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score or more of blasts, all fortunately not as near as the last bolt. He saw Lukyo down again. She was
not moving.
When he got near her, he could smell the burned flesh. He put the child down, though she fought
against leaving him. Lukyo's body was burned black.
He picked up the little girl and began running as fast as he could. Then, out of the flickering
checkerboard of day-turned-night he saw a ghostly figure. He stopped. What the hell? All of a sudden he
was in a nightmare. No wonder the whole tribe had fled in panic, forgetting even the child.
But the figure came closer, and now he saw that it was two beings. Wergenget on his hikwu. The
chief had managed to get control of the beast, and he had come back for them. It must not have been
easy for him to conquer his fear. It certainly was difficult for him to keep the moosoid from running away.
The poor animal must have thought his master was mad to venture into that bellowing death-filled valley
after having escaped from it.
Now Kickaha understood why Wergenget was the chief.
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The graybeard stopped his beast, which trembled violently, its upper lip drawn back, its eyes
rotating. Kickaha shouted at him and pointed at the corpse. Wergenget nodded that he understood. He
lifted up the girl and placed her on the saddle before him. Kickaha fully expected him to take off then.
Why shoud he risk his life and the child's for a stranger?
But Wergenget controlled the hikwu until Kickaha could get up behind the chief. Then he turned
it and let it go, and the beast was not at all reluctant. Though burdened with the three, it made speed.
Presently, they were in the pass. Here there was no rain; the thunder and the lightning boomed and
exploded but at a safe distance away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WERGENGET HANDED THE child to its weeping wailing mother. The father kissed his
daughter, too, but his expression was hangdog. He was ashamed because he had allowed his fear to
overcome him.
"We stay here until the Lord is through rampaging," the chief said.
Kickaha slid off the animal. Wergenget followed him. For a moment Kickaha thought about
snatching the knife from the chiefs belt. With it he could flee into a storm where no man dared venture.
And he could lose himself in the forest. If he escaped being struck by lightning, he would be so far away
the tribe would never find him.
But there was more to his decision not to run for it just now.
The truth was that he didn't want to be alone.
Much of his life, he'd been a loner. Yet he was neither asocial nor antisocial. He'd had no trouble
mixing with his playmates, the neighboring farmers' children, when he was a child nor with his peers at the
country schoolhouse and community high school.
Because of his intense curiosity, athletic abilities, and linguistic ability, he'd been both popular and
a leader. But he was a voracious reader, and, quite often, when he had a choice between recreation with
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others or reading, he decided on the latter. His time was limited because a farmer's son was kept very
busy. Also, he studied hard to get good grades in school. Even at a young age he'd decided he didn't
want to be a farmer. He had dreams of traveling to exotic places, of becoming a zoologist or curator of a
natural history museum and going to those fabulous places, deepest Africa or South America or Malaya.
But that required a Ph.D. and to get that he'd have to have high grades through high school and college.
Besides, he liked to learn.
So he read everything he could get his hands on.
His schoolmates had kidded him about "always having his nose stuck in a book." Not nastily and
not too jeeringly, since they respected his quick temper and quicker fists. But they did not comprehend
his lust for learning.
An outsider, observing him from the ages of seventeen through twenty-two, would not have
known that he was often with his peers but not of them. They would have seen a star athlete and superior
student who palled around with the roughest, raced around the country roads on a motorcycle, tumbled
many girls in the hay, literally, got disgustingly drunk, and once was jailed for running a police roadblock.
His parents had been mortified, his mother weeping, his father raging. That he had escaped from jail just
to show how easy it was and then voluntarily returned to it had upset them even more.
His male peers thought this was admirable and amusing, his female peers found it fascinating
though scarey, and his teachers thought it alarming. The judge, who found him reading Gibbon's Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire in his cell, decided that he was just a high-spirited youth with much
potentiality who'd fallen among evil companions. The charges were dropped, but Paul was put on
unofficial probation by the judge. The young man gave his word that he would behave as a decent
respectable citizen should-during the probation period, anyway-and he had kept his word.
Paul seldom left the farm during the probation period. He didn't want to be tempted into evil by
those companions whose evil had mostly come from their willingness to follow him into it. Besides, his
parents had been hurt enough. He worked, studied, and sometimes hunted in the woods. He didn't mind
being alone for long periods. He threw himself into solitariness with the same zest he threw himself into
companionship.
And then Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan, perhaps in an effort to straighten him out even more, perhaps
in an unconscious desire to hurt him as he'd hurt them, revealed something that shocked him.
He was an adopted child.
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Paul was stunned. Like most children, he had gone through a phase when he believed that he was
adopted. But he had not kept to the fantasy, which children conceive during periods when they think their
parents don't love them. But it was true, and he didn't want to believe it.
According to his step-parents, his real mother was an Englishwoman with the quaint name of
Philea Jane Fogg-Fog. Under other circumstances, he would have thought this hilarious. Not now.
Philea Jane's parents were of the English landed gentry, though his great-grandfather had married
a Parsi woman. The Parsis, he knew, were Persians who had fled to India and settled there when the
Moslems invaded their homeland. So ... he was actually one-eighth Indian. But it wasn't American Indian,
among whom his step-mother counted ancestors. It was Asiatic Indian, though only in naturalization. The
Parsis usually did not marry their Hindu neighbors.
His mother's mother, Roxana Fogg, was the one who'd picked up the hyphenated name of
Fogg-Fog. She'd married a distant relative, an American named Fog. A branch of the Foggs had
emigrated to the colony of Virginia in the 1600's. In the early 1800's some of their descendants had
moved to the then-Mexican territory of Texas. By then the extra "g" had been dropped from the family
name. Paul's maternal grandfather, Hardin Blaze Fog, was born on a ranch in the sovereign state, the
Republic of Texas.
Roxana Fogg had married an Englishman at the age of twenty. He died when she was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]