as
blank as he had thought. There were pale areas that gathered the faint
starlight to themselves on flat, broken surfaces. He realized presently
that these were walls, or had been once, and that he was walking on the
shattered fragments of a city street. The feel of gritty concrete was
unmistakable.They went for quite a long way, apparently on some known path through
the ruined city, and the sky began to pale before they reached
their destination. Price could now make out the ghostly looming of
building-fronts on both sides, high fronts with nothing behind them, so
that the window-holes looked like a kind of elaborate pierced-work. It
was deathly still, so still that their own breathing and the stealthy
padding of their feet woke furtive echoes from the stone.Their guide stopped beside a small black hole no different from all the
other small black holes that lurked under fallen masonry and flattened
girders. "Down there," he said, and left them.They climbed down a wide steel stairway, bent and twisted, but
mostly intact. A great wave of warmth from close-packed and steaming
humanity rolled up the stair to meet them, mingled with the smells of
candle-grease, smoke, leather, sweat and the lingering overtones of
horse.Beyond the bottom of the stair there was a comparative blaze of light.
Price knew they were in the basement of what had been a public building
or department store, a space foreshortened by a mass of rubble and
hanging steel where part of it had caved in. It was crammed with men,
and their voices growled in that low enclosed space like the growling
of a great animal too long caged.There was a small group of men sitting somewhat apart, and Sawyer
joined them, with Oakes. Chiefs, thought Price, and realized that this
was a very big council indeed, and planned for long ahead. Burr and
Twist stood close on either side of him, but he forgot them for the
moment, looking around in fascination at these his countrymen.Forest-runners and hunters, like Burr and Twist, in greasy buckskins.
Men from the lower river, from the swamp and bayou country,
soft-spoken, hard-handed, dressed in coarse cotton dyed in bright
Indian colors, yellow and red and green. Gaunt hill-farmers in hickory
homespun, with their rifles between their hands. Boatmen down from
the northern lakes, with a faint smell of fish about them, and long
lean riders up from the southwest, leather-skinned and dangerous as
rattlesnakes. Men from the black cornlands of Iowa, following their
chief to talk of war. America, Price thought, basically unchanged,
basically recognizable, but with all the fat sweated off it and all the
luxuries stripped away, fined down to the ruggedness and strength of an

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