his father was already eating
at the table.

The people of the Toon like to eat in the open. It was something
they'd always done, just as they'd always like to eat together in
the evenings.

He sweetened his cup of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and
began to sip it before he sat down, standing with one foot on the
bench and looking down across the parade ground, past the
Aitch-Cue House, toward the river and the wall.

"If you're coming around to Alex's way of thinking--and mine--it
won't hurt you to admit it, son," his father said.

Murray turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger,
and then he grinned. The elders were constantly keeping the young
men alert with these tests. He checked back over his actions
since he had come out onto the porch.

... to the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench ...
which had reminded him again of the absence of the hatchet from
his belt and brought an automatic frown ... then the glance
toward the gunsmith's shop, and across the parade ground ... the
glance including the houses into which so much labor had gone,
the wall that had been built from rubble and topped with pointed
stakes, the white slabs of marble that marked the graves of the
First Tenant and the men of the Old Toon....

He had thought, at that moment, that maybe his father and Alex
Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the others
were right: there were too many things here that could not be
moved along with them, if they decided to move.

It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not
to admit that he was the leader of the younger men, and the boys of
the Irregulars. He had been forced to face the responsibilities of
that fact since last winter.

Then, the usual theological arguments about the proper order of
the Sacred Books and the true nature of the Risen One had been
replaced by a violent controversy when Sholto Jiminez and Birdy
Edwards had reopened the old question of the advisability of
moving the Toon and settling elsewhere.

He had been in favor of the idea himself and found that the other
young men had followed his lead. But, for the last month or so,
he had begun to doubt the wisdom of it.

It was probably reluctance to admit this to himself that had
brought on the strained feelings between himself and his old
friend, the gunsmith.

"I'll have to drill the Irregulars, today," he said. "Birdy
Edwards has been drilling them whil