In the sleeping car?"
"Where's who?" the man said.
"Dont lie to me," Jason said. He blundered on in the cluttered obscurity.
"What's that?" the other said. "Who you calling a liar?" and when Jason grasped his shoulder he exclaimed, "Look out, fellow!"
"Dont lie," Jason said. "Where are they?"
"Why, you bastard," the man said.
His arm was frail and thin in Jason's grasp.
He tried to wrench free, then he turned and fell to scrabbling on the littered table behind him.
"Come on," Jason said. "Where are they?"
"I'll tell you where they are," the man shrieked. "Lemme find my butcher knife."
"Here," Jason said, trying to hold the other. "I'm just asking you a question."
"You bastard," the other shrieked, scrabbling at the table.
Jason tried to grasp him in both arms, trying to prison the puny fury of him.
The man's body felt so old, so frail, yet so fatally single-purposed that for the first time Jason saw clear and unshadowed the disaster toward which he rushed.
"Quit it!" he said. "Here.
Here!
I'll get out.
Give me time, and I'll get out."
"Call me a liar," the other wailed. "Lemme go.
Lemme go just one minute.
I'll show you."
Jason glared wildly about, holding the other.
Outside it was now bright and sunny, swift and bright and empty, and he thought of the people soon to be going quietly home to Sunday dinner, decorously festive, and of himself trying to hold the fatal, furious little old man whom he dared not release long enough to turn his back and run.
"Will you quit long enough for me to get out?" he said. "Will you?" But the other still struggled, and Jason freed one hand and struck him on the head.
A clumsy, hurried blow, and not hard, but the other slumped immediately and slid clattering among pans and buckets to the floor.
Jason stood above him, panting, listening.
Then he turned and ran from the car.
At the door he restrained himself and descended more slowly and stood there again. His breath made a hah hah hah sound and he stood there trying to repress it, darting his gaze this way and that, when at a scuffling sound behind him he turned in time to see the little old man leaping awkwardly and furiously from the vestibule, a rusty hatchet high in his hand.
He grasped at the hatchet, feeling no shock but knowing that he was falling, thinking So this is how it'll end, and he believed that he was about to die and when something crashed against the back of his head he thought How did he hit me there?
Only maybe he hit me a long time ago, he thought, And I just now felt it, and he thought Hurry.
Hurry.
Get it over with, and then a furious desire not to die seized him and he struggled, hearing the old man wailing and cursing in his cracked voice.
He still struggled when they hauled him to his feet, but they held him and he ceased.
"Am I bleeding much?" he said. "The back of my head.
Am I bleeding?" He was still saying that while he felt himself being propelled rapidly away, heard the old man's thin furious voice dying away behind him. "Look at my head," he said. "Wait, I'--"
"Wait, hell," the man who held him said. "That damn little wasp'll kill you.
Keep going.
You aint hurt."
"He hit me," Jason said. "Am I bleeding?"
"Keep going," the other said.
He led Jason on around the corner of the station, to the empty platform where an express truck stood, where grass grew rigidly in a plot bordered with rigid flowers and a sign in electric lights: Keep your on Mottson, the gap filled by a human eye with an electric pupil.
The man released him.
"Now," he said. "You get on out of here and stay out.
What were you trying to do? commit suicide?"
"I was looking for two people," Jason said. "I just asked him where they were."
"Who you looking for?"
"It's a girl," Jason said. "And a man.
He had on a red tie in Jefferson yesterday.
With this show.
They robbed me."