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Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans-in fact, few Kansans-had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life-to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir pratice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises-on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them-four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore suffciently unfearful of each other over to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again-those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

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