"Yes sir! Mr. Holtz the math teacher's making the coffee back there."
Groff approached Holtz, a small, harried man. Holtz listened and said: "Not in the junior high, no. No lecture demonstrations, just recitation and lab. But the senior high across the river would have some. My good friend Mr. Anderson lectures there and he believes in making it spectacular. Yes; they would have lecture flasks. I'd guide you there if I weren't assigned. Perhaps you can find somebody—"
Groff decided he would not. These people were working at top capacity now. He could do the job on his own.
Groff and Polly picked their way through the silt to the river bank. A rowboat manned by two husky youngsters with the improvised brassards was unloading a weeping woman and a silent child.
"Get to the school," one of them told her in an important, basically uncertain voice. "They'll take care of you there. They've got nurses and everything."
She walked off clutching the child's hand, still weeping.
The kids looked after her, round-eyed. They told Groff: "That's Mrs. Vostek. Her husband drowned. We just found her sitting on her porch crying. Maybe she's gone crazy."
"Can you get us across the river? We want to get into the high school and look for oxygen bottles. The sick cases need it."
"That's what we're here for, mister!"
Good kids....