Doug spun and aimed his cap-pistol.
“Bang!”
Braling, with a pale, wild look, cried, “Missed!”
“Bang!” Douglas jumped up the porch steps.
He saw two panicked moons in Braling’s eyes. “Bang! Your arm!”
“Who wants an arm?” Braling snorted.
“Bang! Your heart ! ”
“What? ”
“Heart—bang! ”
“Steady… One, two !” whispered the old man.
“Bang! ”
“One, two!” Braling called to his hands clutchin ghis ribs. “Christ! Metronome!”
“What?”
“Metronome! ”
“Bang! You’re dead! ”
“One, two!” Braling gasped. And dropped dead.
Douglas, cap-gun in hand, slipped and fell back down the steps onto the dry grass.
CHAPTER SIX
The hours burned in cold white wintry flashes, as people scuttled in and out of Braling’s mansion, hoping against hope that he was Lazarus.
Calvin C. Quartermain careened about Braling’s porch like the captain of a wrecked ship.
“Damn! I saw the boy’s gun!”
“There’s no bullet-hole,” said Dr. Lieber, who’d been called.
“Shot dead, he was! Dead!”
The house grew silent as the people left, bearing away the husk that had been poor Braling. Calvin C.
Quartermain abandoned the porch, mouth salivating.
“I’ll find the killer, by God!”
Propelling himself with his cane, he turned a corner.
A cry, a concussion! “No, by God, no!” He flailed at the air and fell.
Some ladies rocking on the nearest porch leaned out. “Is that old Quartermain?”
“Oh, he can’t be dead, too— can he?”
Quartermain’s eyelids twitched.
Far off, he saw a bike, and a boy racing away.
Assassin, he thought. Assassin!
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when He ran, his mind walked. The houses fell aside, the sky blazed.
At the rim of the ravine, he threw his cap-pistol far out over the gulf. An avalanche buried it. The echoes died.
Suddenly, he needed the gun again, to touch the shape of killing, like touching that wild old man.
Launching himself down the side of the ravine, Doug scrambled among the weeds, eyes wet, until he found the weapon. It smelled of gunpowder, fi re, and darkness.
“Bang,” he whispered, and climbed up to fi nd his bike abandoned across the street from where old Braling had been killed. He led the bike away like a blind beast and at last got on and wobbled around the block, back toward the scene of awful death.
Turning a corner, he heard “No!” as his bike hit a nightmare scarecrow that was flung to the ground as he pumped off, wailing, staring back at one more murder strewn on the walk. Someone cried, “Is that old Quartermain?!”
“Can’t be,” Douglas moaned.
Braling fell, Quartermain fell. Up, down, up, down, two thin hatchets sunk in hard porch and sidewalk, frozen, never to rise.
Doug churned his bike through town. No mobs rushed after him.
It seemed the town did not even know that someone had been shot, another struck. The town poured tea and murmured, “Pass the sugar.”
Doug slam-braked at his front porch. Was his mother waiting in tears, his father wielding the razor strop…?
He opened the kitchen door. “Hey. Long time no see.” Mother kissed his brow. “They always come home when they’re hungry.”
“Funny,” said Doug. “I’m not hungry at all.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
At dinner, the family heard pebbles ping ing against the front door.
“Why,” said Mother, “don’t boys ever use the bell?”
“In the last two hundred years,” said Father, “there is no recorded case in which any boy under fi fteen ever got within ten feet of a doorbell. You fi nished, young man?”
“Finished, sir!”
Douglas hit the front door like a bomb, skidded, jumped back in time to catch the screen before it slammed. Then he was off the porch and there was Charlie Woodman on the lawn, punching him great friendly punches.
“Doug! You did it! You shot Braling! Boy!”
“Not so loud, Charlie!”
“When do we shoot everyone on the school board? For gosh sakes, they started school a week early this year! They deserve to be shot. My gosh, how’d you do it, Doug?”
“I said, ‘Bang! You’re dead!’”
“And Quartermain?!”
“Quartermain?”
“You broke his leg! Sure was your busy day, Doug!”
“I didn’t break no leg. My bike…”
“No, a machine ! I heard old Cal screaming when they lugged him home. ‘Infernal machine!’ What kind of infernal machine, Doug?”
Somewhere in a corner of his mind, Doug saw the bike fling Quartermain high, wheels spinning, while Douglas fled, the cry of Quartermain following close.
“Doug, why didn’t you crack both his legs with your infernal machine?”
“What?”
“When do we see your device, Doug? Can you set it for the Death of a Thousand Slices?”
Doug examined Charlie’s face, to see if he was joking, but Charlie’s face was a pure church altar alive with holy light.
“Doug,” he murmured. “Doug, boy, oh boy.”
“Sure,” said Douglas, warming to the altar glow. “Him against me, me against Quartermain and the whole darn school board, the town council—Mr. Bleak, Mr. Gray, all those dumb old men that live at the edge of the ravine.”
“Can I watch you pick ’em off , Doug?”
“What? Sure. But we got to plan, got to have an army.”
“Tonight, Doug?”
“Tomorrow…”
“No, tonight ! Do or die. You be captain.”
“General!”
“Sure, sure. I’ll get the others. So they can hear it from the horse’s mouth! Meet at the ravine bridge, eight o’clock! Boy!”
“Don’t yell in the windows at those guys,” said Doug. “Leave secret notes on their porches. That’s an order!”
“Yeah!”
Charlie sped off, yelling. Douglas felt his heart drown in a fresh new summer. He felt the power growing in his head and arms and fi sts. All this in a day! From plain old C-minus student to full general!
Now, whose legs should be cracked next? Whose metronome stopped? He sucked in a trembling breath.
All the fiery-pink windows of the dying day shone upon this arch-criminal who walked in their brilliant gaze, half smile-scowling toward destiny, toward eight o’clock, toward the camptown gathering of the great Green Town Confederacy and everyone sitting by firelight singing, “Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp grounds… ”
We’ll sing that one, he thought, three times.
CHAPTER NINE
Up in the attic, Doug and Tom set up head quarters. A turned-over box became the general’s desk; his aide-de-camp stood by, awaiting orders.
“Get out your pad, Tom.”
“It’s out.”
“Ticonderoga pencil?”
“Ready.”
“I got a list, Tom, for the Great Army of the Republic. Write this down. There’s Will and Sam and Charlie and Bo and Pete and Henry and Ralph. Oh, and you, Tom.”
“How do we use the list, Doug?”
“We gotta find things for them to do. Time’s running out. Right now we’ve gotta figure how many captains, how many lieutenants. One general. That’s me.”
“Make it good, Doug. Keep ’em busy.”
“First three names, captains. The next three, lieutenants. Everybody else, spies.”
“Spies, Doug?”
“I think that’s the greatest thing. Guys like to creep around, watch things, and then come back and tell.”
“Heck, I want to be one of those.”
“Hold on. We’ll make them all captains and lieutenants, make everyone happy, or we’ll lose the war before it gets started. Some will do double-duty as spies.”
“Okay, Doug, here’s the list.”
Doug scanned it. “Now we gotta fi gure the fi rst sockdolager thing to do.”
“Get the spies to tell you.”
“Okay, Tom. But you’re the most important spy. After the ravine meeting tonight…” Tom frowned, shook his head. “What?”
“Heck, Doug, the ravine’s nice but I know a bette r place. The graveyard. The sun’ll be gone. It’ll remind ’em if they’re not careful, that’s where we’ll all wind up.”
“Good thinking, Tom.”
“Well, I’m gonna go spy and round up the guys. First the bridge, then the graveyard, yup?”
“Tom, you’re really somethin’.”
“Always was,” said Tom. “Always was.”
He jammed his pencil in his shirt pocket, stashed his nickel tablet in the waistband of his dungarees, and saluted his commander.
“Dismissed!”
And Tom ran.
CHAPTER TEN
The green acreage of the old cemetery was filled with stones and names on stones. Not only the names of the people earthed over with sod and fl owers, but the names of seasons. Spring rain had written soft, unseen messages here.
Summer sun had bleached granite. Autumn wind had softened the lettering. And snow had laid its cold hand on winter marble. But now what the seasons had to say was only a cool whisper in the trembling shade, the message of names: “TYSON! BOWMAN! STEVENS!”
Douglas leap-frogged TYSON, danced on BOWMAN, and circled STEVENS.
The graveyard was cool with old deaths, old stones grown in far Italian mountains to be shipped here to this green tunnel, under skies too bright in summer, too sad in winter.
Douglas stared. The entire territory swarmed with ancient terrors and dooms. The Great Army stood around him and he looked to see if the invisible webbed wings in the rushing air ran lost in the high elms and maples. And did they feel all that? Did they hear the autumn chestnuts raining in cat-soft thumpings on the mellow earth?
But now all was the fi xed blue lost twilight which sparked each stone with light specules where fresh yellow butterflies had once rested to dry their wings and now were gone.
Douglas led his suddenly disquieted mob into a further land of stillness and made them tie a bandanna over his eyes; his mouth, isolated, smiled all to itself.
Groping, he laid hands on a tombstone and played it like a harp, whispering.
“Jonathan Silks. 1920. Gunshot.” Another: “Will Colby. 1921. Flu.”
He turned blindly to touch deep-cut green moss names and rainy years, and old games played on lost Memorial Days while his aunts watered the grass with tears, their voices like windswept trees.
He named a thousand names, fixed ten thousand fl owers, flashed ten million spades. “Pneumonia, gout, dyspepsia, TB. All of ’em taught,” said Doug. “Taught to learn how to die. Pretty dumb lying here, doing nothing, yup?”
“Hey Doug,” Charlie said, uneasily. “We met here to plan our army, not talk about dying. There’s a billion years between now and Christmas. With
