And at last, the clearest, most improbable sound of all--the sound of a green trolley car going around a corner--a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire....
The old man sat on the floor.
Time passed.
A downstairs door opened slowly. Light fo
otsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.
"We shouldn't be here!"
"He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can't let him down."
"He's sick!"
"Sure! But he said to come when the nurse's out. We'll only stay a second, say hello, and ..."
The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.
"Colonel Freeleigh?" said Douglas softly.
There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.
They approached, almost on tiptoe.
Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man's now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.
Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.
"Boom!" said Tom. "Boom. Boom. Boom."
He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful.
"You look like you're going to get out the old pencil any second now," said Tom.
"Let me think!" said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. "Tom, it just hit me."
"What?"
"Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grant and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleigh's house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn't even appreciate it at the time. It's awful, Tom, it's awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? I never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did!"
Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away.
"You got your tablet with you?"
Douglas shook his head.
"Better get home and put all that down before you forget it. It ain't every day you got half the population of the world keeling over on you."
Douglas sat up and then stood up. He walked across the courthouse lawn slowly, chewing his lower lip.
"Boom," said Tom quietly. "Boom. Boom!"
Then he raised his voice:
"Doug! I killed you three times, crossing the grass! Doug, you hear me? Hey, Doug! Okay. All right for you." He lay down on the cannon and sighted along the crusted barrel. He squinted one eye. "Boom!" he whispered at that dwindling figure. "Boom!"
"There!"