Blaine jerked up his head. “Why, all right, I suppose. I have just been watching your friends out across the street.”
The sheriff chuckled thinly. “No need to fear,” he said. “They haven’t got the guts to even cross the street. If they do, I’ll go out and talk with them.”
“Even if they know that I am Fishhook?”
“That’s one thing,” the sheriff said, “that they wouldn’t know.”
“You told the priest.”
“That’s different,” said the sheriff. “I had to tell the father.”
“And he would tell no one?”
“Why should he?” asked the sheriff.
And there was no answer; it was one of those questions which could not be answered.
“And you sent a message.”
“But not to Fishhook. To a friend who’ll send it on to Fishhook.”
“It was wasted effort,” Blaine told him. “You should not have bothered. Fishhook knows where I am.”
For they’d have hounders on the trail by now; they would have picked up the trail many hours ago. There had been but one chance for him to have escaped — to have traveled rapidly and very much alone.
They might be in this very town tonight, he thought, and a surge of hope flowed through him. For Fishhook would scarcely let a posse do him in.
Blaine got up from the bunk and crossed over to the window.
“You better get out there now,” he told the sheriff. “They’re already across the street.”
For they had to hurry, naturally. They must get what they had to do done quickly before the fall of deeper night. When darkness fell in all obscurity, they must be snug inside their homes, with the doors double-locked and barred, with the shutters fastened, with the drapes drawn tight, with the hex signs bravely hanging at every opening. For then, and only then, would they be safe from the hideous forces that prowled the outer darkness, from banshee and werewolf, from vampire, goblin, sprite.
He heard the sheriff turning and going back across the corridor, back into the office. Metal scraped as a gun was taken from a rack, and there was a hollow clicking as the sheriff broke the breech and fed shells into the barrels.
The mob moved like a dark and flowing blanket and it came in utter silence aside from the shuffling of its feet.
Blaine watched it, fascinated, as if it were a thing that stood apart from him, as if it were a circumstance which concerned him not at all. And that was strange, he told himself, knowing it was strange, for the mob was coming for him.
But it made no difference, for there was no death. Death was something that made no sense at all and nothing to be thought of. It was a foolish wastefulness and not to be tolerated.
And who was it that said that?
For he knew that there was death — that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.
You, he said to the thing within his mind — a thing that was a thing no longer, but was a part of him — it is your idea. Death is something that you can’t accept.
But something that in all truth must surely be accepted. For it was an actuality, it was an ever-presence, it was something that everything must live with through the shortness of its life.
There was death and it was close — much too close for comfort or denial. It was in the mumble of the mob just outside the building, the mob that now had passed from sight and quit its shuffling, that even now was massed outside the courthouse entrance, arguing with the sheriff. For the sheriff’s booming voice came clearly through the outer door, calling upon those outside to break up and go back to their homes.
“All that this will get you,” yelled the sheriff, “is a belly full of shot.”
But they yelled back at him, and the sheriff yelled again and it went back and forth for quite a little while. Blaine stood at the inner bars and waited, and fear seeped into him, slowly at first, then faster, like an evil tide racing through his blood.
Then the sheriff was coming through the door and there were three men with him — angry men and frightened, but so purposeful and grim their fright was covered up.
The sheriff came across the office and into the corridor, with the shotgun hanging limply from his hand. The other three strode close upon his heels.
The sheriff stopped just outside the bars and looked at Blaine, trying to conceal the sheepishness he wore.
“I am sorry, Blaine,” he said, “but I just can’t do it. These folks are friends of mine. I was raised with a lot of them. I can’t bear to shoot them down.”
“Of course you can’t,” said Blaine, “you yellow-bellied coward.”
“Give me them keys,” snarled one of the three. “Let’s get him out of here.”
“They’re hanging on the nail beside the door,” the sheriff said.
He glanced at Blaine.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said.
“You can go off and shoot yourself,” said Blaine. “I’d highly recommend it.”
The man came with the key, and the sheriff stepped aside. The key rattled in the lock.
Blaine said to the man opening the door. “There is one thing I want understood. I walk out of here alone.”
“Huh!” said the man.
“I said I want to walk alone. I will not be dragged.”
“You’ll come the way we want you,” growled the man.
“It’s a small thing,” the sheriff urged. “It couldn’t hurt to let him.”
The man swung the cell door open. “All right, come on,” he said.
Blaine stepped out into the corridor, and the three men closed in, one on either side of him, the other one behind. They did not raise a hand to touch him. The man with the keys flung them to the floor. They made a clashing sound that filled the corridor, that set Blaine’s teeth on edge.
It was happening, thought Blaine. Incredible as it seemed, it was happening to him.
“Get on, you stinking parry,” said the man behind him and punched him in the back.
“You wanted to walk,” said another. “Leave us see you walk.”
Blaine walked, steadily and straight, concentrating on each step to make sure he did not stumble. For he must not stumble; he must do nothing to disgrace himself.
Hope still lived, he told himself. There still was a chance that someone from Fishhook might be out there, set to snatch him from them. Or that Harriet had gotten help and was coming back or was already here. Although that, he told himself, was quite unlikely. She’d not had time enough and she could not have known the urgency involved.
He marched with steady stride across the sheriff’s office and down the hall to the outer door, the three men who were with him pressing close against him.
Someone was holding the outer door, with a gesture of mock politeness, so he could pass through.
He hesitated for an instant, terror sweeping over him. For if he passed that door, if he stood upon the steps outside, if he faced the waiting mob, then all hope was gone.
“Go on, you filthy bastard,” growled the man behind him. “They are waiting out there for you.”
The man put a hand behind his shoulder blades and shoved. Blaine staggered for a step or two, then was walking straight again.
And now he was across the doorway, now he faced the crowd!
An animal sound came boiling up from it — a sound of intermingled hate and terror, like the howling of a pack of wolves on a bloody trail, like the snarling of the tiger that is tired of waiting, with something in it, too, of the whimper of the cornered animal, hunted to its death.
And these, thought Blaine, with a queer detached corner of his mind, were the hunted animals — the people on the run. Here was the terror and the hate and envy of the uninitiate, here the frustration of those who had been left out, here the intolerance and the smuggery of those who refused to understand, the rear guard of an old order holding the narrow pass against the outflankers of the future.