A Place in Time Read Free Page B

point their guns at him for the pleasure of seeing him frightened. They would demand the basket. Or worse. They could do worse. They could do as they pleased.
    In her mind a thought like a prayer cried out: “Eli! Get out of sight!”
    She looked quickly at the line of riders now coming up even with her window, and then quickly back at Eli. For another wonder, he had seen them first. Exactly as if he had heard her unspoken warning, he had vanished.
    Relieved, she now looked only at the line of riders as one by one they straggled by. Their horses were fairly fit and of fairly good stock. The men in general rode them well enough, with an evident sense of their power, even maybe of pomp, and yet still she felt their strangeness, the strangeness of their ability now, in their bunch, to do as they pleased. They were like biting dogs. Emboldened by the fear they had caused, they longed for pursuit, but they had found as yet nobody to pursue.
    They had almost gone by. She had almost relaxed her strict vigilance over her fear—her courage, though she had not called it so, that had kept her sitting and watching. She was ready to stand up, shake herself, and go to find Dicey and the children, when the last of the line of riders glanced up and saw her.
    He stopped his horse, turned him to face the house, and sat looking up at her. Having recovered her stillness, pressing firmly downward within herself the physical tremor of her fright, she looked back at him. He was a young man with a curly, sand-colored beard. To somebody else, or in different circumstances, he might have seemed even, in his fashion, a handsome young man. But she feared him and she hated him, and without flinching she looked back at him.
    She thought, and the thought was familiar to her, how easy it would have been, if she had had a gun, if she had placed herself a few feet back in the shadowy room, to have shot him dead. And then she thought immediately, for this thought also was familiar, of the endlessness of such an act, or of its many ends multiplying unforeseeably forever. Maybe it was that thought that kept most people out of the way of such acts, when they could keep out of the way of them.
    She knew she was daring him. She meant her facing him, her looking back, to be merely a refusal to be cowed by him. But she knew, she felt, the boldness even of so quiet a refusal. The deliberate impassivity of her face he would see as impudent. He would be challenged by it. He could, if he wished, shoot her and get clean away, unwitnessed, his shot not necessarily causing his companions even to look back.
    His reprisal, though not violent, though it did not cause her to move or change expression, was nonetheless shocking to her, for it was just as unexpected as she expected it to be. He said without raising his voice, in perfect contempt, “Get your ugly face out of that window.”
    Though for some time she continued to watch him, defying him, for she trembled now with the knowledge that she gladly would have killed him, he went on and did not look back.
    Finally she allowed herself to look away. She willed herself free of her anger and her fear. She allowed the familiar room and all the house, quiet and warm and shadowy, to come round her again. Old Eli, wherever he was out there in the dimming country, was safe. The household and the town still were silent. Chances were there would be no human sound again until morning.
    She got up from her chair. She would go now to find the others. They would fix supper and eat. They would let another evening come upon them. They would sleep.
    As she went by the mirror on her dresser, she paused a moment and looked in. Unlike her mother, but as her daughter Margaret would be in her turn, she was a young woman of principled modesty. She would not have liked to catch herself thinking of herself as beautiful, though she was. But she did think, articulating the words deliberately as if saying them aloud: “That is not