Brice nodded. “Okay, John.”

The farm couple were strangers to Brice, but their type was familiar. Pennsylvania was full of them. They were, as Cartwell had said, good people. They were farmers, about three jumps above the witchcraft believing stock that had given them birth and were hard to understand. They were the stay-at-home type, to whom Pittsburgh was the Far West, and if they were forced to move farther than fifty miles away from home, their relations screamed that they would never see them again.

The woman, whose name Nolan hadn’t caught, was plain appearing, with no makeup and her hair pulled back into a severe knot at the base of her skull. From the moment, she asked them in and poured their coffee, he liked her. In her own, slow way she was a fine person, but her [p55]  world was the farm, her life was the soil.

[p55]  

[p

]  

“Have you found that poor pilot, yet?” She asked, setting the coffee before them.

“No, ma’am,” Cartwell told her.

The heavy set woman made a clucking sound with her mouth. “Honest to true,” she mused. “You’d wonder why a thing like that had to come to be.” She sighed heavily. “There’ll be some poor woman in tears tonight. D’you think he was married?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Cartwell said.

“It’s the children that suffer...” she said softly and allowed the rest of what she was about to say trail off as Dickson came in. He smiled at the farmwife and she poured him a cup of coffee.

Dickson pulled off his hat. “I’d like to thank you,” he told her, “for being so kind...”

The woman looked pleased and flustered at the same time; there was a tinge of flush about her face. “Bosh,” she said, smiling. “It’s the least a body can do. I know I’d feel real glad to have someone helping, were it my boy up there.”

“Your boy flies?”

“He did.” The woman looked a bit pained. “He was killed during the war.”

“I’m sorry,” Dickson said, and reached for a doughnut from the plate on the table.

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