Reuben had known it, waited for it, now watched with no astonishment as the thing on all fours lurched obscenely from the entry into the front room and fumbled about, snorting, searching for the axe. Reuben caught his mother's wrists and pushed her arms away--no help for it. Amazed at their clinging strength, he was more amazed that he had the power to overcome it, and without harming her. He was free and not free. He could drive himself a few steps forward, but it seemed that the air between him and the thing on all fours had thickened to monstrous glue. His lungs must toil to fill themselves. He located the thing again as it crouched and began to rise. With all his force, with a sense of huge achievement, he spat on the face of it. Reuben felt it at first simply as a brutal and foul indignity when the thing, rising to a vast height, laid a hand flat across his face and lifted him so, with nothing but iron thumb and finger gouging under his cheekbones, and flung him sprawling. He struck the bed, and during some long sluggish course of time, two or three seconds perhaps, he secured a bedpost and hauled himself upright, finding that the firelight from the west window was now behind him, and everything was changed. He must get back across the room. The thing towered to the ceiling between him and his mother, who still knelt in the doorway and still prayed. He must get back across the room. She would not look up. It might be she did not see, did not know the stone axe was swinging down. He must go back across the room. Reuben felt the scream wrenched out of his throat: he himself had nothing to do with it. He was certain then that he was running back across the room. This room or some other, in this world or some other. * * * * * Ben moved into the light, stumbling over the ravished door, falling, gathering himself in one motion to go on, to kneel beside the unresponding mouth, knowing that his father was dead. His mind retained an ice-fire shrewdness, a corner-of-the-eye intelligence understanding the smoking houses, the running, the shrieking, the fur-capped Frenchman who was reloading, and shouting too in foreign-sounding English: "_Surrender!_"--was that what the fool was yammering? To Ben he appeared a stupid and trivial man with babyish pop eyes--couldn't the fellow understand that Goodman Cory was dead? Ben was on his feet, his father's gun dull and heavy--loaded, too, he realized. The French officer fired, clumsily this time, and a hornet-thing of no importance muttered past Ben's ear. In the house, someone screamed.