"Oh, no?" Shanklin had picked up a club of his own, and grinned fiercely.
"No. Let me go, and I leave without having to be whipped out of camp. Mob me, and I promise to die fighting, right here." He stamped a foot on the ground. "I'll crack a skull or two before I wink out. That's a solemn statement of fact."
"Let him go," said Varina Pemberton again, this time with a ring of authority. "He wears that armor, and he'll put up a fight. We can't spare any more men."
"Thank you," Parr told her bleakly. He gave Shanklin a last long stare of challenge, then turned on his heel and walked away toward the thickets amid deep silence. Behind him the council fire made a dwindling hole in the blackness of night. It seemed to be his last hope, fading away.
He pushed in among thick, leafy stems. A voice hailed him:
"Hah!"
And a figure, blacker than the gloom, tramped close to him across a little grassy clearing.
"You! They drive you out?" a thick, unsure voice accosted him.
Parr hefted his club, wondering if this would be an enemy. "Yes. They drove me out. I'm exiled from among exiles."
"Uh." The other seemed perplexed over these words, as though they stated a situation too complicated. Parr's eyes, growing used to the darkness, saw that this was a grotesque, shaggy form, one of the degenerate outcasts from the village. "Uh," repeated his interrogator. "You come to us. Make one more in camp. Come."