"Well, it takes a big territory and a lot of travelin' to make a livin' these days."

"I heard you say that, all rightee," Grogan agreed. "Nice car."

"Was before I hit that wind yesterday. Look here, like sandpaper. Took the finish off m'hood."

He wiped his hand across the front of the car, sweeping a small dune of dust into the air. It was just as he said, the blue paint was nearly sanded off.

"Damn, would yuh look at that," Grogan said.

"Where you headed?"

"Thought I'd make Lippencott and spend the night. I forgot it was a holiday t'day."

"F'get it," said Grogan shaking his head.

"What's the matter?"

"Black blizzard. Had to cancel the Armistice Day parade. Tell me you can't see your feet, it's so bad."

"Could be blowin' this way," Hiram said.

"You know that for a fact?"

"Just talk," said Grogan. "He's been on the phone with old Harvey Logan."

Hiram shook his head. "Could be blowin' this way," he repeated.

"I'd sure find out," the drummer said. "It can kill you, y'know. Dust is so thick it'll just choke your life out. If it does come, you need to be inside. Maybe wrap a hanky around your nose and mouth."

"I heard of a man who got caught outside and actually vomited dirt, it was that bad," said Hiram.

"There you go again," said Grogan.

"Well, if it's blowing in Lippencott I'm not going near there," said the drummer, walking to the edge of the sidewalk and looking west, down the ribbon of black top toward Lippencott. "Got a hotel?"

"Back down the road about ten miles. Bradyton."

He squinted his eyes, focusing on the horizon, looking for the ominous wave of sand and wind that had plagued these prairie towns for months. The previous summer, the heat in Kansas had stayed at 108 for sixty days in a row and there had only been twenty inches of rainfall in the year. That had started it. The earth, weary from years of poor farming practices, dried up, cracked, turned to shale, then to dust. Then heavy winds came and like a giant hand scooped the earth up and threw it into the air. The clouds of dirt tumbled over each other like waves, built into towering black oceans of dirt, engulfing everything. Roads disappeared before the clouds. Homes were buried in mountainous dunes. Whole towns vanished in a night, buried under the sea of sand. Animals suffocated in their tracks and people died of pneumonia, their lungs ruined by the sod. In nine months, one hundred million acres of topsoil had blown away. The deadly bowl spread from Texas north to the Colorado border. The prairie land looked so much like a beach that a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune had written: "I was driving and suddenly the road disappeared. Then I saw the roof of a house, just the very peak of it, sticking up through what looked like dunes at the beach. I almost expected to smell salt air."

The drummer had driven through a small wind storm the day before and that was bad enough. Now as he watched, the black cloud obscured the horizon and grew like a great broiling, black thunderhead. There was no sound yet, just the ominous towering black cloak swirling before gale winds, towering up into the sky even as he watched it. It was headed straight for them.

"My God," the drummer breathed.

The three townsmen joined him at the curb, followed his eyes and saw the deadly cloud. As they watched it kept swirling higher into the sky, darker than a storm cloud, darker than dusk.

"God a'mighty," Hiram breathed.

"Is it comin' this w-w-way?" Grogan stammered, his eyes bulging at the sight of the growing cloud.

"It ain't goin' on vacation," said Dewey.

"I got t'get home," Hiram said. "God, don't tell me we's gonna get what Tulsa got!"

"It's comin', it's comin'," Grogan cried as the three men scurried for their vehicles. The drummer stood hypnotized, watching the storm of sand build. Then faintly he heard the wind, a low rumble, almost like thunder. It was probably fifteen miles away, he thought, and it's already twenty thousand feet high. He bought another Pepsi, got in the car and roared away, back the way he had come.

He drove back toward Bradyton ignoring the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Behind him, the giant wave of dirt seemed to chase him down the highway. The drummer wrapped a handkerchief around his face and kept the windows open because of the heat. Farm after farm on both sides of the road was deserted. Signs flapping on the front doors told the world the bank now owned the property. Once he passed a farmer, his wife and their two children, rushing in and out of their small frame home, valiantly struggling to pile possessions on a battered old Model T. The wind was already whipping sand into twirling dervishes around them.

He was three miles outside Bradyton when he noticed the gas gauge. The needle registered empty. He tapped the gauge with his fingers but the needle was frozen on "E." Panic coiled in the pit of his stomach. The black blizzard was already on his tail. Ahead of him, he could see maelstroms of sand whirling onto the highway and he could feel the wind buffeting the car. Then, through the whorls of sand and wind, he saw a small filling station beside the road. He whipped the LaSalle off the road and parked beside the pumps. It was a Sinclair station, a small building of corrugated tin and wood, already shuddering before nature's onslaught. He ran to the door and beat on the glass, then cupped his eyes and looked inside. The place was deserted. He found a rusty old tire iron and smashed the window. It was obvious the owner had left in a hurry. The cash register drawer was open and the power had been turned off. The drummer ran back outside and smashed the Yale lock off the single gas pump and started filling the tank, trying to shield the tank opening against the whirling sands.

The great black wave descended on him, howling like a wounded animal, suddenly turning day to night. Sand ripped at his face and hands like tiny razor blades. He drove the car to the front of the building and pried the lock off the garage door, pushing and shoving it open against the banshee gale. Finally he got the car inside. The wind slammed the door closed behind him. Darkness descended over him like a dark cloth. He turned on the car lights and went back into the office, grabbed a handful of crackers and candy bars and stuffed them in his pockets. He used his crowbar to force open the soda machine and took a half dozen bottles back into the garage. He got in the car, wrapped his jacket around his face, closed the car windows and huddled there.

Outside, a great sea of earth thirty thousand feet high, forty miles wide and nine miles deep, swept down on the small building, engulfed it, assaulted it, battered it mercilessly with sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Around him he could hear metal screaming, things clattering against the small building, timbers groaning. An edge of the roof fluttered loose of its nails and the gale roared under it, peeled it back like the skin of an orange, and whipped it away. Sand poured through the gaping hole in the roof like water. The car began to rock before nature's wrath. The drummer held on to the steering wheel, his eyes closed and his teeth clenched, while the car rocked harder and harder. Fine silt started to ooze in around the windows.

Finally in abject fear and frustration, the drummer cried out: "Stop! . . . Stop! . . . Stop! . . . "

It was midnight-dark and the nightmare continued.

The drummer cursed himself for taking the job. He had spent three months, driving first through the South, then north beside the big Mississippi to St. Louis. He had spotted the ad in the Sunday newspaper and had taken the traveling job because it seemed perfect. He would be on the road all the time, traveling from one hamlet to the next in the prairie states.

"All you need," said Albert Kronen, the man who answered the phone, "is an auto and a silver tongue." His territory included Kansas, northern Oklahoma and southern Nebraska. He could stay on the road for months at a time, displaying his wares-girdles, cotton stockings and panties, simple frocks-in village after village. Perfect. No time clock to punch, no schedules to meet. He would be on his own.

Kronen did not mention the black blizzards, the towering waves of death that were turning the plains states into deserts and villages into abandoned ghost towns and blowing the farmlands to the winds.

The car rocked harder. The rest of the corrugated roof tore off with a mighty screaming sound and the drummer huddled deeper in his seat, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his eyes squeezed shut to keep out the fine sand that filtered through every slit and opening in the car. How long would it last? he wondered. How long could it last?

The wind howled for half an hour before passing as quickly as it had arrived. It became deathly still. The drummer sat at the wheel of the car with the taste of dirt in his mouth. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw an apparition, a dusty clown face with two black potholes for eyes. He brushed the dirt off his face with his hands and got out of the car. A shower of dust poured down from the top of the car when he opened the door.

Gray sunlight poured through the gaping holes in the roof of the garage. The door was jammed shut. He put his shoulder against it and battered it open a foot or so and squeezed through. Dunes of sand greeted him. Drifts of it slanted down from the sides of the battered building. The road was an indented sliver stretching toward Bradyton. He sank to his ankles as he walked to the front of the filling station. He found a large metal sign half-buried near the pump and pulled it free. A rugged-looking cowboy with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth smiled up at him from the sheet.

The drummer laughed aloud when he read the slogan.

"I'd walk a mile for a Camel."

The drummer looked around. I could use a camel myself right now, he thought to himself. But not the kind you smoke.

He used the sheet to shovel the sand away from the garage door and make tracks to the main road, ate a candy bar, washing it down with a bottle of soda pop, and backed out onto the highway.

A man who could have been forty or eighty stood near the entrance to the Bradyton House, a three-story yellow brick building in the center of town. He wore bib jeans and his fists were pressed against his chest. The man stared past the drummer, his face caked in dust, his eyes and mouth black scars in the powdery facade. He was shaking uncontrollably.

"You all right?" the drummer asked.

"N-n-never seen anything 1-1-like it," the old man stammered, his terrified eyes gazing straight ahead in a fixed stare. "D-d-dirt falling from the sky. Hell on earth. Hell on earth."

A woman, her skin leather-tanned in color and texture, was sweeping up sand that lay in ripples across the linoleum floor. Oiled rags were stuffed in the sills and sashes of the windows. It was a pleasant lobby with several sofas and easy chairs and a scattering of magazines and newspapers. A door beside the tiny desk led to a restaurant.

The woman looked up as the drummer entered.

"Come to stay the night?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered.

"You're in luck. Kin have any room in the place." She set aside the broom and walked behind the desk, spinning the registration book around so it faced him and handing him a pen.

"Four dollars the night. Includes clean sheets, sink and commode in the room, bath at the end of the hall. Breakfast is on the house."

"Very reasonable," he said wearily and scribbled his name on the ledger. She whirled it back and read the name aloud.

"John Trexler, St. Louis. Tell you what, Mr. Trexler, I can tell you've had a bad afternoon, as we all have. Why don't you just go on up to the top of the stairs and take the suite. Has its own bath and shower. I should be able to feed you in an hour or so. We should have the kitchen back open by then."

"That's very kind of you," the drummer said. "Thanks."

He carried a couple of newspapers up with him and sat in a steamy tub, leisurely reading a four-day-old Kansas City Star. In the Help Wanted section, an item immediately caught his eye.

Golden Opportunity.

For qualified men only, a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new winter resort. Must be expert skier and mountain climber and have training in survival tactics. Weekly salary, room and board. Inquiries: Snow Slope, Aspen, Colorado.

He got out of the tub, toweled off and dug his atlas out of the suitcase. Aspen was a mere dot in the middle of the Rocky Mountains about 150 miles west of Denver. Trexler sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Twenty-seven had found the perfect place to once again settle down.

BOOK FOUR.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is its natural manure."

Thomas Jefferson.

THIRTY-THREE.

Rudman walked down through the ruins of Alicante. The city was virtually leveled. There was hardly a wall more than five feet tall still standing. The civilians were gone. The dogs had been eaten. There was nothing left but the rats and a tattered battalion of Loyalists who were holding the town because it was a port and controlled the main coast road.

It was sweltering hot and there were flies everywhere. Some of the more recent dead had yet to be collected for burial.

Rudman had been in the same clothes for six days, since the hotel had been bombed out. He had bathed naked in the ocean every night but his clothes were stiff with dirt. His beard was beginning to show some gray and he had a slight limp from a piece of shrapnel which had buried itself in his calf months before.

Only one or two restaurants were still open, along with the telegraph office from which Rudman and other journalists covering the civil war filed their daily dispatches. Rudman carried his story into the disheveled telegraph office and the telegraph operator, an old man with thick white hair and a drooping mustache, gave him a weary smile.

"Seor Rudman," he said, "what have you got for me today?"

"Same old stuff," Rudman said wearily. "I've been here off and on since 1935. After three years of writing about this butcher shop it's all beginning to sound the same."

He stood at the counter and read over the hand-written piece once more, marking out or changing a word here and there.

ALICANTE, SPAIN, June 22, 1938. The last remaining Loyalist troops are facing annihilation in this southern coast town today as the Fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco move closer to the city.

There is little left of this town that was once a holiday haven for the rich of Europe. But it is no different from most other villages that have been destroyed in this three-year war, the worst civil strife since the American Civil War.

This morning, vultures have replaced Nazi bombers in the skies above, circling the devastated town in search of a feast.

Looking in horror at this fratricidal holocaust, I am reminded of a time in Africa when I saw a gut-shot hyena, nature's most efficient scavenger, eating its own insides.

In this war, which has pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, church against state, Spain, too, is devouring itself while its German and Italian "friends" sit on the sidelines crying "Ole!"

They have provided the most modern and efficient machines of death to Franco. What a cynical gesture-turning Spain into their private testing ground and using Spanish blood for their grisly experiments. The weapons perfected here will be the weapons used in the next world war. . . .

He put down the pencil and pinched his eyes.

"Oh, the hell with it," he said, "just send it on, Pablo."

"Si Seor, " the operator said.

Rudman went back outside. A Loyalist soldier was sitting on a pile of bricks, digging beans out of a can with his bayonet which he used as a fork. He was thin as a palm leaf, his pale eyes buried deep in black sockets. He wore a rag of a white shirt and torn cord pants and had a bandolier around his shoulder. His toes were sticking through the end of his boots. His rifle, an old Mannlicher, was leaning on the bricks near his leg.

"Americano?" Rudman asked.

"Yeah. You too?" the soldier answered.

"Yep. Join you?"

"Sure, pull up a brick and sit down."

Rudman sat down and took a swig of water from his canteen.

"What's your name?"

"What's the dif? I'm just a soldier." His voice was hoarse from the dust that drifted up from the ruins.

"Are you a Communist?" Rudman asked.

"Hell, no. I just hate these Fascist bastards. You don't stop them here, they'll be in Coney Island next. Least that's what I thought when I came over here."

"You don't think so anymore?"

"Hell, I don't know what I think. Y'know, I never seen a dead body before I came over here? Some education."

"Sorry you came now?"

The soldier laughed. "Shit, is anybody ever glad they came? It's something you think you ought t'do. You can't complain when it doesn't go right, can you?"

"Where you from?"