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"I understand that" He hesitated "I’m not sure how to put this Did it…feel like I was there?"

Greer seemed perplexed by the question "I really couldn’t say That wasn’t part of it"

"You can be honest with unfire from the causeway: five shots, a pause, then two uess that’s that," said Greer

Rand walked up to them "Everybody’s asseht of it Not ordering the deaths of so e now--the isthazine on his sidearm, decocked the hammer, and slid the pistol back into its holster Froht, that oil ships in thirty-six days Let’s get this show on the road"

30

IOWA FREESTATE

(Foran thehis holstered revolver on the bedpost

Because carrying a weapon wouldn’t be right It wouldn’t be respectful For the next few hours, he’d be just ajoints to think about the way things ht have been

He kept a rooht he couldn’t make himself return to the house, that here he’d slept He’d always considered hiet on with things, and it wasn’t as if he was the first person whose luck had turned bad But soone out of him and never come back, and so this here he lived, in a cinder-block box with nothing but a bed and a sink and a chair to sit in and a toilet down the hall, nobody but drunks sleeping it off for co in a halfhearted, March-in-Ioay He heated a kettle on the stove and carried it to the basin with his straight razor and soap His face looked back in the old cracked ht Half his front teeth gone, left ear shot off to a pink nub, one eye clouded and useless: he looked like sore under the bridge He shaved, splashed water on his face and under his arms, and dried himself off All he had on hand for breakfast were so at the table, he worked them over with his back teeth and washed the beneath the sink He wasn’t , especially thisof March 24

He put on his hat and coat and stepped outside The last of the snow hadthe earth to s in the old don that anybody still used;on his hands, heleft of it now but a pile of rocks and a few charred timbers--and down the hill into the area that everybody still called the Flatland, though the old workers’ lodges had long since been dismantled and used as firewood Some folks still lived down here, but not enerally younger, born after the days of the redeyes, or else very old and unable to break the psychological chains of the old regi water, hly equivalent nuh the trash Eustace’s heart broke every time he saw it