e we've been hunting. But I'll
go up and see Alex about a new hatchet and fixing my rifle. I'll
have a talk with him."

He stepped forward to the edge of the porch, still munching on a
honey-dipped piece of cornbread, and glanced up at the sky. That
was a queer bird; he had never seen a bird with a wing action
like that.

Then he realized that the object was not a bird at all.

His father was staring at it, too.

"Murray! That's ... that's like the old stories from the time of
the wars!"

But Murray was already racing across the parade ground toward the
Aitch-Cue House, where the big iron ring hung by its chain from a
gallows-like post, with a hammer beside it.

III

The stockaded village became larger, details grew plainer, as the
helicopter came slanting down and began spiraling around it.

It was a fairly big place, some forty or fifty acres in a rough
parallelogram, surrounded by a wall of varicolored stone and
brick and concrete rubble from old ruins, topped with a palisade
of pointed poles. There was a small jetty projecting into the
river, to which six or eight boats of different sorts were tied;
a gate opened onto this from the wall.

Inside the stockade, there were close to a hundred buildings,
ranging from small cabins to a structure with a belfry. It seemed
to have been a church, partly ruined in the war of two centuries
ago and later rebuilt.

A stream came down from the woods, across the cultivated land
around the fortified village. There was a rough flume which
carried the water from a dam close to the edge of the forest and
provided a fall to turn a mill wheel.

"Look, strip farming," Loudons pointed. "See the alternate strips
of grass and plowed ground. These people understand soil
conservation.

"They have horses, too."

As he spoke, three riders left the village at a gallop. They
separated, and the people in the fields, who had all started for
the village, turned and began hurrying toward the woods. Two of
the riders headed for a pasture in which cattle had been grazing
and started herding them also into the woods.

For a while, there was a scurrying of little figures in the
village below. Then, not a moving thing was in sight.

"There's good organization," Loudons said. "Everybody seems to
know what to do, and how to get it done promptly. And look how
neat the whole place is. Policed up. I'll bet anything we'll find
that they have a military organization, or a military t