Nearby, a man in a straw hat lay among the dried grass, peering through the wire at the drained channel running toward the beach. A nexus of narrow creeks and small dunes separated them from the inner fence. Beyond this the recently erected huts were already filling. Several trucks stopped outside them, and some fifty or sixty people climbed out and quickly carried their suitcases indoors.
A large truck hove into view past the huts and headed toward the inner fence. It stopped there, and two soldiers jumped out and opened a crude gate. Rolling forward, the truck bumped across the dunes. As its engine raced noisily, Ransom noticed a concerted movement through the camp. People climbed down from the roofs of their trailers, others stepped from cars and pulled their children after them. Fifty yards away, where the truck stopped by the outer fence, the crowd gathered some three or four hundred strong. The soldiers lowered a fifty-gallon drum off the tailboard and rolled it across the ground.
There were a few shouts as the drum neared the fence, but neither of the soldiers looked up. As they pushed it through the wire the crowd surged forward, drawn as much to these two isolated figures as to their cargo of water. As they climbed into the truck again the crowd fell silent, then came to and burst into a chorus of jeers. The shouts followed the truck as it crossed the open interval and disappeared through the gate. With a whoop, the drum was lifted into the air and borne away, then flung to the ground twenty yards away.
As the spray from the scattered water formed ragged rainbows in the air, Ransom turned away and rejoined the others in the hollow. Mrs. Quilter appeared from the direction of the fun-fair, the straw-hatted man following her. He beckoned Ransom toward him.
"You talk to him, dearie," Mrs. Quilter croaked. "I told them what a marvelous doctor you are."
The straw-hatted man was more precise. He took Ransom aside. "The old romany says you have a gun. Is that right?"
Ransom nodded cautiously. "Fair enough. Why?"
"Can you use the gun? She says you're a doctor."
"I can use it," Ransom said. "When?"
"Soon." The man glanced at Ransom's grimy linen suit and then walked away to the merry-go-round, swinging himself through the antique horses.
Soon after midnight, Ransom lay on the crest of the dune. Around him echoed the nightsounds of the camps, embers of hundreds of fires smoking in the darkness. A dull sullen murmur, punctuated by shouts and gunfire further along the beach, drifted across the sandhills. Below him, Catherine and Mrs. Quilter lay together in the hollow, their eyes closed, but no one else was asleep. The dunes around him were covered with hundreds of watching figures. Listening to the slow uncertain movements, Ransom realized that there was no concerted plan of action, but that some dim instinct was gathering force and would propel everyone simultaneously at the wire.
The lights beyond the fences had been dimmed, and the dark outlines of the huts shone faintly in the light reflected from the waves as they spilled onto the beaches. Only the pumping gear drummed steadily.
Above him somewhere, a wire twanged softly. Peering into the darkness, Ransom saw a man disappear through the fence, crawling down one of the drained channels.
"Catherine!" With his shoe, Ransom kicked some sand onto Catherine's shoulder. She looked up at him and then woke Mrs. Quilter. "Get ready to move!"
On their left, across the channel of the river, more firing broke out. Most of the tracers flew high into the air, their arcs carrying them away across the estuary, but Ransom could see that at least two of the sentries, presumably members of the locally recruited militia, were firing straight into the trailer camp.
Floodlights blazed from a dozen posts along both fences. Crouching down, his white arms motionless in the grass, Ransom waited for them to go out. He looked up as there was a roar from the open interval beyond the fence.
Crossing the dunes and creeks, in full view of the platoon of soldiers on the dunes above the inner fence, were some forty or fifty men. Shouting to each other, they jumped in and out of the shallow creeks, one or two of them stopping to fire at the floodlights. Unscathed, they reached the wire, and everywhere people started to climb to their feet and run forward into the light.
Ransom reached down and took Catherine's arm. "Come on!" he shouted. They scaled the shallow slope up to the fence. A wide section of the wire coil had been removed, and they crawled through, then darted down into a narrow creek. Dozens of other people were moving along with them, some pulling little children, others carrying rifles in their hands.
They were halfway across when a light machine gun began to fire loosely over their heads from an emplacement below the huts, its harsh ripple coming in short bursts of two or three seconds. Partly hidden by the rolling ground, everyone pressed on, climbing through a gap cut in the inner fence. Then, ten yards from Ransom, a man was shot dead and fell backwards into the grass. Another was hit in the leg, and lay shouting on the ground as people ran past him.
Ransom pulled Catherine down into an empty basin. Everywhere men and women were rushing past them in all directions. Several of the floodlights had gone out, and in the flaring darkness he could see men with carbines retreating to the dunes beyond the huts. To their left the open channel of the river ran to the sea, the beach washed like a silver mirror.
The scattered shooting resumed, the soldiers firing over the heads of the hundreds of people moving straight toward the sea. Taking Catherine by the arm, Ransom pulled her toward the opening in the inner fence. Behind them, the bodies lay among the dunes, tumbled awkwardly in the coarse grass.
Following an empty creek, they moved away from the huts. As they crouched down to rest before their final dash to the sea, a man stood up in the brittle grass ten feet above them. With a raised pistol he began to fire across the dunes, shooting straight at the people driven back by the soldiers.
Looking up at him, Ransom recognized the stocky shoulders and pugnacious face.
"Grady!" he called. "Hold off, man!"
As they stumbled from their hiding place, Grady turned and searched the darkness below him. He leveled his pistol at them. He seemed to recognize Ransom, but gestured at him with the weapon.
"Go back!" he shouted hoarsely. "Keep off, we came here first!"
More people appeared, running head down along the dry bed of the creek. Grady stared at them, his little face for a moment like an insane sparrow's. Raising his pistol, he fired blindly at Ransom's shadow. As Catherine crouched down on her knees, Ransom drew the pistol from his belt. Grady darted forward, his eyes searching the darkness among the clumps of grass, his small figure illuminated in the floodlights. Holding the butt of the revolver in both hands, Ransom stood up and shot him through the chest.
He was kneeling over the little man, his own weapon lost somewhere in the creek, when a platoon of soldiers appeared out of the darkness. Lying down, they began to fire over the heads of the people further down the creek.
A bare-headed lieutenant crawled over to Ransom. He glanced down at the body. "One of ours?" he asked breathlessly.
"Grady," Ransom said. The lieutenant jumped to his feet and ordered his men back up the slope toward the huts. The firing had slackened as the main impetus of the advance spent itself, and many people were retreating back to the fences. Others had got through, and were running down to the water between the huts, ignored by the soldiers further along the beach, who let them go by.