They reached the Diamond, an oval of grass with benches and a Civil War monument and with the three-story storefronts all around it, their dusty windows looking down like blind eyes. "KEEP RIGHT" said a big sign at each end of the Diamond, but nothing moved along the wide street, nothing at all. Wales peered from a doorway, then took Martha's wrist and hurried across. Dutton's Hardware, with its windows still full of fishing-tackle displays, was on the other side. But when he tried the door, it was locked. He could smash the plate-glass of the door but that would be to advertise his presence inside. He hurried, tense and sweating now, around to the alley in back of the store. The back door by the little loading platform was locked too, but he broke a window with his gun-butt. The shattering of the glass sounded in the silent town like an avalanche. Wales swore under his breath, waited, listened. There was no sound. He got the window open, and drew Martha in after him into the dim interior of the store. "Why here?" she whispered, now. "Anyone who comes searching Castletown for me is bound to come to the Diamond sooner or later," he told her. "It's our best place to watch." He had another reason. He went forward through the obscurity of the store, through sheaves of axe-handles and rural mail-boxes in piles, with the hardware-store smell of oil and leather and paint strong in his nostrils. He found a gun-rack. All rifles and pistols were gone but there were still a row of shotguns, the barrels gleaming in the dimness like organ-pipes. In the worn, deep wooden drawers beneath, he found shells. "I seem to remember you used to go after pheasant with Lee," he said. Martha nodded, and took one of the pumpguns. "Just don't use it, until I tell you," he said. They went on, toward the front of the store. Then they sat down, and through the show-windows they could look out on the Diamond. The sun sank lower. The man on the monument cast a longer and longer shadow across empty benches where once old men of Castletown had gossiped. Nothing happened. Wales, waiting, thought how outraged crusty Mr. Dutton would have been by what they'd done. It had been like him to carefully lock up the store, front and back, before he left it forever. He looked across the Diamond, at the Busy Bee Cafe, at the Electric Shoe Repair Shop, at the old brick YWCA. Twilight deepened. Martha moved a little, beside him. He hoped she wasn't losing her nerve. Then he realized she had been nudging him. She whispered, "Jay." At the same moment he heard a thrumming sound. Even here inside the store, it seemed unnaturally loud in the silent town. He crouched lower. A long green car came down the street and swung around the Diamond, and then with squealing brakes it came to a stop. The hunters had come to Castletown. CHAPTER VI Three men got out of the car and stood there in the dusk, at the south side of the Diamond.