And, finally, here was Jay Vickers fleeing to the west.

By midnight, he knew what he was doing and where he was going.

He was going where Horton Flanders had said that he should go, doing what he had said he would never do.

He was going back to his own childhood.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THEY were exactly the way he had expected them to be.

They sat out in front of the general store, on the bench and the upturned boxes, and turned sly eyes up toward him and they said: "Too bad about your Pa, Jay. He was a damn good man."

They said: "So you write books, do you. Have to read one of your books someday. Never heard of them."

They said: "You going out to the old place?"

"This afternoon," said Vickers.

"It's changed," they warned. "It's changed a whole lot. There ain't no one living there."

"No one?"

"Farming's gone to hell," they told him. "Can't make no money at it. This carbohydrates business. Lots of folk can't keep their places. Banks take them away from them, or they have to sell out cheap. Lots of farms around here being bought up for grazing purposes — just fix the fences and turn some cattle in. Don't even try to farm. Buy feeder stuff out in the west and turn it loose the summer, then fatten it for fall."

"That's what happened to the old place?"

They nodded solemnly at him. "That's what happened, son. Feller that bought it after your Pa, he couldn't make the riffle. Your Pa's place ain't the only one. There's been lots of others, too. You remember the old Preston place, don't you?"

Vickers nodded.

"Well, it happened to it, too. And that was a good place. One of the best there was."

"No one living there?"

"No one. Somebody boarded up the doors and windows. Now, why do you figure anyone would go to all the work of boarding up the place?"

"I wouldn't know," said Vickers.

The storekeeper came out and sat down on the steps.

"Where you hanging out now, Jay?" he asked.

"In the East," said Vickers.

"Doing right well, I expect."

"I'm eating every day."

"Well," the storekeeper said, "you ain't so bad off, then. Anyone that can eat regular is doing downright well."

"What kind of car is that you got?" another of them asked.

"It's a new kind of car," said Vickers. "Just got it the other day. Called the Forever car."

They said: "Now ain't that a hell of a name to call a car."

They said: "I imagine it cost you a pile of jack."

They said: "How many miles to a gallon do you get on it?"

He got into the car and drove away, out through the dusty, straggling village, with its tired old cars parked along the streets, with the Methodist church standing dowdy on the hill, with old people walking along the Street with canes and dogs asleep in dust wallows under lilac bushes.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE gate to the farm was chained and the chain locked with a heavy padlock, so he parked the car beside the highway and walked the quarter mile down to the buildings.

The farm road was overgrown with grass in places and knee-high with weeds in others and only here and there could you find the sign of wheel-ruts. The fields lay unplowed, with brush springing up along the fences and weed patches flourishing in the poorer spots, where years of cultivation had sapped the ground of strength.

From the highway, the buildings had looked about the same as he remembered them, cozily grouped together and strong with the feel of home, but as he drew nearer the signs of neglect became apparent, striking him like a hand across the face. The yard around the house was thick with grass and weeds and the flower beds were all gone and the rosebush at the corner of the porch was dying, a scraggly thing with only one or two roses where in other years it had been heavy with its bloom. The plum thicket in the corner of the fence had run riot, and the fence itself was rickety and in places had disappeared entirely. Some windows in the house were broken, probably by kids heaving idle stones, and the door to the back porch had become unlocked and was swinging in the wind.

He waded through the sea of grass, walking around the house, astonished at how tenaciously the marks of living still clung about the place. There, on the chimney, running up the outside wall, were the prints of his ten-year-old hands, impressed into wet mortar, and the splintered piece of siding still remained above the basement window, broken by poorly aimed chunks of wood chucked through the open window into the basement to feed the old, wood-eating furnace. At the corner of the house he found the old wash-tub where his mother each spring had planted the nasturtiums, but the tub itself was almost gone, its metal turned to rust, and all that remained was a mound of earth. The mountain ash still stood in the front yard and he walked into its shade and looked up into its canopy of leaves and put out his hand and stroked the smoothness of its trunk, remembering how he had planted it as a boy, proud that they should have a tree like no one else in the neighborhood.

He did not try the door, for the outside of the house was all he wished to see. There would be too much to see inside the house — the nail holes on the wall where the pictures had been hung and the marks upon the floor where the stove had stood and the stairway with the treads worn smooth by beloved footsteps. If he went in, the house would cry out to him from the silences of its closets and the emptiness of its rooms.

He walked down to the other buildings and they, he found, for all their silence and their emptiness, were not so memory-haunted as the house. The henhouse was falling in upon itself and the hoghouse was a place for the winter winds to whistle through and he found an old worn-out binder stored in the back of the cavernous machine shed.

The barn was cool and shadowed, and of all the buildings it seemed the most like home. The stalls were empty, but the hay still hung in cobwebby wisps from the cracks in the floor of the mow and the place still smelled the way he had remembered it, the half-musty, half-acid smell of living, friendly beasts.

He climbed the incline to the granary and sliding back the wooden latch, went in. Mice ran squeaking across the floor and up the walls and beams. A pile of grain sacks were draped across the partition that held the grain back from the alley way and a broken harness hung from a peg upon the wall and there, at the end of the alley lay something that stopped him in his tracks.

It was a child's top, battered now and with all its color gone, but once it had been bright and colorful and when you pumped it on the floor it had spun and whistled. He had gotten it for Christmas, he remembered, and it had been a favorite toy.

He picked it up and held its battered metal with a sudden tenderness and wondered how it had gotten there. It was a part of his past catching up with him — a dead and useless thing to everyone in all the world except the boy to whom it had once belonged.

It had been a striped top and the colors had run in spiraling streaks when you spun it and there had been a point, he remembered, where each streak ran and disappeared, and another streak came up and it disappeared, and then another.

You could sit for hours watching the streaks come up and disappear, trying to make out where they went. For they must go somewhere, a boyish mind would figure. They couldn't be there one second and be gone the next. There must be somewhere for them to go.

_And there had been somewhere for them to go!_

He remembered now.

It all came back to him, with the top clutched in his hands and the years peeling off and falling away to take him back to one day in his childhood.