Children of Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat (little readers .TXT) 📕

Dikar heard that from the sill of the window on which he was crouched Marilee’s hand was pulling John’s hand away from the button on the radio table. “Shut the talkin’ thing off.” Dikar heard her whisper, as he’d told her to, and while she was telling John the rest of what Dikar had told her to, Dikar dropped to the little roof below. He crouched out there, looking down to where, quite suddenly, quite silently, the black who watched the front of the house had crumpled into the wheat.

“Hooo-” the hoot of an owl came from his lips, and “Hoooo-” came an answer from near the still, black heap in the wheat. What little sound Dikar made jumping from the roof to the ground was covered by Martha’s screams inside the house. The yellow light from the house’s windows glimmered on the naked brown skin of Henfield, lifting up out of the wheat to meet Dikar.

“There were four outside,” Dikar whispered.

“We got ‘em all,” the answer came. “I took two an’ Bengreen an’ Danhall each took one.” Two other shadowy forms rose out of the wheat beside them. “What next, Dikar?”

Dikar hooted twice, then whispered his plan. “Give me your bonarrer, Danhall,” he finished. “I’m a better shot than you.” He took them, turned to the open door of the house, where Martha’s screams had stopped.

The door was wide and Dikar could see everybody in the room inside. One of the blacks had hold of Martha. The top part of her clothes were torn and a knife in Li Logo’s hand was red-tipped, and now Martha’s flesh was bleeding, but Martha and Logo and the blacks were looking at the stairs that came down out of the roof of the room, at the gray-haired man who stood halfway down the stairs, hands behind his back, tall and straight and proud.

One of the blacks held Martha and the other two pointed their long guns at John, but it was Logo who spoke to John, what he said coming clear and distinct to Dikar. “Ah, John Dawson,” Captain Logo said in that soft, thin voice of his. “I thought your wife’s screams would bring you out of your hole.”

Once more Dikar hooted, and in the same instant he loosed the arrow, and the twang of his bow was joined by the twang of two other bows in his ears. Inside the house the three blacks crumpled to the floor, an arrow in each of their backs, and John’s hand came out from behind his back and the little gun in it flashed fire, and Captain Li Logo was down on top of one of his blacks, but his head was lifted, his eyes looking hate at John.

“So sorry,” John Dawson said. “So very sorry, Captain Li Logo,” and his little gun flashed fire again, and Li Logo’s head fell down, and he was as dead as the men he had bossed for the last time.

The cool, green-smelling dark of the woods closed around the five from the Mountain, and around John Dawson and Martha. The Bunch would have wondered, could they have seen, what strange, heavy loads they were that the Boys and John carried, and they would have wondered at the light without fire that came to life in the hand of Marilee as she followed behind Martha and the men, smoothing out such signs of their passage through the woods as she could.

“Eight rifles, nine revolvers, and all the stuff necessary to rebuild my wireless,” John chuckled. “Quite a beginning for what we’ll need to bring tomorrow to America, as you put it. But you did a good job with your bows and arrows, you four.”

The pallid, gaunt man seemed now to have found a new vitality; he walked with the step of a young man, and the memory of horror no longer lived in his eyes.

“We did only our best,” Dikar muttered, looking back uneasily. “Martha said their blacks are good trackers. Is that right, John?”

Thunder blotted out the start of John Dawson’s answer, a great clap of thunder from where they’d just come, and back there the sky was lit with red light. And then the sky was black again, and the thunder had ended, and John was chuckling.

“Yes. Dikar,” he said. “Their blacks are good trackers, but I doubt very much that they will be tracking us. Now you know why I had you carry all the corpses into the house. It was already mined, as you know, and I set a time-fuse before we left, and all that anyone will ever find back there will be a big, charred hole in the ground and a mass of fragments too small to be identified. It isn’t the first station of the Secret Net that has been blown up during a raid, and not the first in which everyone, prisoners and raiders, have perished. That is what they will think happened there, and they will not bother to look for Martha and me, nor will they ever know you and your friends were there.”

“Ah,” Dikar said, and felt eased. There was yet a long way to go to the Mountain, and there was still all these people and all these things to be gotten to the top of the Drop, and the load on his shoulders was heavy, but when he thought of what they would do with the load, of all the plans John and he would make, the load and his heart were light as the feathers of a bird.

The sun struck brightness through Dikar’s eyelids and woke him, and though the night had held very little sleep, he was instantly awake. He flung out his arm to waken Marilee found nothingness—remembered that he had given his place in the bed in his little house to Martha Dawson, was back again, for this night, in the Boys’ House.

Dikar leaped from his cot, and all around him the flashing brown bodies of the Boys of the Bunch leaped from theirs, and there were shouts of welcome to him, but Dikar ran out of the house and through the woods toward his little house, and Marilee. He went quietly when he neared the little house, and stood in the doorway peering in, and then his heart bumped his ribs as he saw that only Martha was inside on the bed.

“Where’s Marilee?” Dikar demanded. “Where’s my Marilee?”

Martha smiled at him. “Come in,” she said. “Come in, son, I want to give you a little piece of advice.”

Dikar went in, wondering, and squatted on the floor by the bed. Martha’s fleshless hand reached out and took his, and she said, very softly, “Listen son. Don’t bother your Marilee mornings. And be very gentle with her, very tender.”

“I am,” he said. “I try always to be.”

“I know,” Martha answered. “But try harder now. Don’t mind it if she is irritable with you, and unreasonable, and angry over trifles.”

“What do you mean?” Dikar cried. “What are you talkin’ about?”

He had drawn taut now, staring at her and fear had come suddenly into his eyes.

“Go ask her,” Martha said. “She is the one to tell you what I mean, though I had to tell her, myself, this morning. You children,” she said, and there was a wetness in her eyes. “You precious infants. Go, Dikar, I hear her outside.”

Dikar rose and he went out again, and Marilee was coming toward him out of the bushes, and her face was greenish as it had been the morning before, but her eyes were shining. “Dikar!” she cried, lifting her arms wide to him, and Dikar ran to her. “Oh, Dikar. I have something to tell you.”

And then Dikar was holding Marilee close, close to him, and she was whispering something in his ears, and his heart leaped within him and in his veins his blood ran laughing and glad as the streams that laugh down the Mountain.

But after awhile Dikar sobered, and his face was grave, his voice solemn. “Now indeed, Marilee,” Dikar said, “I must work hard for the day when I shall lead the Bunch down from the Mountain to an America retaken for freedom and liberty. For you an’ I, Marilee, were the children of a dark yesterday, but ours must be the child of a bright an’ shinin’ tomorrow.”

THE END