"You tried to help me, didn't you?" said Finch.
"That's because I'm so sympathetic. But it's reasonable, too. For instance, ef you came up to trial, you might be able to put some of the blame back on me on account of my being lower status. Everybody else would try to do that anyway, even ef you didn't. So I help you escape and kill two possums with one rock."
"Oh," said Finch. "I'm disappointed. I thought you were the world's one simon-pure altruist."
Terry rubbed a hard chin. "Well, maybe I am, now you consider it that way. Lot of things I kin do for you that nobody else kin."
They drove on in silence rill the light began to pale and Terry, with a prodigious yawn, suggested they turn off, abandon the car and get some sleep. "I'll watch while you sleep at first if you want to," said Finch.
"Okay," replied Terry, as they got out of the car and found their way up a grassy bank to the shade of a clump of trees. He yawned again and peeled off the coat of his pajama-like costume. As he did so, something small and hard bounced on the turf. Both men dived for it together, and Finch was first.
"My carnelian cube!" he cried. "So you had it!"
"That hain't no carnelian cube," said Terry indignantly. "That's my lucky stone. Why I most couldn't sleep without it."
"Yours! Where did you get it?"
"Hit was give to me, a long time ago by one of them foreigners that came through here. Thian Appollony Pedler or something like that was his name. I wouldn't have no luck no more ef I lost that."
Finch reluctantly surrendered the trinket and watched Terry stuff it in the breast-pocket of the undergarment.
"All right," he said. "I want to talk to you some more about it, but it can keep till morning."
"Wake me up after a couple hours, will you?" said Terry, and placing his head on the improvised pillow, was snoring almost at once..
Finch looked down at him in the starshine that had succeeded moonlight. Tiridat Ariminian had claimed ownership of the cube too, with perhaps somewhat greater justification. But if the hatchet-faced individual lying on one side were, as Finch suspected, only a representative of something from the real world, then he was a figment of the imagination. It would be no immorality to deprive such a figment of his own, Finch's, only connection with reality. He bent over and, his fingers moving lightly as they ever had in disengaging a delicate fragment of antique clay, worked the carnelian cube out of Terry's pocket; then lay down himself and with his hand holding the cube under his coat-pillowed head, drifted off to sleep, thinking happily of the world where an individual could be himself.
Eight:
Finch realized that although he was still sleepy, sleep was past. Light bored into his eyelids—sunlight. He opened his eyes a crack, blinked them, rolled over and covered his face with one arm, then realized that he was too chilly and too cramped to he there any longer even if the light were gone.
What now? The recollection roused itself in his mind that he had gone to sleep with the carnelian cube in the hope of dreaming himself out of the pediculous world of too-reasonable reason as he had dreamed himself into it. An education in dreams:
Well, was it? Check the facts, then make inferences. Finch opened his eyes fully, sat up, and gave a groan of disappointment.
He ought to be back in that stuffy little room in Asia Minor, He was not. The sun-flooded scene was that of the previous night; dark streaks of forest disclosing a small, bright blue patch of the Tennessee River; on the slope above him, a state highway appearing out of the woods, winding a couple of turns around easy slopes, then disappearing again.
Still the dream. Oh, hell—
Wait, though. Wasn't there a difference? Finch could have sworn that the road had concrete posts connected with iron pipe at the convexity of the curves. Now there was none.
Or could he be sure? He decided he could not with regard to the guard-rail. But there was certainly no sign of Terry; nor for that matter of Terry's carnelian cube, which Finch had clutched tightly in his hand as he went to sleep. Nor was it, he assured himself by a brief search, anywhere in the short green grass where he had lain.
Finch ran a hand across his forehead, trying to grasp the rational of his experience with an effort like "that involved in trying to draw one's own reflection in water. Hold everything—
He stared at his own forearm, then down. One memory was certain. The night before he had been wearing a comfortable, conservatively colored pajama-like suit. Now he was attired as though for a cross-country hike, with laced boots and a violently tartan red-and-yellow wool shirt which he regarded with increasing disfavor.
Before he could meditate on the implications of this phenomenal change, a sound made him look up. An automobile was slowing to a stop on one of the curves where the guard-rail ought to be, but was not. An automobile as extraordinary as the shirt in which he found himself: its color a highly visible lavender, its hood almost big enough for a locomotive boiler, its body so long that he wondered how it could take the turns. As Finch watched, a second car, cream-colored, appeared behind the first and slid to a stop on screeching brakes. Doors opened softly and a set of Napoleonic field-marshals emerged.
At least this was Finch's first reaction to the four men who came lumbering down the hillside, embowered in gold braid. They were tall men and towering hats (two of them were shakos) made then look taller. Finch scrambled to his feet.
As he scrutinized the approaching faces, looking in vain for that of Terry or anyone else he knew, the largest field-marshal jerked a thumb toward the lavender automobile. "Come on," he said. "The boss wants a look at you."
Finch said: "My good man, tell your boss that if he wants to look at me, he can either contemplate my beauties from a distance or come down here where I am —ow!" The field-marshal had gripped him above the elbow with painful force.
"Come on," he repeated. "I ain't fooling!"
"Neither am I," said Finch, and the thought flashing through his mind that men so heavily bedecked could hardly move fast, he pivoted round on the held arm and let the field-marshal have a roundhouse swing squarely in the gorgeous midriff.
The man said "Uhhnk!" and sat down. Finch, poised for flight, half expecting the others to fall on him, halted as they unanimously burst into raucous laughter.
"My turn," said another of the group with red hair and sideburns projecting from beneath an admiral's fore-and-aft hat.
"No it ain't," shouted another. "I'm the original offspring of disaster; I'm the hound-dog of the angel of death. I eat porcupine-quills and drink caustic lye. Where I step the grass withers. Whoopee!" He slapped his chest with a jingling of accoutrements and began to peel off his coat. "Step aside and let me at him!"
"Shet your trap, Basil," growled one with a shako and hard blue eyes. "You ain't got a bit of sense. Reckon this settles whose turn it is." Finch saw that the man was covering him with a highly efficient and modern pistol. "Now you jest come along easy, mister, if you don't want to get your head blowed off. Hyperion, you got your in-sides unstirred yet?"