Except for the damnable aching of his cheekbone.
In Hollywood, he thought sourly, it would have been just the beginning. The boy and the girl meet cute and you take it from there. In real life you save them from rape and they don't want to have anything to do with you. She was probably embarrassed, horribly so, and wanted no part of anybody who had seen her with her dress torn, about to be violated.
As he walked he constructed a face-saving fantasy about another maiden who might be less preoccupied and more grateful, but it was uphill work. His cheek was very bad, and it occurred to him that it might be more than a bruise; people did get fractures there. Also he seemed to have broken a knuckle.
The hero business didn't pay very well.
He turned around and headed back for the school. Maybe he could find a doctor there to take a look at his face; he was by then almost sure he could feel bones grating when he worked his jaw.
It was a panel truck, like any other panel truck you might see except for the name on the side and the thirty-meter whip antenna sticking up from the roof. It parked out in front of the schoolhouse and Mickey Groff stepped outside to see what was going on. Federal Broadcasting System Mobile Unit Four, he read. One of the men in the front seat wore headphones, was talking into a hand microphone.
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning. Hell of a fat audience they'll have to listen to them now, thought Groff. It didn't occur to him that all over the country listeners were staying up past their bedtimes for just such eyewitness, on-the-spot accounts as this.
Chief Brayer came out and said, "You still here? Get some sleep."
It was good advice for the chief too, Groff thought. He was too old a man for this sort of carrying-on. The national guardsmen had taken over the problems of patrolling the flooded-out, burned-out areas, and most of the temporary deputies had turned in their guns and armbands. But Groff wasn't sleepy. He was tired, dead-sick tired, but he wasn't sleepy.