LITMIR.BIZ

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that the Chief had extraordinary resemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and William B. McKinley, and to Napoleon on his better days.

      The trumpets blew, the M.M.'s gallantly marched off nowhere in particular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his laugh. Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he proposed a game of contract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy—with Mrs. Candy as volunteer umpire.

      But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever he was dummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun came out for a false, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked unreal. Clouds with torn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt, were driven down the valley, cutting off the bulk of Mount Faithful; the sun went out as in a mammoth catastrophe; and instantly the world was in unholy darkness, which poured into the room.

      "Why, it's quite dark, isn't it! Sissy, turn on the lights," said Emma.

      The rain attacked again, in a crash, and to Doremus, looking out, the whole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the deluge he saw a huge car flash, the great wheels throwing up fountains. "Wonder what make of car that is? Must be a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, I guess," reflected Doremus. The car swerved into his own gateway, almost knocking down a gatepost, and stopped with a jar at his porch. From it leaped five Minute Men, black waterproof capes over their uniforms. Before he could quite get through the reflection that he recognized none of them, they were there in the room. The leader, an ensign (and most certainly Doremus did not recognize him) marched up to Doremus, looked at him casually, and struck him full in the face.

      Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been arrested before, except for an occasional toothache or headache, or a smart when he had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had not for thirty years known authentic pain. It was as incredible as it was horrifying, this torture in his eyes and nose and crushed mouth. He stood bent, gasping, and the Ensign again smashed his face, and observed, "You are under arrest."

      Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him with a china ash tray. Two M.M.'s dragged her off, threw her on the couch, and one of them pinned her there. The other two guards were bulking over the paralyzed Emma, the galvanized Sissy.

      Doremus vomited suddenly and collapsed, as though he were dead drunk.

      He was conscious that the five M.M.'s were yanking the books from the shelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the covers split, and with their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp shades and small occasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough M M on the white paneling above the fireplace with shots from his automatic.

      The Ensign said only, "Careful, Jim," and kissed the hysterical Sissy.

      Doremus struggled to get up. An M.M. kicked him in the elbow. It felt like death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He heard them tramping upstairs. He remembered then that his manuscript about the murders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham Swan was hidden in the Franklin stove in his study.

      The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on the second floor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone mad.

      In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up—to set fire to the papers in the stove before they should be found. He tried to look at his women. He could make out Mary, tied to the couch. (When had that ever happened?) But his vision was too blurred, his mind too bruised, to see anything clearly. Staggering, sometimes creeping on his hands and knees, he did actually get past the men in the bedrooms and up the stairs to the third floor and his study.

      He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved books and his letter files, accumulated these twenty years, out of the study window, to see him search the papers in the Franklin stove, look up with cheerful triumph and cackle, "Nice piece you've written here, I guess, Jessup. Commissioner Swan will love to see it!"

      "I demand—see—Commissioner Ledue—Dist' Commissioner Tasbrough—friends of mine," stammered Doremus.

      "Don't know a thing about them. I'm running this show," the Ensign chuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely with a shamefulness as great as Doremus's when he realized that he had been so cowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did not open his mouth again, did not whimper nor even amuse the troopers by vainly appealing on behalf of the women, as he was hustled down two flights of stairs—they threw him down the lower flight and he landed on his raw shoulder—and out to the big car.

      The M.M. driver, who had been waiting behind the wheel, already had the engine running. The car whined away, threatening every instant to skid. But the Doremus who had been queasy about skidding did not notice. What could he do about it, anyway? He was helpless between two troopers in the back seat, and his powerlessness to make the driver slow up seemed part of all his powerlessness before the dictator's power . . . he who had always so taken it for granted that in his dignity and social security he was just slightly superior to laws and judges and policemen, to all the risks and pain of ordinary workers.

      He was unloaded, like a balky mule, at the jail entrance of the courthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he would so rebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But Doremus was not taken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a large, black-painted, unlettered truck by the entrance—literally kicked, while even in his bewildered anguish he speculated, "I wonder which is worse?—the physical pain of being kicked, or the mental humiliation of being turned into a slave? Hell! Don't be sophistical! It's the pain in the behind that hurts most!"

      He was hiked up a stepladder into the back of the truck.

      From the unlighted interior a moan, "My God, not you too, Dormouse!" It was the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as prisoners were Truman Webb and Dan Wilgus. Dan was in handcuffs, because he had fought so.

      The four men were too sore to talk much as they felt the truck lurch away and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus spoke truthfully, "I don't know how to tell you how ghastly sorry I am to have got you into this!" and once he lied, when Buck groaned, "Did those — — hurt the girls?"

      They must have ridden for three hours. Doremus was in such a coma of suffering that even though his back winced as it bounced against the rough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he drowsed and woke to terror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke to his own helpless wailing.

      The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among white brick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the one-time Dartmouth campus—headquarters now of the Corpo District Commissioner.

      That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough! He would be released! They would be freed, all four!

      The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away. He came out of his sick fear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching boat.

      But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.'s, silent save for mechanical cursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which had once been part of a sedate classroom, left him with a final clout on the head. He dropped on a wooden pallet with a straw pillow and was instantly asleep. He was too dazed—he who usually looked recordingly at places—to note then or afterward what his cell was like, except that it appeared to be filled with sulphuric fumes from a locomotive engine.

      When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was torn, and foul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as though he had done something shameful.

      His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble coffee, with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine, was thrust at him, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he was marched out into the corridor, by two guards, just as he wanted to go to the toilet. Even that he could forget in the paralysis of fear. One guard seized him by the trim small beard and yanked it, laughing very much. "Always did want to see whether a billygoat whisker would pull out or not!" snickered the guard. While he was thus tormented, Doremus received a crack behind his ear from the other man, and a scolding command, "Come on, goat! Want us to milk you? You dirty little so-and-so! What you in for? You look like a little Kike tailor, you little ——-"

      "Him?" the other scoffed. "Naw! He's some kind of a half-eared hick newspaper editor—they'll sure shoot

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