"That's nothing."

"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be d.a.m.ned forever."

"No. No...."

Jesse mumbled: "G.o.d-d.a.m.n flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own b.l.o.o.d.y strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology.

"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."

"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."

"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee."

Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him, through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force, was not really level but a stairway. Level it was--flat level, drearily flat and white and cold--but his mind by quiet a.s.sertion made of it a stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to tell him he had done well.

By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben knew it.

From within the region of illusion that he knew to be illusion, Reuben grew aware, and more comfortably, that old Jesse Plum was still rambling on, and singing.

"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot...."

Reuben no longer resented the croaking sound as a hateful intrusion. The old man meant no harm, and was drunk. Ben had refused to abandon him, and Ben always knew best.

"Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run, we will run.'

Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run.

For I value no disgrace, nor the losing of my place, But the enemy I won't face, nor his gun, nor his gun....'"

Peacefully, almost un.o.bserved, the boundary between the two regions dissolved. The snow was flat. For a few moments Reuben's mind was completely engaged in an effort to understand how they had got away from the house. The axe--came--down.... Then what? Out of this blank two remote voices spoke with needle sharpness: "_Goodm'n Cory?_" "_They've shot him, Jesse._" Maybe after that he had fainted. But now, to the deepest privacy of his mind, Reuben could state: That home was not; that he would be twelve in May; that his mother and father were dead; that he was walking on flat snow into the outskirts of the village of Hatfield with his brother and an old servant who was drunk and naked.

Hatfield buzzed. For a short way--questions from distracted citizens spattered from all sides--Reuben knew that Jesse was shambling between him and Ben, an arm on each, wobbling and protective; then under the guidance of a pink fat man they pa.s.sed into the thick warmth of the ordinary's common room. In this hot haze and clatter of voices, Reuben's senses clouded, not in retreat but bodily exhaustion. A birdy, ancient woman hovered about them with noises of concern. Beside her face, Ben's appeared, and Reuben searched the strangeness of it in a fluctuating dark and brightness. They must be sitting near a fireplace, he reasoned, and Ben's arm was preventing him from toppling over. Ben was speaking, too. "What?"

"I said, rest thee a while, Ru."

The fat man had wrapped Jesse Plum in a huge brown horse-blanket; now someone brought the old man a pewter tankard. At the rim of it gleamed Jesse's little blue eyes, unfocused like those of a baby at the breast.

At length Reuben heard someone drawl in unbelieving admiration: "G.o.dso-o-o!" Jesse's grimy fingers fluttered; a frowzy-haired boy in a grubby ap.r.o.n giggled and s.n.a.t.c.hed the tankard before it could hit the floor. Jesse collapsed into himself, a wired skeleton from which rose the bubble and rasp of a sudden snore.

The fat man was talking in lardy tones. "Hoy! Killed an Inj'an, he did say. He don't look it." Jowls shaking and puffy fingers gentle, he twitched away the blanket to examine Jesse's burnt side. "Bad. Gun blowed, he said. We'd ought to have goose-grease." The ragged boy was peeking at it. The fat man lifted him away by a greasy spreading ear.

"Mind thy G.o.d-d.a.m.ned manners, pup--a'n't we all brothers in Christ? Go fetch cobwebs. Good as grease, they'll mend a burn."

Jesse Plum was carried away, his slumber undisturbed, and Ben was talking with the old woman.

Reuben supposed he ought to listen, say something himself. Their speech came to him disconnected and obscure. "Grandmother in Springfield--Madam Rachel Cory ... great-uncle--Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."

"... sleigh gone a'ready to Hadley with others from Deerfield--be there more on the way?"

"I think there was no one near us."

"... to your grandmother--certainly...."

Most unmanly, Reuben thought, to let his head sink, to leave Ben the whole burden of caring for him, but with that head an unmanageable lump of exhaustion there was no help for it. He found it strange that Ben's voice should be rumbling directly under his ear and yet sound far away.

"Ma'am, if my brother might rest in a room where it's quiet?"

Reuben tried to protest as he was lifted. He could walk. The protest fell short of words. An alien hand touched him, someone else offering to take him. Ben's voice was oddly impatient: "Nay, I'll carry him...."

Reuben sensed the pa.s.sage of a creaking stairway. Ben let him down, on a cot, and as he stretched out his vision cleared, showing him a narrow room, and Jesse Plum on a pallet nearby, snug in his horse-blanket, brown gnarled feet innocently protruding, Adam's apple bobbing with his snores. The old woman was hovering. "Nay then, boys, you bide here long as you're a-mind. Jerusha'll get a cart, or you might wait on the sleigh's returning if you wish. Eh, Lord, we saw the fires on the sky before dawn, I'd only just come down to see after breakfast. Anyone'd know you for brothers--eh, Lord, yes! What's your name?"

"Reuben and Benjamin Cory--I'm Benjamin."

"Eh, Lord, yes! I'm Goody Hawks, and you can trust my Jerusha--he'll get you to Springfield one way or t'other. Some tea, ha?"

Reuben thought: I _must_ speak, if only for thanks. But Ben, sitting by him, a hand spread without pressure on Reuben's chest, was saying everything, taking care of everything. "You're most kind, ma'am."

"Eh, Lord, nothing--shame if we couldn't help the Lord's own on such a day...."

Reuben saw his brother wince and lean down, pulling up the leg of his breeches to bare his knee. Though it made the room swirl dangerously, Reuben braced up on his elbow to look at the long splinter embedded below Ben's kneecap.

"Law me!" Goody Hawks knelt by Ben, clucking and muttering. She secured the end of the splinter in h.o.r.n.y nails, drew it free with skillful quickness and held it up. "You walked from Deerfield with that and all?

Marry, it's two inches long if I'm a day old. You must have a poultice of sawdust or the like. I'll fetch it when I bring the tea. That'll draw out any that's left--like draws like, you know--eh, Lord, what a thing, I'd've dropped flat with it in twenty paces."

Reuben thought: I _will_ speak, and his hand reached out, and he heard his own voice as a hoa.r.s.e and stupid little noise: "Give it here."

Goody Hawks dropped the stained thing in Reuben's hand, apparently not puzzled that he should want it, though Ben was, and studied him with some mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and concern. Reuben pushed the splinter into his shirt pocket, and then, in some dread that Ben might ask questions unanswerable, he lay back and shut his eyes.

He heard them whispering together a little while, the sound partly smothered by the snoring of Jesse Plum. "... was there when our mother was killed ... outside the house, but he was forced to see...."

Reuben thought: _A stairway. I am lying still--nevertheless a stairway._

As Goody Hawks tiptoed from the room, he felt again on his chest the undemanding weightless warmth.

"Ben, what are we to do?"

"Nothing for now, except you should rest.... I suppose Grandmother will have room for us. If not there's Uncle John at Roxbury."

"Last night I saw a part of his letter that Father didn't read aloud.

Uncle John must be a great infidel."

"What did he write?"

"'Nor no man, by threat of d.a.m.nation nor promise of paradise, shall ever betray me into the folly of hating my neighbor, whether in the name of princes who are but men or in the name of a G.o.d I know not....' How could anyone write such a thing, unless he...."

"Marry, I don't know. I think--oh, let it be, Ru. He's a good man, we know that.... I suppose he only meant that the general opinion is not his own, that his own religion is in some manner different."

"Yes, maybe.... Ben, is it true 'tis a hundred miles to Boston and Roxbury?"