‘You know how risky it’s going to be, out on your own?’ he asked Merritt. He didn’t really have to put that question; he asked it more for the sake of his own conscience than to dissuade Merritt from going.

Merritt, of course, nodded. Nobody could have failed to miss the carcasses of burned-out trucks and cars that were strewn along the highway; or driven through abandoned communities like Greensburg and Minneola, where boarded-up houses and looted stores were now visited only by family dogs, fiercely hungry and scavenging for food, without realising how dangerous the countryside had become.

‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘Give my love to your wife, and take a whole lot of care. You understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Merritt. ‘And Mr Hardesty, sir?’

‘Yes?’

Lennie Merritt dropped his gaze. ‘I just want to say that I’m sure sorry we never got the time to work the farm out the way we should have done. I think you would have made a real good boss.’

‘Thanks, Lennie,’ said Ed, and sat silent for a long time as the man trudged slowly back to his dusty green car.

‘Are we going to move on?’ asked Shearson Jones. ‘Or are we going to sit here in this heat until we melt into pools of human grease?’

‘You speak for yourself, Senator,’ said Karen, from the tail compartment, where she was sitting amongst hurriedly-stacked cans of corned beef and carrots and peas, and two large polythene containers of water, which sloshed loudly as they drove along.

‘It’s okay,’ said Ed. ‘We’re leaving.’

He blew the horn three times, waved his arm out of the window, and the farmworkers hurried back to their cars and started up their motors.

‘You should have been on Wagon Train,’ said Shearson, sarcastically.

‘You should have been on The Gang Show,’ retorted Karen.

‘You’re fired,’ said Shearson.

‘No way,’ Karen told him. ‘I quit your employ the night I found out about the Blight Crisis Appeal.’

Shearson tugged his shirt out of his waistband, and used it to wipe the sweat away from his neck. ‘I don’t know which irritates me more,’ he remarked. ‘Perspiration, or naïveté.’

Ed listened to this bickering without comment. He was still thinking about last night, and their hectic escape from the South Burlington Farm. In his mind’s eye, as he drove along the uneven blacktop to Liberal, he could see the roof of the old farmhouse flaring up, and the bedroom drapes flapping and flying from the windows like fiery wings.