Groff decided he would not. These people were working at top capacity now. He could do the job on his own. Groff and Polly picked their way through the silt to the river bank. A rowboat manned by two husky youngsters with the improvised brassards was unloading a weeping woman and a silent child. "Get to the school," one of them told her in an important, basically uncertain voice. "They'll take care of you there. They've got nurses and everything." She walked off clutching the child's hand, still weeping. The kids looked after her, round-eyed. They told Groff: "That's Mrs. Vostek. Her husband drowned. We just found her sitting on her porch crying. Maybe she's gone crazy." "Can you get us across the river? We want to get into the high school and look for oxygen bottles. The sick cases need it." "That's what we're here for, mister!" Good kids.... On the other bank, perilously attained, the kids pointed Groff and Polly in the right direction and took aboard two grim brassarded men who carried a limp, moaning girl of ten between them. The other side of the river was the older part of town; the inevitable slum had grown up there. Here in the streets and on the steps they saw drunken men and women with blank despair in their eyes tilting bottles skyward. One of them drained his bottle and yelled: "To hell with it!" and hurled the empty through the plate-glass window of a silt-choked little magazine-and-candy store. A man, not young, sitting in the store came charging out with a sawed-off ball bat in his hands, swinging. "You cheap rotten bum!" he yelled. "Things aren't bad enough, you have to make them worse!" While the drunk stared stupidly, Groff rushed between them and caught the wrists of the man with the bat. "Easy," he said. "For God's sake, you'll kill him with that thing." The drunk came to life. "Let him kill," he yelled. "What's the damn difference now? No job, no house, no furniture. Let him kill!" But he reeled off down the street while Groff held the furious man. "Stupid bastard," the proprietor swore. "I'll give him bottles. Three-fifty he owes me, I'll give him bottles!" Then the fight suddenly evaporated out of him. Groff let go and they walked on, looking back to see him shamble into his store again and sit down with the bat across his knees. They passed a bar, and there was no nonsense about that. Two men who looked like brothers stood grimly at the door. Each had a shotgun over his arm. When Groff and Polly walked by they shifted the guns a little and said nothing. A corner grocery had become a sort of involuntary relief station. There was a long unruly line leading to the door. The grocer stood there; behind him in the store his wife was bringing up canned goods, bottled pop, everything. The grocer, sweating and afraid, was handing out the food and drink to the sullen people as they passed.