The soap lay on the top of a meal sack, a yellow square, placed there by David on his way to the water. It shone between Susan and Leff, standing forth as a survival of a pampered past. Susan's eye shifted toward it, fastened on it, waiting for Leff's hand to come and bear it away. But the hand executed no such expected maneuver. It planted the needle deliberately, pushed it through, drew it out with its long tail of thread. Surprise began to dispel her lethargy. Her eye left the soap, traveled at a more sprightly speed back to Leff, lit on his face with a questioning intelligence. David called again. "Hurry up. I want to light the fire." Leff took another considered stitch. "I don't know where it is," he answered without looking up. The questioning of Susan's glance became accusative. "It's there beside you on the meal sack," she said. "Throw it to him." Leff raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were curiously pale and wide. She could see the white round the fixed pupil. "Do it yourself," he answered, his tone the lowest that could reach her. "Do it or go to Hell." She rested without movement, her mouth falling slightly open. For the moment there was a stoppage of all feeling but amazement, which invaded her till she seemed to hold nothing else. David's voice came from a far distance, as if she had floated away from him and it was a cord jerking her back to her accustomed place. "Hurry up," it called. "It's right there beside you." Leff threw down his sewing and leaped to his feet. Leaning against the bank behind him was his gun, newly cleaned and primed. "Get it yourself and be d--d to you!" he roared. The machinery of action stopped as though by the breaking of a spring. Their watches ticked off a few seconds of mind paralysis in which there was no expectancy or motive power, all action inhibited. Sight was all they used for those seconds. Leff spoke first, the only one among them whose thinking process had not been snapped: "If you keep on shouting for me to do your errands, I'll show you"--he snatched up the gun and brought it to his shoulder with a lightning movement--"I'll send you where you can't order me round--you and this d--d ------ here." The inhibition was lifted and the three men rushed toward him. Daddy John struck up the gun barrel with a tent pole. The charge passed over David's head, spat in the water beyond, the report crackling sharp in the narrow ravine. David staggered, the projection of smoke reaching out toward him, his hands raised to ward it off, not knowing whether he was hurt or not. "That's a great thing to do," he cried, dazed, and stubbing his foot on a stone stumbled to his knees.