After their first attack the raiders had eased off their gunfire for an hour or two; and at one time Ed was convinced that they must have retreated. Maybe one or two of them had been hit by shotgun blasts. Maybe they had decided that besieging the farm wasn’t worth the hassle, just for a few supplies. But shortly before dawn, the garages and stables across the yard had suddenly burst into flames, and Ed had realised that the raiders had been doing nothing more than regrouping and planning a final assault.

Fortunately, Ed had been almost ready to pull out by then. The two hours of ceasefire had enabled him to assign twelve men to loading the cars and the wagons, and the convoy was only short of a couple of cases of canned fruit when the raiders attacked in force. All the farmworkers and their families has scrambled into their vehicles, and they had driven out of the farmyard without lights, letting off shotgun blasts in all directions in a racketing parade, like Chinese New Year.

It had all been over in a few seconds. There had been a light, inaccurate spray of sub-machine gun fire in retaliation, which had broken the side window of the last car in the convoy, but that had been all. It was only a mile to the front entrance of South Burlington Farm, and even a heavily-laden wagon driving at forty mph can cover a mile in one and a half minutes.

What had hurt Ed more than anything else, though, had been the sight in his rear-view mirror of the farmhouse, blazing from verandah to roof like a galleon burning at sea. He had been brought up in that house; and apart from the family treasures stored in the attic, the old Hardesty photograph albums dating back to Edwardian days, there were a thousand memories in that house for Ed, from the strange patterns that were cast on the wall by the tiny stained-glass window on the upstairs landing, to the last rail on the back verandah, which he had worn smooth as a boy from riding as his pretend horse. It was like watching his whole childhood burn, the whole reason for his coming back from New York and setting up as a farmer. And as he turned out of the farm entrance, and drove into the darkness, he knew just why ordinary mortals should stay well out of politics and power, and never try to cross men like Senator Shearson Jones.

Liberal, Kansas, was deserted as they drove through. A gas station on the outskirts was still smouldering, and there were dead bodies lying on the forecourt, clouded in flies. They drove on, and crossed the state line into Oklahoma at 12.55 p.m.