Apart from occasional bands of scavengers. South Burlington Farm hadn’t seen much of the disastrous rioting and burning that had scarred America on Sunday evening and Monday morning. Kansas wheat farmers, those who lived on their spreads, were quiet and reserved and dogged, and they met disaster with quiet God-fearing bitterness, rather than hysteria. Out here in Kingman County, there had been too many droughts and too many lost crops for folks to panic when they heard there were tough times up ahead.

Still, Willard had taken sensible precautions. As well as arranging a guard-duty roster, he had brought in some of the farmworkers from outlying houses, and given them temporary accommodation in his own cottage, and in the apartments over the stables and the garages which used to be occupied by stable-boys, in the days before motor-tractors and Jeeps. He had put Jack Marowitz in charge of rationing, and Jack had divided up the remaining food supplies on the farm according to their nutritional value and the size of the farmworkers’ families. Four families had chosen to leave, and join their relatives in Hutchinson and Emporia and Lehigh; and since most of the acreage was blackened now, and rotting, and there wasn’t the slightest prospect of a harvest, even a drastically reduced one, Willard had given all of them permission to go. In all. South Burlington Farm had been left with twenty-three men, women, and children, apart from Ed, Della, Karen, Peter Kaiser, and the obese and slumbering senior senator for Kansas.

Ed had called his mother in Independence five times, hoping to get her to join them, but each time the phone had rung and rung and nobody had answered. He had had to give up.

Peter Kaiser said, ‘You can’t hold us here for ever, you know. Sooner or later you’re going to have to do something positive.’

‘That’s for Della to decide,’ Ed told him. ‘She represents the law around here.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me if she represents the International House of Pancakes. She can’t legally hold us without formal charges and without giving us the chance to call a lawyer.’

Ed crushed his cigarette out in an ashtray that had been given to him in New York by Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. ‘Where else are you going to go?’ he demanded. ‘Out there – where people are tearing each other to shreds for the sake of a few cans of baked beans?’

‘I have to get back to Washington,’ Peter protested, sulkily. ‘I have to get back and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop me.’