“Feed the fire! It might blow up the whole building. There won’t be enough pieces left for them to discover what was inside before the blast.”
“Or who might have been there!” For the first time Dard saw a ray of real hope. The Peacemen could not have known of this passage, they probably believed that the dwellers in the farmhouse had been blown up in that explosion. The escape of the Nordis family was covered—they now had a better than even chance.
But still he waited, or rather made Lars and Dessie wait in hiding while he crept on into the barn hole and climbed up the ladder he had placed there for such a use as this. Then, making a worm’s progress crawling, he crossed the rotting floor to peer out through the doorless entrance.
The outline of the farmhouse walls was gone, and tongues of blue-white flame ate up the dark to make the scene day-bright. Two men in the black and white Peace uniforms were dragging a third away from the holocaust. And there was a lot of confused shouting. Dard listened and gathered that the raiders were convinced that their prey had gone up with the house, taking with them two officers who had just beaten in the back door before the explosion. And there had been three others injured. The roundup gang was hurrying away, apprehensive of other explosions. Peacemen, who prided themselves on their lack of scientific knowledge, were apt to harbor such suspicions.
Dard got to his feet. The last man, trailing a stun rifle, was going around the fire now, keeping a careful distance from the chemically fed flames, such a distance that he plunged waist deep through snow drifts. And a few moments later Dard saw the ’copter rise, circle the farm once, and head west. He sighed with relief and went back to get the others.
“All clear,” he reported to Lars as he supported the crippled man up the ladder. “They think we went up in the explosion and they were afraid there might be another so they left fast—”
Again Lars chuckled. “They won’t be back in a hurry then.”
“Dard,” Dessie was a small shadow moving through the gloom, “if our house is gone where are we going to live now?
“My practical daughter,” Lars said. “We will find some other place… ”
Dard remembered. “The messenger you were expecting! He might see the blaze from the hills and not come at all!”