Enoch Wetzel stooped suddenly and picked up the shotgun and wordlessly held it out to me. My jaw fell in astonishment. The twin barrels were bent into a rude V. I licked my lips and backed away. "Let's get out of here, Wetzel." He tossed the gun aside and we turned back to the road. Neither of us said anything for fully a mile. "No human hands could have done that to a gun," I said. "I'm beginning to believe what you said about robots. Robots that take scalps!" * * * * * Another hill, another valley ... and Wetzel caught hold of my arm. "I come across them sojers about here," he said. "Okay. From now on you act as guide." We went on. Several times Wetzel's long, swinging, tireless stride left me behind and he was forced to wait until I caught up with him again. I had the feeling that I was holding him back, and there was something faintly contemptuous in his obvious patience. But the life of a book-writing newspaper man hadn't prepared me for cross-country marathons, and there was nothing to be done about it now. The fairly level, open ground was giving place to a heavily wooded countryside. After another mile of winding roadway, Wetzel suddenly turned aside and plunged into the forest. It was as dark as the inside of an undertaker's hat, and after I had banged into a few dozen trees and tripped over a few dead branches, making enough racket to alert half the state, Wetzel slowed his pace to a crawl. Finally I grabbed one of the fringed sleeves of his buckskin shirt to stop him and sank down on a fallen log. "How much farther?" He leaned his folded arms on the muzzle of his long gun and I could feel his deep-set eyes studying me without approval. "'Nother hour; p'rhaps more. Dependin' on you." "Sure," I said with understandable bitterness. "I'm not the man my granddaddy was. Nobody is. When I take a walk it's down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes. Anything farther than that I use a horseless carriage. We don't need steel muscles and superior woodcraft these days, brother. Just enough eyesight to read the directions on the can, ears sharp enough to hear the boss bawling you out, enough nose to smell the whiskey on your neighboring straphanger's breath, reflexes quick enough to avoid being run down by some politician's Cadillac. If I'd have known I was going to be called on to go batting around a jungle, I'd have been down to the Y five days a we--" He moved like a striking snake. A hand was clapped over my mouth and a knee forced me to the ground. Before I could make an effort to fight back, he placed his mouth close to my ear. "Danger! 'Tis death for so much as a broken twig!" He removed his hand and I could breathe again. We lay there side by side close to a huge tree, deep in the shadows. And then faintly as from far off I heard the crackle of disturbed undergrowth and, slowly louder and louder, an evenly spaced thumping sound that seemed to shake the earth.