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He said nothing to O’Brien but silently followed the man and girl across the now dark barnyard. They passed an outhouse, and O’Brien made a request which Two Hawks tried to pass on to the farmer. The man was impatient, but he agreed. A few minutes later, they resumed their path to the barn.

O’Brien said, “We’re really in the sticks. They don’t have no paper; there’s a pile of clean rags and a bin for dirty ones. They must wash them afterward. Geeze, and to think we was eating from food she made. I bet she doesn’t even wash her hands!”

Two Hawks shrugged. He had more important matters to thing about than sanitation. The man opened the barndoors, and they stepped inside.

The two large barndoors swung shut with a creaking of wooden hinges. In the darkness, Two Hawks put his hand on O’Brien’s shoulder and pushed gently to urge him several feet to the left. If the farmer planned to surprise them with an attack, he would not find his victims where he had last seen them. For about thirty seconds, there was no noise. Two Hawks crouched down on the ground, O’Brien by his side. He closed his fingers around the butt of his .32 and waited.

Then the farmer moved through the straw on the ground away from Two Hawks. Slightly metallic sounds made Two Hawks wonder if blades, or maybe guns, were being taken from a hiding place. Suddenly, a match flared, and he saw the farmer applying the flame to the wick of a lantern.. The wick caught fire; the farmer adjusted the flow of oil; the interior of the barn was cut into light and shadows.

The farmer, seeing them crouching on the ground, smiled briefly. His smile seemed to indicate more of approval than anything else. He gestured for them to follow him. They rose and came after the farmer and the girl. Near the back of the barn, a pig grunted from a stall. Large brown eyes looked at them in the lantern light from behind wooden bars. Cows and pigs and sheep, thought Two Hawks, but no horses. Could the Germans have taken them all? Perhaps they had requisitioned all the horses of this particular farmer. But the photographs taken by reconnaissance planes before the raid had shown plenty of horses on Rumanian farms. And then there was O’Brien’s brief sight of the column on the road. Cars and oxen-drawn wagons.

The farmer stopped before a shed built on to the back wall of the barn. He knocked three times, waited several seconds, knocked three times again, waited, and rapped three more times. The door swung open; the shack was dark inside. The two natives went inside, and the farmer gestured at them to come on in. As soon as the two fliers had entered, the door was closed, and the farmer turned up the lantern flame.

There were six people crowded inside the shed. The odor of dried sweat and rancid hair oil was strong. Four men, dark, eagle-faced, dressed in heavy cloth garments, were squatting or else leaning against the wall. All wore small round caps with single red feathers projecting from the top of each cap. Two had muzzle-loading, long-barreled muskets. One had a quiverful of arrows strapped to his back and a short recurved bow of horn in his fist. Two had the same type of rifles with revolving cartridge chambers that the soldiers had carried. All had long knives in scabbards at their belts; the handle of a tomahawk was thrust into the belt of one.

“Jeeze!” O’Brien said under his breath. He may have exclaimed because he was in a trap or because of the oddity and disparity of the weapons. More probably, he was startled by the sixth person, a woman. She was dressed in the same clothes as the others, but she was obviously not one of them. Her skin was very white, where there was no dirt, and her long hair was golden. She had a pretty although tired looking face with a snub nose and a sprinkling of faint freckles. Her eyes were large and deep blue.

Two Hawks, standing close to her, knew she had been in her clothes a long time. She stank, and her hands were dirty, the fingernails half-moons of filth. The whole group had the air and looks of fugitives. Or of guerrillas who had been a long time from their base.

The leader was a tall man with hollow cheeks and burning black eyes. His coarse black hair was cut to resemble the shape of a German helmet, and he wore heavy leather boots. His shirt was of buckskin and hung outside his belt. The backs of his fists were tattooed with the faces of monsters or demons.

He spoke at length with the farmer and his daughter. Now and then he glanced sharply at the two Americans. Two Hawks listened with his ears tuned up. Occasionally, he could make a little sense out of the rapid firecracker explosions. Yes, the phonology was familiar, and so was a word or a phrase here and there. But he would never have understood anything if he had not had a fluent knowledge of all the Iroquoian languages, including Cherokee.

Once, the leader (his name was Dzikohses) turned to speak to the blonde. He used an entirely different language then, but it was one that also seemed vaguely familiar to Two Hawks. He was sure that it belonged to the Germanic family and that it was Scandinavian. Or was it? Now he could swear it was Low German.

Abruptly, Dzikohses focused his attention on O’Brien and Two Hawks. His index finger stabbing at them, occasionally indicating items of their uniforms, he rattled off one question after another. Two Hawks understood the pitches of interrogation, but he did not understand the questions themselves. He tried to reply in Onondaga, then Seneca, then Cherokee. Dzikohses listened with his eyebrows raised and a puzzled, sometimes irritated, expression. He switched to the same speech he had used with the blonde. Finding that this was not understood, he tried another language and worked his way through three others before Two Hawks could comprehend a word. The final attempt was in some form of Greek. Unfortunately, although Two Hawks had a fair reading knowledge of Homeric and Attic Greek, he had not conversational ability. Not that this knowledge would have helped him much, since Dzikohses’ Greek seemed to be only distantly related to those that Two Hawks knew.

“What the hell’s he gibbering about?” O’Brien growled.

“Ask him something in Gaelic,” Two Hawks said.

“You nuts?” O’Brien replied, but he rattled off several sentences.

Dzikohses frowned and then threw his hands up as if to indicate that he was thrown for a complete loss. One thing Two Hawks was sure of, however. Dzikohses was no peasant. A linguist of his ability had to have traveled much or been well educated. And he bore himself as a man used to command.

Dzikohses became impatient. He gave several orders. The men checked their weapons; the girl pulled a revolver from under her loose foxskin jacket and examined the chambers. Dzikohses held out his hand for Two Hawks’ automatic. Smiling, Two Hawks shook his head. Slowly, so that he would not startle the others or cause them to misinterpret his actions, he took his automatic from his holster. He ejected the clip of bullets and then reinserted them, making sure the safety was on before he put the gun back into the holster.

The eyes of the others widened, and there was a starburst of questions from them. Dzikohses told them to shut up. The farmer extinguished the lamp, and the whole group left the shed. Within two minutes, they were in the woods. The farmer and the daughter bade them a soft goodbye, then returned under the light of the half-moon to their house.

4

All night, the party followed a path that left the shadows of the trees only when necessary to cross fields to get from one wood to another. They saw nothing to disturb them and, shortly before dawn, they bedded down for the day in a broad hollow deep inside the forest. Their travel had been generally northeastward.