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now.
    Suddenly they began to yell.
    They had the makings of a bonfire set up—McCall saw some perfectly good chairs and at least one new-looking wooden filing cabinet in the debris. Someone had rigged a beam above the pile of wood. Two students seized the dummy and fastened it to the beam.
    â€œ Burn him !”
    Kerosene splashed. A roar went up as someone flipped a match. Flames spread, leaped, took hold. Fire began nipping at the legs of the dummy.
    And then McCall saw the neatly lettered sign, black on white:
    DEATH TO TYRANTS.
    AND WE MEAN YOU,
    DEAN GUNTHER!!!!
    And McCall solved the mystery of Dean Gunther’s stolen suit of clothes.
    He began to circulate.
    Not everyone was enthusiastic about the ceremony.
    â€œIt’s reactionary,” McCall heard one boy say. He was with another boy and a pretty girl. They were all dressed conventionally. “They think this is the cool thing to do,” the boy went on. “It’s stupid and juvenile. Where does it get them?”
    â€œIt’s satisfaction,” the girl argued.
    â€œLike a kid beating his dolly to death.”
    â€œHow else can they get through to him? You can’t even get in to see him half the time.”
    â€œIt’s a big student body,” the other boy said. “The dean has his hands full.”
    â€œI’m not defending him,” the first student said. “It’s just that these kid antics make me sick.”
    â€œYou’re right. It’s stupid. They’re a bunch of clots.”
    McCall moved along. One boy in a large group was shouting, “It gets us nowhere! What’s the point? This is no confrontation. It’s a farce—Gunther isn’t even here. Systematic disruption!” He actually spat. “This sort of thing was done a generation ago. It’s ancient history. We’re here — now . Or we’re supposed to be. What we need are modern tactics to carry out a modern strategy!”
    â€œAh, knock it off, Demosthenes.” There was a general hoot and laugh. “Let him burn. I wish it were real.”
    â€œIt’s perfectly in accord with the movement,” a girl confided to another girl. “And it eliminates hangups. Really it does. If you don’t take action— some action—you just go mad.”
    â€œWatch out for pig meat!” a boy yelled.
    Another boy said, “Nobody gives a damn. They won’t listen. The dean’s a cramp. So it’s a responsible protest.”
    â€œI don’t agree,” another said, a Negro boy. “This just isn’t the way to go about it.”
    â€œSeparatist,” a white girl said.
    â€œOkay, okay,” the Negro said. “Call me what you like, but I mean it.”
    â€œOh, baby,” the white girl said, patting his cheek. “I love you and you know it.”
    â€œI’ll go along with that,” the Negro boy said, and patted her back.
    â€œWatch out, burrhead,” a white boy said, “or your friends will start calling you Tom.”
    They grinned at each other.
    McCall glanced at the fire. The dummy was burning fiercely. Yells and cheers. They used to celebrate football victories this way. He wondered which students had instigated the affair.
    He came upon a little congregation of long-haired boys and girls dressed in weird conglomerates. They stood off by themselves rather sadly, McCall thought. He put them down as flower children, who would not enter into the activist business of effigy-burning. Some hippies went along with the mob and some held back. Camps within camps.
    He started back for his car and his dinner engagement with the man the students were destroying by proxy.

6
    Dean Gunther looked very much unburned. In the porch light over the front door of his Tudor-type house his eyes told McCall that he had long since heard the declaration of the auto-da-fé and its subsequent execution on his effigy.
    â€œI still think I shouldn’t have