Chapter 16

	Crisis is a Hair
	Toward which forces creep
	Past which forces retrograde …
	EMILY DICKINSON

One of the tourists from Texas had longer legs than Patrolman Vine. He brushed past him and bounded down the path. “I’m a doctor,” he hollered over his shoulder. Ralph Chope was the representative of a floor machinery company in Houston, but he had been a medical corpsman in the Korean War, and if there was one thing he knew how to do in the medical line, it was tell if a poor devil was dead or not. By the time Patrolman Vine came pounding up, Chope had administered his tests on the body, and had rolled it over and was groping with his fingers in the wound.

“Is he dead?”

“He sure is. Jeez, look at that. The ball went all the way through him and out the other side, almost.” The Texan held up something between two fingers. “Looky here. That’s a regular old-fashioned musket ball. Say, this sure is some show you’re puttin’on here.”

Patrolman Vine didn’t think that was funny. He took the musket ball and looked at it, then wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He stared at the corpse, then wheeled and looked sharply at a growing audience of Texas tourists, the bus driver and the woman with the baby carriage. “Okay,” he said loudly. “Get back, now. Don’t anybody touch anything.”