He rose and went questing up the stream to where he had seen a few bushes loaded with blackberries. He picked and ate several handsful of them, then came back to his squatting place and sat down again. Idly, he dipped black mud from the bottom of the stream and did some repair work on his body.
It was quite clear that there was nothing he could do right now. Dusk already was creeping in and the mosquitoes swarmed about in clouds. He would have to spend the night here and in the morning he would have some more blackberries for breakfast and renew his coat of mud, then start out to do whatever it might be that he had to do.
Darkness fell and fireflies flickered out, dotting the bluffs and the heavy brush of the river bottomland with brief, tiny flecks of cold green fire. From somewhere in the tangle of the river forest a raccoon whickered. The east flushed with a golden light and the moon, almost full, arose. The whine of the mosquitoes filled every cranny of the night and a few got into his eyes and ears and he brushed them off. He dozed fitfully, waking each time with a start of terror, sometimes not knowing where he was, taking long seconds finally to orient himself. Little prowlers of the night came out and rustled all about him in the grass and weeds. A rabbit hopped down the road, stopped at the edge of the bridge, and stared solemnly down, its long ears tipped forward, at the strange figure huddled on the stream bank. Far away something barked with short, high, excited yips, and once, from the craggy cliffs atop the bluffs, a cat screamed, a sound that turned Frost's blood cold and set him to shivering.
He dozed and woke, dozed and woke again. And in his waking moments his mind, seeking to divorce itself from reality, went back to other days. To the man who had left the packages of food beside the garbage cans, to Chapman's visit when he was living in the cellar, to the old grizzled man who had asked if he believed in God and to that brief hour of candlelight and roses with Ann Harrison.
And why, he wondered, had that man fed him—a man he did not know, a man he'd never spoken with? Was there, he wondered, any sense at all in this life that mankind lived? Could there be any purpose in a life so senseless?
Sometime in the course of the long night he knew what he must do, realized, dimly and far off, a responsibility he had not known before. It did not come to him at once; it grew by slow degrees, as if it were a lesson learned most haltingly and very painfully.
He must not go back to the Loafers' camp. He must not ask for death. So long as he had life he must stay steadfast to a purpose that he did not know. He had started out to reach a certain farm, without knowing why, and he must go on until he reached his destination. For somehow it seemed that it was not he alone who was involved in this senseless journey, but Ann and Chapman and that strange man who'd asked him all the questions and the man who'd died out in the alley—or at least the memory of that man. He tried to make some sense out of all of this and it made no sense. But he knew that, in some way he could not fathom, he had become committed to a certain course and he must continue on that course regardless of all doubt.
Was it possible, he wondered, that this crazy compulsion to make the journey was the result of some sort of precognition that operated outside the normal mental process? Perhaps an added or extra function of the mind that worked only under stress and in a time of great emergency.
Morning finally came and he went up the creek to get more blackberries. Then he did a new and meticulous job with the mud again and started out.
Another fifteen miles or so and he'd come to the mouth of a certain hollow that ran down from the hills and by following up the hollow he'd finally reach the farm. He tried to recall how the mouth of the hollow looked and all that he could remember was that a short way up the hollow a spring gushed from the hillside and that a stream of water flowed through the culvert underneath the road and made its way into a little pond, choked by cattails and rank swamp growth. He'd have to rely on the spring and the creek as landmarks, he realized, for he could remember little else.
The nettle rash seemed to have worn itself out. The mosquitoes and the flies, balked by the mud, gave him little trouble.
He trudged along and the day wore on. His stomach grumbled at him and once, spying some mushrooms by the roadside, he stopped and eyed them, remembering that back in those days when he'd spent the summers on the farm he'd gone out with his grandfather to gather mushrooms. These looked like the ones they'd picked, but he could not be sure. Hunger and caution waged a battle and caution finally won and he went on down the road, without touching them.
The day grew hot and crows cawed in the river bottoms. Protected by the towering, bluff-crowned hills, the road had not a breath of breeze. Frost moved in a haze of heat and suffocating air, unstirred by any wind. The mud dried and flaked off his body or ran in dirty rivulets of sweat. But the mosquitoes now were fewer, retreating from the blazing sun to seek the roadside shade.
The sun reached midday height and slanted down the west. Great thunderheads towered in the west and the air went still. Nothing stirred and there was no sound of any sort. A sign of storm, Frost thought, remembering his grandmother and her weather signs.
For an hour or more he had been watching for landmarks that he might recognize, stopping every now and then at the top of a slight knoll to study the terrain ahead. But the road wound on through the everlasting walls of green, with scarcely anything to distinguish one mile from the next.
The day wore on and the clouds piled higher in the west. Finally the sun disappeared behind the clouds and the air became somewhat cooler.
Frost plodded on, one step and then another, and then another step—and it went on endlessly.
Suddenly he heard the sound of running water. He stopped and jerked up his head. And there the hollow was, with the running stream and the now-remembered configuration of the bluff looming to the right, with its great crown of limestone and the cedar trees growing from the ledge just below the top.
As if it were a place sprung full-bodied out of yesterday, it had a familiarity he had not expected. But despite the familiarity, there was a strangeness, too.
Something was hanging in a tree close beside the spring. There was a path beaten from the road up toward the spring and a sharp smell he could not recognize hung in the air.
Frost felt his body tensing as he stood there in the road and a sense of danger prickled at his scalp.
The sun by now was entirely hidden by the towering clouds and the recesses of the woods were dark and the mosquitoes were coming out again.
The thing hanging in the tree, he saw, was a knapsack, and the smell, he knew now, was the acrid odor of old, wet ashes. Someone had built a campfire by the spring and had gone off, leaving the knapsack hanging in the tree. Whether the campers had gone away for good or would be coming back, there was no way of knowing. But where there was a knapsack, there might possibly be food.
Frost turned off the road and padded cautiously up the path. He came out of the weeds that flanked the path and the little trampled area of the camp lay in front of him.
Someone, he saw, was there. A man lay upon the ground, on his side, with one leg doubled up almost to his belly and the other leg stretched out. Even from where he stood, Frost could see that the stretched-out leg was almost twice the size it should be, swelling out the fabric of the trouser leg so that it seemed to shine. The trouser leg was rolled up just above the ankle and beneath it the ballooning flesh was an angry red and black, puffed out beyond the fabric of the trouser and the shoe.