The man lowered his rifle, not quite convinced. Coker emerged from the cover of my truck, which had hidden his exit from his own.
“What’s the big idea? Dog eat dog?” he inquired.
“Only two of you?” the second man asked.
Coker looked at him.
“What would you be expecting? A convention? Yes, just two of us.”
The trio visibly relaxed. The fair man explained:
“We thought you might be a gang from a city. We’ve been expecting them here, raiding for food.”
“Oh,” said Coker. “From which we assume that you’ve not taken a look at any city lately. If that’s your only worry, you might as well forget it. What gangs there are are more likely to be working the other way round—at present. In fact, doing—if I may say so—just what you are.”
“You don’t think they’ll come?”
“I’m darned sure they won’t.” He regarded the three. “Do you belong to Beadley’s lot?” he asked.
The response was convincingly blank.
“Pity,” said Coker. “That’d have been our first real stroke of luck in quite a time.”
“What is, or are, Beadley’s lot?” inquired the fair man.
I was feeling wilted and dry after some hours in the driving cab with the sun on it. I suggested that we might remove discussion from the middle of the street to some more congenial spot. We passed round their trucks through a familiar litter of cases of biscuits, chests of tea, sides of bacon, sacks of sugar, blocks of salt, and all the rest of it to a small bar parlor next door. Over pint pots Coker and I gave them a short résumé of what we’d done and what we knew.
They were an oddly assorted trio. The fair-haired man turned out to be a member of the Stock Exchange by the name of Stephen Brennell. His companion was a good-looking, well-built girl with an occasional superficial petulance but no real surprise over whatever life might hand her next. She had led one of those fringe careers—modeling dresses, selling them, putting in movie-extra work, missing opportunities of going to Hollywood, hostessing for obscure clubs, and helping out these activities by such other means as offered themselves. She had an utterly unshakable conviction that nothing serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order. She was quite the least troubled person I had encountered since the catastrophe took place. Though just occasionally she pined a little for the bright lights which she hoped the Americans would hurry up and restore.
The third member, the dark young man, nursed a grudge. He had worked hard and saved hard in order to start his small radio store, and he had ambitions. “Look at Ford,” he told us, “and look at Lord Nuffield—he started with a bike shop no bigger than my radio store, and see where he got to! That’s the kind of thing I was going to do. And now look at the damned mess things are in! It ain’t fair!” Fate, as he saw it, didn’t want any more Fords or Nuffields—but he didn’t intend to take that lying down. This was only an interval sent to try him—one day would see him back in his radio store with his foot set firmly on the first rung to millionairedom.
The most disappointing thing about them was to find that they knew nothing of the Michael Beadley party. Indeed, the only group they had encountered was in a village just over the Devon border, where a couple of men with shotguns had advised them not to come that way again. Those men, they said, were obviously local. Coker suggested that that meant a small group.
“If they had belonged to a large one they’d have shown less nervousness and more curiosity,” he maintained. “But if the Beadley lot are round here, we ought to be able to find them somehow.” He put it to the fair man: “Look here, suppose we come along with you? We can do our whack, and when we do find them it will make things easier for all of us.”