"The hell you will," thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
"Ellen, show him around," ordered the teen-ager. "I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, cause the white-handed aren't clean, you know." She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.
The name of the girl in the barbed-wire bracelet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler's first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home.
Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probable fair game anywhere else. Of course, there was one likely reason for travel.
She didn't like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teen-ager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another's will. She had had a dozen sub-machine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire's Mountain. Chandler said, with some effort, "I must have been——"
"Ellen, I must have been," she corrected.
"Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun."
"Of course. First time?"
He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.