went outside again,
setting the basin on the bench.
Most of the ware in the Hughes cabin was of light-metal. Murray
and his father had mined it in the dead city up the river, from a
place where it had floated to the top of a puddle of slag, back
when the city had been blasted, at the end of the hard times.
It had been hard work, but the stuff had been easy to carry down
to where they had hidden their boat. And, for once, they'd had no
trouble with the Scowrers.
Too bad they couldn't say as much for yesterday's hunting trip!
As he rubbed lather into the stubble on his face, he cursed with
irritation. That had been a bad-luck hunt, all around.
They had gone out before dawn, hunting into the hills to the
north. They'd spent the day at it, and shot one small wild pig.
Lucky it was small, at that. They'd have had to abandon a
full-grown one, after the Scowrers had began hunting them. Six of
them, as big a band as he'd ever seen together at one time, had
managed to cut them off from the stockade. He and his father had
been forced to circle miles out of their way.
His father had shot one, and he'd had to leave his hatchet
sticking in the skull of another, when his rifle had misfired.
That meant a trip to the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to
have the mainspring of the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to
have a rifle that couldn't be trusted, least of all a hunter and
prospector.
On top of everything else, he had had a few words with Alex
Barrett, the gunsmith, the other day.
Well, at least that could be smoothed over. Barrett would be glad
to do business with him, once the gunsmith saw that hard
tool-steel he had dug out of that place down the river. Hardest
steel either he or his father had ever found, and it hadn't been
atom-spoiled, either.
He cleaned, wiped and stropped his razor and put it back in the
case. He threw out the wash-water on the compost pile and went
into the cabin, putting on his shirt and his belt. Then he passed
through to the front porch, where his father was already eating
at the table.
The people of the Toon like to eat in the open. It was something
they'd always done, just as they'd always like to eat together in
the evenings.
He sweetened his cup of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and
began to sip it before he sat down, standing with one foot on the
bench and looking down across the parade ground, past the
Aitch-Cue House, toward the river and the wall.
"If you're coming around to Alex's way of thinking--and mine--it
won't hurt you to admit it, son," his father said.
Murray turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger,
and then he grinned. The elders were constantly keeping the young
men alert with these tests. He checked back over his actions
since he had come out onto the porch.
... to the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench ...
which had reminded him again of the absence of the hatchet from
his belt and brought an automatic frown ... then the glance
toward the gunsmith's shop, and across the parade ground ... the
glance including the houses into which so much labor had gone,
the wall that had been built from rubble and topped with pointed
stakes, the white slabs of marble that marked the graves of the
First Tenant and the men of the Old Toon....
He had thought, at that moment, that maybe his father and Alex
Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the others
were right: there were too many things here that could not be
moved along with them, if they decided to move.
It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not
to admit that he was the leader of the younger men, and the boys of
the Irregulars. He had been forced to face the responsibilities of
that fact since last winter.
Then, the usual theological arguments about the proper order of
the Sacred Books and the true nature of the Risen One had been
replaced by a violent controversy when Sholto Jiminez and Birdy
Edwards had reopened the old question of the advisability of
moving the Toon and settling elsewhere.
He had been in favor of the idea himself and found that the other
young men had followed his lead. But, for the last month or so,
he had begun to doubt the wisdom of it.
It was probably reluctance to admit this to himself that had
brought on the strained feelings between himself and his old
friend, the gunsmith.
"I'll have to drill the Irregulars, today," he said. "Birdy
Edwards has been drilling them while we've been hunting. But I'll
go up and see Alex about a new hatchet and fixing my rifle. I'll
have a talk with him."
He stepped forward to the edge of the porch, still munching on a
honey-dipped piece of cornbread, and glanced up at the sky. That
was a queer bird; he had never seen a bird with a wing action
like that.
Then he realized that the object was not a bird at all.
His father was staring at it, too.
"Murray! That's ... that's like the old stories from the time of
the wars!"
But Murray was already racing across the parade ground toward the
Aitch-Cue House, where the big iron ring hung by its chain from a
gallows-like post, with a hammer beside it.