A grinning man wearing knuckle-dusters put his fist through the window next to Mrs. Jones. “Get down here with me!” Maria shouted, and she pulled Mrs. Jones down next to her and wrapped her arms protectively around the older woman.

The yelling got louder. “Communists!” they screamed. “Cowards!”

Maria said: “Duck, George!”

George could not bring himself to cower before these hooligans.

Suddenly the noise diminished. The banging on the bus sides stopped and there was no more breaking glass. George spotted a police officer.

About time, he thought.

The cop was swinging a nightstick but talking amiably to the grinning man with the knuckle-dusters.

Then George saw three more cops. They had calmed the crowd but, to George’s indignation, they were doing no more. They acted as if no crime had been committed. They chatted casually to the rioters, who seemed to be their friends.

The two highway patrolmen were sitting back in their seats, looking bewildered. George guessed their assignment was to spy on the Riders, and they had not reckoned on becoming victims of mob violence. They had been forced to join the Riders’ side in self-defense. They might learn to see things from a new point of view.

The bus moved. George saw, through the windshield, that a cop was urging men out of the way and another was waving the driver forward. Outside the station, a patrol car moved in front of the bus and led it onto the road out of town.

George began to feel better. “I think we got away,” he said.

Maria got to her feet, apparently unhurt. She took the handkerchief out of the breast pocket of George’s suit coat and mopped his face gently. The white cotton came away red with blood. “It’s a nasty little gash,” she said.

“I’ll live.”

“You won’t be so pretty, though.”

“I’m pretty?”

“You used to be, but now . . .”

The moment of normality did not last. George glanced behind and saw a long line of pickup trucks and cars following the bus. They seemed to be full of shouting men. He groaned. “We didn’t get away,” he said.

Maria said: “Back in Washington, before we got on the bus, you were talking to a young white guy.”

“Joseph Hugo,” George said. “He’s at Harvard Law. Why?”

“I thought I saw him in the mob back there.”

“Joseph Hugo? No. He’s on our side. You must be mistaken.” But Hugo was from Alabama, George recalled.

Maria said: “He had bulging blue eyes.”

“If he’s with the mob, that would mean that all this time he’s been pretending to support civil rights . . . while spying on us. He can’t be a snitch.”

“Can’t he?”

George looked behind again.

The police escort turned back at the city line, but the other vehicles did not.

The men in the cars were shrieking so loud they could be heard over the sound of all the engines.

Beyond the suburbs, on a long lonely stretch of Highway 202, two cars overtook the bus, then slowed down, forcing the driver to brake. He tried to pass, but they swerved from side to side, blocking his way.