Letty Fox by Christina Stead Page B

the intruder.
    The setting sun shot long red rays through the bush at Hogg’s left.
    Hogg smiled cunningly, “Let’s fall to, boys!” and he sat down with them, using a clean collecting tin for his pannikin. He showed a ferocious appetite and made the boys sit back while he lunged for the meat. When it was all gone, he kicked over what remained, saying, “Well, it was really my bird and rabbit, boys, my fire, my sticks. It’s against the law to make a fire here,” he said. “You’ll have the woods on fire and burn all these people’s homes. You only think of your bellies and thieving, that’s why you’re where you are.”
    â€œIs that so?” said the redhead, who had a hungry stomach-ache. There was a large-headed boy who looked fiercely at Hogg, and his eyes were bright with tears: “I did nothing, I never did anything. They just got after me.”
    â€œThere’s a simple answer to that,” said Hogg. “Go back to the Farm and give yourselves up.”
    One boy snickered bitterly, one shrugged.
    â€œGo on down to the road and get going,” said Hogg, full of meat.
    The boys mooched off, the one with the pail carrying it off. Hogg, to conceal his wild exultation at having eaten the stolen meat, stopped to gather a mandrake he saw. He carefully loosened the soil and brought up the strange plant, with two green leaves and a white flower and two brown roots and a white root, and which for him was
Podophyllum peltatum
(May apple), and when he approached the road going into the lower valley and came down softly, skirting an old stone fence in which he knew some copperheads lived, he saw that the three boys were talking to another boy and looking up the hill. The fourth boy was Jack Lack. For all his woodcraft, he made sounds; the boys broke and went in opposite directions, Lack mounting the hill.
    â€œWatch out for copperheads,” called out Hogg involuntarily, for at this time of a warm evening they liked to lie out on the smooth, tarred road, catching the last rays that came through the tunnel of branches. The boys looked at him and went on straight down the road. Suddenly they halted, looked down in front of them, and watched something that was moving toward the hill where Hogg stood. Hogg laughed. It was the copperhead, he knew, that was there every evening. The boys, startled, went on cautiously and hurried out of sight.
    Hogg turned away from the stone heaps and made for the road, all the time looking at the ground with an expert eye. The farmers round there went about with canvas shoes, all through the fields, in spite of the danger, and he did the same, to be one of them.
    He was strange and distasteful. He held them up on the roads, haranguing them about their political views and their errors. He himself, single-handed, had tried to stop them going to their mysterious rendezvous, some years before, when the fiery cross burned on the hills, and there was talk about Catholics and Jews, but out of deviltry and irresponsibility he himself at times laughed with them; a little later he would give the fascist salute for fun, explaining that this was the old Roman gesture, and would make a garden-knot in his wild, unweeded place in the shape of the swastika, saying that it was an old Greek pattern, the original of all the mazes of the world; and all this because he thought even these death-dealing frenzies of his neighbors contemptible games of the ignorant and childish, and because the world was just a vacant lot to him. The farmers, the death-riders, the reformatory boys were all the same to him. They were Other-men, Not-Hogg.
    When he woke up the next morning, someone had scrawled on the picket fence, one letter to a pike, “P-e-r-c-e H-o-g-g, d-i-r-t-y d-o-g, e-t a-1-1 o-u-r m-e-a-t, w-a-s-h y-o-u-r d-i-r-t-y f-e-e-t.” “I know who it is,” said he, and he laid for Jack Lack, but the boy kept away for a long time. Hogg forgot