As a shield for the lonely, frightened thing that was his mind, he put on a phony sternness: "I wish to examine you about Millstone and your knowledge of Abraham. How many others are living at Millstone?"
"Two fives, sa," said the boy promptly, "and I who may be called Jonason and this one we may call Paula. Two fives and two. We are the biggest, we two. The others are only children, but he we call Jimi has killed his deer. He sees after them now while we go across the sun-path."
Under Brian's questioning, more of the story came, haltingly, obscured by the young man's conviction that the Old Man already knew everything. Some time, probably in the middle 2080s, Jonas and Abigail (whoever they were) had come on a group of twelve wild children who were keeping alive somehow in a ruined town where their elders had all died. Jonas and Abigail had brought them all to an island they called Millstone.
Jonas and Abigail had come originally from "up across the sun-path"—the boy seemed to mean north—and they had been very old, which might mean anything between thirty and ninety. In teaching the children primitive means of survival, Jonas and Abigail had brought off a brilliant success: Jonason and Paula were well fed, shining with health and cleanliness and the strength of wildness, and their speech had not been learned from the ignorant. Its pronunciation faintly suggested New England, so far as Brian could detect any local accent at all.
"Did they teach you reading and writing?" he asked, and made writing motions on the flat of his palm, which the two watched in vague alarm.
The boy asked: "What is that?"
"Never mind." He thought: I could quarrel with some of your theories, Mister whom I may call Jonas. "Well, tell me now what they taught you of Abraham."
Both made again that circular motion at forehead and breast, and the young man said with the stiffness of recitation: "Abraham was the Son of Heaven, who died that we might live."
The girl, her obligations discharged with the religious gesture, tapped the marimba shyly, fascinated, and drew her finger back sharply, smiling up at Brian in apology for her naughtiness.