and the tallest boy and farthest warrior grew scared and hunchbacked and trembled for he seemed overtaken with fear over the immediate safety of his small and generally irresilient person and he looked around and it wasnt even a real stadium just a dusty field of tolerable flatness with many small and not so small rocks sprinkled on it boys called the strings of larger rocks the obstacle course and these rocks guarded one of the goals and so whenever the native children played there one team would have to navigate these symplegades for the defending team would roll and throw the large rocks at the attackers faces and feet and the teams argued over who would get the fortressed goal and such fights experientially ended with the taller and stronger team scoffing at the hard-line beggars that such tricks would only make the drubbing they were about to inflict on the other ladies so much more unbearable and real men feared no rocks but willed the rocks into submission and calculated flight and dead cathedral and there was by now in all probability no one pursuing the boy browncoat but he knew nevertheless that his mother or his telepathically summoned to the scene of violation father or the girls father who did not work but mostly stayed at home and read cheap books at their low window so everyone could see him reading as opposed to the girls mother who worked all day and mostly all night and was hardly at home and only showed herself in the low window to challenge her husbands choice of reading and to demand dinner or all three of them were right there behind him maybe watching him from behind a building or street corner and waiting to trap him in a trap of no escape and all three of them like an halitotic hydra would impose on him physical punishment of a systematic cruelty that would be at the very least equal to the cruelty of what the girl had suffered and unlike the girl who incurred her scar on the battlefield where such things come and go and laugh at you he the boy browncoat would be executed by a court of law and not in an equal or random fight and he hated the law so much both now and always and the browncoat knew then that there had been a breaking a final irreparable rupture and the consequences and he had reached a point a positioning that was not to be reached no not even contemplated in the safe distance of the horizon in the raging epicentre of the horizon and there was but one remaining solution and namely run away from home which he had already accomplished so that was a good clean start and avoid his parents and the girl and the girls vindictive father for the rest of his the boy browncoats natural mortal life which was of course easilier panicked than done and for lack of more constructive ideas he hid himself in the little underground passage that ran around the great hospital to which the dusty football field belonged and the underground passage was quite deep and almost fully covered there was but a little space for an underweight drunken adult to fall through and dark so people could not really see anything in it from without and the brownback fumbled and groped his way not to the deeper part of the passage because that was where most footballs inevitably ended up five or six times every game when the native boys played there and as incredulous as the thought made him now he knew that someday in the distant future the local boys and maybe other boys as well would eventually be allowed to play football again and they were likely to do it here and they would lose the ball to the underground passage and the least popular smaller boy on the team that had lost the ball would descend into the passage and look for the ball and the supreme gesture of infantile altruism one could perform was to go down and recover the ball even if one had not been the one to allow the ball to slide into the passage and even if one was not the smallest and weakest boy on the team .