As the dust clouds rose into the air behind them, there was a shout from the bridge.

Catherine took Ransom's arm. "Over there! Who's that boy?"

"Philip!" Ransom waved vigorously. Philip Jordan was standing near the houseboat on the other side of the river, looking down at the outboard motor Ransom had abandoned. His skiff, secured by the pole, was propped against the shore. With a quick glance at the men signaling from the motorbridge, he sidestepped down the bank. Freeing his pole, he jumped aboard, the craft's momentum carrying it across the channel.

He helped Ransom and Catherine Austen into the craft and pushed off again. A shot rang out in warning. Four or five men, led by Jonas, crossed the slip road and made their way down the embankment. The bosun brought up the rear, a long-barreled rifle in his hands.

Jonas' stiff figure strode down the slope, black boots sending up clouds of dust. His men stumbled behind him, Saul cursing as he slipped and fell on his hands, but Jonas pressed on ahead of them.

The skiff stopped short of the bank as Philip Jordan scanned the river and approaches, uncertain which direction to take. Ransom leaned from the prow across the short interval of water. A bullet sang over their heads like a demented insect. "Philip, forget the boat! We've got to leave now!"

Philip crouched behind his pole as Saul reloaded the rifle. "Doctor, I can't… Quilter is-"

"Damn Quilter!" Ransom waved the pistol at Catherine, who was on her knees, holding tightly to the sides of the craft. "Paddle with your hands! Philip, listen to me-"

Jonas and his men had reached the water's edge, little more than a few boat-lengths away. Saul leveled the rifle at Philip, but Jonas stepped forward and knocked the weapon from his hands. His dark eyes gazed at the occupants of the skiff. He stepped onto a spur of rock, and for fully half a minute, oblivious of the pistol in Ransom's hand, stared down at the boat.

"Philip!" he shouted harshly. "Boy, come here!"

As his name echoed away across the drained river, Philip Jordan turned, his hands clenching the pole for support. He looked up at the hawkfaced man glaring down at him.

"Philip…!" Jonas' voice tolled like a bell over the oily water.

Philip Jordan shook his head slowly, hands nervously grasping at the pole. Above him, like a hostile jury, a line of dark faces looked down from the bridge. Philip seized the pole and lifted it horizontally from the water, as if to bar the way to Jonas.

"Doctor…?" he called tensely over his shoulder.

"The bank, Philip!"

"No!" With a cry, looking back for the last time at the dark figure of Jonas, Philip leaned on the pole and punted the boat upstream toward the drained lake. The men on the bank surged forward, shouting for the rifle, but the skiff darted behind the hulk of a lighter, then swung away again, its prow lifting like an arrow. Philip whipped the pole in and out, the water racing between his hands off the wet shaft.

"I'll go with you, doctor. But first…" he released the pole, then crouched down as the skiff surged across a patch of open water. "… first I must bring my father."

Ransom reached forward to take Catherine's hand. He watched the youth as he maneuvered them swiftly around the bend toward the lake, seeing in his face only the dark arrowlike mask of the black-garbed man standing alone on the shore behind them.

For an hour they followed the residue of the river as it wound across the lake. The channel narrowed, sometimes to little more than fifteen feet in width, at others dividing into thin streams that groped their way among the dunes and mudbanks. Stranded yachts lay on the dry slopes, streaked with the scum-lines of the receding water. The bed of the lake, almost completely drained, was now an inland beach of white dunes covered with pieces of blanched timber and driftwood. Along the bank the dried marshgrass formed a palisade of burnt bristles.

They left the main channel and followed one of the small tributaries. Here and there they passed the remains of an old shack, or a pier jutted out above the remains of grass that had seeded itself the previous summer when the level had already fallen several feet. Working his pole tirelessly, Philip turned the craft like a key through the nexus of creeks, his face hidden behind his shoulder as he avoided Ransom's gaze. Once they stopped, and he ordered them out, then ported the craft across a narrow saddle to the continuation of the stream. They passed the cylinder of an old distillation unit built out on the bed, its leaning towers rising like the barrels of some eccentric artillery in mutiny against the sky. Everywhere the bodies of voles and waterfowl lay among the dried weeds.

At length the stream wound between a series of scrubcovered dunes, and they emerged into a small drained lagoon. In the center, touched briefly by the stream as it disappeared beyond, was an ancient sailing barge, sitting squarely on the caked mud. All the craft they had passed had been stained and streaked with dirt, but the barge was immaculate, its hull shining in the -sunlight in a brilliant patchwork of colors. The brass portholes had been polished that morning. A white-painted landing stage stood by the barge, a trimly roped gangway leading to the- deck. The mast, stripped of its rigging and fitted with a cross-tree, had been carefully varnished to the brass annuhis at its peak.

"Philip, what on earth-?" Ransom began. He felt Catherine's hand warningly on his arm. Philip beached the craft ten feet from the landing stage and beckoned them aboard. He hesitated at the companion-head. "I'll need your help, doctor," he said, in a low, uncertain voice that reminded Ransom of his gruff waifs croak. He pointed to the cabin and deckwork, and added with a faint note of pride: "It's an old wreck, you understand. Put together from any scraps I could find." He led the way down into the dark cabin.

Sitting upright in a rocking chair in the center of the spartan chamber was a gray-haired old Negro. He wore a faded khaki shirt and corduroy trousers, patiently darned with a patchwork of laborious stitching. At first glance Ransom assumed from his broad shoulders and domed head that he was in late middle-age, but as the light cleared he saw from his sticklike shoulders and legs that he was at least seventy-five years old. Despite his advanced age, he held himself erectly, his lined patrician head turning as Philip came toward him. The faint light through the shuttered portholes was reflected in his opaque, blind eyes.

Philip bent down beside him. "Father, it's time for us to leave. We must go south to the coast."

The old Negro nodded. "I understand, Philip. Perhaps you would introduce me to your friends?"

"They will come with us to help. This is Dr. Ransom and Miss-"

"Austen. Catherine Austen." She stepped forward and touched the Negro's clawlike hand. "It's a pleasure, Mr. Jordan."

Ransom glanced around the cabin. Obviously there was no bloodlink between Philip and the elderly Negro, but he assumed that this blind old man was the youth's fosterfather, the invisible presence he had felt behind Philip for so many years. A thousand puzzles were immediately solved-this was why Philip always took his food away to eat, and why, despite Ransom's generous gifts during the winter, he was often close to starvation.

"Philip has told me of you a great deal, doctor," the old man said in his soft voice. "I have always known you to be a good friend to him."

"That's why I want us to leave now, Mr. Jordan, before the drought begins to break up the land. Are you well enough to travel?"

The merest hint of an implied negative made Philip Jordan bridle. "Of course he is!" He stepped between Ransom and the old man. "Don't worry, Father, I won't leave you."

"Thank you, Philip." The old man's voice was still soft. "Perhaps you would get ready. Take only what water and food you can carry." As Philip moved away to the galley the old Negro said: "Dr. Ransom, may I speak with you?"

When they were alone, he looked up at Ransom with his sightless eyes. "It will be a long journey, doctor, perhaps longer for you than for me. You will understand me when I say it will really begin when we get to the beach."

"I agree," Ransom said. "It should be fairly clear until we reach the coast."

"Of course." The Negro smiled faintly, his great domed head veined like a carved teak globe of the earth. "I shall be a great burden to you, doctor; I would rather stay here than be left by the roadside later. May I ask you to be honest with yourself?"

Ransom stood up. Over his shoulder he could see Catherine Austen standing in the sunlight on the deck, her red hair lifting like some Homeric fleece in the moving air. Something about the old Negro's question irritated him. Partly he resented the old man for having taken advantage of him for so many years, but even more for his assumption that Ransom could still make a simple choice between helping him on the one hand and abandoning him on the other. After the events of the previous days, he already felt that, in the new landscape emerging around them, humanitarian considerations were becoming increasingly irrelevant.

"Doctor?"

"Mr. Jordan, I daren't be honest with myself. Most known motives are so suspect these days that I doubt whether the hidden ones are any better. All the same, I'll try to get you to the beach."

Shortly before dusk they began their return journey down the river. Ransom and Philip Jordan stood at bow and stern, each working a puntpole, while Catherine and the old man sat amidships under a makeshift awning.

Around them the baked white surface of the lake stretched from horizon to horizon. Half a mile from the town, where they joined the main channel, they heard a siren sound into the hot afternoon air. Philip Jordan pointed two hundred yards to starboard, where Captain Tulloch's river steamer sat in a small landlocked pool of water. Pennants flying and deck canvas trim over the rows of polished seats, the steamer's engines worked at full ahead, its long prow nudging the curve of a huge sandflat. The screws turned tirelessly, churning the black water into a thick foam. Deserted by his crew, Captain Tulloch stood behind the helm, sounding his siren at the dead flank of the dune as he nudged away at it, as if trying to wake a sleeping whale.