The woman might not be cruel. Arrin might be only a decent officer in a hard position. But all the same, they were aliens, despoilers of Earth, and he was an Earthman. These were his people—Sawyer, Burr, Twist, even the hateful and suspicious Oakes. These were the ones he would fight for, and with.
If they let him.
But they had to let him. He was the man with the plane. And as he rode wearily through the dark, he thought he knew the argument to use.
Just before dawn, when the world was at its blackest and most silent, there was a challenge in the woods ahead, and the man with the lantern answered. Here and there among the trees other shielded lanterns flickered, widely scattered, and the woods were full of quiet sounds, the creak of leather and jingle of bridle-chains, the soft thump of hoofs, the somnolent blowing of picketed horses. What men there were spoke in low voices.
Price's party dismounted and walked quietly among the picket lines. In a few minutes they reached the edge of the sheltering woods. The man with the lantern gave a low whistle, and another man materialized out of the blank dark ahead.
"This way," he said. "And watch your foot."
Now the man with the lantern followed him, the others coming after in Indian file. And Price began to see that the darkness was not as blank as he had thought. There were pale areas that gathered the faint starlight to themselves on flat, broken surfaces. He realized presently that these were walls, or had been once, and that he was walking on the shattered fragments of a city street. The feel of gritty concrete was unmistakable.
They went for quite a long way, apparently on some known path through the ruined city, and the sky began to pale before they reached their destination. Price could now make out the ghostly looming of building-fronts on both sides, high fronts with nothing behind them, so that the window-holes looked like a kind of elaborate pierced-work. It was deathly still, so still that their own breathing and the stealthy padding of their feet woke furtive echoes from the stone.
Their guide stopped beside a small black hole no different from all the other small black holes that lurked under fallen masonry and flattened girders. "Down there," he said, and left them.