Ossian's Ride by Fred Hoyle Page B

his band of hoodlums. Even at the risk, I paused to watch them. The scene became ludicrous beyond my fondest hopes. In a sort of fantastic polo game the tractors wheeled hither and thither. Every so often a man would leap down from his seat, and another piece of nonsense was gathered to the fold. Chuckling mightily, I trotted after Cathleen, a modern Milanion anxious to claim my Atalanta.
    I saw already that something was wrong, even when I was fifty yards from Cathleen. Her eyes blazed with furious anger.
    “You—,” she flared.
    I suppress the word not because it was a particularly bad one—I had heard worse often enough before—but because, this was the only time I ever heard her make such a remark.
    “And me poor brother not dead in his grave these twelve hours,” she added.
    Now I saw the appalling thing I had done. I had casually tossed away the manuscript that Michael gave his life for. I had thrown it to his murderers, and I had done so with a laugh. I started to explain, but then I saw the hopelessness of the real explanation. It’s perfectly true that in the best society one does not integrate the derivative of a function and expect always to arrive back at the original function. But can one expect such a remark to appeal to a pretty girl in an extremis of anger? Of a surety one cannot.
    So I tried an appeal to common sense.
    “Look, Cathleen, if I hadn’t scattered your brother’s manuscript to the winds we’d have been caught by the tractors. And if we’d been caught, Houseman would have got the manuscript anyway. In fact he’ll find it harder to get the papers out from the bog than if he’d only had to take them from my rucksack.”
    This cold logic calmed her a little. But she hammered a fist into the palm of her hand. “At least you should have fought for it.”
    No remark could have been better calculated to destroy me. Once again I spluttered with laughter. The trouble went back to my nursery days. I had puzzled for the best part of a couple of years over a little piece that went something as follows:
    A asked for it.
    B bit it.
    C cut it.
    D dug for it.
    I remember that F fought for it, S sought for it, M mourned for it and that T, most sensibly, simply took it. The problem that worried my childish mind was the nature of “it.”
    “Oh, well, if that’s what you’re thinking of me, I’ll be going my way,” said Cathleen.
    The humor was gone.
    “That you will not. There’s still danger from the road.” Which was perfectly true. It was by no means impossible that Houseman had sent a carload of thugs round by the road with the idea of heading us off. If so they were too late, so long as we didn’t stand around arguing futile nonsense. I seized Cathleen by the arm.
    “Come on, girl, you can say all you want to say once we’re safely away from here.”
    It would make a nice ending to this episode if I could claim a final encounter with the Houseman gang, there among the trees and bushes. But a hundred men might have searched all day in that wonderful cover and never had sight or sound of us. We reached the road and lay down to wait for the next bus toward Athlone. I judged from my timetable that one would go by somewhere between 8:20 and 8:30 A.M. We had only half an hour to pass.
    It seemed that the best place would be to leave the bus near a small place called Tang. Cathleen was of a different mind.
    “It’s to Athlone I’m going.”
    “But that’s exactly where Houseman will be looking for you, if he wants to look for you.”
    “Maybe it’s me that’ll be looking for him.”
    I passed this by. “The towns are a bad idea, Cathleen. I doubt if I could stand up even to a routine police inspection.”
    “Then it is right for you to stop at Tang, and I will go to Athlone.”
    “But it’s only sensible that we should stick together.”
    “After what happened back there on the bog, do not think that I will go with you.”
    A vision came to me of the pages of manuscript