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 corn bread, and glanced up at the sky. That was
a queer bird; he'd 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 the hammer beside it.

* * * * *

The stockaded village grew larger, details became 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 out 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, which 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. Those people understand soil conservation.
They have horses, too."

As he spoke, three riders left the village at a gallop, through a gate
on the far side. 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, and 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 tradit