Michael Malone - Weebly

Stooped down now, he worked his way through
brambled hedge growth, westward, away from the
aborted road, west to where, beyond a tangle of thick,
dark conifers, the old Indian path led to the marshland.
Until yesterday, when Otto Scaper's chance remark
had called back up that devastated stretch of earth that
looked so uncomfortably like the pictures of bombed
terrain ten thousand miles away which, in the 1960s,
obsessive liberals had broadcast over and over, with
such unfortunate results; until yesterday Ransom had
really almost forgotten about the land. He'd sold a great
many things since 1972, and talk about scandals had
died away after the new president had pardoned the
old, leaving him to repent in private as he would. The
country was absolved of guilt. A decent man, promising
to awaken those troubled from their nightmares,
enjoined his fellow citizens to think of themselves as
decent men.
Ransom already did so.
Privately, the banker had long since assumed he
must have come upon a testing site for military
hardware—some experimental flamethrower. He had