graybeard harangued the group in low tones, then turned back to Mulvaney. Mulvaney stuck his head from behind the windshield.
"Well?"
"I'm Hank Simpson. Where's your folks, boy?"
Mulvaney hesitated. "Dead, sir," he said reluctantly. "When I was still a boy. I was raised in an orphanage."
"You remembered your people coming from Wereville?"
Mulvaney crushed back a desire to resent Simpson's questions.
"No, sir," he said truthfully. "I read about it in my mother's diary. I thought maybemaybe I might find some relatives here."
Simpson shook his bearded head, pale eyes bright.
"No. Tod and Mary had no kin. But if you're who you say you are, you've got friends. If you're not, may God help you. He's the only one can!"
Hank Simpson stepped aside and jerked his head to the others. Watching Mulvaney curiously, they came forward and swung the great gate wide.
The green coupé left the quartet standing by the gate and chugged along the narrow road. The way rose gently, twisting through the narrow canyon. It followed the course of the creek, sometimes crossing it only to recross it farther upstream. The narrow bridges were rickety, and Mulvaney eased the coupé over them with trepidation.
He felt like Alice in Wonderland. Things were getting curiouser and curiouser. He didn't pretend to understand what was going on here, what subtle cause prompted the people of the valley to bar their town to strangers. Mulvaney recalled the words of the service station proprietor at Lastwater. He had stopped there to get gas.
"A queer bunch up there," the fellow had told him, gnawing a generous chunk from a plug of tobacco. "Holed up in that valley since God knows when. Nobody ever goes to Werevillethem that does, comes right back. Never say nothin', neither. 'Shamed o' gettin' run out, I guess. He laughed sharply and leered at Mulvaney.
He glanced sideways at the girl in the seat beside him. Beyond a certain amount of reticence, she had displayed no peculiarity that he that he could discern. She had seemed tense on the journey across the desertespecially after they had passed the cowboybut that seemed gone now. She laughed and the tips of her teeth showed white between red, half-parted lips.
Only her eyes were the samealmost ingenuously blank. And the men at the gate. A sinister feeling shook him. Their eyes were the same. It baffled him. He could not know that his own bore the same look.
"It's all very confusing," he said drawing the words from nothingness.
She smiled briefly. "I suppose it is." Shadow hovered over her full, soft mouth. "There's no reason why you shouldn't know," she said slowly. "As long as you're one of us."
Her acceptance of him as one of the people of the valley comforted him, at the same time that it repelled him strangely. He steered the coupé expertly around a curve, waiting for her to continue.
"It's the ranchers, of course."
He nodded. "That explains the cowboy?"
She divined what he meant. "Yes. He recognized me. I suppose he did, anyway. I'm in Lastwater frequently. Everyone for miles around is there at one time or another. We're poison around here, Mister Mulvaney."
"Cut the formality," he said. "You don't look poison to me."
