He lit a cigar lighter — it was a trinket of gold — foppish and expensive for an agitator like Gene Silga; and the wife of a cement manufacturer had given it to him when he was abetting a strike against her husband. He saw that Howard Cornplow and Guy Staybridge were bleeding from cut foreheads, both of them unconscious, both alive.

He felt them over. He quietly set the flaming cigar lighter in a crevice of the crumpled dashboard, and with his handkerchief and others from the boys’ pockets, bound their heads. He tugged Howard out of the car and laid him on the earth, his own coat under the Norse god’s head. He propped up Guy in the seat. He stepped down from the running board, wincing as, to his sick fancy, his shoulder seemed to howl with pain. He staggered into the road and looked methodically back and ahead.

He made out a tiny light back along the road and went swaying toward it, his thin hand pressed tight to his shoulder. As he plodded, he hummed the ‘Internationale’, though it was punctuated with small groans.

The source of the light was a farmhouse, a bulk of darkness — and instantly there was a hateful dog pattering toward him, snarling. Gene kicked to right and left, felt a stone with his toe, stooped, cringing with pain, to pick up the stone, and marched on to meet the coming dog . . . For more than a year, once, Gene had been a hobo and learned the harsh wisdom of outfacing dangers: deppities and railroad dicks and their relatives, the savage dogs. He gushed, in the tone of a spinster lady addressing her Pekinese: ‘Why Towser I’m tho ashamed of you! Don’t oo remember oo’s old friend Gene, oo sweet dirty son of a so and so, darling?’

The dog was puzzled. In a truce, but a truce still armed, it sniffed at Gene and followed him to the farmhouse door, from which an old man was peering.

Gene droned, ‘Motor accident — smash-up — got a telephone I can use?’

‘Guess so. Thought I heard a crash. Come in, boy.’

Gene telephoned on to Truxon village, site of the college, for an ambulance, a doctor. When he turned, the farmer called from an adjoining room, ‘Be right with you, soon ‘s I dress.’

‘Thanks, sir. I’ll go ahead.’

‘Want a flashlight?’

The question seemed to stir in Gene Silga some startling thought, and he sounded doubtful as he muttered, ‘Oh. Oh, sure, you bet. Thanks.’

He was too reflective, as he trembled out of the house, to pay much heed to the still grumbling dog; he absently patted its head, while its tail wagged as finally it recognized a fellow killer.

On his way to the car, Gene thought angrily: ‘Well, why not? Why shouldn’t I? These snobs like Howard — oh, they’ll buy you a dinner, yes, with beer and highballs, if they’ve recently gouged any money out of their slave-drivers of dads. That’s so they can show off how liberal and brave they are. But do they care a hoot whether an organizer has one cent for breakfast — whether you sleep in a lousy lodging house — whether you have to hitch-hike to the next town? They do not! They’ve got to be MADE to care, and to pay. It’s not for me personally. It’s for the Revolution . . . Stealing? . . . Nothing but a word. One of my last holdovers from bourgeois morals . . . Didn’t Stalin himself,’ and mentally, Gene crossed himself, ‘didn’t he rob banks, as a youngster, to get money for the Cause? . . . Of course I’ll do it.’