"Keep y'eyes open!" commanded the man on horseback. "Maybe he don't know he's been found out yet. He's brash enough to show himself, thinkin' we don't know yet what he done. Try an' ketch him alive if y'can, but don't take no chances on him gettin' away!"
Jim Hunt's eyes flared, ten yards away in the thick underbrush. The sound of his movements had not been heard only because these people made too much noise themselves.
A voice asked harshly; "She's sure 'nough dead?"
The man on horseback snapped; "What're we takin' the wagon for? Buryin' tomorrow down to Clearfield! She got back to the house an' told 'em what the fella done, an' she died. He kilt her. He prob'ly don't know we know it yet. He don't know how we git told things. Keep y'eyes open!"
The grumbling, trudging, small-sized mob moved on along the road. Presently it would reach the trail that led up to the farm of Sally's family. It would turn aside there.
Jim remained very still, except that he trembled a little with an icy passion.
He was clear-headed enough though. He knew—now, —the mistakes he had made. The idea that thought-transmission could be accomplished only by human beings had died hard. When Sally'd told him that the Little Fella was something else than human; something that was carried; something that stayed in a soft warm nest; something that was greedy of the life that flowed in human veins—even then Jim had not really grasped the fact. Without thinking it out specifically, he'd assumed that Sally wouldn't be punished for something she could not help. That when she fled back to her home and gasped heartbrokenly that Jim, whom she loved, had threatened to kill the Little Fellas, that her loyalty to that Little Fella would move him at least to mercy in return.
It wasn't so. Sally was dead. And Jim knew quite surely how she'd died. All the family was weak and exhausted and drained of all energy, and she'd said the Little Fella was greedy. If Sally had failed to carry out his commands, what would be more likely than that he'd indulged his greed without restraint?
There is a limit to the capacity of a human being for rage and grief and hatred. Jim had reached that limit. He was numbed. To all intents, Jim Hunt was wholly calm. He could think quite sanely of quite indifferent things. But somehow he did not happen to think of anything but ways to kill, and kill, and kill the Things he had not even seen.
8
He lay in hiding next morning and watched Sally's family leave the cabin for Clearfield. They moved very silently, like ghosts. Sally's father and mother, and her two gangling brothers, and the younger children. Sally's mother carried the baby. They filed away into the woodstrail that would lead down to the highway. They looked pale and weak and sickly. It seemed improbable that they could walk the six miles to Clearfield. But possibly a wagon would have been sent up for them. The armed mob that had come up here before was proof that human beings had not ceased to be human, even under the control of the Things. They had emotions of indignation, and surely they would feel compassion and pity, too. Unless they were told not to.
But there was reason for public tumult to be encouraged among humans. The Things, so far, were all-powerful only within their own quite secret domain. Outside, Jim had heard no hint of any strangeness in this part of the world. Security, too, with vastly more information of every sort, could have had no inkling of the enslavement of human beings to non-human Little Fellas. The merest breath of such a suspicion would have had this place swarming with agents of Security. Some would doubtless have been overwhelmed and enslaved by the Little Fellas. But surely some uneasiness would have gone undispelled. The least hint of experiment with atomic energy or bacteriological mutation—X-ray apparatus which could produce mutations was now used only in the presence of a Security representative—invariably led to investigation so exhaustive that all the world dreaded it. And thought-transmission would surely lead to action, if Security got a hint of it. Jim had reason to know that!
So there was reason to have a public excuse for any action which might become known outside the Things' dominion. A wanton and brutal crime resulting in the death of Sally had been invented and was firmly believed in. If Jim were caught, it was even possible that all his questioning would follow all the forms of law. But behind it would be the Little Fellas.
He watched the funeral party of Sally's family file into the woods and go away. Sympathy would go out to them, and fury would rise, and the folk who attended Sally's funeral would turn to and hunt Jim down with a vengeful industry. They had a perfectly adequate motive in the tale they believed of the death of Sally. And nothing would happen to put the rest of the world on guard. Only—Jim had other ideas.
The party of mourners vanished. The world grew silent and still. There still were sounds, of course. The shrilling of insects and the cries of birds, and at long, irregular intervals the plaintive whistle of a bob-white quail. There was bright, warm sunshine. But the tree-branches stirred hardly at all, and the chickens in the farmhouse yard pecked languidly, and the pigs in the pig-pen rooted and grunted without real energy.
Jim watched. And watched. And watched. He was very calm. He knew what he needed to do. It would be infinitely simple, the essential part of it, but he took no chances.
Mostly he watched the trail of smoke from the farmhouse chimney. The whole family had left. Jim had counted them. That should have left the house empty save for the Little Fella. But Jim had his doubts.
He was right to disbelieve. Half an hour after the disappearance of the family along the trail, the thin and steady line of ascending smoke was disturbed. The smoke thickened. Someone had put a log in the fireplace inside.
Half an hour later, a man came out. He carried a rifle. He chopped wood. While Jim was at large and inexplicably immune to the commands of the Little Fella, there must be a guard. Over every Little Fella. This man chopped a little and rested, and chopped a little more and rested. He went slowly back to the house with wood. He came out again and got his rifle. He went wearily into the house again.
Jim moved forward. He'd had plenty of time in which to spy out the land. There was a little rise which would hide him, if he crawled, until he could get the barn between himself and the house. He reached the barn. He was taking a desperate chance, but surely the scene of a supposed crime would be the last place where either the Little Fellas or the humans of this neighborhood would expect him to appear. People and Things alike would expect him to try flight at the top of his speed, to get as far as possible from this place.
Presently he wormed his way out of the bottom half of a door at the far end of the barn. He was behind the chicken-house. It was old and tumbledown. He found a wide plank, partly rotten at the bottom, which could be pulled away. He went inside without showing himself to the house.
There was no alarm. A beady-eyed, abstracted hen sat on a nest. There were other laying-nests about. He crept to the door. Presently a hen entered. He caught her in a sudden snatch. A single squawk and she was still. Minutes later, another hen. A third hen got off a nest and essayed to cluck triumphantly. He caught her.
He was ready. A strip torn from his shirt tied one foot of each hen to one leg of each of the others. He put the three fowl down and crouched inside the door, watching the house through a crack.
The hens squawked. They tried to walk and could not. They scolded each other furiously. They waxed hysterical. They created a sustained, outrageous din, fluttering crazily this way and that as first one and then another succeeded momentarily in imposing her hen-mindedness on the others. It sounded exactly as if some small animal had gotten into the chicken-house and was wreaking havoc among the hens.