tantly.

He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.

[Illustration]

It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
minute shouting: "Rhett! The children's mush is on fire!" or something
equally inappropriate.

Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
the PRS--and one person who was not a member.

But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter
of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
the house--nor, Malone realized, thinking of "Gone With the Wind,"
were there any horses or carriages.

The place looked deserted.

Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
originally commanding a huge tract of land. Now, all that remained of
the vast acreage was the small portion that surrounded the house.

But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.

A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
anything.

There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
had thought raced through his mind again. Nothing seemed to move
anywhere, except Malone himself.

Was he right? Were the people he'd been beaming to really here? Or had
he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated, in spite of his
shield, as easily as they had manipulated so many others?

That was possible. But it was