About eight o’clock that morning, the motel owner came to the door with two policemen, One of the cops knocked on the door and said, "Open up! You’re all under arrest for trespassing!" 
    "At least the state attorney general probably kept them from arresting us last night," Ben muttered as he unchained the door and opened it. We went to the cop car and the cops frisked us and drove us to the station where we were booked and finger printed. Newspaper photographers snapped a lot of pictures of Clu. A young cop looked in Ben’s brief case and pulled a couple of metal objects out, "Wow, he’s got Russian money!" the cop said. 
    "Those are New York subway tokens," Ben replied. 
    At the station Ben spouted legal jargon a mile a minute at the desk sergeant. He made another phone call to a federal court. Finally the cops told us we could go free, but that we should get out of town at once. Clu and I got in her car and started out of Pronghorn. 
    "I just don’t know what to think about it," I said as we drove along. 
    "What do you mean?" Clu asked. 
    "When I grabbed your arm back when the reporters were after you and I got you away from them. I never forced a woman to do anything before in my life. I wouldn’t have done it if Mrs. Soaper hadn’t asked me to." 
    "I guess you’ve got your plan and I’ve got mine," Clu said. "Let’s leave it at that." 
    As soon as we got back there was more to do. We were dead tired, but we had to go to the airport and pick up the Vanguarders who were coming for Will’s court-martial the next day. This time there were only three - Don and Marge and Randy Mezarosh. 
    Don kissed Clu on the cheek and said, "This time we’ll get to have our press conference at the court-martial." 
    As Clu drove us to her place, Don had a note pad in his lap, trying to write a statement for the press the next day. I was conversing with Marge and Randy, trying to renew my limited acquaintance with them. We stopped and picked up the local paper. Clu and I were front page news along with the "anxious citizens of Pronghorn trying to prevent a possible riot by alleged Communists." The only source of the story of the previous night’s events was the radio reporter whose van had guided the mob to the motel. About the only accurate new fact that I found out was that Clu’s official name was Claudia Proctor. 
    Marge took the paper and scanned it. this newspaper was one of the institutions that dominated our state. The editor and publisher was over ninety - and convinced that the country had been going to hell since Woodrow Wilson was elected. 
    "Wow!" she said after looking over the dismal editorial page. "I thought the NEW YORK TIMES was biased and one-sided, but this!" 
    "It’s a big country west of the Hudson River," I said and curled up in a corner of the back seat and closed my eyes. 
    When we got back to Clu’s, everything was pretty mellow compared to the last time Don and Marge had been there. Clu was enthusiastically telling them all the great things about Will. I found myself in a corner talking with Randy Mezarosh, a short, slender fellow with big glasses on, still young enough to have some acne on his cheeks. 
    "What’s happened with Sandra?" I asked. Sandra Morgala had been my girl friend before I ever met Hope, back when I was leaving the civil rights movement in the south and Sandra was going down there to be a part of it. I had found out to my surprise when I met Randy that spring that she had also once been his girlfriend. She had gotten him into the Organization and he had broken up with her and gone on into Vanguard Youth. I still tried to keep up with her by letters and phone calls...not romantically, but as a human being, a comrade I love in the Movement. 
    "I don’t see very much of her," Randy said. "My whole life now is taken up by the Vanguard. You knew she married this guy named Tom, didn’t you?" 
    "Yeah," I said. "She told me on the phone this spring." 
    "Well," Randy went on, "the last time I talked to her she was going on and on about how she had failed both the Movement and as a wife. I didn’t know how to get her out of that. It’s just that to her husband, the Movement was only part time - like going to church on Sunday, while you know her - she’s this natural front-line fighter and she misses the action." 
    I knew how she was. At the end of the summer of 1965 I had gone up from the south to a big anti-war demonstration in Washington called the Assembly. Over 300 of us had sat down and blockaded the capitol driveway. We were arrested and most of us were in jail for three days. When I got out, I walked to the capitol, where people were still picketing, Sandra among them for a while and then she took me back to the apartment where she was staying with three guys who had all been civil rights workers down south. I had known one of them as a good friend. 
    We all hitched to New York to visit other former civil rights workers and then I hitched with Sandra to Memphis. I was taking the bus from there to the little town where I had been for a year to pick up my stuff at the shack of the black family I had been living with. I was going back to my own state to work against the war. Vietnam had gotten so big that I thought it blocked all hope for further progress by black people. 
    Sandra was taking the bus down to the civil rights project that had accepted her. (It was still unsafe for civil rights workers to hitch in the really deep south). She had been raising money up north for the Movement for a whole year. Now she wanted to find out what the south was really like. I kept in touch with her. She had someone else write her last letter from the south to me. Her project had gotten a lot of threats from the Klan. Sandra went out with some of the black staffers to learn how to fire a rifle to protect themselves. She had never handled a rifle before and she had a loaded one with the safety off. She tripped and banged the rifle on the ground and it went off and shattered her right arm. And she was not yet nineteen years old. 
    "I think she would be more satisfied in the Vanguard," Randy went on. "It’s just that the Organization has such an inadequate perspective that she..." 
    By this time I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I was remembering Sandra and myself along the road sides, sleeping with our arms around each other at night. (It’s a good thing it was summertime. Neither of us had a sleeping bag or coat). In the daytime we debated whether or not we should talk to the people who gave us rides, about Vietnam. Sandra was against it. She thought people might just get mad and put us out of their cars before we got a ride to the next town. So we hitched across America that late summer with Vietnam like a terrible secret in our hearts. 
    Clu drove Don and Marge to a motel. By the time she got back, I had gone upstairs and crashed. I couldn’t stay awake a second longer. 
    Next morning only one car drove by Clu’s for the journey to Pronghorn - Evie Fenwick, a heavy set young woman who did a lot for the Committee. She was there with her boyfriend, a blind young man named Bob Hawkins. No one else from the Committee was there. For some it was a final exam day, for others exams were over and they had gone off on vacations. But surely some didn’t come because of the front page story about mob action in Pronghorn. Just as we were about to leave, Hope came running up and threw her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth. 
    "How did you get away from your parents?" I asked in amazement. 
    "I left a note that I had gone over to spend the night with my brother Zack," she said, in a very low voice, almost a whisper. "Zack and Marilyn left a note on their door that they had gone to Florida with me for a week. Actually they went to Haight-Ashbury. They’ve been wanting to see what it was like for a long time. So they’ll be back in a week and everything is cool." 
    I got in the back seat of Evie’s car with Hope and a stack of GUARDIANS. Clu, Don, Marge and Randy were in the car in front of us. And as we left town, behind us was a car with two people I recognized - FBI agents who used to come take films of our demonstrations. Pretty soon we picked up a couple of other official-looking cars following close behind us and a Highway Patrol car. 
    Evie’s old car had a slow clunky motor, so Clu was soon far ahead of us, out of sight. When we got to the main entrance of Fort Clay, there was no sign of Clu’s car, but there were two rows of MP’s in front of the gate. Evie turned the car into the road to the gate. A very angry-looking guard came out from among the MP’s and said, "You’ve got to turn back and go where you came from." 
    "Can you tell me which way goes to Pronghorn?" Evie asked. 
    "No!" the guard said, "just turn around and go back where you came from!" 
    "Look," Evie said, putting her large arm out the window and waving her finger toward the road, "that is a public highway out there! You don’t own it! I have a right to travel on it where I please!" 
    "Evie!" I whispered from the back seat, "just back up to the highway and keep going south and you’ll be in Pronghorn in a couple of miles." 
    Evie backed her car onto the highway and we headed south into Pronghorn. Downtown, Pronghorn had an eerie, deserted look. I knew the G.I.’s wouldn’t be on the streets until after five in the afternoon, but there were very few local people about. Evie drove up to a drugstore and we went in and sat down at a table and she ordered coffee for all of us. 
    A middle-age man came over to our table. "Excuse me," he said, "mind if I sit down?" 
    "I’m a reporter from the Pronghorn CONSTITUTION," he went on. "I recognized your face from our front page," he said, turning to look at me. 
    "Do you have any idea where the other people are who came to see the court-martial?" I asked. 
    "Oh, they’ve been arrested for trespassing on the post," he said. 
    "Where can we go see them?" Evie asked. 
    "They’ve got them in jail right now," the reporter said. "It’ll be a while before they book them. They’ll wait until the court-martial is over. So right now would any of you all like to order anything? I’m paying. I’d just like to know what your side of this story is." 
    We all ordered milk shakes. The reporter went on: "As you already know, people around here are kind of worried. First the riot in Detroit, then the swimming pool demonstration and now this. What do you all want? What are you trying to do with us?" 
    Our milk shakes came. I put my straw in my mouth and took a deep drag off my chocolate shake and looked around at the others. "Anybody else want to start?" I asked. 
    "You start," Evie said. "I’ll have enough to say." 
    "Well," I said, "my friend Will Orry - the army is framing him because he gave out anti-war literature. Army regulations say he has a right to do that, so they’re trying to get him on another charge." 
    "Yeah," Evie put in, "what kind of country are turning into? I was in Youth for Goldwater. Then today I have this soldier telling me I can’t go into Pronghorn - just go back where I came from and..." 
    "You don’t have to be a Communist to be a radical," Evie’s blind boy friend Bob interrupted, as he often did. "All you have to do is just believe what this country was founded on in our in our revolution. I’ve read Marxism - I don’t think much of it. But if we ask for the rights that we’re guaranteed, it’s like we’re trying to overthrow the government." 
    The reporter turned towards Hope, "All right," he said, "what do you think?" Hope took a couple of minutes before speaking. She bent her head and there was a reddish glow in her cheeks. "I don’t have much to say," she finally said. "It’s just that my brother came back from Vietnam physically and mentally injured. And the government can’t tell me why. Then if somebody tries to say why, the government wants to punish them." Her voice trailed off. 
    "But don’t there have to be rules, laws?" the reporter asked. There were troubled lines around his mouth. "Like this riot in Detroit..." 
 "I didn’t think that would have anything to do with what we’re talking about," I said. "But I guess it does. In the anti-war movement we’re kind of in the shape that black people are. If black people get hurt by the police, they can’t do anything about it. The police are white and it’s their word against the blacks,  like it’s they army’s word against Will Orry." 
    An elderly black woman was sitting at the counter on a stool drinking a coke. She turned her stool around in my direction. She stared hard at me. 
    "But if there’s a case where they think there’s police brutality," the reporter said, "can’t they take it to the courts in an orderly way?" 
    "But the courts are all run by white people," I said. "Blacks don’t have any influence there." 
    "That’s right!" the old black woman said, not loud but very sharply. 
     The reporter looked more nervous than ever. "I guess I’d better be going," he said. He didn’t look nearly as cheerful as when he bought us the milkshakes. "Can I take a picture of you all before I leave?" 
    "No!" Hope and I said at once. The reporter hurried out of the drugstore and Evie chuckled. We finished our milkshakes and went on out to her car and drove to the courthouse. We went inside. I had a load of GUARDIANS under my arm. We could see the stairways up to the second floor were full of people. We tried working our way through the crowd. On the second floor, the flash bulbs of reporters’ cameras were popping. Hope grabbed a GUARDIAN from under my arm and spread it out to cover her face like she was reading. In the middle of the crowd I saw Clu and Marge and Don and Randy threading their way out of the courtroom door. Dan held his note pad, looking around like he hoped he could still have a press conference with somebody. Some of the reporters recognized me and ran over. 
    "You with this group??" four or five of them said at once. "Is this your organization’s literature?" 
    "Not exactly," I said. "This is the GUARDIAN. If you want to buy a copy, you’ll find out something about what’s happening." I sold a few copies. 
    Clu came over to me and Evie, "My car’s been impounded for out of date plates," she told Evie. "I’ve got to get Don and the others back to the airport on time for the plane to New York, could I please borrow your car?" 
    Evie looked a little surprised, "That means we’ll all have to hitch back and un..." 
    Then blind Bob, her boy friend spoke up, "I’ve never hitched before. I’d love to try. Let’s do it, my dear!" 
    "Oh, thank you!" Clu said, beaming. 
    "Oh-OK, I guess," Evie said. The corners of her mouth drooped dubiously. 
    The crowd was starting to move downstairs, pushing us apart from Clu and the other Vanguarders. I remembered what we had come to Pronghorn for. "What happened at Will’s court-martial?" I hollered to Clu. 
    "Oh, his sergeant testified that he was only under post restriction, not barracks restriction," she called back. "He was found not guilty." 
    A couple of minutes later I found myself on the courthouse lawn, one of the best known Commies in the state, on a seventy mile hitch hike home, with a seventeen year old runaway girl.