I came here to ride over tents full of children, rope together the hands of weeping women.

Children like my children, women like my wife.

And would have done so.

But for the intervention of these two.

These two I have killed.

The Mod now urges me back: the news of Harrington’s death (I Speak, I Shout, compelled by the Mod to do so) found Mrs. Harrington at their home in Michigan. She took the news calmly at first but later that evening went missing, leaving the children behind in the empty house. She was not heard from again for two years, during which time she roamed the West, seeking her husband. At one point, she was found wandering the battlefield by members of the Crow tribe: an insane white woman in a torn, filthy dress, the same dress she had been wearing the night she heard of her husband’s death, a lost woman, likely made use of by men along the road, degraded by hunger and thirst.

My dear wife.

It is I who did this to you, I who bequeathed you this nightmarish fate.

Why am I even here? I Speak. On this murderous march? Upon this Speaking Wall? Have my thoughts and deeds ever truly been my own? Do I not hang perpetually inert here, until Pulsed? Why must I, and Lauren, and Craig, and our Singers hang here, when even Jean, lowly Jean, even reprehensible adult son Mike, may leave Listening Room whenever they please? Has anyone ever, for my enjoyment, Spoken words I have given them to Speak? Has anyone Sung, even once, for my pleasure?

Then, suddenly, the prairie is gone, and the fear, and I am no longer winded with flight; nor can I smell horses, blood, or sun-scorched, waist-high grass.

I am no longer Harrington. Well, just a bit. Then not at all.

Mr. U. stands at Podium, having switched us Off.

Returning to myself, I feel ashamed. For what I have just now Spoken. I have just now Spoken aloud, publicly, against my craft, my life, against the dear Untermeyers, my family.

If, for merely speaking without permission, one is sent to Penalty shed, what punishment must await me now?

The two I have killed are dead, yet young. One of her yellow shoes is untied. He has, this morning, perhaps nervous about what was to come, missed a belt loop. Might these two, in another life, have been friends of mine? Might they have enjoyed hearing me Speak upon topics of interest to them? Now that can never be. Nothing, henceforth, can be, for them.

And it is I who have done it.

Company shouts their approval: I have saved the Untermeyers from these fanatics who came to murder them.

The remaining members of the White Cap Consortium stand wide-eyed amid the disordered folding chairs. It appears that, all along, only their leader had a gun. That is, the intruders had just that one gun between them.

And I am now holding it.