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But Taine was not interested, he had known how it would be. Right now he was looking for his dog and he felt the panic rising in him. Somehow it felt a long way from home.
He spent three hours at it. He went back into the house and Towser was not there. He went into the other world again and searched among the tumbled rocks and Towser was not there. He went back to the desert and walked around the hillock and then he climbed to the crest of it and used the binoculars and saw nothing but the lifeless desert, stretching far in all directions.
Dead-beat with weariness, stumbling, half asleep even as he walked, he went back to the pickup.
He leaned against it and tried to pull his wits together.
Continuing as he was would be a useless effort. He had to get some sleep. He had to go back to Willow Bend and fill the tank and get some extra gasoline so that he could range farther afield in his search for Towser.
He couldn’t leave the dog out here—that was unthinkable. But he had to plan, he had to act inteUigently. He would be doing Towser no good by stumbling around in his present shape.
He pulled himself into the truck and headed back for Willow Bend, following the occasional faint impressions that his tires had made in the sandy places, fighting a half-dead drowsiness that tried to seal his eyes shut.
Passing the higher hill on which the milk-glass things had stood, he stopped to walk around a bit so he wouldn’t fall asleep behind the wheel. And now, he saw, there were only seven of the things resting in their cradles.
But that meant nothing to him now. All that meant anything was to hold off the fatigue that was closing down upon him, to cling to the wheel and wear off the miles, to get back to Willow Bend and get some sleep and then come back to look for Towser.
Slightly more than halfway home he saw the other car and watched it in numb befuddlement, for this truck that he was driving and the car at home in his garage were the only two vehicles this side of his house.
He pulled the pickup to a halt and tumbled out of it.
The car drew up and Henry Horton and Beasly and a man who wore a star leaped quickly out of it.
“Thank God we found you, man!” cried Henry, striding over to him.
“I wasn’t lost,” protested Taine. “I was coming back.”
“He’s all beat out,” said the man who wore the star.
“This is Sheriff Hanson,” Henry said. “We were following your tracks.”
“I lost Towser,” Taine mumbled. “I had to go and leave him. Just leave me be and go and hunt for Towser. I can make it home.”
He reached out and grabbed the edge of the pickup’s door to hold himself erect.
“You broke down the door,” he said to Henry. “You broke into my house and you took my car—”
“We had to do it, Hiram. We were afraid that something might have happened to you. The way that Beasly told it, it stood your hair on end.”
“You better get him in the car,” the sheriff said. “I’ll drive the pickup back.”
“But I have to hunt for Towser!”
“You can’t do anything until you’ve had some rest.”
Henry grabbed him by the arm and led him to the car and Beasly held the rear door open.
“You got any idea what this place is?” Henry whispered conspira-torially.
“I don’t positively know,” Taine mumbled. “Might be some other—”
Henry chuckled. “Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Whatever it may be, it’s put us on the map. We’re on all the newscasts and the papers are plastering us in headlines and the town is swarming with reporters and cameramen and there are big officials coming. Yes, sir, I tell you, Hiram, this will be the making of us—”
Taine heard no more. He was fast asleep before he hit the seat.
He came awake and lay quietly in the bed and he saw the shades were drawn and the room was cool and peaceful.
It was good, he thought, to wake in a room you knew—in a room that one had known for his entire life, in a house that had been the Taine house for almost a hundred years.
Then memory clouted him and he sat bolt upright.
And now he heard it—the insistent murmur from outside the window.
He vaulted from the bed and pulled one shade aside. Peering out, he saw the cordon of troops that held back the crowd that overflowed his back yard and the back yards back of that.
He let the shade drop back and started hunting for his shoes, for he was fully dressed. Probably Henry and Beasly, he told himself, had dumped him into bed and pulled off his shoes and let it go at that. But he couldn’t remember a single thing of it. He must have gone dead to the world the minute Henry had bundled him into the back seat of the car.
He found the shoes on the floor at the end of the bed and sat down upon the bed to pull them on.
And his mind was racing on what he had to do.
He’d have to get some gasoline somehow and fill up the truck and stash an extra can or two into the back and he’d have to take some food and water and perhaps his sleeping bag. For he wasn’t coming back until he’d found his dog.
He got on his shoes and tied them, then went out into the living room. There was no one there, but there were voices in the kitchen.
He looked out the window and the desert lay outside, unchanged. The sun, he noticed, had climbed higher in the sky, but out in his front yard it was still forenoon.
He looked at his watch and it was six o’clock and from the way the shadows had been falling when he’d peered out of the bedroom window, he knew that it was 6:00 P.M. He realized with a guilty start that he must have slept almost around the clock. He had not meant to sleep that long. He hadn’t meant to leave Towser out there that long.
He headed for the kitchen and there were three persons there— Abbie and Henry Horton and a man in military garb.
“There you are,” cried Abbie merrily. “We were wondering when you would wake up.”
“You have some coffee cooking, Abbie?”
“Yes, a whole pot full of it. And I’ll cook up something else for you.”
“Just some toast,” said Taine. “I haven’t got much time. I have to hunt for Towser.”
“Hiram,” said Henry, “this is Colonel Ryan. National guard. He has his boys outside.”
“Yes, I saw them through the window.”
“Necessary,” said Henry. “Absolutely necessary. The sheriff couldn’t handle it. The people came rushing in and they’d have torn the place apart. So I called the governor.”
“Taine,” the colonel said, “sit down. I want to talk with you.”
“Certainly,” said Taine, taking a chair. “Sorry to be in such a rush, but I lost my dog out there.”
“This business,” said the colonel, smugly, “is vastly more important than any dog could be.”
“Well, colonel, that just goes to show that you don’t know Towser. He’s the best dog I ever had and I’ve had a lot of them. Raised him from a pup and he’s been a good friend all these years—”
“All right,” the colonel said, “so he is a friend. But still I have to talk with you.”
“You just sit and talk,” Abbie said to Taine. “I’ll fix up some cakes and Henry brought over some of that sausage that we get out on the farm.”
The back door opened and Beasly staggered in to the accompaniment of a terrific metallic banging. He was carrying three empty five-gallon gas cans in one hand and two in the other hand and they were bumping and banging together as he moved.
“Say,” yelled Taine, “what’s going on here?”
“Now, just take it easy,” Henry said. “You have no idea the problems that we have. We wanted to get a big gas tank moved through here, but we couldn’t do it. We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen to get it through, but we couldn’t—”
“You did what!”
“We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen,” Henry told him calmly. “You can’t get one of those big storage tanks through an ordinary door. But when we tried, we found that the entire house is boarded up inside with the same kind of material that you used down in the basement. You hit it with an ax and it blunts the steel—”