“See, now, if they’d shot these guys right away, it would have been okay. But no, they let the damn thing drag on; they let the monsters talk and let the people listen and look at them in the morning.

“When we finally got around to hanging them, Linker, nobody really gave a rat’s ass. Nobody who’d attended the trials, anyway. It was a dull circus, and we were all relieved to see it end. That was the only thing we felt deeply. Relief.”

Driscoll honked his horn loudly and angrily at a car that had cut in front of him from the next lane. “That’s what I mean about this job,” he said, grinning. “It muddles your thinking. You have to talk to people and then you start understanding them. Once that happens, there’s just nobody around to hate. And I ask you—without hate, where the hell would the world be now?”

18

18

“You all saw what happened last night,” the tall man said, “and you all know what it means. Now, I’m for law and order, always have been; and so is Georgia, my wife; and no matter what we might have thought personally to ourselves about the ruling, we tried to abide by it. ’Most everybody in Caxton did. But it seems pretty clear that it isn’t going to work. Attendance at the school is down from eight hundred to four hundred and twenty—four hundred and twenty! It’s going to keep dropping, too. Every day.”

Tom looked at the man who had been his friend for eight years and tried, as Dave Masters continued to speak, to remember the times they had shivered in duck blinds together, slept in fields and talked all night. He could remember the times well, but somehow, he could not connect them with this thin, stuttering, apologetic person. Dave wasn’t a coward, not the Dave he’d known! Where’d this guy come from, anyway?

He glanced at Ruth. She was listening, as she had been listening all evening, intently.

So were the others: tense in their chairs, silent, hanging onto the words. Randolph Underwood and Mrs. Underwood; the Moodys; the Perkinses.

Listening.